MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RamtinJ95 | 2025-10-21 17:57:31+00:00
I think "Identity Crisis" is a bit over dramatic, but I for the most part agree with the sentiment. I have written something in the same vane, but still different enough that I would love to comment it but its just way more efficient to point to my post. I hope that is OK: https://handmadeoasis.com/ai-and-software-engineering-the-co...
by ghaff | 2025-10-21 17:57:39+00:00
I recently had to get a lot of electrical stuff in my house redone because of a kitchen fire, smoke mitigation, and a lot of stuff being opened up anyway.

I told my electrician to redo lighting in a more sensible and modern way but basically nothing involving smart devices -- to which he wholeheartedly agreed. There are a couple things that aren't quite convenient related to how everything is positioned and because a couple of motion detectors weren't reconnected. And I'll deal with those with unconnected devices.

So I had an opportunity to make the house "smart" and basically passed.

(Will probably add some remote monitoring over time but nothing fancy and mostly Raspberry Pi-based.)
by speedgoose | 2025-10-21 17:57:40+00:00
Fair enough for some of the points. My tesla is older so it has good controls, stalks, and parking sensors still. I can also exit the vehicle with a mechanical switch.

I personally don't really miss the fisher-price designed CarPlay (never tried Android auto). It's alright and often better than the car manufacturer infotainment, but it's also not very good. You can't even pinch to zoom the map for example.
by dangus | 2025-10-21 17:57:51+00:00
Not from a cold email to a support line. Remember that this isn’t a personal email where people can be contacting you for all kinds of reasons.

The amount of legitimate reasons to ever open a link in a support email is basically zero.

When you have a company policy enforced by training and/or technology there is no thought involved, you just respond with “sorry, we can’t open external links. Please attach your screenshot to [ticketing system].”

Your ticketing/email system can literally remove all links automatically right?
by array_key_first | 2025-10-21 17:59:09+00:00
I don't know man, the US is very wishy washy with laws at the moment.

And all of this relies on Tesla customers going after Tesla. But people are poor, times are tough, ain't nobody got time for that.

And of the people that do got time for that, a lot of them bought Teslas because of the vision. Or something. Not sure if those people would sue.
by kgermino | 2025-10-21 17:59:30+00:00
I agree?

In both cases the control system is physically in your house. It sounds like the sprinkler system did work completely offline (though it's not clear if you'd actually be able to change anything without internet - that would be a problem if not), they didn't set up an account so the system was in "offline" mode and dutifully ran the sprinklers on the last known schedule.

For the thermostat the example was physically removing the control system, which is typically not connected to the furnace through any sort of internet connection, and expecting the furnace to know what to do.
by amluto | 2025-10-21 18:00:01+00:00
How easy is it to commission a Matter device onto a specific WiFi network? And how easy is it to set up a Thread network without Internet access?

I haven't actually tried this, but:

- The Home Assistant Matter commissioning tool doesn't have any documentation at all about how the network is selected AFAICS.

- The Thread organization seems extremely proud of how Thread devices can access the Internet. Apple TV doesn't seem friendly at all to preventing its Thread Border Router from forwarding to the Internet. Home Assistant's OTBR add-on has no useful configuration whatsoever AFAICS. The easiest way to get it right would seem to be to buy something like a Sonoff POE-capable Thread dongle and sticking it on a VLAN, except that those, for some reason, seem to support Thread RCP but not being a Border Router themselves, and then you're back to managing your own OTBR installation.
by ajross | 2025-10-21 18:00:06+00:00
This framing seems weird:

> Two days after receiving the Apple threat notification, Gibson contacted a forensic expert with extensive experience investigating spyware attacks.

Surely as a professional "exploit developer", Gibson himself should have been about as expert at this particular niche as any human being on the planet already.

I mean, sure, absolutely he should have called in his friends in the community and gotten more eyes on the device. But the way that's written it sounds like he took it into the local Genius Bar.

It also, in context, feels a little obfuscatory. Like he's trying to flag the involvement of senior folks who he can't name.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-10-21 18:00:22+00:00
This is the way.

My rule #1 in home automation is making sure none of the technology fails its original function without connection.

I implement Home Assistant to assist in homes for non-technologist. Every single thing i implement must function independently, without the vendor or any internet connection. i.e., z-Wave locks must function with or without connectivity. Switches must switch on/off with or without zigbee, and valves must be able to close/open without that wifi.
by tonymet | 2025-10-21 18:00:43+00:00
this is a great idea that I've been toying with too. Something like OU / Orthodox Union certification for Kosher or UL for electrical & electronic equipment. A Right-To-Operate & Right-to-Repair certification

There are a few sub-certifications:

- OF: Offline-First as you mentioned

- JE: Jailbreak-Escrow -- the firmware install keys are held in escrow and will be published if the company goes defunct -- allowing ongoing repair & control.

- FE: Firmware-Escrow -- firmware source will be published if the company goes defunct.

- FA: Firmware-Audit -- firmware is compiled by certifiers to verify BOM, security, privacy & online dependencies.

Another benefit would be a "nutrition label" showing active online traffic & data shared.
by ammar_x | 2025-10-21 18:00:45+00:00
My "trick" was to divide things into batches (which can be big with LLMs with larger context sizes) and classify the items in each batch, then take the resulting categories from each batch and feed them into an LLM to group semantically similar categories into groups with a representative category for each group. The representative category can be chosen from the group or created by the LLM. This is an over-simplification of the process but that's the gist of it.
by kanzure | 2025-10-21 18:01:06+00:00
Why stop at software? Open-source software is a good idea in election systems. The principle could be better generalized as an "open" (copyleft licensed) process for the entire system, regardless of whether the election system is implemented as software or not.

Anyone who talks about election security should be required to spend at least a few moments walking around Defcon in the election machine hacking village. Even absent electronic voting machines we still need to apply that same level of rigor to security across all domains of the election system no matter what format is used.

More fundamentally, the epistemic meaning of a ballot, a vote, or an option on the ballot, how options are even decided for inclusion or their exclusion, which outcome deciding algorithms are used, and how "the result" is interpreted by society or implemented by a political agent is deeply confused. The vote itself has very little resemblance to what actually happens. Such things likely cannot be formally specified anyway. Massive amounts of ambiguity, noise, error rate, and insecurity are to be expected in these kinds of systems. So what then are we even doing with all this? I am not referring to what we say we are achieving, or what we say we are intending to achieve, but rather what kind of actual outcomes be can supported by careful engineering of all these components?

Blockchain is no solution here. See:

"Going from bad to worse: from Internet voting to blockchain voting" https://www.dci.mit.edu/s/VotingPaper-RivestNarulaSunoo-3.pd...
by eMPee584 | 2025-10-21 18:01:11+00:00
Agentic browser, fine, might be cool, we'll see.

Though what I really would love to have is an LLM-powered browser extension that can simply do fluid DOM/CSS manipulation to get an upper hand on all these messed up websites.. fiddling with devtools inspector and overriding element styles one by one really takes too much time.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-10-21 18:01:31+00:00
> No business model short-term. My goal is broad adoption, 100% open-source.

IMHO that's kind of a red flag. There's a happy path here where it's successful but stays low-maintenance enough that you just work on it in your spare time, or it takes of and gets community support, or you get sponsorships or such. But there's also an option where in a year or two it becomes your job and you decide to monetize by rug-pulling and announce that actually paying the bills is more important than staying 100% open source. Not a dig at you, just something that's happened enough times that I get nervous when people don't have a plan and therefore don't have a plan to avoid the outcome that creates problems for users.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-21 18:01:34+00:00
Has it occured to you that maybe the reason Elon Musk is universally unliked is because he's unlikable?

Someone people deserve to be hated. Elon is one of those people. From a business perspective and a human perspective.

From a business and politics perspective, he's a con man. He stole your money. Mine too, with DOGE.
Show HN: Don't Ask Me – An AI that refuses to answer and makes you think
by johnzakkam | 2025-10-21 18:01:36+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Don’t Ask Me — an AI chat app that does the opposite of what most AIs do. Instead of giving you instant answers, it helps you reason things out, reflect, and build your own conclusions.

The idea came from noticing how easy it’s become to outsource thinking to LLMs. I wanted to experiment with a tool that doesn’t take over your thinking — but guides it.

How it works:

You ask a question or describe a problem.

Instead of replying with a final answer, the AI asks you questions back.

It helps you unpack assumptions, find contradictions, and explore perspectives.

The goal isn’t to “get an answer” — it’s to think better.

Why: I wanted something between journaling, Socratic dialogue, and ChatGPT — something that builds resilience of thought instead of dependency.

Note: This is very much an MVP — just the first working version of the concept. There’s still rough edges, limited depth, and no fancy onboarding yet. I’m more interested in validating whether this type of AI interaction feels valuable at all before polishing it.

I’d genuinely like your thoughts on:

Whether the “refuse to answer” approach feels helpful or just frustrating

The UX of being challenged instead of spoon-fed

Any ideas for making the reasoning scaffolding smarter or less repetitive
by neilv | 2025-10-21 18:01:42+00:00
Scheme was a lot of places in 1999, so I started guessing about concentrations where someone might have had polo shirt schwag made up (e.g., Felleisen's PLT group at Rice, https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~robby/logos/ ) and a lot of churchgoing people (Texas, Indiana, and maybe later BYU/Utah).

I was at MIT in 1999, and class T-shirts occasionally happened, and there were tens of churches within walking distance, for historic reasons, but not a lot of churchgoing people from the universities themselves, that I'm aware of.

But who knows: toplevel works in strange and mysterious ways.

> My work place was using it in production, 1999. A ton of code was written by a VERY SMART (and famous) person and of course it worked. He delivered it under pressure, ahead of schedule and it just worked. Ok, but my frustration was that we could not find anyone to support the decoders.

Actually, except for the "famous" part, that sounds a bit like a major system in Scheme for which I was hired by a very smart person who'd done 10x or 100x development on it. And it just worked, and we could evolve it rapidly, and keep it just working. In 1999, it probably would have been based in New Jersey.
by fabk | 2025-10-21 18:01:43+00:00
FOSS effort to bring live pixel art to microcontroller-driven displays, such ESP32 projects with LED matrices or LCD/OLED modules.

This is for:

- Makers: Get art that looks awesome on low-res, download firmware

- Pixel artists: Reach real-world displays, gain points and badges

- Everyone: Enjoy free art & community, even if you don't own a display

At high level, the project seeks to combine an MQTT broker for live updates (new posts), a lightweight free & ad-free social media experience (comments and likes only), a self-hosted approach to storing the artworks, and MCU firmware to turn any display into a web-connected pixel art player.

Join us! It is a lot to build and this is all just for fun & love.
by austin-cheney | 2025-10-21 18:01:56+00:00
Of course. Sales people make money. They are ones who put money in your wallet. The good ones are the last people you want to scare off. Even worse is that they can be scared away to a competitor.

Developers, on the other hand, are a replaceable cost center. Developers never make money. They only cost money, and if a developer gets upset they can be replaces with minimal consequence.
by section_me | 2025-10-21 18:02:23+00:00
Matter turned into a cluster fuck of devices. Use you're android phone to provision a device and connect it to your setup, most people use Google Home or homeassistant, smartthings is also an option, maybe others. But it's only to onboard the device for the most part. It'll still connect to your WiFi, give you next to no visibility as to what's going on in a failure and no interface to control it should your controller go down.

It's also not very well supported in things like homeassistant, despite what they say.
by pdntspa | 2025-10-21 18:02:32+00:00
It's never going to go down like that as long as companies are required to serve shareholder interests above customers' or employees'.

Instead all these automation tools are and will be used to cut corners and optimize on cost. Quality, peace-of-mind, and increased free time will be the sales pitch used to placate us plebes. But we all know what the executive dipshits will really care about.
by ZeljkoS | 2025-10-21 18:02:52+00:00
Here are the highlights from the .DMG installer screens (https://imgur.com/a/Tu4TlNu):

1. Turn on browser memories Allow ChatGPT to remember useful details as you browse to give smarter responses and proactive suggestions. You're in control - memories stay private.

2. Ask ChatGPT - on any website Open the ChatGPT sidebar on any website to summarize, explain, or handle tasks - right next to what you're browsing.

3. Make your cursor a collaborator ChatGPT can help you draft emails, write reviews, or fill out forms. Highlight text inside a form field or doc and click the ChatGPT logo to get started.

4. Set as default browser BOOST CHATGPT LIMITS Unlock 7 days of extended limits on messaging, file uploads, data analysis, and image generation on ChatGPT Atlas.

5. You're all set — welcome to Atlas! Have fun exploring the web with ChatGPT by your side, all while staying in control of your data and privacy. (This screen also displays shareable PNG badge with days since you registered for ChatGPT and Atlas).

My guess is that many ChatGPT Free users will make it their default browser just because of (4) — to extend their limits. Creative :)
by valbaca | 2025-10-21 18:02:56+00:00
> It never made sense to me how such a ruthless and inhumane culture is sustainable in the long run.

It doesn't need to be sustainable in the long run: just needs to get to the next quarter and there continues to be enough desperate people in the US or India willing to be ground up in the machine for a chance to buy a house in a major metro

(Source: I was at Amazon for 10 years, finally quit last month)
by bunderbunder | 2025-10-21 18:02:58+00:00
When people ask me about Internet connected door locks, I tell them about the coworking space I used to be a member of.

More than once I got stuck standing outside in the rain waiting for the smart door lock to come back online after a squirrel jiggled the cable drop by running down it or some k8s pod in the cloud service got knocked over by a chaos gremlin or someone was using a vacuum cleaner that generated too much noise in the wifi spectrum or who even knows what.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-10-21 18:03:04+00:00
> Give me a boring ass 90s control layout with the electric drive train and I'm much more interested. Make the car kind of ugly too. On purpose. I don't need a GPU farm inside my car. I'm not running a robotic taxi company. I just want to go get some groceries.

People say there is a huge market for this, but I really doubt it. Yes, there is a market for old school, but it is a pretty small niche where investments in more expensive analog tech (compared to digital anyways) just isn't worth it.
by dougdonohoe | 2025-10-21 18:03:08+00:00
I worked in the Bay Area during the dot-com boom and large swathes of time were effectively 996. I was generally irritable, gained a bunch of weight (up to 220; am now 170), and eventually burned out. What was old is now new. Perhaps AI encourages 996'ing, but people will still burn out just the same.
by unsupp0rted | 2025-10-21 18:03:17+00:00
This was my experience too until a couple weeks ago, when Codex suddenly got dumbed down.

Initially, I had great success with codex medium- I could refactor with confidence, code generally ran on the first or second try, etc.

Then when that suddenly dumbed down to Claude Sonnet 3.5 quality I moved to GPT5 High to get back what had been lost. That was okay for a few days. Now GPT5 High has dropped to Claude Sonnet 3.5 quality.

There's nothing left to fallback to.
by hbn | 2025-10-21 18:03:24+00:00
After skimming the product page I'm still not sure what extra data exactly everyone is so confident is being gathered/used in a way that Google wouldn't already be doing in Chrome. As far as I can tell, most of these features are already integrated into Chrome but with Gemini.

What exact feature in Atlas would need to log your every keystroke? Could they be doing that? Yes. But so could Google and in both cases they've got about equal reason to be doing it and feeding it into your personalized prediction model.

I don't see how this is so different from Chrome.
by doublerabbit | 2025-10-21 18:03:39+00:00
> Also, turning off internet connections means less-capable remote shut shut-off.

Why does it have to be remote what's wrong with it being in-house? Besides a shut-off should never be able to be triggered remotely.

The same goes for digital emergency shut off buttons; all should be physical.

> Less-responsive power plants.

What? How is remote any more responsive than physical workers being in-house?

If power-plants operated efficiently back in the 50's without internet, they should be able to now without internet.
by adambb | 2025-10-21 18:03:59+00:00
Learned a few things I didn't know about exception handling, like Vectored Exception Handling. If it's possible to somehow have enough permissions to install a generic vectored exception handler that has enough complexity to emulate generic instructions, not sure why the shellcode couldn't just be included there instead.

Maybe someone else will have a follow on regarding some product that does some more complicated processing in a VEH that could be used to implement something that has the same shape as this.
by paulcole | 2025-10-21 18:04:06+00:00
> You say this as though it's trivial to just see that Tesla is a scam.

I asked if a person would feel dumb that they had been conned.

Isn't the answer going to be yes even if that con is very sophisticated?

Paying a lot of money for self-driving when self-driving literally doesn't exist isn't that sophisticated of a con! They are telling you it doesn't exist! I know it doesn't exist and am paying for the hope that it will one day exist.

I mean sure make a law against this or whatever. But at the end of the day it's my money and no law can stop me from making a regrettable decision.
by cheeseomlit | 2025-10-21 18:04:10+00:00
>We need to do everything possible to increase participation in the democratic process

Do we? Participation should be made easy for those eligible and inclined to do so, but I don't see the benefit of encouraging participation from people who can't be bothered to put some effort into it, or are ignorant of the issues and candidates and are easily swayed by trashy campaign ads. I've seen the statistic thrown around that less than half of americans can even name the 3 branches of government, and if that's true I think those people have a civic duty not to vote.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-10-21 18:04:38+00:00
Pre WW2 the USA had skid rows and flop houses full of men who didn't make the cut to the new industrialized economy. People literally rented a rope to lean on for the night. WW2 changed things for the US where that was no longer a common thing.

People fear that we are heading back into that, with no plan other than 'things turned out fine last time this happened' ignoring the, you know, skid row, flop houses, etc and no idea what the magic jobfairy will bring us to be these new, magically appearing 'jobs to come'.
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-10-21 18:04:50+00:00
Citizenship by blood is not established in the Constitution but by the various modifications of the Immigration and Nationalization Act. In 1936, when McCain was born, the 1934 modified version of the Cable Act allowed transmission of citizenship via his mother as well as his father...

It wasn't until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that todays standards of overseas citizenship conference took shape. Citizenship in the US is a bit of a mess.

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/123.7.Collins_r35np7ug.pd...
by andai | 2025-10-21 18:04:51+00:00
I encourage everyone with even a slight interest in the subject to download a random sample of Common Crawl (the chunks are ~100MB) and see for yourself what is being used for training data.

https://data.commoncrawl.org/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-38/segm...

I spotted here a large number of things that it would be unwise to repeat here. But I assume the data cleaning process removes such content before pretraining? ;)

Although I have to wonder. I played with some of the base/text Llama models, and got very disturbing output from them. So there's not that much cleaning going on.
by FaradayRotation | 2025-10-21 18:05:02+00:00
It is genuinely impressive to grow thin film polycrystalline diamond at 400C, but my understanding is this temperature is basically at the ceiling of what the circuits will tolerate in the course of manufacturing to still get a good quality device at end of line. Stress tests, anneals, and wafer bakes are usually limited to about 400C - unless the point is to deliberately degrade the chip

Not to say that it can't be done, only that the process window is not very large and the propensity for deleterious carbon soot is very high. Likely this will generate some very fun, highly integrated problem statements before we see this available for sale.

Getting heat out of the chip is such a painful and important struggle. I hope this works on a real process line. Too many benefits on the table to ignore.

Edit: Grammar, clarity
by GaryBluto | 2025-10-21 18:05:10+00:00
These are my thoughts exactly. Whenever I use agents to assist me in creating a simple program for myself, I carefully guide it through everything I want created, with me usually writing pages and pages of detailed plaintext instructions and specifications when it comes to the backends of things, I then modify it and design a user interface.

I very much enjoy the end product and I also enjoy designing (not necessarily programming) a program that fits my needs, but rarely implementing, as I have issues focusing on things.