MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-04 21:30:40+00:00
I don't see the problem with GP' solution here, though. Unless socialism is to be frowned upon. It won't fix upbringing, but knowing there's some income coming when you cone of age can help shape your post secondary education and housing habits.

You can perform a "child fund to the parents instead if you need earlier impact. And maybe we will need that as an incentive as 1st world populations decline. But it might not make a difference based on the spending habits of the parent.
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-04 21:30:47+00:00
This is why I hate digital thermostats. With the old classic round Honeywell thermostats you could turn the dial a fraction of a degree when nobody was looking and "boil the frog" to get a reasonable temperature. With digital thermostats, you can only change the temperature in discrete steps which will be immediately noticed.

>Why does it say 74?? I had it set to 75!!1!
by torginus | 2025-11-04 21:31:22+00:00
what's so special about nest? I have bought a Venstar thermostat, that connects to HA via WiFi, with no cloud server involved. It's a plasticky square with a liquid crystal screen, but I don't know why I would a thermostat of all things (that I touch like once a month) to be a conversation piece.

Even if it wasn't evil, I'd consider buying an expensive one a waste of money, which is kinda important considering I'm looking to save money.
by pqtyw | 2025-11-04 21:31:46+00:00
Go for what? I would just find it surprising if they release a laptop which is running anything but Mac OS. You can already get an iPad with a keyboard and a touchpad anyway...

> have their customers best interest in mind, and it shows time and again.

Of course, neither does Dell, Lenovo or HP. Or especially Google for that matter (at least in that case Apple's and their customers interests somewhat align since they aren't making money by selling their data to third parties).
by tguvot | 2025-11-04 21:32:01+00:00
"they" didn't debate it in knesset. it was screaming match in one of subcommittees meetings in which, quoting the cbs news:

------------------

Lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked as he defended the alleged abuse whether it was legitimate, "to insert a stick into a person's rectum?"

"Yes!" he shouted in reply to his fellow parliamentarian. "If he is a Nukhba [Hamas special forces that took active part in october 7th, and did a lot of killing and raping], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!"

--------------------------
by foxfired | 2025-11-04 21:32:02+00:00
I remember when ChatGPT 3.5 was going to be AGI, then 4, then 4o, etc. It's kinda like the dooms day predictions, even if they fail it's ok. Because the next one though, oh that's the real doomsday. I, for one, am waiting for a true AI Scotsman [0].

[0]: https://idiallo.com/byte-size/ai-scotsman
by antognini | 2025-11-04 21:32:27+00:00
It's hard to prove rigorously which is why people usually refer to it as the "manifold hypothesis." But it is reasonable to suppose that (most) data does live on a manifold in the strict sense of the term. If you imagine the pixels associated with a handwritten "6", you can smoothly deform the 6 into a variety of appearances where all the intermediate stages are recognizable as a 6.

However the embedding space of a typical neural network that is representing the data is not a manifold. If you use ReLU activations the kinks that the ReLU function creates break the smoothness. (Though if you exclusively used a smooth activation function like the swish function you could maintain a manifold structure.)
by AlexandrB | 2025-11-04 21:32:32+00:00
Genuinely hate this. Thanks to the so-called "vibe shift" all of the ostracism mechanisms pioneered by the left are now being turned against them. I think the lesson here is that when building tools of social change, consider what happens when they're turned against you. I agree with Keira Knightley[1] - people need to learn to live with those that disagree with them (again).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/v4zSxefgKQM
by IshKebab | 2025-11-04 21:32:32+00:00
I don't think so - most organisations and employees don't actively try to violate licenses, but if the path of least resistance is "eh" then individual employees definitely aren't going to bother. I bet there are thousands of people using the free version of MSVC commercially for example.

Depending on what action you take with this, I'd say it has a pretty good chance of tipping people into emailing IT to get a license.
by dzhiurgis | 2025-11-04 21:32:40+00:00
18 panels is like $1.3k. Same for inverter. Battery stars at $2k for 15kWh, but I'd go for used car battery, so perhaps $6k for 60kWh, much less if you got means to drop battery yourself. That leaves you with propulsion. While electric motors are pretty cheap, marine ones still seem at rip off. DIY solutions from China start at 3k and complete outboard is like 15k.

So overall I'd say for $10k for power and another $5k for motor.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-04 21:33:39+00:00
>If an inheritance tax has to be applied, this means society has already failed to stop runaway wealth accumulation and inequality.

Yes. And we are already on "too late" mode. So we should go with the 2nd best solution because the best one (actually taxing billionaires) won't work retroactively.

>I'd much rather we have checks in place to stop individuals from accumulating megawealth in the first place (or at least slow it down), rather than relying on an inheritance tax which takes effect long after the accumulation happened.

Both would be nice. I don't see this as mutually exclusive. Though proper wealth taxes will lessen the need for inheritance tax. But not in all cases.
by namibj | 2025-11-04 21:33:57+00:00
Step recovery diode!

Abuse minority carrier lifetime to very suddenly turn from resistive to capacitive just after switching from forward current to reverse bias; use the fact that the current wants to keep flowing to force it to concentrate into another step recovery diode that's about to cut out, in turn making the cut off spike even sharper, and on.

Surprisingly capable for e.g. blasting a FET gate off while tanking the Miller effect gate current needs through sheer power of SRD-based-pulse-shaping. Because for e.g. GaN and SiC if you have to choose between ZVS and ZCS, you can take ZVS and just furnish a gate pulse that _makes_ the channel remain off as the current drops and the voltage soars. At least if you pull some tricks and make the current commutation loop sufficiently low inductance to keep your transistors from blowing out in self-inflicted overvoltage due to a current that needed to pass too high an inductance in too short a time. (Total drain charge is sadly fundamental to the channel's existence, and non-ZVS turn-on is unavoidably lossy. A majority carrier device is theoretically capable of just switching off though if you can arrange the structure for extremely low inductance.)
by adamzwasserman | 2025-11-04 21:34:10+00:00
I've written a full response to Somers' piece: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking: What The New Yorker Missed: https://emusings.substack.com/p/the-case-that-ai-is-thinking...

The core argument: When you apply the same techniques (transformers, gradient descent, next-token prediction) to domains other than language, they fail to produce anything resembling "understanding." Vision had a 50+ year head start but LLMs leapfrogged it in 3 years. That timeline gap is the smoking gun.

The magic isn't in the neural architecture. It's in language itself—which exhibits fractal structure and self-similarity across scales. LLMs navigate a pre-existing map with extraordinary regularity. They never touch the territory.
by silisili | 2025-11-04 21:34:59+00:00
Inspiring comment. I hope you're right, if nothing else for the next generation's sake. I'm a bit more pessimistic here.

> We can restore the timeline that's been stolen from us, the one we were on in the 90s before financialization and ensh@ttification ruined all the fun.

It'd have to be a cultural change. Consumers at large have decided with their wallet they'll buy products made anywhere, of any quality, with missing or abusive support, if it means they can save a dime. Or that they'll sign away every ounce of privacy if it's free. Until we fix that problem, fixing anything else is going to be hard.

I like that younger generations care, or at least pretend to, about causes and sustainability. Not that that itself isn't being abused, but it's a glimmer of hope.
by everdrive | 2025-11-04 21:35:31+00:00
People are interested in consciousness much the same way that we see faces in the clouds. We just think we're going to find it everywhere: weather patterns, mountains, computers, robots, in outer space, etc.

If we were dogs, we'd invent a basic computer and start writing scifi films about whether the computers could secretly smell things. We'd ask "what does the sun smell like?"
by mhaberl | 2025-11-04 21:35:42+00:00
..and the Wren compiler :)

> Context switching is a skill that gets easier the more you practice it, just like any other.

Totally agree with this!!

I learned this when I started off as a junior dev. We had some shitty machines and the project compiled for like almost 10mins. Most of the people just read the news and stuff and for some reason I started reading Clean code from Bob Martin (probabbly someone sent me a pdf of it or something). I remember reading it all in a few weeks using those breaks. Then I just kept the habit for almost a year (until we got some better workstations).
by lossyalgo | 2025-11-04 21:36:25+00:00
LLMs were not designed to count letters[0] since they work with tokens, so whatever trick they are now doing behind the scenes to handle this case, can probably only handle this particular case. I wonder if it's now included in the system prompt. I asked ChatGPT and it said it's now using len(str) and some other python scripts to do the counting, but who knows what's actually happening behind the scenes.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16705
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-04 21:36:36+00:00
“Bots” is a cover term for both purely automated scripts, and for human posters who are using some kind of tools to post more efficiently in order to manipulate discourse.

In this case, it’s obvious that a lot of Russian state-actor employees, for instance, are not passing their writing through an LLM, but rather are just quickly vomiting out a comment in their imperfect English. Exposés of Russian troll factories show that a lot of these employees are young university-educated people who only want the money, and don’t have strong feelings for the propaganda they are posting, so they half-arse it.
by kelnos | 2025-11-04 21:36:54+00:00
I was wondering if the removal of IMDB's comment section coincided with Amazon's purchase of IMDB, but I looked it up, and apparently Amazon has owned IMDB since 1998?! Somehow I thought it was more recent, like within the past 10 years, at most.

I guess Amazon was content to leave it alone for many many years, but more recently decided to push harder at monetizing it. Even the mobile IMDB app now has ads for random products on amazon.com. It's gross.

I never participated in IMDB's comment forum, but I would sometimes read through some of it, and generally found the quality of discussion to be very high.
by antognini | 2025-11-04 21:37:38+00:00
Taylor & Wheeler's Spacetime Physics is similar. They emphasize the importance of frame invariant representations. (I highly recommend the first edition over the second edition, the second edition was a massive downgrade.)

Kip Thorne was also heavily influenced by this geometric approach. Modern Classical Physics by Thorne & Blandford uses a frame invariant, geometric approach throughout, which (imo) makes for much simpler and more intuitive representations. It allows you to separate out the internal physics from the effect of choosing a particular coordinate system.
by stoltzmann | 2025-11-04 21:37:38+00:00
>connected to their wifi

Absolutely, it's their own network.

>being brought to their premises

Depends on the local laws. Where I live, they can either deal with it, or provide a secured storage space for the duration of the visit.

Either way, if a corporation wants their employees to use a device, they are obliged to make one available. Surrendering your private equipment to their management makes it not yours anymore.
by tredre3 | 2025-11-04 21:38:04+00:00
He's a former minister who graduated college in Bible studies. As unpalatable it might be to you, his views are perfectly in line with a strong christian believer from the midwest. So I don't really see a need to bring that up when we're discussing his technical videos. It's not like he lectures you about abortion at the end of a raspberry pi video...
by bawolff | 2025-11-04 21:39:09+00:00
Yes, but how does inheritence affect that?

Its not like inheritence makes money appear out of nowhere. Every inherited dollar is taken from a rich person who died. The amount of inequality should stay roughly the same as you are just transfering money between rich people. You aren't creating any new money, nor are you concentrating it in fewer hands. Why would inequality increase after inheritence instead of just staying the same?

The returns on wealth after it is inherited isn't going to be higher then the returns that same wealth would have gotten prior to it being inherited. Its still the same amount of money.
by popalchemist | 2025-11-04 21:40:18+00:00
Some of your points are lucid, some are not. For example, an LLM does not "work out" any kind of math equation using anything approaching reasoning; rather it returns a string that is "most likely" to be correct using probability based on its training. Depending on the training data and the question being asked, that output could be accurate or absurd.

That's not of the same nature as reasoning your way to an answer.
by more_corn | 2025-11-04 21:40:20+00:00
Did you send spam or conduct business in a way that resembles malicious scanning behavior?

I know Google sucks and it’s impossible to get anyone to fix anything, but one thing they don’t do is take arbitrary and capricious action. I don’t want to hear a long sob story. First I want to hear what you did wrong (I suspect you know what you did to get flagged) that caused suspension.
by devilbunny | 2025-11-04 21:40:51+00:00
State highway departments don't generally completely rework a road that's less than 20 years old.

That said, one of my uncles had a VW Beetle in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and he was pulled over by a state trooper. The trooper said, "I clocked you doing 65 in a 55." He replied, "Sir, I stopped at that light half a mile back. If you can get this car to do 65 mph between there and here, you can have it." He did not get a ticket.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-11-04 21:42:01+00:00
> Maybe some of you think I’m an idiot: You don’t get it at all lol. But that’s kind of my point. There are insiders and outsiders. When I talk to researchers or engineers who are happy to drop AGI into the conversation as a given, it’s like they know something I don’t. But nobody’s ever been able to tell me what that something is.

They have, including multiple times in this very article, but the author's not willing to listen. As he says later:

> But set aside the technical objections—what if it doesn't continue to get better?—and you’re left with the claim that intelligence is a commodity you can get more of if you have the right data or compute or neural network. And it’s not.

Modern AI researchers have proven that this is not true. They routinely increase the intelligence of systems by training on different data, using different compute, or applying different network architectures. But the author is absolutely convinced that this can't be so, so when researchers straightforwardly explain that they have done this, he's stuck trying to puzzle out what they could possibly mean. He references "Situational Awareness", an essay that includes detailed analyses of how researchers do this and why we should expect similar progress to continue, but he interprets it as a claim that "you don’t need cold, hard facts" because he presumes that the facts it presents can't possibly be true.
by youoy | 2025-11-04 21:42:01+00:00
The closest thing that you may get is a manifold + noise. Maybe some people thing about it in that way. Think for example of the graph of y=sin(x)+noise, you can say that this is a 1 dimensional data manifold. And you can say that locally a data manifold is something that looks like a graph or embedding (with more dimensions) plus noise.

But i am skeptical whether this definition can be useful in the real world of algorithms. For example you can define things like topological data analysis, but the applications are limited, mainly due to the curse of dimensionality.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-11-04 21:42:09+00:00
>> Being a farmer isn't owning a farm

> Not according to the government.

Why would we care what they think? Depending on the government we're talking about, that could be an ignominious distinction. One government that comes to mind most recently focused its efforts on creating fake memes and myspace pages of political opponents, to troll them, while the same government failed to provide basic services to its people (and continues to do so).

Instead of asking the government what words mean (Orwell wrote on this idea), we can just ask the people what the words mean. And the people say that 'farmer' includes folks doing the actual cultivation, even if they don't own a thing.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-04 21:42:18+00:00
>Wealth disparity doesn't grow because wealthy people are allowed to retain their generational wealth or not,

Yeah it does. The way compounding interest works means at some point that your passive accumulation of savings will outpace what most workers can earn as a salary. You can't really combat that by throwing more money at workers.

It's just mathematically impossible to let wealth run rampant in an individual like that and expect everyone to keep up with their limited hours of energy.

>This isn't a zero sum game.

It isn't. But with modern labor habits the billionaires want to make it one. That's why there isn't such thing as an 'earned billionaire'. They take from workers, lobby government to pay less, engage on anti-competitive behavior, or outright commit crimes to get to that point. The best case billionaire merely inherits the wealth and lets it accumulate, but I don't see many people like that these days who also don't fall into the other points.

>I would also not trust the government or any political body to handle income from the inheritance taxes.

Well someone has to. The us government has most things in record, so they are the easiest to audit.

This is more a sign that we need to pay more attention to politics and trustworthy figures who will self regulate. As in, pass laws that hold them and future policy makers in check.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-11-04 21:42:26+00:00
I'm sure this post will be gone in another few minutes.

I do think, in general, people are increasingly feeling a mismatch between what they're being told people feel on social media and what people in irl feel. However, there is still a lot of control being exerted online and it still seems to have some effect at maintaining the illusion of what views are and are not actually mainstream.
by kelnos | 2025-11-04 21:43:11+00:00
> User-voted: Social media

I don't think user voting automatically makes something social media. I think there's a blurry line between voting/"likes" and user-driven moderation.

User-driven moderation can certainly develop aspects of a popularity contest like social media has, but often it looks like a somewhat hopefully objective assessment of the quality of a comment, regardless of whether or not the moderator agrees with the point the commenter is making.

I'm not saying that HN's user moderation is fully objective. It certainly isn't; I don't fully moderate that way, myself, even. But HN's user moderation is absolutely not the same as the liking done on a Facebook post or its comments.
by ifh-hn | 2025-11-04 21:43:23+00:00
I live in the country I was born in and whilst I do travel it's mostly holidays and then if abroad at most once a year for less than 2 weeks. I have no idea what half of the stuff the article is talking about and less about what the app solves. I can only assume it's something so far out of my frame of reference I'm completely ignorant... I don't get it.
by all2 | 2025-11-04 21:43:29+00:00
> first mention i've heard of abacus.ai and IDE. what do you think stands out about them?

Their reasoning agent is better than anything else I've used, tbh. The inability to use it in a CLI environment is why I stopped using it. They have a router that they hook into that "intelligently" chooses models for you in a normal "chat" setting. The power comes with their DeepThink (or whatever) mode that has a VM hooked up to it, as well as many, many well designed agents and internal prompts that handle all sorts of interesting things, from planning to front-end dev, to reasoning about requirements and requirements fulfillment.
by scarmig | 2025-11-04 21:43:43+00:00
> It’s this myth that’s the root of the AGI conspiracy. A smarter-than-human machine that can do it all is not a technology. It’s a dream, unmoored from reality.

So, if you assume that AGI is fake and impossible, it's... A conspiracy. Sure.

Though, if you just finished quoting Turing (and folks like von Neumann), who thought it is possible, it would be good form for you to offer some reasoning that it's impossible, without alluding to the ineffable human soul or things like that.
by mikepurvis | 2025-11-04 21:43:46+00:00
I'm very interested in this— I have a fairly new Vitodens 100 boiler + Ecobee and also a heat pump system with its own thermostat, and I'm frustrated by several elements of this setup:

- The Vitodens has like ten stages, but the Ecobee has no way to command them, it's just a binary call to the Taco pump for heat / no heat, with the boiler deciding on its own how hard to push (I guess based on the outside air sensor and maybe time of day?)

- The Vitodens is monitoring the return boiler water temperature, but the Ecobee doesn't know anything about that.

- None of this is interlinked with the heat pump, so the systems can run on top of each other and end up with the wrong parts of the house overheated or left cold. The heat pump's controller is proprietary but it works with the NetHome Plus app so there is a bridge to get the units on homeassistant.

I don't have the spoons right now to try to beat this all into shape, but eventually I'd like to get HA temp monitors in multiple places in the house so that a single central system can make smarter decisions about which system to run and when. For example, in the evening I mostly care about the bedrooms, and the bedrooms are covered by zone 2 of the heat pump, so it would make sense to prioritize the heat pump then and only run the boiler if the heat pump isn't able to keep up; whereas in the daytime if heat is needed, it's probably throughout the house so the boiler should run.