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Apple vs the Law

https://formularsumo.co.uk/blog/2025/apple-vs-the-law/
180•tempodox•3h ago•130 comments

OpenFront: Realtime Risk-like multiplayer game in the browser

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Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale

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446•davidgu•3d ago•189 comments

Batch Mode in the Gemini API: Process More for Less

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108•xnx•3d ago•34 comments

LLM Inference Handbook

https://bentoml.com/llm/
90•djhu9•7h ago•3 comments

The ChompSaw: A Benchtop Power Tool That's Safe for Kids to Use

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178•surprisetalk•3d ago•104 comments

What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

https://dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/#What_is_Realtalks_relationship_to_AI
256•prathyvsh•18h ago•84 comments

Show HN: Interactive pinout for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2

https://pico2.pinout.xyz
54•gadgetoid•3d ago•9 comments

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https://lwn.net/ml/all/cover.1747070147.git.anand.jain@oracle.com/
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https://evertpot.com/http/
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Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language

https://flix.dev/
279•freilanzer•20h ago•135 comments

An almost catastrophic OpenZFS bug and the humans that made it

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23•r4um•4h ago•26 comments

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https://foks.pub/
233•ubj•21h ago•53 comments

Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland's coast is a breakthrough

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191•djoldman•19h ago•164 comments

Show HN: Cactus – Ollama for Smartphones

https://github.com/cactus-compute/cactus
153•HenryNdubuaku•15h ago•63 comments

The Wet History of Media in the Bathroom

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6•zdw•3d ago•0 comments

Operational Apple-1 Computer for sale [video]

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55•guiambros•2d ago•18 comments

Graphical Linear Algebra

https://graphicallinearalgebra.net/
247•hyperbrainer•18h ago•19 comments

Show HN: I built a playground to showcase what Flux Kontext is good at

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59•Zephyrion•1d ago•14 comments

Red Hat Technical Writing Style Guide

https://stylepedia.net/style/
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https://www.browseros.com/
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Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/
371•simonw•9h ago•230 comments

Analyzing database trends through 1.8M Hacker News headlines

https://camelai.com/blog/hn-database-hype/
152•vercantez•3d ago•79 comments

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https://susam.net/million-times-million.html
79•susam•1d ago•75 comments

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https://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/page/2/
110•bookofjoe•16h ago•62 comments

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127•mihau•21h ago•31 comments

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https://h0x0er.github.io/blog/2025/06/29/ebpf-connecting-with-container-runtimes/
58•forxtrot•15h ago•7 comments

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https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
626•dheerajvs•17h ago•410 comments

AI coding tools can reduce productivity

https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown
183•gk1•10h ago•180 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: AI Baby Monitor – local Video-LLM that beeps when safety rules break

https://github.com/zeenolife/ai-baby-monitor
94•zeenolife•1mo ago
Hi HN! I built AI Baby Monitor – a tiny stack (Redis + vLLM + Streamlit) that watches a video stream and a YAML list of safety rules. If the model spots a rule being broken it plays beep sound, so you can quickly glance over and check on your baby.

Why?

When we bought a crib for our daughter, the first thing she tried was climbing over the rail :/ I got a bit paranoid about constantly watching her over, so I thought of a helper that can *actively* watch the baby, while parents could stay *semi-actively* alert. It’s meant to be an additional set of eyes, and *not* a replacement for the adult. Thus, just a beep sound and not phone notifications.

How it works

* *stream_to_redis.py* captures video stream frames → Redis streams

* *run_watcher.py* pulls the latest N frames, injects them + the rules into a prompt and hits a local *vLLM* server running *Qwen 2.5 VL*

* Model returns structured JSON (`should_alert`, `reasoning`, `awareness_level`)

* If `should_alert=True` → `playsound` beep

* Streamlit page displays both camera and LLM logs

Comments

temporarything•1mo ago
Great idea! Is it possible to run this on latest Macbook Pros? No GPU unfortunately :)
dghlsakjg•1mo ago
The latest MacBook pros all have gpu cores built in.
skull8888888•1mo ago
why qwen 2.5 specifically?
rokset3•1mo ago
will it be able to process sounds, so it can beep while baby crying? i work with music in headphones, would be nice
techjamie•1mo ago
This could probably be achieved very simply by a device with a microphone and a script that just checks the noise level. Either checking for consistently high noise levels, or if you want to get fancy, maybe do some heuristic stuff to pick out crying specifically.

Might be a cool project to do with a cheap microphone and an SBC.

throwaway173738•1mo ago
This is how a lot of baby monitors do it. Mine goes off if someone with a loud muffler drives by too which is convenient because my son will frequently be awakened by that so I get a little extra time.
clarkcharlie03•1mo ago
Pretty cool - I might try this with my kiddo
up-n-atom•1mo ago
Perfect now we can put more good willing parents in jail for “neglect”. For every good idea, a bad idea will be born.
bilsbie•1mo ago
I had this same idea for monitoring my pool while I’m away. Watching for things in pool, low or high water levels, cloudy water, stray dogs, etc.

There are actually hundreds of applications for this basic idea. Common sense applied to a video feed.

ozzydave•1mo ago
I want this for pedestrians and cyclists at intersections, and particularly HAWK beacons.
csmoak•1mo ago
https://www.roundabout.tech/ tackles this problem
throwup238•1mo ago
There’s an entire Curb Your Enthusiasm season about that.

(Just get a fence is the conclusion)

bronco21016•1mo ago
I've thought of the same for my lake shore, which is very much not a "just build a fence" situation.

We have 50 ft of lake shore with neighbors on either side. Assuming I fenced my 50 ft there is still a path around said fence on either side.

At the very most I could gate the dock, but again, there are about 8 other docs readily available.

Edmond•1mo ago
try Watchman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44087499

I am the developer and happy to answer questions.

You can basically setup your own instructions and setup you own observation solutions...you can imagine everything from security to farm operations, the sky's the limit.

epolanski•1mo ago
Are we moving to a world where AI will be fed so much of our cameras for analysis?
barbazoo•1mo ago
Except it’ll fail and a kid will die. Please keep physically blocking off pools.
pixl97•1mo ago
Eh, I don't think anyone is saying they are going to stop blocking off pools...

I had a friend that almost lost his kid with a pool with a self closing gate, an object happened to get caught in the latch when someone was leaving the pool and their 2 year old capitalized on this to almost get themselves killed. They had to perform CPR and rush to the hospital.

A backup system that could alert is just another layer of the security onion.

th3h4mm3r•1mo ago
What about hardware?
dtgriscom•1mo ago
Absolutely. I want a "Cat on the Counter" detector, but a) the hardware needs to be cheap, and b) it can't take more than a few seconds to analyze a frame.
alibova•1mo ago
Totally doable! Raspberry pi and YOLO.
throwaway173738•1mo ago
Especially doable since the owner can probably get lots of pictures of their cat in different poses and lighting conditions and really overfit on their cat instead of just any cat.
thenthenthen•1mo ago
How would you go about to tune a model using your own images? Any easy/clear methods (e.g. $ llama.ccp -tune ./mycatpicturesfolder )
zeenolife•1mo ago
+1
zeenolife•1mo ago
the gemma 3n looks promising.

Btw, it doesn't really sound like the problem needs a video as an input to llm. Feels like sending an image is okay. So that makes it less demanding(?)

jxcole•1mo ago
IANAL but I would be scared of getting sued. For example, if I try to give a perfectly good car seat to good will they refuse to take it for liability reasons. Baby safety is serious business.
worldsayshi•1mo ago
Yeah it's an interesting project but it seems there should be lower stakes use cases that should be tried first.
NitpickLawyer•1mo ago
> Baby safety is serious business.

Are "regular" baby monitors any more complicated than a dumbed down cheapest you can build it walkie-talkie? Society really needs to stop wanting other people to be responsible for their actions. The choice of what devices you use on your kids should first and foremost be on you. AI or no AI. Fear mongering with literal "someone think of the kids" is getting old, IMO.

itishappy•1mo ago
I don't agree this is a "think of the children" issue. Nobody is saying "don't use this on your kids" they're saying "understand if by sharing this you might be exposing yourself to potential financial consequences." Baby safety is serious business.

* Summer Infant Baby Monitor Overheating Settlement – $10 million after reports of overheating monitors leading to fire hazards.

* Angelcare Monitor Recall Lawsuit – $7 million settlement due to defective cord placement that led to strangulation risks.

* Levana Baby Monitor Overheating Lawsuit – $5.5 million awarded in cases of monitors causing burns to children.

* VTech Baby Monitor Battery Defect Settlement – $6.2 million after reports of exploding batteries causing fire risks.

* Motorola Baby Monitor Signal Failure Class Action – $4.8 million settlement after claims of poor signal reception leading to missed emergencies.

* Owlet Smart Sock Monitor Lawsuit – $6.5 million awarded due to inaccurate heart rate readings that caused false alarms and panic among parents.

* Graco Digital Monitor Lawsuit – $5 million settlement after a lawsuit citing defective monitors that stopped functioning during critical moments.

* Philips Avent Baby Monitor Lawsuit – $4.2 million after several reports of overheating and potential fire hazards.

* Samsung Baby Monitor Fire Hazard Settlement – $3.5 million awarded due to incidents of overheating leading to home fires.

* Infant Optics Monitor Class Action – $4 million settlement after claims of faulty batteries and wiring causing sudden shutdowns during use.

https://www.personalinjurysandiego.org/product-liability/saf...

epolanski•1mo ago
He's not selling a product, he's sharing a library which includes his terms and conditions.
arcticfox•1mo ago
I looked for primary sources on two randomly selected ones there, the VTech Baby Monitor Battery Defect Settlement and the Motorola Baby and I didn't find anything. Only the linked site. I feel like GPT just invented those lawsuits.

Just checked Infant Optics Monitor Class Action and also didn't find anything.

itishappy•1mo ago
Shoot, you're totally right. Horrifying. I should know better by now not to let my guard down like that.
amelius•1mo ago
Even if this fails only in 0.1% of cases, given enough users this will kill babies.

(Of course you should compare this to humans, but in any case, do the math! And get a good lawyer.)

natosaichek•1mo ago
This thing will not kill babies. That's like saying seatbelts kill people because they don't save everyone in a car accident. It is precisely this attitude that prevents good things from flourishing - the idea that if something is involved however tangentially in a safety important subsystem it must have perfect results. No, we should not have this view. If something is net positive, we should promote it.
dsr_•1mo ago
When people decide that the nannycam works, they will rely on it. Then, when it fails, their inaction will kill babies.

It is amazing/horrifying to me how many people are intent on reincenting the reasons why we have UL, the FDA, the FCC, traffic laws, seatbelts, electrical codes, fire marshals and unions.

icoder•1mo ago
What inactions? Apart from creating safe conditions beforehand (but perhaps that is your point), once my kid is asleep there's not much more I can do? Most of that time I'm sleeping myself.
NoPicklez•1mo ago
Exactly, there's not much more you can do when you're asleep. However, this system might just nudge you awake if something happens when you're asleep. Or it won't and you would be no worse off than if you didnt have it.

It's not going to solve all problems.

amelius•1mo ago
Parent 1: what's that sound? Should we check it?

Parent 2: Nah, the baby monitor would have warned us.

amelius•1mo ago
Tesla autopilot has some disclaimers saying you should always be prepared to grab the wheel, and we all read the stories in the news ...

In other words, if you want AI to take over tasks of humans you either do it well or not at all.

NoPicklez•1mo ago
It's not taking over tasks, it's helping to support those tasks. For the times when you might not be looking directly into the camera, it attempts to tell you about anything suspicious.

Tesla autopilot could steer you into a concrete wall, a baby monitor with some LLM attached to it does not directly harm the child.

This is stupid

DonHopkins•1mo ago
But I love babies!!!

(I just can't eat a whole one.)

bethekidyouwant•1mo ago
If your daughter can climb out of the crib, then she is too big for the crib.

Also, if I accept your premise that a baby sleeping is inherently dangerous, then this is just an added layer of safety. It doesn’t remove safety.

But really safety is a highly lame way of framing this. what you want is more hours asleep so you have this thing try to hypnotize the baby with lights, sound, vibration, and it only alerts the parent(s) if it fails Eventually it could just straight up talk to your three year-old read it a second bedtime story, dispense a cup of water convince it not to hang out with the bad kids at school etc

epolanski•1mo ago
How about judging the software rather than speculating on what's in OP's mind?
alibova•1mo ago
Love this!

A long time ago I built a cat detector to keep my cat out of the baby play area, this was before modern AI systems and I'm sure it could be so much better now. https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/baby-proofing-raspberry-pi...

amelius•1mo ago
Reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIbkLjjlMV8
DonHopkins•1mo ago
That would work great to keep babies from peeing on things, too!
delichon•1mo ago
A small pilot study for more efficient nanny state technology. Just add scale.
jerf•1mo ago
The state is several steps ahead of you. Have you wondered why the push for AI all of a sudden, everywhere, all at once, really quite far ahead of its actual capabilities to help most of us? Huge monies thrown at it? An effectively-instantaneous turnaround on decades of anti-nuclear sentiment just to power AI?

It's not because it's going to be good for us.

dang•1mo ago
"Don't be snarky."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. If your comment was intended as a joke on the word 'nanny' then I take this back.

delichon•1mo ago
I don't mean it to be a dismissal or snark. It wouldn't be as terrifying if I could do that. On the contrary it is remarkable how directly this exact baby monitor model can be scaled up to an automated intelligent panopticon.

(Thank you, yes, baby monitor -> nanny state)

DonHopkins•1mo ago
At least give them the benefit of the Doubtfire!
protocolture•1mo ago
You hardly need AI at the state scale. They can just process footage at regular speed.
mywacaday•1mo ago
I remember when we were preparing to have our first kid 10 years ago we bought a monitor with the pad underthe mattress on the advice of other parents. As a former cpr instructor I was dumbfounded when I realised that parents would spend 100s on monitors but not one person had bothered to learn infant cpr.
OtherShrezzing•1mo ago
Any reliable places online to learn? Or is it a course that you should only do in person?
coherentpony•1mo ago
I did an in-person class. I highly recommend it.
sdoering•1mo ago
I do not know about infant CPR. But I would never trust myself administering CPR to even an adult, after watching something online.

I have had regular first responder refresher courses at work every two years - and i have to say: I always relearned something every two years, because not having done it (luckily no-one needed my first aid) meant I had forgotten quite a bit in those two years.

Especially how it feels to administer CPR. and how to position the person.

So not sure where you are located, but in Germany, you can volunteer to become a first aid responder for your company - they love that, because from a certain size on they must have enough of us. And you get a certificate every time you retrain (you need to do this regularly every two years, as said).

We even once hat a baby puppet for training, but I was not able to test it that time (as it was not mandatory, I wanted that the parents actually had the chance - or those planning for kids).

d1sxeyes•1mo ago
CPR is one of those things where you hope never to have to be the best in the room at.

Thank you for volunteering.

wil421•1mo ago
The hospital we had our kids at had a baby CPR class and an expectant parent class. The CPR class didn’t give you a certification but you learned what to do for CPR and choking.
yusina•1mo ago
How reliable is this, i.e., what is the failure rate? False positives / negatives?
zeenolife•1mo ago
It's a bit tricky, the fp rate is not ideal, it does wrongly beep from time to time. I haven't really had a serious false negative, but did have some true positives :)

About the hard numbers, it's tough to test it quantitatively, because there's not a lot of data for babies in danger :D and I hope it stays that way

In general, I'm hoping that the open models will get better, there has been a lot of acceleration in video modality recently

laurent_du•1mo ago
As a parent of several kids, I have no idea what is the use case for this. When does it ever happen that a kid too small to be safe by himself has to be let alone, with a camera to record him? My eyes are a good enough camera, and my brain holds a reasonable list of safety rules. What problem does this solve that isn't already near perfectly solved by my existence?
jdminhbg•1mo ago
> When does it ever happen that a kid too small to be safe by himself has to be let alone, with a camera to record him?

Nap time? Overnight?

sokoloff•1mo ago
The same set of problems that is solved by an audio or AV baby monitor.

Surely you didn’t have the baby in the same room as an awake adult 24 hours per day for 730 straight days, right?

Edmond•1mo ago
What about the AI playground monitor?:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44087499

I am the developer :)

That is a demo of course but I think what sets LLM tools like this apart from what came before is that implemented correctly, the user gets to decide what it is, and can change the meaning at any time, in other words what it should be looking for at any time.

That is of course if the solution is implementation correctly.

There is immense potential for these type of capabilities if they are done in a way that leaves the specific use case implementation up to users.

victorbjorklund•1mo ago
You never ever sleep? Did your children have an awake adult watching them 24/7 all year around? I doubt most people can have that situation since that would require a team of people taking shifts sitting looking at the child
epolanski•1mo ago
Why would you need to have someone awake 24/7 while your child sleeps?
victorbjorklund•1mo ago
Because the child might wake up while you are sleeping. That is why people use baby monitors (this is just a more fancy baby monitor)
epolanski•1mo ago
That's different than having someone awake 24/7 following the child?
bigmattystyles•1mo ago
I’m dumbfounded at the negative comments in here. Read the git read me, it’s a hobby for op, not some crazy commercial venture and he makes it clear it’s to help in the event one gets distracted for a few seconds. The only valid comment is his daughter being likely too big for her crib, but sheesh lay off op’s approach to actually trying something. Ps: am not op’s alt account.
throwaway314155•1mo ago
The only negative comment that is perhaps overly negative is the one mentioning "killing babies" (but they make a good point still).

Everyone else's criticism is effectively entirely warranted even if it's just a hobby project if only because the criticisms are mostly pretty mild and reasonable things like "don't try to automate parenting with tech that still isn't ready yet".

zeenolife•1mo ago
Cheers!

Yes, I tried to stress it hard that it's in no way a replacement for an adult, just an additional eye as a safeguard

husband4412•1mo ago
Tools that can cause harm deserve scrutiny, regardless if OP make money or not.

Also who knows ? With enough popularity, OP might launch this into a startup.

diggan•1mo ago
> Tools that can cause harm deserve scrutiny

How on earth would this project, by itself, cause harm?

Sure, inattentive parents can lead to children hurting themselves, but that can happen while browsing gmail, or even when frigate is setup, does that mean gmail and frigate cause harm to children? Obviously not.

itishappy•1mo ago
Gmail and Frigate aren't AI Baby Monitors. If you use Frigate as a baby monitor, it's absolutely worth scrutinizing your setup. The exact same thing can be said of a human nanny too. You wouldn't hire someone with no research.
diggan•1mo ago
No, but what about people planning terror attacks via gmail? Does that count as gmail being a "harmful" tool? You've seemed to have missed my point completely.
itishappy•1mo ago
Yeah, which is why Google scans your messages for illegal content. Not sure if they scan for terrorism, but they certainly do for CSAM.
Foreignborn•1mo ago
way too many people get hung up on the idea OP led with.

what OP has is a fully self hosted, private video feed that can alert for more sophisticated events like:

- is anything happening that shouldn’t be? - are things not where they’re supposed to be? - has anything fallen? (plants, things into the pool)

good job OP. i’m going to take a look at this in the next couple months.

3abiton•1mo ago
This is such a fun project! I am curious about the hardware used? Or is the LLM hosted on a remote server?
zeenolife•1mo ago
Hey! It's fully local, I was trying to build it privacy first. All the things related to kids are very sensitive, I didn't want to send anything to cloud.

But you can still run the inference remotely, changing that should be just a matter of changing the address.

turtlebits•1mo ago
Sorry, this is an interesting but terrible idea.

If your crib is unsafe or undersized, the solution is to make it safe by adding guardrails or buying a safer/correct sized model. Or remove the hazard entirely by putting their bed on the floor.

Adding AI/tech to catch deficiencies is not the right way to go about it. You're willing to risk injury/death in case the AI is wrong, you don't hear the beep, or there are too many false positives and you end up ignoring it?

This is the same thing as self driving. It seems good enough to that it takes your attention away - until it doesn't. And it's AI, not a model specifically trained on catching the issue.

its-summertime•1mo ago
I usually replace all my fuses with plain wire, since I know not to plug broken things in in the first place.
asachanfbd•1mo ago
This sounds interesting, I would give it a try coming weekend.
pabe•1mo ago
What a cool project with local processing! Will check it out, thanks!
barbazoo•1mo ago
> When we bought a crib for our daughter, the first thing she tried was climbing over the rail

Maybe get a proper crib then?!