MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by recursive | 2025-10-21 17:11:38+00:00
I think the group of people who would buy something with "smart" in the name and also really care about reliability is pretty small.

For instance, most people who want a reliable mattress would buy one that doesn't require, or allow configuration.

It seems to me that most of the home automation enthusiasts are actually into configuration and troubleshooting as a hobby. And maybe doing party tricks. There's nothing wrong with that. But I don't think there are enough people to really make this badge work.
by immibis | 2025-10-21 17:11:48+00:00
This closes an activity - the user interface of an app - not an app. In Windows terms, this is DestroyWindow, not ExitProcess.

You can also exit an Android process, of course. It's probably what you're looking for, but it's weirdly inconsistent with the overall user experience and you should try to make something consistent instead. Even closing a top-level activity is weird.
by Spivak | 2025-10-21 17:11:50+00:00
The technology forum that despises technology, what a world. We should be expanding voting access, not taking it back to the 19th century. Vote with whatever means you have: wanna show up physically and hand-write your ballot, great!, wanna mail it in, go for it!, wanna vote via website or app, have fun!

Who gives a shit man, it's not going to be the end of the world or even substantially change things no matter what methods we choose. You might as well choose the ones that make things easier on people. Crazy that the world wide information network that we've built and defines our current age in history is treated like some horrible evil. It's not, it will be fine. But with vote by website now every home, school, and library in the country becomes a polling place.

There is no amount of transparency that will achieve the mythical "public trust" that's being envisioned. Our current voting system is all paper right now, actual voting fraud—meaning literal ballot stuffing is nonexistent and still people buy into conspiracy theories. Voting manipulation happens in broad daylight at the systems level and is done by carefully restricting access. Expand access and the problem vanishes.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-21 17:12:18+00:00
Your desktop probably already has mDNS set up, most user-friendly distros do it out of the box.

But it doesn't really matter, because KDE Connect implements its own sort-of mDNS system by itself, in the form of JSON broadcast across the local network on a standard port offering hostnames, services, and other metadata. Actual, real mDNS would require integration into the host's networking setup and that's too much to ask for clients like Android or iOS and you'd need to implement it manually in many other cases, so they kind of made their own mDNS. It also means you don't need root access to run KDE Connect on your device, which makes it viable on platforms like the Steam Deck.

To get KDE Connect working reliably, you need to make multicast traffic work reliably. Every network has its own restrictions when it comes to multicast so it's hard to know what specific tweaks your workstation needs. Having KDE Connect open on your phone, you should see packets coming in on your desktop on 255.255.255.255 on 1716/udp.
by afavour | 2025-10-21 17:12:22+00:00
We'll have to adjust, certainly. But that doesn't mean nothing bad will happen.

> People gossiped all sorts of stuff, spread malicious runors and you had to guess what's a lie and what's not.

And there were things like witch trials where people were burnt at the stake!

The resolution was a shared faith in central authority. Witness testimony and physical evidence don't scale to populations of millions, you have to trust in the person getting that evidence. And that trust is what's rapidly eroding these days. In politics, in police, in the courts.
by fooker | 2025-10-21 17:12:23+00:00
>I would strongly wager it's vastly more likely that these Chinese vehicles do not meet US safety standards

This was correct a few years years ago.

It's actually the opposite nowadays, most of these cars are safer than the typical 2.5L 4 cylinder American car. Both the EU and Australia has been completely flooded with these cars, to an extent that you'd have to see it to believe it.
by fragmede | 2025-10-21 17:13:13+00:00
If you worked for 15 minutes but wrote 3 hours on the invoice, how is that not a lie?

I'm not saying you're wrong to charge the full amount for the same job that used to take much longer. I fully support that, go get that bread! I'm just not down with writing 3h on an invoice when it took 15 mins.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-10-21 17:13:37+00:00
OpenAI is steering significant amounts of traffic away from Google and ChatGPT is a fairly common name that extends beyond awareness of the company (or even what the word it means specifically).

Not nearly on the level of "Kleenex" or "Google" as a term, but impressive given that other companies have spent decades trying to make a similar dent.
by ddelnano | 2025-10-21 17:13:52+00:00
Does anyone know how their KV cache sync mechanism compares to newer P2P communication layers like nixl, uccl p2p, etc.?

The authors mention that NCCL and Ray initialization were too slow (see quote below), but from the description it sounds like they’ve reimplemented a layer that’s increasingly being standardized by frameworks like nixl and uccl.

> Distributed executor: Inference engines support model parallelism via distributed executors (e.g., Ray [32] and NCCL [9]), whose initialization takes tens of seconds.
by skydhash | 2025-10-21 17:14:01+00:00
There is nothing that you can’t. Visual programming languages do exist and the shell is an REPL. What’s important is how well you can do it. If you nail down the common use cases, you can create a nice wrapper and people have done so.

But text is very versatile. Adding another layer on top is losing that versatility. And while graphics is nice, symbolic manipulation is on a whole other level.

So fo a closed, and I guess small, you can have gui for intuitiveness. But if you want expressivity, you need symbols and formalism.

But there’s one thing that still beat Graphic in terms of intuitiveness. Tacticality. I’d bet that it’s way faster for a person to learn a physical car dashboard than a touchscreen one.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-10-21 17:14:02+00:00
Yeah, if you're trying to explain the difference in outcomes between Haiti and the Dominican Republic today, appealing to poltical events in Haiti in the 1950s when that economic divergence began to happen has a lot more explanatory power than appealing to poltical events in Haiti in the early 19th century (including the two decades or so when Haiti itself had colonized the DR).

My own understanding of 20th century Haitian poltics is fairly limited. I don't know if "prioritized tourism via cruise ships over education" is a fair characterization of Magliore's policies in Haiti, or, assuming it is, that this constitutes a good casual explanation of the Haiti/DR economic divergence. I'm frankly skeptical - lots of places that are not Haiti have tourism as a major, government-supported component of the economy, and nonetheless are capable of providing some kind of useful formal education to their populace and have better economic outcomes than Haiti. I suspect the story in Haiti is a lot more complicated than this. But sure, if there's a specific education policy that the DR did implement in the 1950s and that Haiti under Magliore did not, that explains DR's greater economic development today, feel free to make the case.
by bilekas | 2025-10-21 17:14:08+00:00
> And everybody starting a hosting company is definitely a profit driven activity.

Absolutely, nobody was doing it out of charity, but there is more diversity in the market and thus more innovation and then the market decides. Right now we have 3 major providers, and that makes up the lion's share. That's consolidation of a service. I believe that's not good for the market or the internet as a whole.
by vanderZwan | 2025-10-21 17:14:17+00:00
I recently saw an article about the history of Sesame Street that claimed that in the late 1960s American preschool kids watched around twenty-seven hours of television per week on average[0]. And most of that was not age-appropriate (education TV had yet to be invented). So maybe we should check in on the boomers too if we're sincere about these worries.

[0] https://books.google.se/books?id=KOUCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA48&vq=ses...
by marshfarm | 2025-10-21 17:14:44+00:00
I think the best way would have been to assume thought is wordless (as the science tells us now), and images and probability (as symbols) are still arbitrary. That was the threshold to cross. Neither neurosymbolic, nor neuromorphic get there. Nor will any "world model" achieve anything as models are arbitrary.

Using the cybernetic to information theory to cog science to comp sci lineage was an increasingly limited set of tools to employ for intelligence.

Cybernetics should have been ported expansively to neurosci, then neurobio, then something more expansive like eco psychology or coodination dynamics. Instead of expanding, comp sci became too reductive.

The idea a reductive system that anyone with a little math training could A/B test vast swaths of information gleaned from existing forms and unlock highly evolved processes like thinking, reasoning, action and define this as a path to intelligence is quite strange. It defies scientific analysis. Intelligence is incredibly dense in biology, a vastly hidden, parallel process in which one affinity being removed (like the emotions) and the intel vanished into zombiehood.

Had we looked at that evidence, we'd have understood that language/tokens/embedded space couldn't possibly be a composite for all that parallel.
by pie_flavor | 2025-10-21 17:15:12+00:00
Haven't watched it, but to summarize what I imagine someone aligned with me would say: A ballot's entire lifecycle can be watched as it goes from the stack to the booth to the dropbox to the counting pile. Poll watchers are vestigial as soon as voting machines are involved; it becomes the honor system, which is not trustworthy enough in a system where the parties do not trust each other. The best you have is 'we have found no evidence of widespread voter fraud', a carefully couched statement from media organs you don't necessarily trust either. You, a (Democrat/Republican), can trust a system with paper ballots, because people from your party will observe all relevant details of the process everywhere the process occurs.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-21 17:16:01+00:00
in space travel there's a saying: once you're out of atmosphere you're halfway to anywhere. it takes tons of energy to get over the friction of air resistance. That's way we want a future where space-related things are built in space as much as possible. Once we can solve the idea of permanent installations on the moon it will have several advantages over an orbital station such as ease of additional construction, potential local resources that don't have to be shipped up and the ability to establish a base that can manufacture the things needed locally from imported or local resources rather than needing to manufacture things on earth and then launch them assembled.
by JadeNB | 2025-10-21 17:16:22+00:00
> I moved into a new house and did not set up the lawn irrigation system. Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule, when I would have expected it turn off in order to conserve water.

Not running when disconnected is definitely a safe default, but I'm not sure it's automatically desired. If I found out I couldn't use my sprinkler system unless it was connected to the internet, I'd be annoyed at the unnecessary gating of such functionality.
by prewett | 2025-10-21 17:17:06+00:00
Another reasonable conclusion is that many people are foolishly over-leveraged. If you buy the biggest/nicest/best house and the priciest you can possibly manage, you will be living paycheck to paycheck almost by definition, since your house/car/etc payments will be eating up all your paycheck.

I don't know how often this actually happens, but it certainly not an unreasonable conclusion.
by mentalgear | 2025-10-21 17:17:15+00:00
Couldn't agree more. The main issue is the data-greed mentality that has arisen over the last 20 years or so (basically every company trying to copy Big Tech). They all want to harvest user data and make the users as dependent as possible (which also opens up the door for subscription services later on, and their walled garden won't allow users to easily move).
by incomingpain | 2025-10-21 17:17:31+00:00
What wall? The only plausible wall I have seen is hardware limits.

If I were to provide you a 100 watt gpu that has 10 trillion cuda cores and 5 TB of vram at DDR120. Deepseek or glm would have a bijilloin tokens per second.

We could train models out to like 10T and run them at home at fast speeds on this imaginary hardware.

Do you think that these models would not be better? Obviously they would be. There's still work to do of course.
by everforward | 2025-10-21 17:17:33+00:00
Something I haven't seen talked about is the potential threat to government recruiting the layoffs and shutdown represent.

My historical impression was that government jobs didn't pay the best and came with a lot of red tape, but also came with a pension and a lot of stability.

From the outside, the stability looks like it's gone. I've got a buddy that works as a firefighter for the army and he's coming up on a second missed paycheck (shutdown hit right before checks went out). He's lucky to have inherited a house and to not have kids, but I don't know what the folks with a mortgage and several kids are doing to make ends meet. Allegedly they won't even get backpay right when the government opens, it'll come during their next pay period so even if they opened up right now he still wouldn't have any money coming in for a couple weeks or more.
by hirvi74 | 2025-10-21 17:17:59+00:00
> The ‘right’ way to do it is be able to deliver more than everyone else so you get a lot more work, undercut your competition, and take a bigger market share.

You are absolutely correct from a business perspective. However, I just cannot shake the feeling that I am so 'over' this society that we have created. I'm near my breaking point, I swear. Each passing day, I just think living off the grid sounds better and better.

Again, I am not trying to dog you or anything. It's just that reading statements like yours reminds my how unfit I am for this society. It's a 'me problem' not a 'you/them problem.'

I know life today provides an abundance of boons. However, I sometimes wish I could live in a time where I could be the town blacksmith, cooper, tailor, etc.. My job would be to provide a role for my small community and we would all know and rely on each other. I'm not cut out for this hyper-optimized world.
by gmueckl | 2025-10-21 17:18:00+00:00
Human tallying is a source of errors, but it typically doesn't affect the outcome in major ways. This is more of an argument against large scale winner-takes-it-all election systems, as they have the least resilience against this kind of error.

The main benefit of manual tallying is that election tampering at scale becomes a rather labor-intensive and physical process that is more likely to leave detectable traces. Compare that to the the last US presidential election that has statistical oddities in machine-tallied voting results of kinds that have historically been shown to correlate with election fraud. If this was indeed caused by fraudulent voting software, it happened without leaving any other obvious traces of tampering.
by Cold_Miserable | 2025-10-21 17:18:47+00:00
I can't see any elegant solution. \n

Struggling proc \n lzcnt ecx,ecx \n test cl,cl \n setz al \n lea edx,[ecx-2] ;[0,1,2] \n cmp rdx,2 \n cmovle eax,ecx \n ret \n Struggling endp
by sokoloff | 2025-10-21 17:18:53+00:00
> Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule, when I would have expected it turn off in order to conserve water.

I'd have expected (and strongly prefer) that it keep running with whatever the last settings were. That's almost surely going to be healthier for the lawn, ornamentals, and vegetable garden than shutting off.

I would wager that most people with automated irrigation systems prefer plant growth/protection over water conservation.

I'm not sure how you'd program a furnace to run to keep a house above freezing without any temperature feedback from the house. You could potentially run it until the area immediately surrounding the furnace itself was above freezing, but that would be nowhere near enough in some cases and way, way more than needed in other cases. You might able to use outdoor weather compensation (easier/more effective/comfortable with hydronic heat distribution than with ducted air heating) if programmed correctly, but my experience is that most are either not installed or are configured to be far too hot [because call-backs are expensive and paid by the HVAC company usually].
by soiltype | 2025-10-21 17:19:05+00:00
You don't know how to elaborate on your claims?

> I already wrote that even under the assumption that intelligence is a purely biological phenomenon, it does not follow that computation can produce intelligence.

See this demands definitions because I do not understand how you can say this. If intelligence is an emergent property of a physical process then I'd feel insane to assume such processes can only happen in certain meats but never in artificially created computers. I fail to see any way they can be fundamentally separated without a non-testable, immaterial "spirit" bestowing intellect on the meat computer. They're just different substrates for computation.

> We know what computation is, because we defined it as such and such.

As what? This is the cornerstone of your entire argument and you've left it as an assumption. I can infer you define computation as "those processes which happen in non-biological systems and which do not lead to intelligence." But that would be worse than useless.
by kgermino | 2025-10-21 17:19:08+00:00
Well that brings up two immediate issues

A standard furnace and thermostat won’t even know if you pull the thermostat off the wall, much less have any way to handle it beyond “full blast heat 24/7”

More challenging: you expected the sprinkler setup to do the opposite. Instead of following its last-known plan (the schedule) it should stop doing anything (possibly killing the plants it’s watering)

Good off-line only mode in a reasonable plan for what to do without the Internet makes a lot of sense, but at some point, there’s a control system and you need to change it (or even just have one in the thermostat example)
by gbxk | 2025-10-21 17:19:22+00:00
(sorry I didn't reply in-thread, I'm new to HN, re-posting response here:)

Exactly! The main local requirement is to have hardware virtualization available (e.g. /dev/kvm) but that should be fine on your local linux machine. Won't work in cloud machines or on Mac ARM in current form but maybe if I extend
by oivey | 2025-10-21 17:19:24+00:00
I don’t really understand the blind trust in paper in person ballots. Historically and currently, elections are stolen all the time whether paper or not. Off the top of my head some recent ones: election irregularities in Venezuela and the Russian referendums in Crimea.

If people in power want to cheat, they will. Shuffling around the tech isn’t going to do all that much to change things.
by xg15 | 2025-10-21 17:19:41+00:00
I'd like to know, from people who really believe that we just need to invent the right technology, then we could all do 20 hour weeks and spend the rest of the time in leisure, what keeps them from doing that right now, and what exactly they believe that miracle tech would change.

It seems relatively obvious to me that if a society has work as its cultural core then no amount of productivity increase will get rid of work - it would destabilize the entire society before it could do so.
by stronglikedan | 2025-10-21 17:19:49+00:00
I go camping often throughout the year, and sometimes sleep in a tent in 85-100+F weather. If I put a box fan at the foot of the bed, blowing straight over me, it will cool me down to the point where I wake up and pull a blanket over me. (I always start with a sheet because cool air blowing directly onto on the bottom of my feet is uncomfortable.) Don't underestimate the power of the simple box fan.
by ndiddy | 2025-10-21 17:20:51+00:00
Not being able to audit what you voted for after the fact is by design. Otherwise, it would make buying votes a viable strategy since you'd be able to show them who you voted for. Yes, taking a picture of the ballot is an option, but you can always ask for another ballot paper after you take the photo. Where I live, you're not even allowed to have a camera out in the same room as a voting booth for this exact reason.

IMO the best solution here is to have electronic counting with an auditable and traceable paper trail as a backup. Every time I've voted for the past 10 years has been like this. First, I get a ballot paper from the front desk and stick it into an airgapped ballot marking machine. I then make my choices and the machine prints them onto the ballot paper. I'm able to read the paper and verify that it matches the choices I made. I then stick it into a separate airgapped ballot counting machine, which scans my ballot and deposits the paper copy into a sealed box. The entire process of setting up the machines, transporting the paper ballots, and reading the results from the machines is cross-checked and signed off on by volunteer poll workers from both parties.
by close04 | 2025-10-21 17:20:54+00:00
You can already see the “sane defaults” vary with the person.

When it comes to safety it’s a bit more clear cut. The job of a heating system is to heat so don’t turn off heating when this can endanger people and houses.

The job of a lawn irrigation system is to irrigate. Who wants a dead lawn just because the internet or wifi are down, or to conserve water only when the system is disconnected from the internet but not from electricity?
by port3000 | 2025-10-21 17:21:00+00:00
"Boosting Nvidia stock prices could also be explained by an expectation of increased inference usage by office workers which increases demands for GPUs and justifies datacenter buildouts"

AI is already integrated into every single Google search, as well as Slack, Notion, Teams, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Zoom, Google Meet, Figma, Hubspot, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, Basecamp, Evernote, Dropbox, Salesforce, Canva, Photoshop, Airtable, Gmail, LinkedIn, Shopify, Asana, Trello, Monday.com, ClickUp, Miro, Confluence, Jira, GitHub, Linear, Docusign, Workday

.....so where is this 100X increase in inference demand going to come from?

Oh and the ChatGPT consumer app is seeing slowing growth: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/chatgpts-mobile-app-is-see...
by renewiltord | 2025-10-21 17:21:27+00:00
Yeah, it’s weird but sometimes we buy foreign banana and sell it here rather than make banana here. Maybe this is loophole around worker laws and we should only be allowed to buy local banana.

Sometimes I wonder, am I commit immigration fraud for buy Fuji apple from China? I have not get work visa for apple picker man. Maybe a crime.

I will confess ICE. We need to sort this out. We’re in a crisis.
by president_zippy | 2025-10-21 17:21:34+00:00
What about just accepting the job, faking a medical problem that requires extended time away from work not to keep the paycheck, but just to officially remain on staff for the purposes of future background checks, and meanwhile apply to other companies. You could just take an unpaid extended medical leave for cancer treatment and bribe an MD to make a phony "sick note" similar to playing hookey back in grade school.

You wouldn't be defrauding anybody if you're not getting paid. You could take a sabbatical for 6-9 months and tell better companies you were working for Amazon that whole time.