MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-08 03:37:59+00:00
It's been happening in the USA for quite a long time.

Anecdotally, the small city I grew up in, in Ohio (USA), started using cameras and some kind of computer vision to operate traffic signals 15 or 20 years ago, replacing inductive loops.

I used to hang out sometimes with one of the old-timers who dealt with it as part of his long-time street department job. I asked him about that system once (over a decade ago now) over some drinks.

"It doesn't fuckin' work," I remember him flatly telling me before he quite visibly wanted to talk about anything other than his day job.

The situation eventually improved -- presumably, as bandwidth and/or local processing capabilities have also improved. It does pretty well these days when I drive through there, and the once-common inductive loops (with their tell-tale saw kerfs in the asphalt) seem to have disappeared completely.

(And as a point of disambiguation: They are just for controlling traffic lights. There have never been any speed or red light cameras in that city. And they're distinctly separate from traffic preemption devices, like the Opticom system that this city has used for an even longer time.)

---

As a non-anecdotal point of reference, I'd like to present an article from ~20 years ago about a system in a different city in the US that was serving a similar function at that time:

https://www.toacorn.com/articles/traffic-cameras-are-not-spy...
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-08 03:38:26+00:00
Yep I know a few mechanics and all of them who worked at dealerships have gone independent. Either started their own shop, or are working for a non-dealer shop.

A mechanic getting $20/hr is crazy. Shops charge the customer $100+ per hour for labor. Of course they have overhead, but many people don't realize that mechanics buy their own tools.

You can earn $20 flipping burgers.
by whacked_new | 2025-10-08 03:38:46+00:00
Thanks for the reply! I'll have to try this out... it almost looks like what perkeep was meant to become.

One interesting scenario re time traveling is if we use an LLM somewhere in data derivation. Say there's a secondary processor of e.g. journal notes that yield one kind of feature extraction, but the model gets updated at some point, then the output possibilities expand very quickly. We might also allow human intervention/correction, which should take priority and resist overwrites. Assuming we're caching these data then they'll also land somewhere in the database and unless provenance is first class, they'll appear just as ground truth as any other.

Bitemporal databases look interesting but the amount of scaffolding above sqlite makes the data harder to manage.

So if I keep ground truth data as text, looks like I'm going to have an import pipeline into timelinize, and basically ensure that there's a stable pkey (almost certainly timestamp + qualifier), and always overwrite. Seems feasible, pretty exciting!
by windexh8er | 2025-10-08 03:39:32+00:00
> A MAC address is needed to bootstrap IP...

This is fundamentally incorrect. IPv4 for LAN, sure - but "bootstrap" it is not.

There's plenty of L2 that have no MAC: PPP, ATM, Frame Relay, etc. Also, MACs aren't needed for IPv6. ND works without MAC in v6.

And, finally... There's no MAC for loopbacks.
by topaz0 | 2025-10-08 03:39:34+00:00
You're probably thinking of NO2, which is indeed a pollutant that results from overly hot combustion in air. N2O is in fact used in engines, but it is not the fuel -- rather it is a supplementary oxidizer, which allows you to burn more fuel and therefore produce more power than you could if you only had the oxygen from air. At any rate, that means using N2O won't be a solution to the aircraft fuel problem -- you'd still need a combustible fuel for it to oxidize.
by paulcole | 2025-10-08 03:40:00+00:00
> I have asked them to terminate my employment immediately so that I can file for unemployment with state of California(my home state).

You don’t ever need anyone’s permission to file for unemployment but telling somebody, “I need you to fire me” is probably not going to work in your favor.

And isn’t max benefit in CA $450/week? I get that it’s better than nothing but you’re probably earning a lot more than that.

> So, I could just "retire" now and pursue other things. But, I want to lead a productive life

From an outside perspective this is a wild statement. Why not retire and pursue a productive life?

Do you really have a clear personal definition of what a productive life looks like to you or is it 100% defined by “working”?

You might be interested in the book Tiny Experiments. It seems like from your track record you set these big goals and then move onto another before seeing anything through? And you feel like you missed out because you never “achieved” what you thought you wanted?

This book presents a very different approach to life that will probably seem very foreign to you but might be interesting and worth pursuing.

I also recommend Tao Te Ching to everyone.
by dgodd | 2025-10-08 03:40:19+00:00
curl -i https://lobste.rs/

gives me the following

HTTP/1.1 200 OK<br> Accept-Ranges: bytes<br> Content-Length: 0<br> Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'none'; img-src 'self' data:; style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline'<br> Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8<br> Etag: "ddcmmk7eoism0"<br> Last-Modified: Wed, 08 Oct 2025 03:39:21 GMT<br> Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000<br> Vary: Accept-Encoding<br> Date: Wed, 08 Oct 2025 03:39:22 GMT<br>
by apeytavin | 2025-10-08 03:41:30+00:00
If we could sell it without we would for sure, but this is a current technological limitation. And we make extra easy to connect to it anywhere still, from your phone. Several components of the robots do not need this cloud service, and because the OS is accessible to you, you could even replace it with your own of doing things.

For this one, it's just the only feasible way we found to bring the kind of experience we created to folks.
by halfcat | 2025-10-08 03:41:44+00:00
> Has ICANN (or registry) ever been bribed or coerced?

Not that I know of. But it would be quite remarkable for an organization with a global choke point to resist attempts at influence indefinitely.

The upstream comment correctly mentioned owning a domain name being insufficient to be unbannable. There’s no mechanism with owning a domain, or DNS, that’s able to be defended by an individual (nothing like encryption, for example). It’s just someone with more power that allows it, until they don’t.
by BubbleRings | 2025-10-08 03:42:20+00:00
And one more idea from me. I could see your current system to be deliberately kept like it is, but offered as a two-part system, where the second part is, “once you get your timeline built and you have reviewed it carefully, then click here and the local-only LLM will have access to the whole thing.” The two part nature could be a big competitive advantage, helping people to carefully build a LLM system that, for instance, they could then offer to their whole family to peruse, without having to worry too much that it accidentally included information that it should not have.
by aceofspades19 | 2025-10-08 03:42:38+00:00
No one got "debanked", it was a temporary freeze for a few days and for a small number of accounts. I also disagree that it was to ruin the lives of those who oppose them, the money was released back to them, that seems like an odd way to ruin someone's life. Surely the tyrannical Liberal government would have been able to do more than keep them from accessing their money for a few days if they truly wanted to ruin lives.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-08 03:43:11+00:00
Similar story for Microsoft with regards to adoption:

> “A source that has seen materials related to sales has confirmed that, as of August 2025, Microsoft has around eight million active licensed users of Microsoft 365 Copilot, amounting to a 1.81% conversion rate across the 440 million Microsoft 365 subscribers.”

Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45476045 - October 2025
by beeflet | 2025-10-08 03:43:21+00:00
When you introduce such a high level of moderation and ranking what you get are a load of reddit style "funny guys" that are desperately trying to be noticed.

I prefer random comments without ranking, because it gives you a more truthful view of public sentiment. The force that aggressively filters comments is the same force that takes away the dislike button. It is all about controlling public opinion. Everything is good all of the time, and everyone is in a controlled demographic where they are insulated from new ideas that might make them difficult to advertise to.
by gpm | 2025-10-08 03:43:26+00:00
Hard to say without being a prophet.

There's a non-zero chance we follow Trump/MAGA, but I would say its unlikely.

My impression is that politically and culturally we have been becoming less welcoming to less well off immigrants. Since the motivation for this feels largely economic (and thoroughly pushed by foreign media and online trolls), economic hardship from losing the US trading relationship is likely to make it worse. I'd compare this more to the sort of anti-refugee sentiment you've seen in Europe for the last decade than what you're seeing in the US now. Of course being anti-refugee when its looking increasingly likely that our southern neighbour will somehow create a refugee crisis would be... unfortunate.

American media has an outsized influence here. When they complain about, say, trans people, you see a loud echo of that here. What that means when American media seems to be increasingly bowing to Trump is... worrying but unclear. At the same time the baseline is much more accepting of differences, cultural or personal, than the US baseline. If I was trans I'd choose Canada over California every time, pre and post Trump.
by shawntan | 2025-10-08 03:44:10+00:00
> Do you mean that HRM and TRM are specifically trained on a small dataset of ARC-AGI samples, while LLMs are not? Or which difference exactly do hint at?

Yes, precisely this. The question is really what is ARC-AGI evaluating for?

1. If the goal is to see if models can generalise to the ARC-AGI evals, then models being evaluated on it should not be trained on the tasks. Especially IF ARC-AGI evaluations are constructed to be OOD from the ARC-AGI training data. I don't know if they are. Further, there seems to be usage of the few-shot examples in the evals to construct more training data in the HRM case. TRM may do this via the training data via other means.

2. If the goal is that even _having seen_ the training examples, and creating more training examples (after having peeked at the test set), these evaluations should still be difficult, then the ablations show that you can get pretty far without universal/recurrent Transformers.

If 1, then I think the ARC-prize organisers should have better rules laid out for the challenge. From the blog post, I do wonder how far people will push the boundary (how much can I look at the test data to 'augment' my training data?) before the organisers say "This is explicitly not allowed for this challenge."

If 2, the organisers of the challenge should have evaluated how much of a challenge it would actually have been allowing extreme 'data augmentation', and maybe realised it wasn't that much of a challenge to begin with.

I tend to agree that, given the outcome of both the HRM and this paper, is that the ARC-AGI folks do seem to allow this setting, _and_ that the task isn't as "AGI complete" as it sets out to be.
by habinero | 2025-10-08 03:45:15+00:00
And plenty of people complain about "overtuned" music with robotic drums and overcorrected vocals that drain all the imperfections out of the sound.

(Here's a musician's take on it: https://youtu.be/BDJF4lR3_eg?si=kKJVF2hqSd-TOEzX)

"Being able to express your imagination more clearly" is fine for what it is but that's not how people use it. His point about the least talented kinds of people using it to pretend to art is dead accurate. People think it's snobbishness about art being this superior untouchable thing, and that is absolutely not it. You see the same thing with people going on about how SWEs will be obsolete, too, because something something code generation.

Making anything worthwhile involves thinking and choices and experience, and that sort of person consider that too hard and boring and just want something that looks worthwhile.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-10-08 03:45:44+00:00
I went the other way. I do not memorize anyone's number, just mine. Or, how it used to be before we had to know every incoming number (versus just outgoing numbers, which was pasted right next to the phone on the wall).

I almost never pick up the phone. If someone wants to reach me they will send me some (insert tech) message or leave me a voice message. If it is an emergency they should not be calling me in the first place - rarely in place to respond to the emergency.

I do keep family and friends' numbers in my contact lists and have a phone numbers in my wallet to contact when they find my body.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-08 03:45:57+00:00
The project seems to be about bootstrapping a civilization after collapse...

leads to: Small scale hobby miners and such will just order equipment from AliExpress

good to know that AliExpress will have the staying power to survive the collapse of civilization. we can all sleep easier knowing that while food/water/fuel will be available to those that can take it, your cheap shit from far away lands will still be a web order away. /s
by kmeisthax | 2025-10-08 03:45:57+00:00
Ethernet was designed to be the cheapest way to network multiple machines together. Everything was connected to a single long loop of coax with "vampire taps" that literally bit into the coax to connect multiple machines. So there's no central machine routing packets, instead each machine needs to decide whether or not a packet is intended for it. So the packets have to have a unique[0] destination address, as well as a source address so you know who to reply to.

Notably, none of this implies IP. IP was the expensive DARPA project that the military was building out. Ethernet is just "I am machine X, I want to talk to machine Y, here's some data". It just so happens that Ethernet was very popular, and people wanted to route IP over Ethernet. But you could route all sorts of other protocols over Ethernet as well and it would more or less work. So now we need two different classes of addressing: one for just the local network, and one for the IP network running on top of it.

And to make matters even worse, we don't use Ethernet in its original configuration anymore. First we replaced the loop of coax and vampire taps with 8P8C wire and passive hubs, then switches got cheap enough that we stopped making hubs. Ethernet framing also wound up being used for Wi-Fi, except like 99% of all Wi-Fi connections are in Infrastructure mode running IP anyway.

If Ethernet had been built to run IP exclusively, we wouldn't need Ethernet's header or MAC addresses at all. It would just need to encode IP packets and their boundaries. Even IPv6 wouldn't need a separate header as IP has its own version field.

[0] MAC addresses are supposed to be unique, but let's just say it's "LAN-scoped" and leave it at that.
by ggm | 2025-10-08 03:46:10+00:00
Turnips and Carrots could be priced equally per tonne, and still be worth trading because although you might think all root vegetables are substitutable, it turns out you can't make carrot soup with Turnips.

It's always worth remembering trade involves use values as well. We don't only trade for asymmetric profit, and there are things like hedging which include a yield where both can acknowledge future risk, and price accordingly.

I'm probably ignorant of some magic economist reason why the words are fluid and don't mean what I think they mean: this always seems to be the case talking economics from the stuffed armchair.

Another take on this is that we can agree to facts and disagree to consequences. Same information, different conclusions.
by rwallace | 2025-10-08 03:46:10+00:00
I disagree with your second sentence above. I think it is shallow dismissals that are inappropriate here. Conversely, I have upvoted a number of long explanations of interesting topics.

If you don't have time to write a detailed refutation, that's entirely understandable! But if you do, I would love to read it.

I did appreciate your paragraph length comment on the matter elsewhere in this thread.
by alberth | 2025-10-08 03:48:34+00:00
I’m a big fan of NPR and the quality of their journalism.

But it’s always struck me as odd that their frequent pledge drives suggest the ads they run don’t actually cover their costs.

In effect, each 30-second pledge driver must generate more revenue than a 30-second sponsor ad — which seems like a flaw in their revenue model, where donations are more valuable per minute than their core revenue generating business model.
by magicalhippo | 2025-10-08 03:48:45+00:00
Makes me think once again about the similarity to Finite Impulse Response[1] filters (traditional LLMs) and Infinite Impulse Response[2] filters (recursive models). Not that it's a very good or original analogy.

Anyway, with FIR you typically need many, many times the coefficients to get similar filter cutoff performance as a what few IIR coefficients can do.

You can convert a IIR to a FIR using for example the window design method[3], where if you use a rectangular window function you essentially unroll the recursion but stop after some finite depth.

Similarly it seems unrolling the TRM you end up with the traditional LLM architecture of many repeated attention+ff blocks, minus the global feedback part. And unlike a true IIR, the TRM does implement a finite cut-off, so in that sense is more like a traditional FIR/LLM than the structure suggest.

So, would perhaps be interesting to compare the TRM network to a similarly unrolled version.

Then again, maybe this is all mad ramblings from a sleep deprived mind.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_impulse_response

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_impulse_response

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_impulse_response#Window...
by Fezzik | 2025-10-08 03:50:28+00:00
One of my favorite classes, Honors Government, actually worked like this - at the beginning of the term we were assigned 15 short essay prompts that were “due” in batches of 3 at equal intervals during the term. But, if we completed the essays early, we got (something like) +5 points out of a 25 possible points on each of the essays. You could also turn the essays in late and would get -5 points. Then there was a final exam with a total possible 50 points. I did all the essays the first 2 weeks of school, scored well, and didn’t have to take the final.

I will note that this was not a common grading scheme when I was in high-school; I graduated in 2000.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-10-08 03:50:59+00:00
I think the thing people have to understand is how fast the value proposition is changing. There is a lot of conversation about "plateauing" model performance, but the actual experience from the combination of the model and tooling changes is night and day in the last 3 months. It was beginning to be very useful with Claude 3.7 in the spring this year, but we have just gone through a step function change.

I was decomissioning some code and I made the mistake of asking for an "exhaustive" analysis of the areas I needed to remove. Sonnet 4.5 took 30 minutes looking around and compiling a detailed report on exactly what needed to be removed from this very very brownfield project and after I reviewed the report, it one shot the decommisioning of the code (in this case I was using CLaude in the Cursor tooling at work). It was overkill, but impressive how well it mapped all the ramifications in the code base by greping around.
by keeda | 2025-10-08 03:51:47+00:00
I think we should just accept that vibe-coding has now semantically shifted to mean all AI-assisted coding. Actually, it makes sense to me even when a human is interacting directly with the code, because it feels a lot like pair-programming. As such, I really am "vibing" with the AI.

But then the original meaning of vibe-coding -- as in, "Take the wheel, LLama of God" -- does need a new term, because that will also be a lasting phenomenon. I propose "Yolo-Coding" -- It fits in nicely with the progression of No-Code, Low-Code, Yolo-Code.
by strogonoff | 2025-10-08 03:52:06+00:00
Considering human intelligence is very social, I wonder if bias to focus on individual humans leads us to a wrong way of understanding why it arose…

One of my pet theories is that it may be related to vocal cord development[0], where losing certain physiology that allows apes to be louder allowed humans to be more specific, if quieter, with enhanced pitch control and stability offering higher information density communication. This unlocks more complex societal interactions and detailed shared maps. (In Iain McGilchrist’s terms, it let the Emissary—the part of the brain shown to specialize in classification and pattern recognition, the requisite building blocks for efficient communication—to take priority.)

This is an example highlighting how it is not about individual humans “becoming smarter”, evolving larger brains, etc., but rather about humans becoming capable of working together in more sophisticated ways. In fact, human brain shrunk in the last few thousands of years, in concert with growing size of our societies and labour specialization[1], which in turn in no small part is helped by communication density offered by our vocal cords. Really, humans in this way are closer ants[2], where being part of human community is the defining part of our nature.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/11/how-quirk-of...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240517-the-human-brain-...

[2] Ants that farm and have stronger division of labour have smaller brains: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-ants-becam...
by trollbridge | 2025-10-08 03:52:15+00:00
The guest instances are fully 386 Enhanced Mode instances of Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1 (and Windows/386 and Windows 3.0) is implemented as an 80386 DPMI server, much like the DOS4GW you used to play Doom, and the the actual GUI code is a DPMI client. Windows 95 is also a DPMI server.

Windows 3.x could also run in “standard mode”, where it used a 16-bit only DPMI server. The Windows GUI system could run in real mode or as a DPMI client.

As far as “nested virtualisation”… Windows 3.1’s DOS windows could actually in turn run more instances of Windows 3.1, because Windows/386 relied on virtual 8086 mode only and Windows 3.x used DPMI which can be nested.
by svieira | 2025-10-08 03:54:22+00:00
Then it turns out that your CI gates are green because your tests are all subtly broken, the code you've been reviewing doesn't matter and the code you haven't been reviewing is what's broken in production. You learn from that and rebuild the universe, but now you're compute-limited from rebuilding your agents to deal with the underlying issue in your tooling and you have to dig yourself out of a hole you dug with a large derrick using nothing but a shovel.
by yongjik | 2025-10-08 03:54:26+00:00
From what I've heard, language is unambiguously unique to humans, if you consider grammar an integral part of languages. You can teach chimpanzees hand signs, but they could never make the leap to stringing them together under a coherent rule: something like the difference between "Mom give me cookies" vs "I give mom cookies."

(I'm no expert, so take that with a grain of salt.)
by wrigby | 2025-10-08 03:54:37+00:00
Yeah, I just did a project at work with an RP2040 and was really impressed with the Pico SDK. It hits a sweet spot in between ST’s insanity and Arduino’s easy-but-not-powerful tradeoff.

No crazy code generation, going from 0 to blinky is quick, but also going from blinky to DMA’s and interrupts is also a breeze.

I will say that I think the hardware peripherals in STM32’s are miles ahead, and PIO’s don’t necessarily make up the difference.