MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hluska | 2025-06-30 21:10:54+00:00
When I finished my degree, the idea that a software system could develop that level of expertise was relegated to science fiction. It is an unbelievable human accomplishment to get to that point and honestly, a bit of awe makes life more pleasant.

Less quality of life focused, I don’t believe that the models he uses for this research are capable of more. Is it really that revealing?
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-06-30 21:11:13+00:00
I'm sure people will want to make it seem like Comcast is doing something evil here, but they're not:

> Comcast does not monitor the motion and/or notifications generated by the service.

> This feature is currently only available for select Xfinity Internet customers as part of an early access preview.

> WiFi Motion is off by default.

Features like this at Comcast are typically one or two engineers on a random team coming up with a cool idea, testing it out, and if it works, they ask if they can roll it out en-masse. If it's just a software or server/backend thing and it doesn't have any negative impact, it gets accepted. Despite their terrible customer service and business practices, they do some cool stuff sometimes. They also release a fair bit of home-grown stuff as open source, which is expensive and time-consuming, but [they hope] it attracts engineers.
by palata | 2025-06-30 21:12:34+00:00
> and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority.

Feels like you weren't able to have a proper discussion with those people. In many EU countries, using SMS made/makes no sense because SMS was/is super expensive as compared to WhatsApp. And using iMessage makes no sense because most people don't have an iPhone. From their point of view, it actually makes no sense.

Now if you tell them "well, where I come from everybody has an iPhone" or "SMS have always been free", probably they won't say "still, I'm better than you for no apparent reason".

I don't think that it is actually seen as a mark of superiority anywhere in the EU to use WhatsApp. Unlike apparently in some places it is seen as a mark of superiority to have an iPhone vs an Android phone.

If you go in a EU country where SMS were not prohibitively expensive in the beginning of WhatsApp (e.g. France), you'll see that WhatsApp has been less successful (at least in the beginning). WhatsApp was a killer app because it was free SMS, really.
by spongebobstoes | 2025-06-30 21:13:45+00:00
my understanding is that BBM was different because there was nothing to interoperate with at the time

Apple refusing RCS integration is a very clear example of hurting everyone in pursuit of profit

it's likely not the most evil, but I do think it qualifies as evil. it stands out by being inarguably willful, and having a very broad impact

I find harming hundreds of millions (probably billions) of friendships to be quite evil
by IshKebab | 2025-06-30 21:14:02+00:00
Just go and ask ChatGPT or Claude something that can't possibly be in its training set. Make something up. If it is only memorising answers then it will be impossible for it to get the correct result.

A simple nonsense programming task would suffice. For example "write a Python function to erase every character from a string unless either of its adjacent characters are also adjacent to it in the alphabet. The string only contains lowercase a-z"

That task isn't anywhere in its training set so they can't memorise the answer. But I bet ChatGPT and Claude can still do it.

Honestly this is sooooo obvious to anyone that has used these tools, it's really insane that people are still parroting (heh) the "it just memorises" line.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-30 21:14:10+00:00
In case anyone is skimming the headline and comments: It's not enabled by default. This is an optional feature that you have to find, turn on, and then select up to 3 WiFi devices to use as reference signals:

> Activating the feature

> WiFi Motion is off by default. To activate the feature, perform the following steps:

The actual title of the article is "Using WiFi Motion in the Xfinity app".
by jml7c5 | 2025-06-30 21:14:13+00:00
The term for this sort of thing is "WiFi sensing". Relevant HN thread from 2021 ("The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901587

As far as I can tell, devices were already on the market when that thread was made. 802.11bf was standardization to help along interoperability and future products.
by smaudet | 2025-06-30 21:15:19+00:00
I don't think you can frame a media outlet based on which administration is currently in power. Anything and everything an administration says is propaganda, and hence untrustworthy.

I.e. your claim that it is leftist requires some justification.

Yeah, sure, if you are a Nazi, everything to the left of you is going to look "left", and likewise if you are a Communist, everything to the right is going to look "right", that doesn't make your viewpoint reality, however.
by shmeeed | 2025-06-30 21:15:19+00:00
This is a chilling outlook, but it looks very plausible.

The process has already started, the building blocks are in place. See the recent rise in public complaints about intense scraper activity. Zero-Click has become all but inescapable, and is going to capture an ever-growing share of searches.

Still, any paradigm shift also gives room for hope. There will be pitfalls for Moloch, they might just trip over their own ambitions. And maybe there will be opportunity for organic growth to take root in the cracks of their foundations.
by softservo | 2025-06-30 21:15:20+00:00
I built a simple web app that helped make me more present during a family tragedy:

https://touchgrass.fm/

Brief backstory: While visiting us overseas, my in-laws were in a very bad car accident. Everyone involved is alive and going to be okay. But what followed was a series of emotional, physical and logistical challenges that pushed my wife and her parents to their limits.

During this time I found myself (shamefully) hiding on my phone. I was obsessively refreshing for updates from insurance/hospital teams, sending empty messages, and mindlessly scrolling feeds. My screen time was averaging 12 hours a day. Time I could have spent being fully present with my wife and her parents.

I finally accepted I have a serious phone addiction. I tried Apple Screen Time and a few popular screen time management apps, but found the blocks were too easy to bypass, and some apps were as useful as they were distracting depending on the context (e.g. YouTube). I didn’t necessarily want to use my phone less: it’s an incredibly useful tool, and the distractions were sometimes helpful.

What I really needed was intentional stretches of time spent away from my phone. I built touchgrass.fm as a simple way to record and incentivize those stretches of time. It’s not quite finished, but it’s been helping me stay present for hospital visits, meals and important conversations.
by bumby | 2025-06-30 21:15:26+00:00
Not to be too nit picky, but I think you’re conflating median and average. The median age is probably lower because the age distribution skews older due to vintage cars and such. But you are right about cars lasting much longer today. At the same time, I think there is a point that they are also less repairable. (I’ve heard horror stories of $7k+ touch screen replacements, which control everything from the radio to the HVAC).
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-30 21:15:30+00:00
Infineon CYW43439, wifi 4 / bt 5.2.

It's a pity wifi6 has been so slow to show up in embedded space. The Target Wake Time feature in particular will help embedded devices power consumption enormously. Then having OFDMA can really drastically reduce the impact of small devices on network performance.
by antisthenes | 2025-06-30 21:15:43+00:00
It's not a complex issue at all.

95% of US population are in temperate climate zones.

Saying "it's a complex issue" is the same kind of ignorant self-induced panic as worrying about EV range for a single digit percentage of long trips.

> The follow on is that if you still want a heat pump in the cold parts of the USA you need a ground loop heat pump.

No, you don't. You just need to accept that your payback period on a system will be longer than in a more temperate climate. It might pay back for itself in 7 years instead of 5, for example.
by hbn | 2025-06-30 21:16:36+00:00
> Nothing would change for you.

If my apps are changing, yes it is changing for me.

Right now I can manage all of my app subscriptions from the Subscriptions screen in the Settings app of my devices. If they open up to other payment methods, my subscriptions are no longer centralized, I have to give my credit card information to more parties of variable trustworthiness, I have to worry about subscription renewal policies for every individual app, I have to figure out different methods of cancelling which could be a more difficult process than hitting "cancel" and trusting Apple will stop the payments, etc.
by whstl | 2025-06-30 21:16:59+00:00
Since Walmart keeps popping up in other comments, I'll do devil's advocate using the exact same argument other people used:

If you don't want to buy on Walmart and their custom payment system, then just go to a competitor.

With that said: this is an unrealistic scenario. Walmart doesn't pay the famous 30% to ApplePay, only a regular CC-like fee (probably less). Also, physically they can just accept contact payments where they don't interact with Apple but it still works with the iPhone wallet. Online, they can just use credit cards instead of ApplePay, which iPhones have autofill for, and probably not lose much.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-06-30 21:17:25+00:00
> Now I have to rework my site to not use "prompt engineering" and have a Take™ on "context engineering". Because of a couple tweets + a blog reverberating over 2-3 days.

The difference here is that your example shows a trivial statement and a change period of 3 days, whereas what Carmack is doing is taking years.
by Tijdreiziger | 2025-06-30 21:17:54+00:00
That’s speculation. In the article, you can see that it’s meant as a pseudo-alarm system. It’s plausible that someone at Comcast thought this is a value-add. (Netgear already offered this as a feature on their routers, it’s not a novel concept.)

Even within tech circles, lots of people aren’t worried about privacy and even have indoor cameras in their homes.
by bri3d | 2025-06-30 21:18:04+00:00
It's just a UART; you can use the UART to debug the device in various ways.

On Pixel devices, the UART is not configured or brought up by default in locked production mode (as things should be), but by unlocking the device and then using `fastboot oem uart enable` you can flip the bits to turn it on. On early Pixel devices it was on the headphone jack and on newer ones it's on the SBU pins.

By default I think it's still configured as the kernel console in the kernel command line, so once it's enabled it will show the kernel debug output and present a TTY. But of course you can subsequently configure it to do whatever you'd want a UART for: kgdb for kernel-debugging, earlier stuff in the bootloader, and so on.

So, the implications are just: there's a convenient debugging interface available to you that turns on if you unlock the device and ask for it.

On Chromebook devices there's a more complicated and fancy debugging system where the SBU pins can be muxed to the security processor's USB host interface by presenting a debug cable called a SuzyQ, which presents a whole suite of debugging facilities. This used to be used quite frequently for unbricking purposes.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-30 21:18:53+00:00
If you don't broadcast your SSID, then how can device manufactures have hyper accurate location services available when GPS is not? You're not participating in the system! Hell, as much money as theGoogs gives to be the default search to various companies, would they not be willing to pay ISPs to keep that option on? I'm just throwing ideas out that I know nothing about, but I don't see why they would be opposed to the concept.
by transpute | 2025-06-30 21:19:03+00:00
> the fact that this ended up going from research paper to "Comcast can tell if I'm home based on my body's physical interaction with wifi waves" is absolutely wild

The 15-year path was roughly:

1. bespoke military use (see+shoot through wall) 2. bespoke law-enforcement use (occupancy, activity) 3. public research papers by MIT and others 4. open firmware for Intel modems 5. 1000+ research papers using open firmware 6. bespoke offensive/criminal/state malware 7. bespoke commercial niche implementations 8. IEEE standardization (802.11bf) 9. (very few) open-source countermeasures 10. ISP routers implementing draft IEEE standard 11. (upcoming) many new WiFi 7+ devices with Sensing features

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/27/1088154/wifi-sen...

> There is one area that the IEEE is not working on, at least not directly: privacy and security.. IEEE fellow and member of the Wi-Fi sensing task group.. the goal is to focus on “at least get the sensing measurements done.” He says that the committee did discuss privacy and security: “Some individuals have raised concerns, including myself.” But they decided that while those concerns do need to be addressed, they are not within the committee’s mandate.
by chem83 | 2025-06-30 21:19:23+00:00
There's an active community around MiniDisc these days. r/minidisc and Discord are the places to check. People have been building replacement gumstick Li ion batteries with reasonable quality and there are replacement OLED displays for RH1 and RH10 Sony players. Mechanisms will eventually fail, I suppose, but for now you can still enjoy the format.

On the software end, web.minidisc.wiki has come a long way and there are even projects to expand the functionality of player firmware. Cool hobby, if you're into that.
by baxtr | 2025-06-30 21:19:32+00:00
>Conclusion

Building powerful and reliable AI Agents is becoming less about finding a magic prompt or model updates. It is about the engineering of context and providing the right information and tools, in the right format, at the right time. It’s a cross-functional challenge that involves understanding your business use case, defining your outputs, and structuring all the necessary information so that an LLM can “accomplish the task."

That’s actually also true for humans: the more context (aka right info at the right time) you provide the better for solving tasks.
by staunton | 2025-06-30 21:19:35+00:00
Again, sure. However, this is still looking at things at the timescale of millenia at best.

In my original comment, I was claiming that biological evolution is not relevant for this:

> as people and societies become wealthier and better educated (both correlated with intelligence), their reproduction rates drop precipitously. Perhaps we've overshot the intelligence cliff and evolution is now gradually pulling us back.
by js8 | 2025-06-30 21:20:17+00:00
I think you're making a good point. I have an honest question for you.

Aren't you scared how American system pits retirees and their kids against each other? What you just said means, essentially, if workers want to improve their working conditions, they have to go against shareholder profits, and they're threatening their parents survival (which relies on these profits). Isn't it f'ed up?
by atoav | 2025-06-30 21:20:35+00:00
> This information didn't just appear out of nowhere. It took time to collate, source and verify.

Could you try to rely less on using vague innuendo on HN? If you have reasonable doubt in a theory and/or additional/missing information that isn't purely anecdotal that lead you to your statement consider sharing it on here. If you don't have any information consider the option that your opiniom might not be as much supported by the ground truth as you probably like it to be.

Journalists like these are professionals that are paid to work in a conflict zone, if they are killed, of course their death will be noted. It works like this in literally every conflict on earth and there are international organizations that monitor violence against journalists because they are an fundamentally important pillar of any free society.

The question is why the technologically advanced IDF kills journalists at rates higher than in any other conflict zone on earth. This isn't a statistical anomaly that can be simply hand-waved away. It describes the nature of this conflict with numbers that are written with blood.

Anybody who defends the killing of journalists in a war zone is on the wrong side of history, period.
by svat | 2025-06-30 21:21:07+00:00
Of course in many cases (such as the one you mentioned), the amount of memory needed does not grow with N. But there are other programs/computation that seem to require more memory. For example, consider the following (Python) program:

def intpow(n, r): return int(n**r) N = 10000 a = [0] * N a[1] = 1 for m in range(2, N): a[m] = a[m-1] + a[intpow(m, 0.6)] + a[intpow(m, 0.3)] + a[intpow(m, 0.1)] print(a[N-1])

It populates an array of size N by, for each index m, accessing array elements at smaller values m-1, m^0.6, m^0.3 and m^0.1 (just arbitrary values I made up). So this is a program that runs in time about N, and as it can depend on array elements that go very far back, it may not be immediately obvious how to make it run with space significantly less than N^0.9 (say), let alone √N. But the result shows that it can be done (disclaimer: I haven't actually verified the details of how the proof carries over to this program, but it looks like it should be possible), and for any program no matter how weird.
by WalterBright | 2025-06-30 21:21:23+00:00
If I may may be provocative :-) this post isn't about C. It's about layering on a custom language using C preprocessor macros.

My compilers were originally written in C. I started using the C preprocessor to do metaprogramming. After some years I got fed up with it and removed nearly all of the preprocessor use, and never looked back. My code was much easier to understand.

An amusing story: long ago, a friend of mine working for Microsoft was told by a team leader that a 50K program had a bug in it, and sadly the developer was long gone. He'd assigned programmer after programmer to it, who could not fix it. My friend said he'd give it a try, and had it fixed in 2 hours.

The source code was written in Microsoft MASM, where the M stood for "Macro". You can guess where this is going. The developer had invented his own high level language using the macro system (which was much more powerful than C's). Unfortunately, he neglected to document it, and the other programmers spent weeks studying it and could not figure it out.

The leader, astonished, asked him how he figured it out in 2 hours? My friend said simple. He assembled it to object code, then disassembled the object code with obj2asm (a disassembler I wrote that converts object code back to source code). He then immediately found and fixed the bug, and checked in the "new" source code which was the disassembled version.

I've seen many very smart and clever uses of the C macros, the article is one of them. But isn't it time to move on?
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-30 21:22:15+00:00
> So pointing to the safety is why it’s a circular argument.

You're confusing me. How about I explain my understanding of what makes things circular.

Generic hypothetical: Regulation requires a part. Cars put the part in because of regulation. Later, people amending the regulations consider something else that requires that part, and they justify it as having negligible cost because that part is already in cars. Because that part is there from regulation, it's to a strong extent regulation justifying itself, and it's circular.

Does your understanding of circularity differ from that?

Now, consider a variant: Regulation requires a part. But it doesn't matter because cars have that part anyway. Later, people amending the regulations consider something else that requires that part, and they justify it as having negligible cost because that part is already in cars. Because that part is not there from regulation, it's not regulation justifying itself, and it's not circular.

Does that make sense? You could imagine the part is "wheels" for the variant. Regulations that imply wheels are not using circular arguments when they say 'cars have wheels anyway, that's not a cost of this regulation'.
by nomel | 2025-06-30 21:22:17+00:00
It's not too crazy, if you're familiar with comms systems.

The ability to do this is a necessity for a comm system working in a reflective environment: cancel out the reflections with an adaptive filter, residual is now a high-pass result of the motion. It's the same concept that makes your cell location data so profitable, and how 10G ethernet is possible over copper, with the hybrid front end cancelling reflections from kinks in the cable (and why physical wiggling the cable will cause packet CRC errors). It's, quite literally, "already there" for almost every modern MIMO system, just maybe not exposed for use.
by chrisb | 2025-06-30 21:22:29+00:00
https://spring-agriculture.com/

Autonomous robotics for sustainable agriculture. Based in the south of the UK. Prototypes of an autonomous mechanical farm-scale weeding robot currently beginning real-world testing. Still a huge amount of work to do though.

Hardware and software developed fairly much from scratch, not using ROS (for not entirely crazy reasons...); everything written in Rust which I find well suited to this application area.

The robot is built using off-the-shelf components and 3d-printed custom parts, so build cost is surprisingly low, and iterations are fast (well, for hardware dev).

On robot compute is a couple of Raspberry Pi 5s.

Currently using the RPi AI Kit for image recognition, ie Hailo 8[L] accelerators.

Not currently using any advanced robotics VLA-type AI models, but soon looking to experiment with some of it, initially in simulation.

Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to talk :) Contact details in my HN profile, and on our website.
by troupo | 2025-06-30 21:22:36+00:00
> I think veo3 proves that ai can generalize 2d and even 3d games

It doesn't. And you said it yourself:

> generating a video under prompt constraints is basically playing a game.

No. It's neither generating a game (that people can play) nor is it playing a game (it's generating a video).

Since it's not a model of the world in any sense of the word, there are issues with even the most basic object permanenece. E.g. here's veo3 generating a GTA-style video. Oh look, the car spins 360 and ends up on a completely different street than the one it was driving down previously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja2PVllZcsI
by _benton | 2025-06-30 21:22:36+00:00
This seems like a bad faith argument. But if you're being serious, I can buy non-nike shoes in the same way you can buy non-Apple phones. If anything, the people complaining about Apple would be upset by the lawsuit because they want to buy an iPhone despite other options being available. And in that case, the alternatives are cheaper not more expensive in the case of ethically made shoes.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-30 21:22:42+00:00
> Poor Sam Altman, 300B worth of trade secrets bought out from under him for a paltry few hundred million

Sorry, you don't lose people when you treat them well. Add to that Altman's penchant for organisational dysfunction and the (in part resulting) illiquidity of OpenAI's employees' equity-not-equity and this makes a lot of sense. Broadly, it's good for the American AI ecosystem for this competition for talent to exist.
by kube-system | 2025-06-30 21:22:58+00:00
There are countless scenarios where cars are operated in close proximity for over an hour, like rural highway traffic or metro corridor traffic.

Every time a TPMS battery dies in these circumstances, the vehicle shouldn't pair with random TPMS sensors around it. Especially when we're talking about logic of a regulated safety system. It's a little better that it is deterministic, and follows an explicit pairing process.