MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by everdrive | 2025-08-18 16:26:02+00:00
I strongly believe that except in edge cases, people spend so much time cleaning because they're not thinking about process and lack attention to detail. (or, potentially, they have people in their family who lack these things)

There are a number of "cleaning challenges" which are really just conscientiousness or process problems.

"It's difficult to sweep the house"

- Often, this just means that the house is too cluttered. You own too many things, they're not put away, and so each time you need to sweep the floors, you need to spend time organizing first.

"The fridge is always getting dirty."

- Only clean things should be put in the fridge. If your shelves are dirty, it's because the bottom of the items you're placing on your shelves are also dirty. Do you let ketchup run down the side of the bottle? Is your counter dirty, and you've set a clean bottle of salad dressing on a dirty counter? In both cases, you have transferred dirt and/or oil into the fridge on the shelf. And then this compounds multiple times: do you always put the ketchup in a different place? Well now you've spread around the dirt. Do you clean the fridge but bot the bottom of the ketchup bottle? Well, now your clean fridge is immediately dirty again the moment you reload it.

- etc.

So many "messes" in the house are compounding problems; the worse you let it get, the bigger the problem you've made for yourself. Didn't put away the kid's toys? Well now you can't sweep that area. Can't sweep that area? Well now you can't mop that area. etc. One solution, which people might not think about with regard to cleaning would actually just be to make sure the kid has fewer toys, or at least fewer _available_ toys. If you nail this, the clutter --> sweeping --> mopping cascade starts improving without any additional work on your end.
by atombender | 2025-08-18 16:26:03+00:00
> A typical kitchen scale has a sensitivity of 0.1 grams

As someone who's been looking for a good kitchen scale, your typical kitchen scale is actually precise to then nearest gram at best, and in terms of precision it's probably not very precise at all. 0.1g is rare, and these usually cost more, especially if they're actually reliable.
by pixl97 | 2025-08-18 16:26:06+00:00
I mean, not exactly with the cities that already exist. I mean, we could do what you say, but you'd get voted out of office and hung on a cross for the immediate economic crisis you'd create in most major cities. You simply can't have 1 to 2 vehicles per household as exists in our suburbs now with all the places those cars go miles away. It will cost places like the US tens to hundreds of trillions over decades to 'fix' this issue.
by jmkni | 2025-08-18 16:26:35+00:00
I have a base m2 macbook air I got a while ago for travelling, and I regularly use it for coding.

At one point I even had to install XCode onto it to release an emergency bug fix for an iOS app while on holiday, and it worked fine (just a bit slow).

It's definitely not a glorified chromebook, really interested to see how the $599 model performs
by renewiltord | 2025-08-18 16:26:59+00:00
Inevitably you'll have to grandfather in existing infrastructure because a lot of it is from ancient times and all you'll do is make it impossible to have a Chinatown, or a NY brownstone. So what you'll get is that almost nothing new gets developed because the cost structure makes it impossible.

Everyone always thinks "why don't we make it harder to make things and that way they'll be nice" but they can't connect the dots to "but to do that we have to grandfather in the existing stuff" and from that to "nothing new will happen and all the old things will stay that way".

Thing of the obvious effects, man. Come on.
by pjbk | 2025-08-18 16:27:17+00:00
As it is stated, I always thought it came from formulations like Euler-Lagrange procedures in mechanics used in numeric methods for differential geometry. In fact when I recreated the algorithm as an exercise it immediately reminded me of gradient descent for kinematics, with the Jacobian calculation for each layer similar to an iterative pose calculation in generalized coordinates. I never thought it was something "novel".
by Catbert59 | 2025-08-18 16:27:26+00:00
I've tested LoRa from Hill<->Hill and Flat Land<->Flat Land and 30-60km worked with plenty of SNR left.

On 868MHz with standard 5dBi omnis.

Thesis: as long you are using one of the more robust LoRa settings it always will work as long you have LoS or at least only lightly obstructed LoS.
Show HN: AI that handles calls and emails for busy CXOs
by emon_meena | 2025-08-18 16:27:43+00:00
We’re building Maksai: an AI executive assistant that handles calls and emails for insanely busy CXOs. It’s our first step toward building Jarvis for everyone. Here’s how it works today: 1) Unanswered calls get forwarded to Maksai. It answers on your behalf, screens spam, and sends a short summary on WhatsApp. 2) No app required. You talk to Maksai over a call or WhatsApp, just like you would with a real assistant. 3) Want to call someone? Just tell Maksai. It will place the call, deliver your message, and report back. 4) Inbox overload? Maksai continuously clears spam and drafts replies. 5) Fully voice-controlled. You manage your inbox and communication using just your voice. Our goal: Let people delegate almost everything using only their voice.
by floatrock | 2025-08-18 16:28:08+00:00
There's a lot of things to take a critical eye towards on the Texas power market, but

> ...no allowances for long term concerns like reliability. Any provider who spends money to address these sort of issues is immediately priced out of the market.

...is a bit of an exaggeration.

When Texas has those cold-snap/freeze days a few years ago, wholesale rates went up to $9,000 per megawatt-hour. So $9/kWh. Wholesale.

A large amount of energy suppliers went out of business because they didn't properly hedge for such an event.

You can bet those who are left have started to react to market price signals like that. Whether it's through financial engineering or boots-and-poles engineering is a fair discussion to have, but to say "no allowances for reliability signals" is a bit disingenuous.

When someone says "It's all really very simple...", it's almost certainly not.
by eigenspace | 2025-08-18 16:28:31+00:00
Reverse move automatic differentiation is not integration. It's still differentiation, but just a different method of calculating the derivative than the one you'd think to do by hand. It basically just applies the chain rule in the opposite order from what is intuitive to people.

It has a lot more overhead than regular forwards mode autodiff because you need to cache values from running the function and refer back to them in reverse order, but the advantage is that for function with many many inputs and very few outputs (i.e. the classic example is calculating the gradient of a scalar function in a high dimensional space like for gradient descent), it is algorithmically more efficient and requires only one pass through the primal function.

On the other hand, traditional forwards mode derivatives are most efficient for functions with very few inputs, but many outputs. It's essentially a duality relationship.
by imtringued | 2025-08-18 16:28:43+00:00
Forward mode automatic differentiation creates a formula for each scalar derivative. If you have a billion parameters you have to calculate each derivative from scratch.

As the name implies, the calculation is done forward.

Reverse mode automatic differentiation starts from the root of the symbolic expression and calculates the derivative for each subexpression simultaneously.

The difference between the two is like the difference between calculating the Fibonacci sequence recursively without memoization and calculating it iteratively. You avoid doing redundant work over and over again.
by throwanem | 2025-08-18 16:29:17+00:00
Fair. I could see use for a wristborne RSS poller/reader, especially in my old systems & networks admin days.

That said, the "leave your phone behind" use case never appealed to me, and turning my watch's radios on in regular operation would reduce its battery life by an order of magnitude. Oh, there's obviously a fashion for the pretense of a tech-free life, but it never seems to improve the equanimity of its pursuers and so I haven't really seen the appeal. Still, that's a "me" problem, and I appreciate the context on your app. Nice work!
by pncnmnp | 2025-08-18 16:29:41+00:00
I have a question that's bothered me for quite a while now. In 2018, Michael Jordan (UC Berkeley) wrote a rather interesting essay - https://medium.com/@mijordan3/artificial-intelligence-the-re... (Artificial Intelligence — The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet)

In it, he stated the following:

> Indeed, the famous “backpropagation” algorithm that was rediscovered by David Rumelhart in the early 1980s, and which is now viewed as being at the core of the so-called “AI revolution,” first arose in the field of control theory in the 1950s and 1960s. One of its early applications was to optimize the thrusts of the Apollo spaceships as they headed towards the moon.

I was wondering whether anyone could point me to the paper or piece of work he was referring to. There are many citations in Schmidhuber’s piece, and in my previous attempts I've gotten lost in papers.
by mrandish | 2025-08-18 16:29:42+00:00
As a fellow ADHDer, can confirm. I must aggressively mono-task to ensure things get done. I have to consciously manage which mode I'm in, "Goal" or "Explore". A simple heuristic I sometimes share with others is: "I can either 'think deeply' or 'do/talk/listen'. Doing both modes at once is possible but at reduced throughput and quality of each. Switching modes is laggy." It's not precisely accurate and there are exceptions but it gets the general idea across.
by burnerRhodo | 2025-08-18 16:29:57+00:00
it's wierd because where before, i've never had a offshore "VA" nor did I think they'd be useful. But after AI, I can just get the VA a subscription to Chatgpt and have them do the initial draft of whatever i need. ChatGPT get 80% of the way, VA gets the next 10 (Copying where i need it, removing obvious stuff that shouldn't be client facing, etc.), i only have to polish the last 10%.
by keeda | 2025-08-18 16:30:13+00:00
> The copying of passwords does not cause direct harm. If it did, then the publishing of common password lists would be harmful and criminal. The real crime is the act of breaking into someone's bank accounts and draining their money which actually deprives them of real scarce resources. In other words, theft.

1. So now passwords (just numbers) and 2FA (just numbers) are "protecting" money (even more just numbers in a database) or your private data (yet more just numbers), the loss of control over which you clearly consider harmful.

2. When a bank account is drained, no "tangible good" is being "taken" but somehow NOW it is theft? ;-)

I think the key disagreement is the unwillingness to accept that numbers can have economic value because that undermines the premise that "just numbers being copied is victimless". Without that there will never be a resolution to this thread ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by jmyeet | 2025-08-18 16:30:28+00:00
There are many ways to attack this assertion. For example:

1. The stagnation or decline in real wages in the developed world in recent decades;

2. Increasing homelessness as a consequence of the housing affordability crisis;

3. How global poverty has increased in the last century under capitalism. This surprises some because defenders claim the opposite. China is singlehandedly responsible to massive decrease in extreme poverty in the 20th century.

Maybe you're looking through the lens of tech. After all, we all have Internet-connected supercomputers in our pockets. While that's true, we're also working 3 jobs to pay for a 1 bedroom apartment where once a single job meant you had a house and enough to eat.
by wolrah | 2025-08-18 16:30:32+00:00
Absolutely, when I was looking at houses my bare minimum was 1.5 bath. I don't need two showers/tubs, but two toilets was non-negotiable.

I lived for a couple of years in a two bed/one bath apartment and the number of times I'd wake up having to use the restroom pretty badly and find my roommate was already in there was just too much.

I have some older neighborhoods around and it boggles my mind how many houses I find that are three, four, even five bedrooms with a single bathroom.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-18 16:30:51+00:00
Minor quibble but: probably get another 5-15% by upgrading from oldoldstable Debian 11/Bullseye with kernel 5.10 to something modern like Debian 13/Trixie.

Edit: oh these are containers, right; the difference will be far less since the kernel is determined by the host. Still, I find it sad to see old software versions like this used.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-18 16:31:01+00:00
Do you think you could do a better job than a CEO of public company [x] from a technical standpoint - in other words, omitting the connections and public-facing charisma that they typically bring as part of the package?

I genuinely do, but kind of paradoxically also suspect I'm wrong. It's simply that it's something so far outside my domain that I just can't really appreciate their skills honed over many years of practice and training, because all I get to externally see are their often ridiculous limitations, failures, and myopia.

I imagine this is, in many ways, how people who have no understanding of e.g. software, let alone software development, see software engineers. I don't think it's uncharitable, it's just human nature. Imagine if we were the ones hiring CEOs. 'That guys a total asshat, and we can get ten guys in India - hard working, smart guys, standouts in 1.4 billion people - for the same price.' Go go go.
by mattlondon | 2025-08-18 16:31:32+00:00
I am fairly confident that while they're not ready "today", with the advances we're seeing in AI recently, we're going to have a viable in-home humanoid robot in the next decade or two, priced at "car" kinda prices

I think this is going to be fairly transformational, at least for care scenarios.

I'm not talking about the sci-fi pipe-dream of a Star Trek Data style robot, but more like a basic humanoid robot that can reliably do mundane & basic things on-command. Like pick things up off of the floor, go fetch items from another room, open the curtains, do some basic food preparation (e.g. heat things up in a microwave levels of sophistication, or even just getting a glass of water), do the dishwasher, take out the trash and so on.

Even if it can only do 1hr of chores at a time before heading back to recharge, thats huge. It will help people live more independent lives for much longer before needing expensive care from humans (something that we have a bit of a ticking time-bomb of, at least in the UK where the population is aging rapidly). It doesn't need to be a fully fledged "robot-nurse" to be helpful.

Bonus points if it can monitor it's user(s) and call for help if there appears to be anything wrong (e.g. fallen and can't get up type monitoring), or intervene in situations before they escalate (e.g. turn the gas off if it is left on, remind to take medicines etc)
by Theodores | 2025-08-18 16:31:52+00:00
This was a surprisingly big thing back in the early 2000s with The War Against Terror. I think that it was mostly for reasons of 'chilling effect', but the media made everyone aware that the Department of Homeland Security were paying attention to what books people took out of the library.

What was curious about this was that, at the time, there were few dangerous books in libraries. Catcher in the Rye and 1984 was about it. You wouldn't find a large print copy of Che Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare, for instance.

I disagree about how libraries minimise the risk of anyone knowing who is reading what. On the web where so much is tracked by low intelligence marketing people, there is more data than anything that anyone can deal with. In effect, nobody is able to follow you that easily, only machines, with data that humans can't make sense of.

Meanwhile, libraries have had really good IT systems for decades, with everything tracked in a meaningful form with easy lookups. These systems are state owned, therefore it is no problem for a three letter agency to get the information they want from a library.
by dmoy | 2025-08-18 16:33:00+00:00
> If this were a neighborhood where people regularly fired guns in the air, we would warn parents to keep their kids inside. A stray bullet may not be intentional, but it’s a predictable outcome of such an environment. On West Hudson Boulevard, the stray bullets are motor vehicles, and the result is the same: occasional, random, but entirely foreseeable deaths.

Maybe that analogy is a little off.

1. The cases where parents are charged with negligence in the context of guns is extremely rare, and like.... kid is a mass shooter or something like that. Or kid shoots someone (or themselves accidentally, and often parents are not charged in that case). The analog here - charging the parent of a kid who is accidentally shot by a total stranger, never happens.

2. It's also wrong order of magnitude on numbers? Accidental stray bullet shootings of kids do happen, but they are extremely rare compared to kid-accidentally-shooting-self-or-friend or car-on-pedestrian-kid. Stray bullet hitting you is not predictable at all. You're talking like <40 per year across all ages <10 per year for just kids. A closer analogy would be accidental self shootings or shot-by-friend (~50 child deaths per year?). An even closer analogy would be swimming pools (hundreds per year for both kids drowning in swimming pools and kids hit by cars).

All that said, it's worth pointing out that kids getting hit by cars has declined a ton in the last 3 decades: https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...

Some of that is due to better road design, some of that is due to better car safety, but a lot of it is... due to kids not being outside as much (30-40% decrease compared to previous generation).
by roncesvalles | 2025-08-18 16:33:14+00:00
I'm not a lawyer so I can't comment on the charge itself but as a lay citizen, after reviewing Street View, the parents are definitely at fault.

That area is not walkable and I wouldn't trust a 7 year old to go there alone, period. And then to allow them to jaywalk at the spot where the kid was struck is downright unconscionable. And the median looks like it's easy to lose your balance over (I suspect that's what really happened).

I'm not generally against the notion of letting a 7 year old walk alone in public but this isn't some cornerstore at the end of a 25mph residential street. This is basically a highway. Although the speed limit on that stretch is 45mph, I'm pretty certain drivers would be hitting 60 there since the road leading into it looks like a 60 road.
by simianwords | 2025-08-18 16:33:20+00:00
Your first and last points are egregiously incorrect. A simple google search will tell you this.

Extreme poverty throughout the world has dramatically reduced. In Western Europe it came down from 50% to less than 1% through the 20th century.

India brought it down dramatically and is continuing to do it. A simple Wikipedia search can tell you this.

Wages has been increasing in china, India as well as USA after accounting for inflation. It’s sort of stagnant in Europe.
by mythrwy | 2025-08-18 16:33:54+00:00
For this to work efficiently maybe we will need to evaluate the form factor of homes in general (particularly in the US).

An example is olives. For centuries people picked or beat olives off of big trees but with machinery they have developed miniature olives that grow in neat hedgerows and can be easily harvested by machines.

I keep thinking about how much space people actually need to live. Bedrooms in particular. If all you need a bedroom for is sleep or romantic activities, why do bedrooms need to be 200+ square feet? Clothes ideally should be stored in another place where you dress and that place should be close to where clothes are laundered and where you shower and prep for the day. An annex to the bathroom, a dressing room seems ideal to me for clothes storage. In this case I'd be perfectly fine with a capsule bedroom big enough to hold a bed, a nightstand and nothing else.

I don't have any other concrete suggestions that would make automation easier but I'm sure this is possible.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-18 16:34:14+00:00
This was a settlement, if the fines were massive, the settlement wouldn't have come as easily. And then if you start fining companies from other countries a lot, it becomes a trade issue and things get messy. In the worst case those companies just pull out of your market, and you are left with small businesses and startups but that might not make up for the services that the mega-corps were providing, and that might have adverse effects on other businesses in your country.

So what happens is that they wind up going with non-massive fines to enforce compliance as a trade off (like you wouldn't deal out the death penalty for someone who was caught stealing).
by duped | 2025-08-18 16:34:33+00:00
Normally you spin up a tool like vtune or uprof to analyze your benchmark hotspots at the ISA level. No idea about tools like that for ARM.

> Would it ever make sense to write handwritten compiler intermediate representation like LLVM IR instead of architecture-specific assembly?

IME, not really. I've done a fair bit of hand-written assembly and it exclusively comes up when dealing with architecture-specific problems - for everything else you can just write C (unless you hit one of the edge cases where C semantics don't allow you to express something in C, but those are rare).

For example: C and C++ compilers are really, really good at writing optimized code in general. Where they tend to be worse are things like vectorized code which requires you to redesign algorithms such that they can use fast vector instructions, and even then, you'll have to resort to compiler intrinsics to use the instructions at all, and even then, compiler intrinsics can lead to some bad codegen. So your code winds up being non-portable, looks like assembly, and has some overhead just because of what the compiler emits (and can't optimize). So you wind up just writing it in asm anyway, and get smarter about things the compiler worries about like register allocation and out-of-order instructions.

But the real problem once you get into this domain is that you simply cannot tell at a glance whether hand written assembly is "better" (insert your metric for "better here) than what the compiler emits. You must measure and benchmark, and those benchmarks have to be meaningful.
by throwanem | 2025-08-18 16:34:42+00:00
I might use the word 'compulsive,' but you would know better than I.

On another subject, you should email hn@ycombinator.com to get your account un-shadowbanned. That generally also is a better, or at least less in-band, way to raise concerns like the presence of obvious spam. Otherwise, the risk is that you'll get caught up in an imperfectly selective mass mod action to deal with a bunch of spam burners, as appears to have occurred a couple weeks ago.
by hluska | 2025-08-18 16:35:18+00:00
I’ve seen LLMs rolled out in several organizations now and have noticed a few patterns. The big one is that we have less experienced people reviewing code an LLM generated for them. They don’t have the experience to pick out those solutions that are correct 98% of the time, but not now.

When management wants to see dollars, extra reviews are an easy place to cut. They don’t have the experience to understand what they’re doing because this has never happened before.

Meanwhile the technical people complain but not in a way that non technical people can understand. So you create data points that are not accessible to decision makers and there you go, software gets bad for a little while.