MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Marsymars | 2025-10-21 18:39:00+00:00
I’ve only got a handful of Matter devices, but haven’t experienced any problems with them. Have had them connected to HomeKit for a year or more, and got around to connecting them to Home Assistant last week - I was actually very impressed at how seamless it was to connect them to Home Assistant (generate pairing code in Apple Home, copy/paste into HA, done) - they’re now all directly connected to both HA and HomeKit and seem entirely functional on both.
by xnx | 2025-10-21 18:39:01+00:00
> OpenAI is making a wild number of product plays at once

It's similar to the process of electrification. Every existing machine/process needed to be evaluated to see if electricity would improve it: dish washing, clothes drying, food mixing, etc.

OpenAI is not alone. Every one of their products has an (sometimes superior) equivalent from Google (e.g. Veo for Sora) and other competitors.
by vict7 | 2025-10-21 18:39:10+00:00
> And then the other party that claims anyone who's done better than anyone else is necessarily immoral.

This is both a strawman and dismissing a real issue. Inequality is a real problem that has a corrosive effect on democracy. Also, American liberals have done little if nothing to reduce the gross inequality in this country.

So no, the guy that said “nothing will fundamentally change” is not helping reduce inequality nor demanding ideological purity in that regard.
by bentt | 2025-10-21 18:40:14+00:00
Some people code to talk and don't want anything said for them. That's okay. Photography and paintings landed in different places with different purposes.

But all of Programming isn't the same thing. We just need new names for different types of programmers. I'm sure there were farmers that lamented the advent of machines because of how it threatened their identity, their connection to the land, etc....

but I want to personally thank the farmers who just got after growing food for the rest of us.
by bokohut | 2025-10-21 18:40:22+00:00
Yes, nostalgia. This teleported me mentally back to the 1990s as I love seeing the old things resurface, that pattern and cycle thing that always holds true.

I recall sitting in board meetings playing games between other tech members as we had written simple games using the earliest means of direct connect device communication well before this was common. With the introduction of the Palm VII having the first mobile cellular smart device available and being a payment processor to large dotcoms at the time we of course we would also move into mobile payments on that Palm VII. This was yet another idea well before its time but it was fun working through the engineering issues of doing payments over cellular as well as satellite long ago. I still have NIB Palm VIIs with NIB payment cradles on my tech shelf of history, maybe some day I will dig them out again to play for inspiration and curiosity.

Stay Healthy!
by ranger_danger | 2025-10-21 18:40:33+00:00
Maybe but if we're talking on the level of targeted government surveillance, I think all options are on the table, i.e. they should assume they are being watched everywhere they go, and that all their communications, including their close friends/family (or anyone they have already been talking to lately) are likely being monitored as well, in which case, getting a new phone may not do much of anything.

Does that really not make sense?
by yongjik | 2025-10-21 18:40:45+00:00
Stop me if you heard it before, but paper ballot with automatic counting machine is the way to go. You still get real time update, and you have a physical ballot box that's constantly under watch of volunteers from multiple parties. And if there's any dispute (there will be disputes) you can simply bring out the boxes and count again.

It's a simple, cost-effective system which is impossible to hack. Electronic voting offers no advantage over this.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-10-21 18:40:50+00:00
A single polling station usually only has a few thousand voters. During the day, polling officers at the station processed (signed/stamped/tore/etc) every single ballot that went into the boxes. They also verified every person's ID. When polling closes, why is it enormous human labor to count the votes, but all the processing during the day is not?
by qingcharles | 2025-10-21 18:40:53+00:00
It also completes CAPTCHAs when I tried it. And clicks the "I am human" buttons.

Sometimes it hesitates on really important button clicks that it determines are not reversible. I was using it to test the UX on an app in beta and it didn't want to click the final step. I had to "trick" it by reminding it I owned the app.

It felt like that scene in Short Circuit 2 where they trick Johnny 5 into plasma cutting his way through a bank vault because it is "their" vault and they are simply testing the security. Wild times.
by jxmorris12 | 2025-10-21 18:41:24+00:00
It's great that people are starting to take continual learning seriously, and it seems like Jessy has been thinking about LLMs and continual learning longer than almost anyone.

I especially like this taxonomy

> I think of continual learning as two subproblems:

> Generalization: given a piece of data (user feedback, a piece of experience, etc.), what update should we do to learn the “important bits” from that data?

> Forgetting/Integration: given a piece of data, how do we integrate it with what we already know?

My personal feeling is that generalization is a data issue: given a datapoint x, what are all the examples in the distribution of things that can be inferred from x? Maybe we can solve this with synthetic datagen. And forgetting might be solvable architecturally, e.g. with Cartridges (https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06266) or something of that nature.
by Kerrick | 2025-10-21 18:41:44+00:00
In fact, on macOS and iOS simply typing two dashes (--) gets autocorrected to an em dash. I used it heavily, which was a bit sloppy since it doesn't also insert the customary hair spaces around the em dash.

Incidentally, I turned this autocorrection off when people started associating em dashes with AI writing. I now leave them manual double dashes--even less correct than before, but at least people are more likely to read my writing.
by dannymi | 2025-10-21 18:41:51+00:00
Just as you can select whatever railroad gauge as a country (if you also build compatible trains, obviously) and have it work just fine no matter what you select--until you try to connect it to another country and then you need to have converters--, some physical theories have gauges like this that you can choose however you want and it will work fine (and be equivalent to a theory in any other gauge)--but if you want the theory to work with the next guy's theory you have to have converters.
by cardanome | 2025-10-21 18:41:57+00:00
Both of your use cases do not require any from of smart device and certainly no internet connection.

In fact you could even use an simple analog switch if you want the lights to go on at certain times. And for the hallway I would suggest the tried and true motion sensor.

Sure for really complex logic and a lot of flexibility you might want an micro controller eventually but those are truly niche uses.

"Smart" devices are insanely overengineered for the simple problems they solve and the huge problems they can cause.
by nostrademons | 2025-10-21 18:42:48+00:00
First video:

Arguments against electronic voting: 1) one person can change millions of votes 2) vulnerable even outside the country 3) even if you audit the software, it's hard to verify that the audited software is what is actually loaded on the machines 4) even if you check hashes of the software, how do you check the software that checks the software (this is a restatement of the Ken Thompson Hack) 5) proprietary software 6) USB sticks are insecure 7) final computer tallying everything is owned and located in a single place 8) XSS attacks on e-voting pages.

Arguments for physical voting: 1) centuries old, many attacks have already been tried and failed 2) no identifying marks on ballot = no opportunity to pressure voters to change their vote 3) multiple people involved in each stage of the process

I realized after typing that out that YouTube has a "Show Transcript" function, so try that for the second video.
by dang | 2025-10-21 18:43:03+00:00
You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. Can you please not do that? We're trying for a different sort of internet forum here, not the kind where people bash each other for being wrong and/or bad.

If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, we'd appreciate it.
by jrowen | 2025-10-21 18:43:28+00:00
This is due to the flawed cornerstone of our culture that a person's job is their worth and value and purpose in the world. This was necessary when the combined efforts of our labor were still not enough to provide basic needs for the people.

The dream of automation was always to fix that. We did that, and more. We have long had the technology to provide for people. But we invent tons of meaningless unnecessary jobs and still cling to the "jobs" model because that's all we know. It's the same reason vaccuum cleaners didn't reduce the amount of cleaning work to be done. We never say "great, I can do less now because I have a thing to do it for me." That thing just enables me to fixate on the next thing "to be done." The next dollar to be gained.

A McDonalds robot should free the people of doing that kind of work. But instead those people become "unemployed" and one individual gets another yacht and creates a couple "marketing" jobs that don't actually provide any value in a holistic humanitarian sense.
by amflare | 2025-10-21 18:43:42+00:00
> Existing mitigation approaches often degrade performance on open-ended generation and downstream tasks, limiting their practical utility. [...] Unlike continuous reward schemes, our approach assigns a reward of one only when the model's output is entirely factually correct, and zero otherwise.

Someone correct me if I am wrong, as I'm am on the very edge of this space looking in, but does this mean that they are using a "degraded performance with fewer hallucinations" model to fact check the "more powerful yet prone to hallucinations" model?
by _aavaa_ | 2025-10-21 18:43:56+00:00
> there’s nothing in that quote that is inherently misleading

The discussion of the issue in terms of primary energy is the very thing that's inherently misleading. To move away from fossil fuels we do not have to replace the primary energy, we have to replace the useful energy that comes out the other side. From the Sankey diagram in the article I linked [0], 67.5 units of energy are not useful energy.

To put it to an extreme, instead of 67.5 units beings wastes, it could be 100 billion units for 32.5 units of useful energy produces. Focusing on the 100 billion is inherently misleading since they are irrelevant when the replacement technology basically creates the useful energy with over 100% efficiency at times.

Heat pumps. Yes their COP is lower during cold winters, but that brings in 2 discussions.

1) any COP value above 1 means that we'll need less primary energy than when buying something, and even in cold weather they manage a COP above that [1].

2) Lower COPs will cost you more, depending on what your natural gas prices are like due to any crazed lunatics invading their neighbours. Which conincidentally is only what pushes electricity prices up in many places that use natural gas for electricity (even just peak demand).

The capital cost difference also depends drastically on situation. Many climates need both heating and cooling, so the price of heat pump versus furnace + AC unit is much smaller than heat pump versus furnace.

> But especially without a strong will today those changes are practically too far off for the 2050 target.

I agree, and even replacing the 1/3rd of the primary energy will be a tough challenge. But Vaclav continual framing in terms of primary energy is actively used to push inaction. His critics have been vocal about this point (and others) for a while, he should know better by now.

[0]: https://spitfireresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/LLNL...

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...
by AtNightWeCode | 2025-10-21 18:43:59+00:00
I actually built my own browser on top of Chromium to be able to use both Claude and ChatGPT ad hoc for various tasks in the browser. Fact is that I use my OS native text to speech more than the LLMs...

Anyhow. The problem is that the LLMs are simply not good enough. And as someone who processes a lot of data through LLMs daily via APIs. The quality is just poor. Clearly LLMs does not work as stated. The fluctuation in the quality of the responses is just silly and very undocumented.
by benbreen | 2025-10-21 18:44:26+00:00
Currently working on an idea like this, but its a history simulator for educational use - I find that LLMs respond rather well to being grounded in a specific time/setting in real world history, as opposed to being told to roleplay a fictional setting. The latent space of any fictional world is close enough to other fictional worlds that they will rapidly slide off into other similar-sounding settings. Whereas if you return them to a super-specific historical context each go-around ("The time is now 3:13 pm. It is August 3, 1348. You are currently simulating the functioning of a small vineyard in Normandy. The farmer, [NPC name], is looking for helpers in the fields") they will be able to pull from a pretty solid baseline of background knowledge and do a decent job with it.

Some fun things I've been experimenting with is 1) injecting primary sources from a given time and place into the LLMs contex to further ground it in "reality" and 2) asking the LLM to try to simulate the actual historical language of the era - i.e. a toggle button to switch to medieval French. Gemini flash lite, the only economical model for this sort of thing, is not great at this yet but in a year or so I think it will be a fascinating history and language learning tool.

Have been meaning to write this project up for HN but if anyone wants to try a very early version of it, it's here - you can modify the url to pick a specific year and region or just do the base url for a fully random spawn, i.e. here is Europe in 1348: https://historysimulator.vercel.app/1348/europe
by submeta | 2025-10-21 18:44:28+00:00
Here's ChatGPT's Atla's analysis of the sentiments here:

<snip> The Hacker News discussion about ChatGPT Atlas (OpenAI’s new AI-integrated browser) is very active and highly mixed — leaning skeptical to negative overall, with a few positive and curious takes.

Sentiment breakdown:

- Negative / Critical (~65%): Privacy, control, monopoly concerns

- Neutral / Cautiously curious (~20%): Waiting to see if it’s useful

- Positive / Enthusiastic (~15%): Productivity and innovation optimism

</snip>

I am a Firefox user, and will be as long as Mozilla keeps it updated. But I also use ChatGPT Max plan because I really like the product.

Gave Atlas a try, but won't use it. We did not fight Google to create another one.
by strix_varius | 2025-10-21 18:44:36+00:00
To me, the most salient point was this:

> Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.”

LLMs have made Brandolini's law ("The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it") perhaps understated. When an inexperienced or just inexpert developer can generate thousands of lines of code in minutes, the responsibility for keeping a system correct & sane gets offloaded to the reviewers who still know how to reason with human intelligence.

As a litmus test, look at a PR's added/removed LoC delta. LLM-written ones are almost entirely additive, whereas good senior engineers often remove as much code as they add.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-21 18:44:41+00:00
> But they open up the gate for a single Big Tech Winner that truly knows everything about you, and can even control everything on your behalf.

Do not want, I want none of it and no part of it.

I'll use Lynx before I use that.

AI is already infesting search results directly (til I adblocked it), writing the crap on whatever page I just landed on and led me to turn unhook up to "just show the damn video" on YT.

I've yet to see a single use of AI that in any way improves my life and I'm supposed to hand companies who are already too powerful even more of my life/data for that.

I'll pass.

From my point of view it's become very tiresome pretending the emperor is wearing clothes or at least not pointing that out.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-10-21 18:44:43+00:00
I think they make sense because most personally owned vehicles spend 98% of their time parked. If instead they rarely parked we could have far fewer of them, pay less for parking, have better saturation of modern safety features into the vehicle pool (since they'd wear out at a more uniform rate), and have better incentive alignment re: maintenance (since the mechanic and the designer work for the same company).

The golf club problem is real, but I think we'll eventually find a way to solve it independently because the wastes associated with an ever growing percentage of the population owning a personal vehicle will eventually cross a tipping point.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-21 18:46:33+00:00
National mandatory holiday for voting would eliminate soo many issues and concerns. It really should be a must in every country, at least for the biggest elections. Inbefore "lazy urupeons are wrong, no holidays is the only true way!!!" there are 11 federal holidays in the USA, same as in many European countries, and the sky didn't fall down because of that. Adding 0.20-0.25 holiday per year won't return a country to dark ages or anything.
by vunderba | 2025-10-21 18:46:41+00:00
> ASI born 2039 when fusion-powered Michelson lab tried to break the Turing barrier using a 1920s Enigma rotor as randomness seed

These aren't so much plot points as they are markov-driven word salads. As I've mentioned in other I.F. related posts, I'd say that the real value-add in an LLM is the potential to act as a flexible parser that stands between user input and allowable actions within the adventure. So you can finally "get ye flask..."
by aaronSong | 2025-10-21 18:46:59+00:00
thanks for using claudable before! for server costs, the sandbox previews have auto-stop functionality so the actual runtime is pretty short. keeps costs manageable. for deployments, cloudflare static hosting is basically free, and we only charge a small fee for custom domains since that's where we have actual costs. the beauty of leveraging existing platforms is that we don't have to run expensive infrastructure ourselves. most of the heavy lifting (the actual coding) happens on your CLI agent subscription, not our servers!
by ggreer | 2025-10-21 18:47:50+00:00
The FCC requires that airborne transmitters identify themselves by broadcasting the an FAA designator such as the aircraft registration number.[1] The FAA has no identification or registration process for small weather balloons. So this effectively prohibits them from broadcasting. It's possible to add a radar reflector, but they add significant weight and bulk to the balloon's payload. I think reflectors are only required for larger weather balloons.

1. See § 87.107: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2024-title47-vol5/pd...
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-21 18:48:00+00:00
Wireguard is purely point-to-point. You have to manually specify any configuration involving routing more than just the local IP addresses you add.

Not sure if it's the best solution, but there's no reason to take over your entire network.

Even with my old OpenVPN setup I had a config where only my local 10.2.0.0/16 got routed over the VPN, everything else went straight to the outside world. Set up IPv6 ULA and you don't need to worry about IP addressing conflicts.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-10-21 18:48:00+00:00
I didn’t say the other side doesn’t have guns, and that isn’t the point.

I see some violent protesters, but I don’t see a violent coup. You’re welcome to call that distinction without a difference, but it’s really not. We’ve had years of violent protest, that’s not what a coup is.

From what you said, it was unplanned, but also run by the president of the United States of America. Who is incompetent, but who also secured the presidency not just once, but twice.

Either way, it doesn’t matter. He won again, with the majority of the vote. It doesn’t seem like the American people believe there was a coup attempt — or they don’t care. He’ll serve out his term, and the same arguments with different actors will play out all over again in 2028.

JD Vance will probably be the Republican nominee, and he’ll be called the next Hitler. We’ll be told that fascism is on the ballot. People will either care or they won’t. Emotion-driven messaging will drive the election. No matter who wins, the country will probably not fall apart.
by tonymet | 2025-10-21 18:48:18+00:00
that's a reasonable theory. they've likely delayed the launch this long due to the inference cost compared to the more basic Alexa engine.

I would also guess the testing is incomplete. Alexa+ is a slow roll out so they can improve precision/recall on the intents with actual customers. Alexa+ is less deterministic than the previous model was wrt intents
by teddyh | 2025-10-21 18:48:32+00:00
If your proposed process is implemented, it will take about 5 seconds before the precinct realizes that they can just feed it all to the machine and sign whatever number which comes out as the “hand-counted” one. Especially as they will be dinged whenever their count differs from the machine, which will be assumed by their superiors to be more trustworthy.

More seriously, even though some cars are programmable, I did not mean that nobody could use cars to transport ballot boxes. I obviously meant that the official results should be the manually-counted one; machines could conceivably be used to get interim results faster, and/or to double-check a count to see if it needs to be counted again. But I was serious about requiring absolutely no machines involved in the counting of the official results.
by groby_b | 2025-10-21 18:48:46+00:00
You can usually do with less than the full history. "Here are five books where I liked the tone/setting/worldbuilding/topic, gimme more" has proven pretty successful.

With gradual refinement - "I like #1 and #4, but I wonder if something like that exists with a 40s scifi tone. Gimme your top 10"

It's... mostly worked out so far. (It also turns out that some topics, I seem to have thoroughly explored. Taking recommendations for off-the-beaten-path heist novels :)
by Veserv | 2025-10-21 18:49:14+00:00
Ah yes, "likely air-gapped", what a high-confidence statement. Any competently designed air-gap must be precisely auditable and demonstrably, positively air-gapped.

The only world where "likely" is a reasonable word is in reference to possible physical taps or a precise enumeration of physical access points that went unaudited, but have reliably followed safe access control/configuration procedures. Anything else is plain incompetence.
by csheehan10 | 2025-10-21 18:49:37+00:00
"The Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department will shrink its class size by roughly 75 percent to three new Ph.D. students, according to two professors. Molecular and Cellular Biology will reduce its figure to four new students, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology will go down to four or five admits, one of the professors added."

Do you really think that is the purpose of those departments?