Cited on HN 3 times, 2025–2026, never outright recommendedscore 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN cites it as evidence that lights-out factories exist, though one commenter notes it is outdated relative to current automation.
A WSJ report on China's 'dark factories', highly automated plants run by robots with little human presence, visiting Zeekr's EV factory. It covers Chinese labor costs, automation and overproduction in the EV industry.
“some Chinese factories are so completely automated now that they don't bother turning on the lights” (HN, 2025)
> the amount of light used when moving from last-gen 'heavy industry' to next-gen 'value add'/'light industry'/'design work'/whatever is going to be reduced Not to mention the automation of heavy industry leading to "dark factories": some Chinese factories are so completely automated now that they don't bother turning on the lights in large chunks of them. See [this video]
Shows automated Chinese factories that run without lights.
> Find me a “lights out” factory. They don’t exist. "Inside China's 'dark factories' where robots run the production lines" [link] "China’s Dark Factories: So Automated, They Don't Need Lights" [this video]
i mean youre most likely not wrong (i dont have insider knowledge of those places), however your previous comment said "never want it to be dark" - when the reality is that its normal operation _is_ dark. only when the automated QA detects issues or theyre doing random inspections are the lights turned up/on this is an outdated video for waht was state of the art a few years ago [this video] again, i dont have insider knowledge so i cannot speak on whats SOTA in chinese automated factories beyond whats covered publicly
Notes video is outdated relative to current state of the art.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
3 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.