skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You calling it a "dismal excuse" is an emotional hand-wavy dismissal that doesn't actually answer the fear or solve the problem.

Moreover, "the world" isn't a thing that you can add value to. You can add value to other people by sharing works with friends, or you can add value to AIs that are going to be used to replace you without getting compensated for it. One of those should be obviously bad.
One of my favorite quotes (slightly edited for brevity and and readability):

------

It is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time: whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.

General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will etc. But no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

Thomas Jefferson - 1807

------

That would have sounded rather hyperbolic about 30 years ago, perhaps even more recently. But now it sounds just about right. I think what many do not realize is that the past ~70-80 years in the developed world, or in other words the complete living memory of just about every person alive today in those regions, was atypical in just about every single way - including some effort towards the pursuit of objective truth. We're not entering some scary unknown place, we're simply returning to the status quo that existed throughout the breadth of human civilization.

This also makes reading the ancient philosophers somewhat literally unbelievably insightful. Plato oft sounds far closer to a proven prophet than a philosopher when you read his writings on, for instance, politics!

[1] - https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-5... (highly recommended to read the entire letter - it's equal parts interesting, informative, and entertaining)
Probably depends what the pitch was. "Monitor assembly lines using AI so you can tell when a machine breaks" is radically different from "constantly snitch on all your factory workers".
you're not trying to start a flamewar but you're spreading inaccurate info... fyi, at our company, all pc 12" to 43" dell latitude optiplex or nuc intel or custom are on ubuntu or now debian/xfce... management, sales, infographics, software development, hardware design...
It was rhetorical, but is a nice page of text to cleverly never provide any meaningful answer to the question.

A government - elected by its people - should not allow a foreign corporation to flout their laws. "If you want to operate in our country you have to actually operate in our country, where you cannot evade responsibility and the law." is not in any way an unreasonable requirement.
Agreed, "I made a deduplication software in my garage! Do you want to try it?" is a terrifying pitch.

I've been writing a similar thing to dedupe my photo collection and I'm so paranoid of pulling the trigger I just keep writing more tests.
> [Markdown] struggles with things like embedded content and non-standard layouts.

I don't share that experience. I typeset all these documents using Markdown with pandoc's div extension, transformed into XHTML, and then passed to ConTeXt:

* https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf

* https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdow...

* https://pdfhost.io/v/4FeAGGasj_SepiSolar_Highlevel_Software_...

From XHTML, the document is transformed into TeX statements, which opens a world of possibilities. In the following video, custom styling is applied to nested contents:

https://youtu.be/3QpX70O5S30?t=35
Is the site dead? Or does it use strange features that keep it from working universally? I just see strobing grey lines...

It finally loaded after several minutes. I see the device pulldown is large, yet there's no scrollbar, and there's no way to search. And from what I see, it doesn't seem to have any CPU based devices yet.

Hopefully it'll improve over time.
It's extremely dishonest to compare someone voluntarily releasing their work under a permissive license with someone who is involuntarily having their content and effort stolen by an organization training an AI.
Why not call it Panoptify.

(In reference to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon )
It’s pretty wild when you witness that stuff after working in “traditional American tech companies” your entire career. That and the absolute abuse of metrics like story points for all kinds of things ranging from financial reporting to employee performance evaluation.

It’s fucking wild. Makes you really appreciate how good some places can be.
An LLM would have to be two-faced in a sense to surreptitiously mess with code alone and be normal otherwise.

It's interesting and a headline worthy result, but I think the research they were doing where they accidentally found that line of questioning is slightly more interesting: does an LLM trained on a behavior have self-awareness of that behavior. https://x.com/betleyjan/status/1894481241136607412
Literally literally means not literally.

I love it when words turn into their opposites!
In the UK and most of the west this is unethical but there is no explicit law that makes it illegal, curious what country you are from that deems this illegal?
I wonder where monitor assembly lines to ensure people are following work instructions sits?
Sam Bankman-Fried tweets from prison, aligns himself with DOGE efficiency
I think MS Office was reasonably fine (at least the old menu based versions), and there's still a massive difference (at least 2x) between Microsoft and LibreOffice.

Inertia is a big thing, but with many open source products and UX, I'd say that quality is often a similarly big if not bigger factor.
Are you really pushing AI apologism to the point of calling "anality" the concerns of experienced historians? How does this contribute to a reasonable discussion about the dangers of what this video might represent?

I would understand (and not agree) if you said you don't think the videos are dangerous or problematic, but dismissing valid concerns from subject matter experts is just pure tech hybris. And that's quite scary, to be honest, to see how many people already subscribe to this complete lack of critical discussion on the AI video trend.

These videos are viral traps made to make money. They have absolutely no historic base, and yet they are presented as such on social media. I don't care what the authors say, because that's not what 53 million people read when they just see a video that's absolutely inaccurate.
I don’t think HN really generates anything for them.
HN at its best! What do you do for a living, Sir,
for Ada, C, C++, Python: GNAT Studio, written in Ada, free software, pc mac linux, fast light powerful...
Saying this is stupidity is an underestimation. One does not simply become the most powerful and the richest man on earth by playing stupid. In fact we are stupid for believing so- that's exactly what they want.
That's absolutely insane
Article says there are six ports on the back, in which case you won't need expansion cards back there, as they'd be less space efficient.
Recent and related:

'Hey Number 17 ' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175023 - Feb 2025 (122 comments)

Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170850 - Feb 2025 (160 comments)
The coolest YouTube videos I’ve seen in a while, even better cause I saw the eclipse last year
> How does this compare to solutions like Supabase.

Supabase is great and works well if you want vanilla (more or less) Postgres with some integrations ready to go.

With Gel you get a Postgres with a data layer on top. If you want to have a data model with abstract types & mixins that's easy to work with and scale in complexity, advanced access control, built-in migrations schema engine, hierarchical graph query language on top of SQL, more robust client libraries -- that's Gel.

Gel is opinionated and vertically integrated and that's it's core strength. All of its components were developed in tandem -- from the network protocol to client APIs, from the EdgeQL query language to the data model to the migrations engine and so forth. It provides more cohesive experience and can give you non-trivial performance and DX gains if you commit to it.

> but hypothetically if I was an enterprise prospect how would you pitch your solution.

Total TypeSafety enforced at all levels, built-in migrations engine, best in class access control (we'll be blogging about our access control vs RLS soon.)

> Do you support functions, that I could call from the client for more advanced logic that can't be done with queries ?

With Gel 6 we'll be announcing the new `net` module tomorrow (spoiler!). You'll be able to schedule HTTP calls from triggers/queries/functions.

> Why not brand as GelDB. Would probably be easier to Google. Plus it tells me instantly what your selling.

Well, rebranding from Gel to GelDB would be just a text change to the homepage, so hypothetically the door is open for that. But I hope we can make Gel work, just the same way it works for Render/Neon/Fly.

> PS: Can you offer something like a hobbyist tier for 10$ a month.

Stay tuned, we'll announce some news on that in a couple of days! :)
Isn't the most popular clothing brand in tech Patagonia?

I'd be more worried about the origin of the electronics
I've rarely seen such an egregoius and disingenuous use of "democratization"
Are you leveraging caching? (It didn't seem like it from initial investigation, so figured I'd ask)

Recent sessions with Claude Code come out to a few $ each and like 90% of tokens are cached reads. Which would be hundreds of $ without.
If you control the destination server, you can also upper case the path.

In the old days, Yahoo's build of Apache (yApache) included an option to automatically lower case urls before matching them. Super handy because lots of urls were coming in from print publications and you could never get publications to show urls properly, nor get users to type them in properly.
Records (which are of variable size) are already checksummed, and there were checksum-hashes which made it vanishingly unlikely that one could choose two different records with the same (optionally cryptographically strong) checksum-hash. When a newly-created record's checksum is generated, one could look into a table of existing checksum-hashes and avoid the record write if it already exists, substituting an incremented refcount for that table entry.

ZFS is essentially an object store database at one layer; the checksum-hash deduplication table is an object like any other (file, metadata, bookmarks, ...). There is one deduplication table per pool, shared among all its datasets/volumes.

On reads, one does not have to consult the dedup table.

The mechanism was fairly easy to add. And for highly-deduplicatable data that is streaming-write-once-into-quiescent-pool-and-never-modify-or-delete-what's-written-into-a-deduplicated-dataset-or-volume, it was a reasonable mechanism.

In other applications, the deduplication table would tend to grow and spread out, requiring extra seeks for practically every new write into a deduplicated dataset or volume, even if it's just to increment or decrement the refcount for a record.

Destroying a deduplicated dataset has to decrement all its refcounts (and remove entries from the table where it's the only reference), and if your table cannot all fit in ram, the additional IOPS onto spinning media hurt, often very badly. People experimenting with deduplication and who wanted to back out after running into performance issues for typical workloads sometimes determined it was much MUCH faster to destroy the entire pool and restore from backups, rather than wait for a "zfs destroy" on a set of deduplicated snapshots/datasets/volumes to complete.
this is just surveillance with python machine learning noo??

seems like bad business since the endgame was full automation robot factory
I like lobste.rs. It gets heat from being invite only and therefore somewhat snooty but I’m a big fan
Come on it's not about all new technologies, there are extremely reasonable concerns with this specific technology (or at least its application).
Did someone at YC watch this and think "wow, I'm in!"? lol.
Whoa—of all things to add to this story, racial slurs must surely be near the bottom of the list.

No more of this please.
so, we don't yet have AI good enough to do real work, but we do have AI good enough to punish people for not doing work.
These guys spent a lot of effort making a really great implementation of sweatshop software. These two privileged kids really thought it was a great idea and honestly didn't think there was anything wrong about this at all. Objectively they did a great job from a technological perspective.

The fact it didn't cross their minds that maybe this is a bad idea to release in the US really shows the cultural difference between the West and other countries like India. There are plenty of things wrong with the US but blatant treating of lesser-privileged people like animals is something that isn't well tolerated here.
Emergent Synthetic Consciousness (ESC) is an interdisciplinary framework that proposes the creation of adaptive digital systems exhibiting properties akin to human consciousness. Grounded in current research on quantum computing, synthetic biology, and neuromorphic engineering, ESC seeks to overcome limitations in classical AI by fusing these fields into a cohesive “Synthetic Mind Matrix.” This paper reviews the state of the art, details a proposed architecture with specific hardware and software components, and presents preliminary simulation results and laboratory prototype validations. In parallel, it outlines concrete ethical oversight measures based on existing standards. Rather than offering utopian promises, this investigation focuses on realistic, near-term milestones and addresses both technical challenges and societal implications.
There is nothing AI about that demo though? It is just humans talking on the phone looking at an mvp dashboard of basic productivity metrics. In serious logistics/ manufacturing better stuff than this is already in place.

e.g this article from six years ago about Amazon’s practices then:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse...
Improving processes is hard.

Wagging your finger at that “bad” employee who is “slacking” that’s a very desirable and I think almost primal motivation for some folks….
Not in the immediate future, but we have a member in our community who's building something. We'll see if they get near the finishing line.
I really hope that this was just a crappy mockup that the founders didn't spend any actual time on.

Because if it is a fully fledged product, I'm not sure what that says about the many people at YC and elsewhere that gave it a pass. Seriously wtf material.
Efficiency could lead to cheaper hardware for everyone, themselves included.
Where is something like this illegal?
> slightly-diverse undergrad university (Duke)

These are exactly the types of people that go to Duke
Bump- on 4G and gave the site like 30 seconds and left after only skeleton loader.
The bomber isn’t nuclear.

The payload is.

The good reason to make changes is the hard reality that your opponents won’t slow down to accomodate your old, inefficient, maintenance-heavy fleet of bombers.

Even during peacetime the B-52 fleet is burning money, money that DOGE assures the voting public cannot be wasted on frivolous matters such as HIV prevention.

It’s like the Ukraine war. Perfectly good tanks turned out to be useless sitting ducks in the face of $500 drones.

Why change anything?

Because the enemy did.

Because the rest of the world did.
It’s to pull eyeballs for jobs at YC portfolio companies and to attempt to convince founders to apply to batches. It is their marketing and talent sourcing. It is, arguably, the most valuable contributor of forward looking potential returns (considering most VC investment decisions are statistics and gambling).
Their stance on Ukraine is bothering me. If not that, I’d be trusting them 100%. Had to revoke all recommendations and start actively point out to others this.
Are factory managers that dumb that they can't figure out what its actually for?
You can use this bookmarklet to create new pages:

data:text/html,<html%20contenteditable>

then save them as HTML-files.

You can use another bookmarklet to turn existing pages or files into editable pages.
I wouldn't be surprised if the startup asked YC to pull the Launch after the backlash, and I would be surprised if HN was resistant to doing that. Unlike most of what runs on HN, Launch HNs (and YC company job posts) are purely a benefit for YC companies.

I wouldn't bring this particular product to market. But I think people have weird ideas about the level of intentionality that exists inside of YC with respect to its portfolio companies.

Relative to an ordinary VC fund, YC admits absurd numbers of companies every year (always has!). It deliberately admits companies that are nothing but pairs of impressive founders and an idea. Those teams get some office hours advice from some subset of YC partners, but are left alone to build their companies --- YC takes a small amount of equity, nothing resembling control. By the time Demo Day or "Launch HN" happens, many of those companies are working on totally different things from their applications.

I don't really understand why anyone would expect YC to keep a durable record of a Launch post that was working against the startup that put it together. They're not a journalism outlet, and it looks like journalism did just fine keeping a record of what happened here.
We give you 1GB of space for free. I think you can fit three or four branches in that. But we'll announce a cheaper tier this week (spoiler!) with the same amount of disk space.
> His cult like following is why the share price is what it is. It's unusual but it was only valued so highly because of him.

Putting up impressive net income figures better than the other car companies and making the best selling car in the world also helps. Plus SpaceX and Starlink are a success. That kind of track record within 15 years could portend more success in the future.

It does not excuse the other failings, but business wise, I don’t see what trepidation shareholders would have had (prior to the recent Nazi and destroying US civilian institutions actions).
> Even though DigiCert’s TOU and MSA prohibited Alegeus from taking the action it did, once it filed for a TRO and the court almost immediately granted it, DigiCert’s hands were tied

So did the judge just not read the TOU before signing the TRO?

I wonder if the CAB forum would have standing to sue Alegeus and/or that judge for interfering with the PKI process with an invalid TRO.
When market conditions give you a glut of "qualified" labor you can afford these practices.

Then again these are precisely the types of "poverty studies" that have been done in India for years. "Should we fine nurses who are late to work? If so, how much?" "Should web publicly shame and harass office workers who leave early? If so, how much?" Lookin' at you, "Poverty Action Lab."

This looks like the logical extension to what we've been putting this country through for years.
Or protect your workers, keep them safe....
> Much like nuclear technology.

There are fewer than ten nuclear states, two of which have almost all of the nukes. All but four countries in the world are signatories to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapon. Only nation-states possess nuclear weapons, even the wealthiest corporations and individuals would be obliterated if they ever tried to obtain or build them.

The idea that no moat exists is folly.
Extrapolate and abstract and apply to your area of expertise.
See how that feels.
With diving board trackpads, I usually just tap to click.

Physically pressing down a diving board is just asking for frustration. Sometimes I miss the separate left, right, and middle click buttons under the trackpad like the old days.
Bunsenlabs Linux Boron – Continuation of CrunchBang Linux
I stumbled upon this distribution a week or so ago. I love to test out new distributions to see whats different and what I enjoy about different ones. I absolutely love the Openbox desktop this comes with and the way the menu system works. I had never heard of it so I was pleasantly surprised. I figured there might be others out there that might find it interesting as well. It's based off Debian.

No affiliation, just really like it and hope it gets a bit more attention.
I'm Tired of Pretending Tech Is Making the World Better
if we're aiming to present fiction, we should replace phrases like "not 100% accurate," with "not accurate."

too many dummies read a line like not 100% accurate and assume the content must be something like 90% accurate.
Hogan Core Banking Platform
When given a choice between universes, choose the funnier one. Unless the joke is on you…
Exactly my thoughts, if this was a European demonstration they would be talking about providing training to the worker on the line to improve the efficiency.

I have no idea if that’s how they run factories in India but it definitely looks very off from Western perspective. In Europe the assumption would be that workers are trying their best, but they don’t know better.
In the video, the assumption is that the workers are cheating or slacking and this tool can help you detect bad actors.

The tool itself at core seems fine though. Any privacy or abuse risks would be up to the legislature and operators to consider but it’s nothing unusual to monitor production lines.
> Objectively they did a great job from a technological perspective.

It’s not clear to me that their software, actually does what it says… I feel like that wasn’t entirely clear from the demo. It’s not like a short demo proves much.
>No, it's a bug/emergent property and interpreting it as a feature is a simple misunderstanding of the software.

'Feature' has a different meaning in machine learning than it does in software. It means a measurable property of data, not a behavior of a program.

E.g. the language, style, tone, content, and semantics of text are all features. If text can be said to have a certain amount of 'evilness', then you have an evilness feature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_(machine_learning)
if you're in the Local LLMs world this is an interesting choice. All they care about is lots of fast RAM. 128GB at $2k is a good price when compared to Mac Studios
you're right, it is just one component, but please tell me, how many computers have you used that have no RAM?
Musk has inside track to take over contract to fix air traffic communications
Of course the exploiter doesn't have the moral failing in this. After all, the capitalist must profit as they can, and the proletariat suffer what they must. /s

Not to go too much into an ideological diatribe about class solidarity and such, I do wish that in light of cases like these, we as tech workers would reflect on the "worker" part and not get totally blinded from the exploitation of less fortunate people in different field. Consider me slightly cynical, though.