MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hardwaresofton | 2025-05-17 11:31:58+00:00
> Does the hub requirement matter that much though? I mean if you want truly peer to peer, then yeah, but if you're already using Home Assistant you can plug a cheap ZigBee usb dongle into that.

Maybe not, but I don't really want to actually run Home Assistant, I want the basics to hack on, really. Trying to pick the most open thing that will be easy to program without relying on using something like Home Assistant (not that its bad or anything).

> So the bit I'm missing: how do you control them purely over WiFi? Do you run software on your phone that can control the target? Eg: app talks directly to the device over your network, instead of via a browser + Home Assistant running on a Pi. I can't think of any examples of a product that works this way without being cloud enabled (IE: there is a hub but you don't own it)

Yeah that's my goal -- basically I want to be able to control the devices from anything web connected (and ideally, the same program running in multiple places).

My thinking is that I can build this without being cloud enabled if I "just" (famous last words) had Thread/Wifi.

With all the excellent feedback in this thread (thanks HN!), it's looking like a small SBC + a Thread/Zigbee/BLE dongle[0] is the way forward, and hooking that up to my router via USB so it's always powered and follows the router around (maybe velcro it on).

SBC (or something smaller maybe, but probably the SBC) so I can program it myself.

[0]: https://sonoff.tech/product/gateway-and-sensors/sonoff-zigbe...
by ok_dad | 2025-05-17 11:31:58+00:00
The "giving a talk" is to introduce newer students to these fields. If you don't introduce undergrads to real research, they never learn about the possibilities they have to study in the future. It is probably really annoying to have to do it, but I think some have forgotten that the research and results aren't the only important thing to come from research, but also the passing of knowledge and experience that is important.
by balloob | 2025-05-17 11:33:27+00:00
Founder Home Assistant here. Want to chime in that I always love to see write ups like these to see the great things what people achieve with Home Assistant.

Not everyone might know, but last year we started the Open Home Foundation as a non-profit in Switzerland and I donated Home Assistant to it[1]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved.

We are fully committed to building out a smart home that focuses on local control and privacy. Yes there are rough edges, but we're actively working on it in the open, with progress being released every month.

~Paulus, Founder Home Assistant & President Open Home Foundation https://github.com/balloob

[1]: https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...
by montebicyclelo | 2025-05-17 11:33:49+00:00
The diagonal-looking attention matrix shown in the post is mathematically equivalent to 3 by 3 convolution. The model learns how to do that via its attention mechanism - it's not obvious that it would be able to do that via attention.

(This can be shown by comparing that attention matrix to a "manually computed Neighbour Attention matrix", which is known to be equivalent to 3 by 3 conv.)
by thicTurtlLverXX | 2025-05-17 11:34:11+00:00
I understand how, from a technical POV, electricity and electrification could be considered great news.

But I don't see how this is good news at all from a societal POV.

Think about all the lamplighters who lost their jobs. Streetlights just turn on now? Lamplighting used to be considered a stable job! And what about the ice cutters…

For real tho, it's not like there's nothing left to do — we still have potholes to fix, t-shirts to fold and illnesses to cure. Just the fact that many people continue to believe that wars are justified by resource scarcity shows we need technological progress.
by boomlinde | 2025-05-17 11:34:13+00:00
> Pedantically speaking, you can't. You can have a variable that points to an integer 5, and then make it point to a character array "hello\0". But the value of the variable is a pointer in both cases.

Unions may be the better analog here.

> Curiously enough, this is also true of Python - just less obvious because it doesn't have any variables that aren't pointers, and most operators perform an implicit dereference.

That's more like an implementation detail than a quality of the language itself. A JavaScript implementation might do the same. For example, values in V8 are all either pointers to the heap except in the case of small (31-bit) integers, and a less optimized implementation might not even make that distinction and allocate everything on the heap. Similarly, a Python implementation might store SMIs directly where the pointer would be, like V8. PyPy uses both tagged pointers/SMIs and may even allocate registers for values.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-05-17 11:36:55+00:00
> American bad attitude is how you have to wait 20 minutes to board a plane because they have a complicated procedure with 9 priority levels

The purpose of the many boarding groups is IMHO, to make those in groups > 1 feel as though they're missing out on some perk that they could get if they paid more. It's an intentional class system where some are encouraged to look down on those who paid less, and vice versa. It's good for revenue, bad for people.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-17 11:37:29+00:00
Unfortunately I cannot use Cursor, not until they fix https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/598.

What about Zed or something else?

I have not used any IDEs like Cursor or Zed, so I am not sure what I should be using (on Linux). I typically just get on Claude (claude.ai) or ChatGPT and do everything manually. It has worked fine for me so far, but if there is a way to reduce friction, I am willing to give it a try. I do not really need anything advanced, however. I just want to feed it the whole codebase (at times), some documentation, and then provide prompts. I mostly care about support for Claude and perhaps Gemini (would like to try it out).
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-05-17 11:37:45+00:00
I don't understand -- we are talking about 100ms or so of latency? which is almost completely dwarfed by any mechanical action such as the gates actually opening?? This is about as ridiculous as it gets. The videos that compare the UK system with the JP system practically show the same throughput, even when in the UK video most people are using magnetic/paper tickets (which by necessity are going to be much slower than NFC).

In addition, the annoyance of these gates comes from having to fiddle with the wallet, etc. in order to find the card or the phone, or the fact that multiples tries may be required for the reader to actually read it; not the 200ms it takes for the reader to do so. I'm going to bet that faster NFC bandwidth makes the entire thing even more finicky, not less.

If you really want to speed how people go through the gates, then _remove the damn gates_. It's not rocket science, and there are some European cities that have _no_ gates in their underground systems. München comes to mind, but even in London less central stations have no gates. Beat that.

In addition , the article bashes NXP for using obscurity as a defense, then goes to praise Felica, whose apparently main barrier of defense is:

> the crypto is proprietary, and probably buried underneath a mountain of NDAs, so the public can't audit it independently.

This is literally the definition of security by obscurity. When I read the two examples set by the author, my only possible conclusion is that security by obscurity actually works, but only when you can keep it actually obscure. The only problem is that NXP failed to keep their algorithms obscure while apparently FeliCa did. It is basically the opposite conclusion to what the author is trying to convince me to believe. I find it totally unjustified to blame NXP for trying to keep the algorithm obscure by the courts when apparently FeliCa also does it -- just much more successfully.

Note: I personally consider MIFARE classic being _almost_ trivially clonable a requirement.
by rubitxxx3 | 2025-05-17 11:38:36+00:00
In the US and watch Britbox and Acorn at least as much as other providers now. We watch a lot of Aussie and British shows, new and old, color and B/W.

The BBC made really great shows. If they go under, it’s a shame. I would pay tax to help the BBC keep going. I’d pay the Aussies, too, if they’re not getting comp’d.
by throw310822 | 2025-05-17 11:38:58+00:00
If you're suggesting that Palestinian civilians are collectively guilty of supporting Hamas and therefore deserve to be massacred and starved and their cities razed to the ground, you have already proven my point, because what you are justifying is a war crime.

Besides, I find it funny that you insist on Hamas as if Israel hadn't already proven to be a hundred times worse. Hamas has a full right to have tunnels and to fight back against the illegal invader and occupier of Palestine, occupier that had from the very beginning the objective of expelling and replacing the native population with Jewish immigrants. If I have to choose a side, between the occupied and massacred that fought back with terrorism, and the invader and colonizer that is hell-bent on oppressing, destroying, exterminating and expelling, I choose the former. Better the Palestinians, better Hamas.
by bdangubic | 2025-05-17 11:39:12+00:00
The question is the problem, if I did not have a problem I wouldn’t be reaching out to a site named StackOverflow (one of the many problems I encountered over the years…). The problem is not just broken code, the problem is many different things like “how do I …?” or “I am trying to figure out how to …?” which is not about the broken code.
by montebicyclelo | 2025-05-17 11:41:26+00:00
> it's brute forcing a small grid

If by small grid you are referring to the attention matrix plot shown, then that is not a correct interpretation. That diagonal-like pattern it learns, is 3x3 convolution, so it can compare the neighbours of a given cell.

Edit: and note that every grid it is trained on / runs inference on is randomly generated and completely unique, so it cannot just memorise examples
by mritchie712 | 2025-05-17 11:41:35+00:00
LLMs are far more reliable at producing something like this:

{ "dimensions": [ "users.state", "users.city", "orders.status" ], "measures": [ "orders.count" ], "filters": [ { "member": "users.state", "operator": "notEquals", "values": ["us-wa"] } ], "timeDimensions": [ { "dimension": "orders.created_at", "dateRange": ["2020-01-01", "2021-01-01"] } ], "limit": 10 }

than this:

SELECT users.state, users.city, orders.status, sum(orders.count) FROM orders CROSS JOIN users WHERE users.state != 'us-wa' AND orders.created_at BETWEEN '2020-01-01' AND '2021-01-01' GROUP BY 1, 2, 3 LIMIT 10;
by masklinn | 2025-05-17 11:41:50+00:00
The error was probably trying to write a generic `using`. In my experience languages which use higher order functions or macros for scope cleanup tend to build high-level utilities directly onto the lowest level features, it can be a bit repetitive but usually not too bad.

So in this case, rather than a generic `using` built on the even more generic `try/except` you should probably have built a `withFile` callback. It's a bit more repetitive, but because you know exactly what you're working with it's a lot less error prone, and you don't need to hope there's a ready made protocol.

It also provides the opportunity of upgrading the entire thing e.g. because `withFile` would be specialised for file interaction it would be able to wrap all file operations as promise-based methods instead of having to mix promises and legacy callbacks.
by satisfice | 2025-05-17 11:41:55+00:00
I want to shake this guy. I want to say “you are a choosing to be a fucking idiot because you falsely believe you are a vacuous moron.” But I know it won’t help.

Here’s the problem: he thinks that what LLMs produce are well-reasoned, coherent thoughts. Here’s a healthier alternative: what LLMs produce is shallow and banal text, designed to camouflage its true nature.

Now here’s a heuristic: treat anything written by an LLM, about any conceptual matter as wrong by definition (because it was not a product of human experience and insight, and because we are humans). If it LOOKS right, look closer. Look more carefully. Take that insight to the next level.

Second heuristic: anything written by an LLM that you cannot falsify is, by definition, banal. Ho hum. Who cares? Does an LLM have an opinion about how to find happiness? How cute… but not worth believing.

Third heuristic: that which an LLM writes which you can neither falsify nor dismiss as banal, you may assume that the LLM itself does not understand. It’s babbling. But perhaps you can understand it, and take it farther.

Define YOURSELF as that which lies beyond these models, and write from that sensibility.
by maccard | 2025-05-17 11:42:01+00:00
> I think to put this to bed, we need to establish a baseline or at least a list of applications to launch while screen recording, and then literally count frames. It would be funny if this was all perception and it wasn't actually "slow", that is, "seconds to load" is actually like 2 seconds, and not 12...

2 seconds is an eternity. Its 15 round trips from London to New York, 5-8GB read from an NVMe drive, and 7 billion cpu cycles per core - with even the cheapest devices on the market having multiple cores. There’s no really any excuse for things being that slow.

Also I think that this idea that the only number that matters is the synthetic exact frame count from interaction to window for a specific list of operations is how we ended up in the scenario where windows explorer takes over a second to show the window on modern OS’s despite multiple orders of magnitude more computing power being available. Nobody really cares about what the actual performance of the running system is, as long as the exact part they’re responsible for doesn’t trip an alert.

A few years ago I worked on a project for a batch operation that was done a few hundred times a day. It took 15 minutes to run and it was starting to get in the way of things. Another team had hired 2 engineers to spin up kafka and a k8s cluster to queue these operations up, along with a reporting dashboard and metrics for queue length etc.

I ran the code through a profiler and found a hotspot on shutdown where we were searching through an array millions of times to remove a single entry, repeatedly, until the array was finished. I replaced it with a set lookup in reverse, and changed a handful of places where we rebuilt this massive array and did the same thing to use the same data structure and it dropped to under 15 seconds with about a weeks work. I identified enough other wins that would bring it under a second that would negate the need for the entire other project to exist, but it had already been approved and budget allocated for it, so last I heard they’re still taking 15 seconds and spending hundreds of thousands a month on this absolutely gargantuan monitoring system that they don’t need.

In both cases, IMO, a vision holder of “this isn’t good enough” using the product in their own device at home is what’s needed
by whstl | 2025-05-17 11:42:33+00:00
The CFO had raised it as a problem but nobody ever bothered to check.

When a new CTO started, he actually checked it out on his first week and discovered the company emitting invoices belonged to the PM.

The CTO also demanded talking with the designer from Fiverr and in the end the amount of money actually paid to him was negligible.

I never really understood the involvement of the internal designer but she was also fired on the spot together with the PM and the company's highest paid engineer (but I don't think this one is involved).
by snthpy | 2025-05-17 11:42:55+00:00
Thank you for sharing that. I'm going to try that up to "then I rewrite significant chunks by hand to make things really sharp". I'm not a writer a would have never dreamed of writing anything until I gave this a try. I've often had ideas for stories though and using Gemini to bring these to "paper" has felt like a superpower similar how it must feel for people who can't code but now can able to create apps thanks to AI. I think it's a really exciting time!

I've been wondering about what the legalities of the generated content are though since we know that a lot of the artistic source content was used without consent?C an I put the stories on my blog? Or, not that I wanted to, publish them? I guess people use AI generated code everywhere so I guess for practical purposes the cat is out the bag and won't be put back in again.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-05-17 11:43:21+00:00
The problem is Google will probably do it again once the press has moved on. Nextcloud directly competes with a bunch of Google's own offerings and clearly its very popular given the amount of users of the app. They will restrict this again in the future.

I moved to F droid and now my app works as its meant to and I don't see much reason to move back to Play store updates.
by kristianc | 2025-05-17 11:46:42+00:00
I agree, it’s often held up as a “risk taking” show but I don’t think it wasn’t really anything of the sort.

At the moment post 1997 when Britain was starting to change and become more diverse and sure of it itself it reinforced an identify of Britain as it used to think of itself: silly voices, binary identities and oddballs.

It has more in common with Love Thy Neighbour than anything that came after.
by rightbyte | 2025-05-17 11:46:54+00:00
The "Is it cake" made me cancel Netflix. That and some shows about car restoration with focus on drama.

I don't want to pay and end up supporting such dreg.

It is funny though. For some reason I almost watched 5 episodes of is it cake and a lot of the car restoration shows.

It is like you default to time wasting when you have nothing you want to see. And I don't want that exposure ...
by viraptor | 2025-05-17 11:47:08+00:00
> I don’t want to buy an IoT hub.

Different expectations. I don't want my things to know that wifi exists. It stops vendor lock-in, it ensures local communication, it means things work even if network goes down. It also makes sure they will never autoupdate or join Mirai botnet.

I've got a mix of zwave (fibaro), ZigBee (Ikea) and ble at home and I'm ok with that.
by ranma42 | 2025-05-17 11:47:54+00:00
> Since there's no point in generating keys for a device which will not be used in Japan, non-Japan SKUs don't have Osaifu-Keitai functionality. So even if you rooted your phone and had full access to the secure element, if your phone's secure element doesn't have the key, you can't use it as an IC card.

At least in some cases it is sufficient to change the phone SKU id (which requires temporary rooting) to the Japan SKU id to unlock the Osaifu-Keitai functionality on a non-Japan phone. I'm not sure if this means that the secure element had the necessary keys provisioned all along, or just that the Osaifu-Keitai app then provisions it on first use.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-17 11:48:33+00:00
I am a resource for my kids, my spouse, and the rest of my friends and family. I am also a resource to my employer and other customers.

In any organization, a resource can vary from things such as land, chemicals, machines, humans, books, etc.

The term Human Resources seems accurate to a refer to a group of people that deal with the humans in the organization.

I do not see why “resources” is seen as having a negative connotation in this context. Of course, just like a family can mistreat a resourceful family member, so can any organization mistreat a human resource.
by motorest | 2025-05-17 11:49:29+00:00
> I think this biases towards sufficiently large engineering organizations where OAuth 2.0 was identified as necessary for some part of their requirements. In most organizations, they're still using `x-<orgname>-token` headers and the like to do auth.

I don't think that's it. Auth is a critical system in any organization, and larger organizations actually present more resistance to change, particularly in business critical areas. If anything, smaller orgs gave an easier time migrating critical systems such as authentication.
by smegger001 | 2025-05-17 11:49:58+00:00
Would this work with a headless VM only accessed via SSH? I naively perhaps assume it would be safe as its not using a virtual vga device but perhaps the machines still has the vga device present in the virtual environment it just not being used by the user but still vulnerable?

also is this specific to any particular host operating system or all versions of virtualbox?
by hardwaresofton | 2025-05-17 11:49:59+00:00
> Thread is using the same protocol as Zigbee, which requires specialized hardware to talk to it. You can’t get around a centralized hub when wanting to use them on your WiFi network. > > Thread just adds an IP layer above Zigbee. Zigbee is on the same protocol layer as Ethernet or WiFi.

AH, I've just realized that I've been using the wrong terminology.

I've been meaning to say Matter over Thread vs Matter over Wifi!

Matter seems like a decent way forward, and it can work only over wifi which is what drew me in to focusing on Matter. IIRC Matter/Zigbee isn't a thing (though it technically should be possible, Zigbee is just a transport as far as Matter is concerned right?).

[EDIT] works -> can work, Thread/Zigbee -> Matter/Zigbee
by danaris | 2025-05-17 11:50:07+00:00
IMO, you're almost there.

"States' rights" has only ever been used as a smokescreen. The original "states' rights" argument was a cover for slavery. More recently, it's been a cover for other far-right reactionary positions specifically during center-left administrations that would otherwise seek to impose regulations preventing them from oppressing people at the state level.

AI is not being "protected" this way because it's Just Too Important To Leave To The States; it's being protected because Musk and other mega-wealthy Silicon Valley types have pushed to exempt it from all regulation. (Notice that this bill does nothing to regulate AI at the federal level, nor is there any particular proposal to do so from the people pushing for this clause!)
by PaulKeeble | 2025-05-17 11:50:25+00:00
A lot of the performance has come from compilers using new instruction sets and optimisations for the new architectures. Programs and libraries are now designed around serial memory access more and multicore and awareness of the heterogenous multicore performance. If you ignore hyperthreading and E core verses P core then it will harm performance. Anything on a server needs to be aware of NUMA and memory locality to avoid risking regression in performance.

As this video shows there are examples of code that went backwards in aspects because they are highly branchy and random access in nature and this harms the pipeline predictions. Performance has got increasingly complex and multifaceted and getting more out of today’s machines requires more knowledge of what the CPU likes because they just stopped getting quicker in basic single threaded functions that were unoptimised for the hardware about 20 years ago. The clockspeed stopped climbing rapidly and along with it single threaded performance increase slowed to instruction optimisation which doesn't affect each programme the same way.