MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by actuallyalys | 2025-06-10 23:15:39+00:00
Yep, watt-hours are correct. Think of it this way: Power supplies and laptop chargers are rated in watts and that represents how much energy they can pull from the wall at a point in time. If you wanted to know how much energy a task takes on your computer and you know it maxes out your 300 watt desktop [0] for an entire hour, that would take 300 watt-hours.

[0] To my knowledge, no desktops are built to max out their power supply for an extended time; this is a simplification for illustration purposes.
by michaelt | 2025-06-10 23:16:05+00:00
> You need some technical specs on the website. How many DOF does it have? Does it have joint angle sensing? If so, what's the resolution? What's the interface to the servos? What's the payload capacity? Does it have integrated motor controllers? How long is it, and what does the dexterous workspace look like?

The post says "kit that keeps LeRobot SO-101’s kinematics" so it's probably very similar to [1] namely 5DOF and a gripper, using STS3215 servos [2]

> As a roboticist, what I'd vote for, in order, is:

As they are making a robot at the $219 price point, I very much doubt they have the money to add anything to the design.

[1] https://huggingface.co/docs/lerobot/so101 [2] https://uk.robotshop.com/products/magnetic-encoding-servo-st...
by Baader-Meinhof | 2025-06-10 23:17:38+00:00
I ask two types of questions:

1. Factual updates to an ongoing or recent story.

2. Analysis, e.g. "What were the economic effects of Brexit."

Without AI, I would try to read multiple opinions from different sides. But its hard for me to always know which experts to trust?

AI will present both sides, but even when AI is not hallucinating, there is still the issue of "are the experts that the AI is sourcing reliable?"
by nothrabannosir | 2025-06-10 23:17:40+00:00
This statement can be true without contradicting anything anyone said upstream. Otherwise could use it to justify just about any bad design decision.

Yes it’s in the docs. Yes people who carefully read the docs won’t get bitten. Also yes the design could be improved so people don’t make this mistake even without reading the docs.

Both things can be true. We’re currently only talking about the latter, though.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-10 23:18:41+00:00
A common failure mode I’ve seen: since Windows 8/8.1 iirc, so-called “Microsoft accounts” are used to login to the OS, as opposed to local user accounts, which were the status quo for personal computers, and are managed locally by the OS on behalf of Administrator users. Many legacy Windows users had and have no idea what the difference is or why it matters, but part of the Microsoft Account setup flow in Windows OOBE involves setting up 2FA for the new Microsoft Account, and I think it will let you use email or SMS, and maybe even a phone call to get the 2FA code. I think you are given the option to complete the 2FA at a later time, in case the code is delayed, but I forget for sure.

I can’t count how many people I helped to regain access to their computer login because of losing access to the method used to receive 2FA codes for Microsoft accounts, which is necessary to login if you have forgotten your password. The Microsoft account user setup won’t let you make a password-free login unless you use a local account, and short easily guessable passwords don’t meet their online account security requirements. Most people probably don’t want a Microsoft account if it has this failure mode, but people don't know the trade offs at the time of user account setup, and Microsoft uses that ignorance as leverage to get people signed into everything so that you will have have opted-in to all of this. It’s such an own-goal by Microsoft and it makes me feel for users who have no idea how any of this works. It’s a hard problem to solve, I’m sure, but it shouldn’t be like this.

The people who are most disadvantaged by the high tech highly secure thrust of modern tech are those who have the least skills with technology. Low skill users are also most at risk for scams and malware and other kinds of tactics, so I don’t mean to say that having no password is good. Having no password is a bad solution to the problem of computers being hard to use for many people, and they don’t know what they don’t know, so anything that they haven’t seen before is a cause for concern or alarm to their mind. Since most people have forgotten that they even have a Microsoft account by the time they have trouble logging in to their computer using one, they click around until they get to the account recovery, and then usually get their account locked because they can’t solve the security challenges that they never faced before or anticipated when doing the initial setup perhaps years prior.
by apwell23 | 2025-06-10 23:19:06+00:00
> I strongly suspect the desire for 2 buses max was a lot more about load balancing than it was rate limiting.

load balance with what exactly ? there is only one server thats rate limiting. oh you mean other servers being border states that aren't allowed to do similar rate limiting?

you asked "examples and hopefully some verbatim quotes of "we cannot handle this?""

I gave you an example of exactly that but you say you "suspect" its not that. Chicago doesn't need "volunteers" to handle intake. City spent 700M dollars to migrant housing, employing thousands of people in all sorts of roles. You think they are dependent on volunteers to man a bus intake point? That was all clearly a ruse. Migrant shelters were very unpopular with mayor's core constituency[1].

> do this orderly, we can handle it

It was not like that it was "we can only take 2 buses total per day any" It was clearly stated in city ordinance. Why are you twisting it into something else. Demand doesn't just drop off just because city decided to rate limit.

I think you are being higly disingenuous here.

Edit: ok i see why from your other comments. You were making a statement not asking a question about cities not wanting migrants.

Anyways, I don't have dog in this fight. I am telling you what the mood was here in south chicago at that time.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2023/05/11/south-shore-neighbor...
by const_cast | 2025-06-10 23:19:45+00:00
The problem is you’re proposing a social solution and those largely just don’t work.

We achieved the conservative wet dream of the nuclear family in the past via oppressive policy. We forced women into subservient positions where they can’t gain financial freedom, and we persecuted sexual minorities like homosexuals.

Returning to that is bad. We all decided that that sucks. Not just women, men too. Gender roles suck ass. I don’t want to be a provider, and women largely don’t want to be domestic slaves.

We gave people more freedom, and turns out that means a lot of people don’t want the white picket fence life.

I mean, what’s the actionable policy here? Restrict women from having bank accounts? Criminalize homosexuality? Kill transgender people? Would that… fix anything? I don’t think so.

Even just the foundation is rocky. Were things better in the past? I don’t think so, no. Maybe if you were a successful white man, but even then, you’re probably better off in the modern, progressive world. For everyone else though, you know, the majority, it was a trap.

I don’t want to work in the mines and come home to a depressed wife who made a sad looking depression casserole. That’s not the life I want and, evidently, not the life a lot of people want. So, here we are.
by seltzered_ | 2025-06-10 23:20:32+00:00
In the 'Tools, not Apps' part of the article they reference Michel Beaudouin-Lafon's talk 'A World Without Apps' which goes back in time and shows the Xerox Star operating system: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ntaudUum06E&t=313s

Another reference I usually bring up is Alan Kay's talk on smalltalk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw&t=4m19s

My related comments on this, just to show other stories along this theme:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36885940

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36594543

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18254214
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-06-10 23:22:30+00:00
Windows and Office used to make up >90% of Microsoft's revenue, back when Microsoft was the biggest company in the world around DotCom.

Windows especially has been a sinking ship for a decade and yet Microsoft is bigger than ever.

Google is well positioned to monetize LLMs. Cloud, Gemini, and Waymo are all growing and could easily be Fortune 50 companies each within a few years.

Gsuite continues to do well.

Google Search revenue was still growing as of last quarter.

It's possible for Search revenue to still grow while Google Search total market share of search (if including LLM "search") goes down drastically (LLM users search more, not less).

It's also possible that total traditional Google Search volume could decline substantially without a huge impact to Search revenues.

Remember, only about ~15% of searches are Monetized. Google will be focused on keeping THOSE searches going.

It's possible Google could lose TONS of marketshare and still keep the frothiest part of the market...

OpenAI could take off more than any expects and be the biggest company in the world, and it's possible that only takes a small dent out of Search.

It's also possible Google could end up having a significant (if not dominant) part of the LLM search market.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-06-10 23:22:58+00:00
If that was their point, it would have been more constructive to actually make it.

To your point, it's only anthropomorphization if you make the anthrocentric assumption that "thinking" refers to something that only humans can do.[1]

And I don't think it confuses laypeople, when literally telling it to "think" achieves the very similar results as in humans - it produces output that someone provided it out-of-context would easily identify as "thinking out loud", and improves the accuracy of results like how... thinking does.

The best mental model of RLHF'd LLMs that I've seen is that they are statistical models "simulating"[1] how a human-like character would respond to a given natural-language input. To calculate the statistically "most likely" answer that an intelligent creature would give to a non-trivial question, with any sort of accuracy, you need emergent effects which look an awful like like a (low fidelity) simulation of intelligence. This includes simulating "thought". (And the distinction between "simulating thinking" and "thinking" is a distinction without a difference given enough accuracy)

I'm curious as to what "capabilities" you think the layperson is misled about, because if anything they tend to exceed layperson understanding IME. And I'm curious what mental model you have of LLMs that provides more "true understanding" of how a statistical model can generate answers that appear nowhere in its training.

[1] It also begs the question of whether there exists a clear and narrow definition of what "thinking" is that everyone can agree on. I suspect if you ask five philosophers you'll get six different answers, as the saying goes.

[2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/janus-simulators
by csa | 2025-06-10 23:23:02+00:00
> Florida cracked down on the state level on businessrs a year ago so not as much of a problem as far as I understand.

Omg, I’m in tears.

It’s an open “secret” in some industries that it’s trivially easy to hire illegal immigrants en masse through Florida-based “recruiters”.

If this somehow changes, some big R donors are going to be very upset.
by morepedantic | 2025-06-10 23:23:41+00:00
I'm not sure what the double whammy is here. I proposed a deduction for raising children, and he countered with a payment premium for adult children, but it sounded exclusive. Only one whammy applies.

Raising your child will run you ~300,000 USD, in addition to the massive opportunity cost from time investment. Given that social security is funded entirely through taxes in that tax year, it's a bit much to expect the children of 53% of the population to care for 100% of the elderly when the willfully childless 47% of the population did not put in more upfront in some other way. As birth rates drop, the ratio of workers to retirees will skew worse and worse, and the entire safety net will collapse progressively.

Alternatively, we can encourage and incentivize child rearing. Yes, that means that the willfully childfree will need to pony up resources for those who want children. What would you prefer: pay now for the continuity of the safety net, or the collapse of the safety net?
by stavros | 2025-06-10 23:23:54+00:00
PLA is pretty bad compared to foam when it comes to planes, as it's very heavy and very brittle. Any semi-hard landing will break parts off, and heavy planes fly badly.

The big advantage is that you can just print the part again, which almost makes PLA worth it.

ABS would probably be better, as it's much more durable and lighter, but it's still much heavier than foam, and printing ABS isn't great.
by musjleman | 2025-06-10 23:24:54+00:00
> The anti-tamper codes, if any tampering is detected will crash on undefined/unallocated regions.

That's basically the whole point of any anti-tamper product. I just think you picked a terrible example of a feature that could break due to OS changes specifically.

> Meaning that if Windows ever were to overwrite that region for whatever reason, will trigger the crash.

We're talking about random stack memory inside of a virtual machine that likely doesn't call any external code whatsoever. There should be no real way for Microsoft to accidentally corrupt this memory.
by petronio | 2025-06-10 23:25:00+00:00
Interestingly, just yesterday I found out 4 already exists, but it's inverse of what you're thinking: top up excess battery capacity overnight, when grid prices are low, and then resell during the day when purchase prices are high.

I think the economic problem is that while there /may/ be overproduction during the day, the day is the only time other than early-mid evening when there is significant demand.

You would effectively be targeting the early-mid evening demand, assuming there was overproduction during the day, and with the current cost of batteries, their installation, and their replacement, I can't see the numbers working out.

I would love for battery prices to come down enough to make something like this possible though.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-06-10 23:25:29+00:00
THe history doesn't help. LA is a huge area and California is traditionally very rocky and hilly. The great weather and modern industrialism is the reason people continued to flock here after the Gold Rush. But anyone playing Orgeon trails knows how rough getting to California was to begin with.

There's definitely amenities that can be done to make LA walkable regardless, but I understand that nature did not intent for this settlement to be human friendly.
by GlenTheMachine | 2025-06-10 23:25:38+00:00
They did ask for suggested upgrades.

“I’d love your feedback! Beyond manufacturing, cleaning up the codebase, and writing docs, I’m considering: a force-controlled gripper, a parallel-jaw gripper, an extra wrist DOF (matching the new Trossen and ARX arms), full force feedback on the leader arm (though that may triple the price), a more affordable version with lower resolution each joint, and a longer-reach variant. Which of these—or something else—would be most useful to you?”
by jbc1 | 2025-06-10 23:25:39+00:00
If I ask the question myself then there's no step where a human expert has vetted the content and put their name on it. That curation and vouching is of value.

Now your mind might have immediately went "pffff as if they're doing that" and I agree but only to the extent that it largely wasn't happening prior to AI anyway. The vast majority of internet content was already low quality and rushed out by low paid writers who lacked expertise in what they were writing about. AI doesn't change that.
by killfisto | 2025-06-10 23:25:44+00:00
ITT: some of the wildest, disassociated, story mode narrative parroting

All language is just a Rorshach test. You saw truth in those books, I saw a connect the dots puzzle book for kids.

Those guys had the literacy of a modern middle schooler. Not gonna deify long dead people obsessed with wanking their literacy instead of inventing plumbing, etc… useful things for humans not empty mind places to gate keep
by macqm | 2025-06-10 23:25:48+00:00
I don't like how the headline reads almost as "Claude will now spy for the US".

I think it's a good thing that the government employees will be able to use LLMs (e.g. to improve language understanding) and feed it to software that is compliant with FedRamp/DoD IL. I can only imagine that there is more work to do than there is manpower and LLMs open up more opportunities to improve efficiency.

Press release from Anthropic on the matter: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-gov-models-for-u-s-nat...
Ask HN: Would You Use a Declarative Back End (APIs, DB, Auth, Sync)?
by Imazadi | 2025-06-10 23:26:49+00:00
I'm exploring the idea of building a developer tool/platform that allows you to define an entire backend (database, APIs, authentication, security rules, sync, etc.) purely through YAML files.

It’s somewhat inspired by Hasura DDN, where you can declaratively design your GraphQL layer. My vision goes further: you'd define everything in a backend/ folder using YAML — including:

Database schema: tables, relationships, constraints

Access/security rules

API channels: exposed through HTTP or MQTT

Functions: written in Dart (AoT compiled) or JavaScript

Auth setup: API keys, OAuth, JWT, etc.

Sync logic: so mobile apps can go offline and sync later

CI/CD friendly: entire backend versioned and deployed as code

This means a complete backend (DB + APIs + logic) could be spun up and deployed from source — no clicking around dashboards, just config and code.

I'm especially interested in making it work well for mobile developers (e.g. Flutter devs) who need offline-first backends or sync capabilities out of the box.

I’d love your thoughts:

Would this replace anything you’re using today?

What are the must-have features for you?

Any dealbreakers?

Too much abstraction or just right?

Thanks in advance — I'm trying to gauge if there's real demand here before going deeper. Honest feedback (especially critical) is welcome.
by charleszyong | 2025-06-10 23:27:10+00:00
For hardware, folding laundry with just one arm is really hard. So probably you will need a dual arm setup.

For software, even the best policy in the industry struggles a little bit (the arms they are using is about $10k each): - https://youtu.be/Oa19cq_MxE0 - https://www.dyna.co/research

In conclusion, for hardware, it might work if you have two of the arms; for software, it's probably too hard to collect enough data to make it work.
by energywut | 2025-06-10 23:27:16+00:00
I have ~200 acres of land I fly a drone survey mission to map. Today, that piloting is done by dronelink and a DJI drone. The challenge is that it's about 3 hours of flight time, give or take, to cover the space, and a given battery is good for about 35 minutes of flight time.

I have 4 batteries, which means I basically need to be refilling my batteries as quickly as I consume them in order to keep flying continuously (unfortunately, even with a quad-charger, I cannot fully sustain this.)

I would LOVE to have a fixed wing drone that could fly over the area and snap close-to-nadir photos as it did so, but the complexity of building and programming a hand built drone seems so much higher than deploying an off the shelf DJI drone. Additionally, the land is steep, with a 1,000+ foot elevation difference, and rugged, and the neighboring land is airspace I cannot fly within, so I couldn't use it to perform my turns.

Author, or others, any thoughts on whether it's worth pursuing a fixed wing aircraft to perform this mapping mission? Or is the best bang for my buck to just buy enough batteries to fly the mission continuously on an off the shelf quadcopter?
by segmondy | 2025-06-10 23:27:40+00:00
It's like going to a NASCAR or drag race with electric cars. What's the fun? The fun with internal combustion engines is the loud engines, the lumpy idles, the reverberation of the engine and exhaust into the environment, you can feel it. The hair on your skin will rise, you will close your ears, you can smell the exhaust. Likewise the same with fireworks, you feel it, if you are close enough you can smell it, LEDs can't match the bright explosive lights. It will never be comparable.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-06-10 23:28:00+00:00
> Given that social security is funded entirely through taxes in that tax year,

This isn't true, or wasn't true for a long time. SS long had a surplus that it lent to the federal government (a lot of the US debt is debt that is owed to SS). It stopped booking a surplus a few years ago, which means that it is dependent on the government paying back what it is owed, and eventually that will be gone, at which point SS will basically be, as you say, living paycheck to paycheck (or probably be insolvent requiring a cut in benefits or an injection from the general fund).

The rise of AI and automation messes everything up. We don't technically need to have more children, we could even shed a few billion people to a new stable smaller population point. The problem is equitable distributions from AI and automation so that unneeded labor isn't just left to die.
by SamPatt | 2025-06-10 23:28:41+00:00
Not everything is hard topics though.

I've found getting a personalized report for the basic stuff is incredibly useful. Maybe you're a world class researcher if it only saves you 15-30 minutes, I'm positive it has saved me many hours.

Grad students aren't an inexhaustible resource. Getting a report that's 80% as good in a few minutes for a few dollars is worth it for me.
by mkfs | 2025-06-10 23:30:06+00:00
> It’s very difficult to take this stuff seriously. It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars wound up by 1000x. Because we got from 1 to 100 of course we’ll get from 100 to 200 in the same amount of time. Or less! Why would you even question it?

It turned out automating creative output, like art or writing, at least to be competitive enough with entry-level humans, was much easier, and the consequences for getting bad output are much less serious, and far short of death, seriously injury, and major financial liability as with self-driving. Fields like concept art and copy editing are already being devastated by generative AI. Voice overs too.

And looking at Google's Veo, I can easily see this tech being used to generate short ads, especially for YouTube, where before you would have had to hire human actors, cameramen, sound/lighting people, and an editor.
by rozap | 2025-06-10 23:30:36+00:00
Yes, the AI is trained on a vast quantity of data therefore it is less likely to be manipulated vs a single editor that may have ulterior motives. Therefore it's much harder to manipulate. A corporation which represents many shareholders' interest has its own reputation on the line, which would be seriously damaged if they were caught doing anything like you suggest.

But this can only be understood within the context of the white genocide currently happening in South Africa. Some are saying it's not real, but there have been documented attacks on farms and chants of "kill the boer".
by coffeefirst | 2025-06-10 23:31:36+00:00
There are two choices here:

1. Create an elite only product that’s way too expensive for the general public.

2. Subsidize the costs of the newsroom with some form of advertising. There’s several of different forms that can take.

That’s the trade off. You can make it but there really is a need for ad supported reporting.

For what it’s worth I’ve been in this business 15 years and can’t name a single incident of your influence scenario. I can’t speak to every outlet in the world but this is not a thing that happens.