MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2025-10-17 14:58:58+00:00
Floor plan isn’t enough for a location model. These have to be learned in from accurately tagged data combined with measurements taken at the precise time of the tagged location data. A lot of tagged data.

You’re not going from a floor plan to a precise location model. Just think about how different the WiFi environment would be if someone put their router next to their steel computer case versus someone setting it on a nice MDF cabinet with no wires nearby. Completely different RF environment and pathing.
by dsego | 2025-10-17 14:59:05+00:00
What I'm saying, say you have 3 dependent dropdown pickers, selecting an item in the first one determine which of the other 2 are shown. When you have reactive interfaces like that, it's hard to extract the common "business" logic. Either you redraw everything from scratch or you do a sort of show/hide on DOM elements as in jQuery days. Not sure how you can abstract that. If you do abstract it, you end up with backbone, vue, react, or other in any case.
by foundart | 2025-10-17 14:59:19+00:00
Indeed! Quite interesting.

title: The neural basis for uncertainty processing in hierarchical decision making

abstract: Hierarchical decisions in natural environments require processing uncertainty across multiple levels, but existing models struggle to explain how animals perform flexible, goal-directed behaviors under such conditions. Here we introduce CogLinks, biologically grounded neural architectures that combine corticostriatal circuits for reinforcement learning and frontal thalamocortical networks for executive control. Through mathematical analysis and targeted lesion, we show that these systems specialize in different forms of uncertainty, and their interaction supports hierarchical decisions by regulating efficient exploration, and strategy switching. We apply CogLinks to a computational psychiatry problem, linking neural dysfunction in schizophrenia to atypical reasoning patterns in decision making. Overall, CogLink fills an important gap in the computational landscape, providing a bridge from neural substrates to higher cognition.
by matt_heimer | 2025-10-17 14:59:22+00:00
Not just social media postings but past real estate listings can probably provide floor plans.

And if you don't have those, a lot of buildings have common patterns. Its very much in the realm of possibility to train a model using exterior and interior information so that you could have AI generate a floor plan using only exterior data.

Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.

Once you have all that don't you have everything you need to detect movement in the building based on signal disruptions?

Yes, seems like a bit of work but it absolutely seems like the type of effort some governments would put effort into.
by theamk | 2025-10-17 14:59:34+00:00
And absolutely unique failure methods that no other languages exhibit.

How often you had a formula like SUM(B1:B20), and then someone added item 21 and suddenly the output is just slightly wrong? Or perhaps someone updated the formula but did not propagate the change to the last few cells?

There are no error messages, no warnings, just an output which is slightly wrong. Wrong enough to break whatever it's going to be used for, but close enough that cursory inspection does not notice it. Basically the worst failure mode an app can have.

Spreadsheets _could_ be beautiful if no one were to use them for tabular data. But people do, so they are a really horrible programming language. I bet people spent thousands of years of their life fixing spreadsheet mistakes that could not have happened in any other language.
by time4tea | 2025-10-17 15:00:02+00:00
Hetzner are great.

Cloud was a reaction to overlong procurement timeline in company managed DC. This is still a thing, it still takes half a year to get a server into a DC!!

However probably 99% of use cases dont need servers in your own DC, they work just fine on a rented server.

One thing though, a rented server can still have hardware failure, and it needs to be fixed, so deployment plans need to take that into account - fargate will do that for you.
by bnjmn | 2025-10-17 15:00:10+00:00
> Humanoid robots are handicapped by their similarity to humans which is really an artificial constraint.

YES, and I wish people would stop pretending we've unlocked some new generality by promoting generic humanoid robots over task-specific ones.

You can probably Rube-Goldberg your way to a diaper-changing robotic enclosure with a 3D baby bidet that uses many low-force robot arms to subdue (most) babies, but a humanoid robot is a very a poor substitute for a human here.

Plus, a human can take personal responsibility for the baby's safety, which is not something a robot can ever do, unless we somehow make the robot fear for its life/freedom/employment the same way the overarching social/legal system does for humans who sign contracts or accept highly accountable roles.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-10-17 15:00:12+00:00
Honestly I don't care about downvotes if I can at least downvote as well. When I've been on this site for months and made hundreds of killer comments, and the only reason I can't downvote yet is because I don't match the hive mind enough, it really pisses me off. Also, this creates an erroneous impression of which comments are good and which aren't. I reckon most users here have under 500 points or whatever and thus cannot downvote. If I had never been downvoted I'd probably have another thousand points on top of what I already have.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-17 15:00:19+00:00
A floor plan is not equivalent to a complete RF characterization of an environment. Ignore the floor plan comments because they don’t enable WiFi positioning.

Think through it: Does your floor plan contain info about the precise location of your WiFi devices and any obstructions between them? Even that isn’t enough to get a WiFi location model, but it’s not in there regardless.
by Ekaros | 2025-10-17 15:00:26+00:00
On other hand if you are able to compile "facts" to an article. You should as well be able to verify them from second source. And trivially fast in modern world. I mean if you synthesis information from one or more sources. Being able to verify them from one more source should not be huge leap.

Then again, maybe it is just AI generated. Which really makes future look lot worse.
by chronci739 | 2025-10-17 15:00:33+00:00
> Edit: extra LOL at creating the account to criticize and then downvote facts in the reply.

Not me, I made this account 7 days ago. Check my history.

> And then you wonder about the obesity crisis.

And for the record:

I don’t give a shit about the obesity crisis.

Or any other drug, mental health, crime, or demographic problem facing any country.

I only care about the number on my bank statement.

Well, my private equity partner accounts, but you get my point.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-10-17 15:00:58+00:00
> As a self hosting fan, i cant even fathom how hard it would be to even get started running a Postgres or redis cluster on AWS. Like, where do I go? Do i search for Postgres? If so where?

Anything you don't know how to do - or haven't even searched for - either sounds incredibly complex, or incredibly simple.
Show HN: VT Code – AST-aware Rust agent for terminal (Tree-sitter/AST-grep)
by vinhnx | 2025-10-17 15:01:22+00:00
VT Code is a Rust CLI/TUI coding agent for AST-aware edits (Tree-sitter, ast-grep). Multi-provider routing with failover and caching (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, xAI, OpenRouter, Z.AI, Moonshot; Ollama locally). Policy-gated tools, workspace boundaries, Zed ACP integration. Config-first via vtcode.toml; reproducible model/constant metadata in the repo.

Try it: cargo install vtcode; vtcode

Code: https://github.com/vinhnx/vtcode
by underlipton | 2025-10-17 15:02:01+00:00
NIMBYs make new developments difficult to produce, too, actually, and for similar reasons: zoning and environmental laws. New developments also cost more, because you're putting in all-new infrastructure, whereas many old communities are approaching their replacement dates for water and sewer and whatnot anyway. You might as well get the most bang for your buck by introducing more avenues for generating property taxes (ADUs, subdivided lots, and especially commercial establishments).

Also, you don't need to tear anything down. Small neighborhood-use commercial establishments can be converted from existing housing.
by iliaznk | 2025-10-17 15:02:06+00:00
I mean in a complex enough application you'll have to come up with some abstractions that will make you life easier anyway. I doubt that you will manually add and remove classes, or add and remove nodes via direct DOM API calls every time you need to do that. You know what I mean? A set of such abstractions is what I call a framework. It doesn't have to be a separate file called "framework.js". It may even be more of a library than a framework. But I believe you will inevitably come to that to centralize certain things and make them easier to do.
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-17 15:02:10+00:00
> If one person or a small group can't do a thing then a big group shouldn't either. And if a big group can do a thing then the small group. If it's ok for ICE to just stop brown people then it's ok for NYPD to do stop and frisk. And if that's not ok then adjust the law.

For what it's worth I fully agree with you!

The thing is, this just isn't achievable with modern politics. The big guns will always lobby for them to be exempted in some way, and even if only by funding the enforcement agencies only so limited that they have no way of enforcing the law againt the big fish.

And on top of that you got Conservatives (or whatever tries to sell themselves under that label these days) and Wilhoit's (misattributed) law [1]:

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit
by YesBox | 2025-10-17 15:02:28+00:00
Hey HN!

I'm the developer of Metropolis 1998. Unfortunately the launch date in the article has come and passed, but that's how things are in game development world. :D

Some tech talk:

- Custom engine (C++) using SFML for the graphics framework, and SQLite for database/data oriented design

- True isometric engine. No 3D models, everything you see is hand drawn sprites (made to look like a 3D render ha)

- Since sorting sprites is O(N^2), I figured out a way to create a depth map for each sprite to depth sort on the GPU

- Tons of work went into the pathing code to make it efficient, since this is the traditional bottleneck in these types of games. The game can handle around 100K units and vehicles moving around (on one CPU core)

- The team is just me and a couple part time contractors for the art and buildings.

- Most recent update (some cool skyscraper construction): https://x.com/YesboxStudios/status/1978928991663776224

- Fun fact: the entire game is currently 27 MB.

- Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-17 15:03:28+00:00
> What is old is new again.

It's not really. It just happens that when there is a huge bullshit hype out there, people that fall for it regret and come back to normal after a while.

Better things are still better. And this one was clearly only better for a few use-cases that most people shouldn't care about since the beginning.
by Noaidi | 2025-10-17 15:04:11+00:00
Some serious boycotts need to be happening, and soon. I do not care if this was an R or a D administration, this has been out of control and just getting worse.

This is us against the oligarchs, not us against each other. And something makes me worried that there is an impending recession/depression and that these surveillance devices will be use to quell any dissent. (I say this because of the insane rise in the price of gold)

I, for one, am canceling my Amazon Prime account and avoiding amazon as much as I can in this dystopia where it is the only place you can buy many goods anymore.
by miki123211 | 2025-10-17 15:04:15+00:00
This is where drone deliveries will shine.

Drone deliveries are a lot more like social media, hotels or flights, and a lot less like traditional deliveries. Once you build out the infrastructure, your cost-per-delivery (OpEx) rounds to zero. You want to spread out your infrastructure costs across as many deliveries as possible, so it makes sense to increase utilization, even at extremely low delivery prices. This is the "Ryanair model."

Because drone deliveries are so cheap (and so fast, there's no traffic after all), long-range deliveries make much more sense. If you can do long-range, you care a lot less about where your restaurant is located and how many customers you have passing by. This makes your rent go down.

Long range also increases how many customers you can realistically serve. You can exploit this in two ways, either by hyperspecializing in some particular kind of food, or by introducing standardization and automation.

A large part of the reason why restaurants aren't automated is that they just don't have that many customers. It doesn't make sense to pay for expensive machines (or even design them) if you are constrained by both rent and range. If neither are a constraint, you can go wild.
by vacuity | 2025-10-17 15:05:01+00:00
That's why I like to read most of the comments on a post, because typically I'll find some useful information scattered throughout. After I'm done, I can roughly get a sense for "excellent comments", "comments that probably have a good point", "medium-quality arguing", and "probably just wrong comments". Then I may seek out other submissions of the same topics to get more data. Over time, I refine which points I think are probably valid. HN has its gems, just perhaps not as often or obvious as advertised.
by aftbit | 2025-10-17 15:05:18+00:00
>Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.

That seems like all you'd need anyway, skip the rest of this. Small autonomous drones with simultaneous location and mapping capability will absolutely revolutionize warfare (and firefighting, but I digress) whenever they stop being sci-fi.
by concrete_head | 2025-10-17 15:06:08+00:00
You can use the browser console to inject any value to any element to verify expected behaviour.

There are also patterns in the water network so issues reveal themselves pretty quick then easy to fix. E.g. pumps on=green, off=grey, fault=red. Easy to spot an element that is misconfigured especially when you look at it all day.

You can also hover over an element and it reveals its tagname in a tooltip which helps. And the script has an error log for things such as if there are any tagnames in the query it can't find a drawing element for or if it failed to set some value
by b112 | 2025-10-17 15:06:28+00:00
This reminds me of a story, where a utility had buried power lines near a farmer's grazing field. These were milk cows, and he didn't know why but they had stopped giving milk, and seemed sickly.

Vets couldn't figure it out. They seemed healthy otherwise.

Turned out that for some reason, the cows were constantly being low-level shocked.

Most people I know, prefer to think of eating an animal that was happy until it was killed, and killed mercifully. It could be an important metric, much like grass-fed or some other property.
by pinpointed | 2025-10-17 15:06:48+00:00
Hi HN, I’ve been building Pinpointed, a vertical AI for wine, beer and spirits retailers. It acts like a knowledgeable store clerk (“sommelier”) on the website, helping shoppers pick the right bottle by taste, food pairing, and budget. Early pilots show ~27% increase in average cart value and higher conversion on product pages.

Demo: https://pinpointed.dev Email: ian@pinpointed

Happy to share more implementation details or anonymised pilot data. Thanks!
by ogurechny | 2025-10-17 15:07:24+00:00
> some people -want- men and women to be interchangeable in all respects

That's a generalisation that loses all sense.

For example, you're building giant pyramids out of human corpses. Based on experiments and precise calculations, you know that you need x.y% more female corpses than male corpses, and get really angry when suppliers try to argue that men and women are equal in all respects.

Obviously, this is not the important question. We should ask questions about your activity as a whole instead.

(It might seem that my example is a bit over the top, but people around us do things that are just as bad, and with real enthusiasm.)

Gender issues are not just abstract, they are tied to problems people see in the society. It is not fashionable today to just state that someone is a swine to behave in some manner (and the answer would usually be that you are not allowed to limit anyone's freedoms), so dumb pathetic fences of bureaucratic states are used, and the talk about progress, benefits, equality, shared future, etc. floods the stage. However, you personally still either think that something is right, or that it's wrong.

During “millions of years of evolution”, in many places any woman walking alone without male relative or servant could be treated as a potential free sex toy. It was simply “evident” that anyone could try to rape her, and “everyone” knew that — men, women, kids. It was “natural”, and even the commandment about neighbour's wife could easily be seen as excluding “no one's” or “everyone's” wives, so it was even sanctioned from above. Obviously, it all stemmed from the heads of certain people, and changes introducing consequences mutated that “natural order”.

By the way, the figure of noble male saving damsel from the jerks is considered noble because... he could've joined the party, but choose not to. What a hero! Simple-minded people continue to see things the old way to this day when they expect heroines saved by the hero to have sex with him immediately. Because what are other options, really?
by op00to | 2025-10-17 15:07:38+00:00
You have to balance the books somehow. I'm not saying "pay for forever wars on the backs of small business owners." I'd like to see a personal wealth tax of 80% of any wealth over a certain benchmark ($50,000,000 maybe?), and 80% profit taxes for any companies with more than $1 billion in net profits. In my ideal world, small business owners should not really have to pay much in taxes, with the largest companies paying the lion's share.
by omnicognate | 2025-10-17 15:07:41+00:00
I got the impression the "you" in the title refers to journalists, who should have all of the skills you list. Confusing, as he then refers to the reader as "you" at the end, but I'm pretty sure he's berating the professionals and encouraging everyone else to try and do the job they are not.

I agree though, that the general population can't reasonably be expected to do a better job of it than the professionals, so I can't imagine that exhortation having much effect.
by intended | 2025-10-17 15:07:52+00:00
The BBC pulled that article/episode - which is the main difference between different media spheres today.

We are habituated to think of information as the fundament of the internet. When in reality the foundation is simply content.

High quality information is content which is verified, or has a chain of sources. This is expensive to produce.

The information consumer primarily consumes emotionally salient content. Maybe 20% of the time they are willing to exert themselves to consume cognitively demanding content.

With the end of classifieds, the end of ad revenue, the dominance of platforms - news is a dumb ass business to expect to survive. They make expensive goods and sell it for cheap.

That’s why theres entire media spheres which are incredibly effective today - because they don’t spend the money to verify, they spend the money to platform narratives that take off.

The economics of the fourth estate dont make sense, and this needs an answer.

We depend on informed voters to have functioning democracies.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-17 15:07:56+00:00
> Not just social media postings but past real estate listings can probably provide floor plans.

I regret even engaging with the floor plan debate.

It doesn’t matter if they have a floor plan. That’s not enough information to characterize the RF environment of a house and how it responds to people moving through it.

A floor plan won’t tell you the position of all the WiFi devices, obstructions, and how the environment responds to moving those around. It won’t even tell you where the router is with any precision or if it’s next to a big chunk of metal like a computer case that’s blocking half the house and causing reflections.

It’s a red herring.
by talkingtab | 2025-10-17 15:08:34+00:00
As for the coffee roasting part, that is something that is near and dear to my heart.

I have been roasting my own coffee for decades. The part about a tough time getting green beans is just plain, factually wrong. SweetMarias.com among many others has an outstanding selection, low cost shipping and good prices. A better selection of beans than any specialty roaster.

My current setup is a gas one butane stove with propane adapter. $56. A 4" section of stove pipe (for wood stoves) $?, and an 8 cup crank flour sifter $20-$30. I've been using this variation (instead of a cheap heat gun) for the last year. You have to deal with the smoke, with either a stove vent or outside.

My testament to the quality of the coffee I make is that I have consistently roasted in the snow and cold. I would not consistently do that if the cost/benefit was not far in the benefit column.

My experience contradicts each of the points you made about roasting beans. Maybe not #1, depending on what you like and how much you want to spend, but even that one is arguable.