MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-04 22:12:04+00:00
I have an analogue thermostat in my home, but vacations (in rental properties) with the in-laws turn into thermostat wars. I particularly don't appreciate the ones that use proximity sensors to light the thermostat display's backlight. Whoever came up with that idea was a genuine asshole.

Besides, would you really break off a relationship over something so petty as temperature preference? The people who find somebody who's literally perfect for them must be very rare, I think most people have to make small sacrifices and concessions.
by rurp | 2025-11-04 22:12:25+00:00
I'm sure the Fed chart is accurately measuring what it's measuring but when I was a kid in Southern California it was normal to buy a house and raise kids on a single teacher or construction worker salary. That has become nearly impossible over the past couple decades. Many others have seen similar changes in their own areas and I don't think they're being crazy when they say it has gotten much harder to finance a normal household on a normal salary.

I don't know what the disconnect is with that chart and people's observations. Is that chart controlling for number of incomes and hours worked? If a household income increases by 20% because the members are working a combined 80% more hours that's not great. Category differences in inflation might be another factor. Sure TVs and other niceties are a lot cheaper, but essentials like housing and medical care eat up a huge portion of most budgets.
by jMyles | 2025-11-04 22:12:27+00:00
Like the illusion of diversity at a shopping mall, with many 'competing' stores being mostly or entirely owned by the same parent corporations, I think we need to question the degree of independent decision-making at local police departments, from state troopers all the way to the college campus level.

I think some localities do a better job than others of ensuring a transparent process, either through the municipal legislative body or a police commission, of decision-making.

But it's telling that, at the end of the day, when we have an actual group of armed people in our cities, acting as though they are beholden to no laws (and even declaring as much at some times and places), our police forces are largely standing down rather than defending the populace and enforcing the laws.

I can understand a few days of wrangling with municipal legal departments over the particularities of the supremacy clause, but once it became clear that ICE was acting wildly out of scope of their duties, and violating state and local laws in the process, it became the obvious duty of local police officers to effect arrests and refer charges to local district attorneys.

What is the underlying reason that's not happening? I'm mostly an abolitionist - I believe that the economics of slavery persist through the prison system and that we can't really craft a new slavery-free system until we dispense with the notion that some people have greater law-enforcement authority than others, or the right to be more armed than others.

But it is just simply a matter that police will always fall in line with federal (or perhaps even global?) say-so, regardless of the laws? Is it a follow-the-money thing?

We've now had ICE agents kidnap US citizens, recklessly discharge firearms, invade every unit of an apartment building with no warrant (not that any warrant providing for such an invasion would be constitutional anyhow), etc. etc. - things that, if anyone else did, they'd be charged without a doubt.

How far does it go? If ICE sexually assaults someone in broad daylight, can they simply tell their employer they'd prefer not to be charged with a crime?

I'm not even sure that'd be an escalation at this point; they've already done things that are just as damaging to society.
by apstls | 2025-11-04 22:13:11+00:00
Sounds very cool.

I wanted to try this out, so I opened Windsurf for the first time in ages and clicked the "Upgrade Available" button, which sent me to: https://windsurf.com/editor/update-linux

Did you install using apt or apt-get? If so... 1. Update package lists sudo apt-get update 2. Upgrade Windsurf sudo apt-get upgrade windsurf

Whle `apt-get upgrade windsurf` will technically upgrade Windsurf, instructing users to run a command that will attempt to upgrade all packages on their system is nuts when the command is provided in a context that strongly implies it will only upgrade Windsurf and has no warnings or footnotes to the contrary. Good thing I didn't ask Windsurf's agent to ugprade itself for me, I guess.

EDIT - I don't want to detract from the topic at hand, however - after upgrading (with `sudo apt-get install --only-upgrade windsurf` :)) and playing around a bit, the Codemaps feature indeed seems very nifty and worth checking out. Good job!
by janalsncm | 2025-11-04 22:13:48+00:00
> Across the Fortune 1000, job postings that mention and require Jupyter knowledge are down sharply

The obvious question is whether Jupyter is being replaced in those postings, whether those types of jobs are proportionally rarer, or whether the whole market is simply hiring less.

Jupyter is still best in class and I can think of a few other explanations for this stat.
by advisedwang | 2025-11-04 22:14:01+00:00
They have faces for every US passport and for every/many[1] REAL ID drivers license. They only have fingerprints for some people that have been arrested and aliens that were admitted into the country.

[1] I'm not sure if REAL ID means the feds get access to driving license details or if there's just a lot of states that share this data voluntarily.
by bluGill | 2025-11-04 22:14:02+00:00
> When was the last time you saw an 00s Sprinter?

Commercial vehicles are used hard and long. They wear out much faster than private cars. Sure they tend to go a lot more miles, but the time is not long. I don't see many vehicles from the 00s - the ones you do are either rusty (road salt gets them where I live), or they are collector vehicles that are rarely driven.

I almost never see Dodge cans either - and when I do they don't look roadworthy.
by kelnos | 2025-11-04 22:14:30+00:00
Probably a few things:

1. When you visit amazon.com looking for a product, even if you are looking for a very specific product, they'll put other products in front of you. You might end up buying one of these other products, and that might make someone more money than if you bought the product you initially planned to buy.

2. You might buy more than you initially intended if you visit the site yourself, via the "Customers Also Bought" links, and other advertising.

3. Agents aren't perfect, and it's possible that they were making ordering mistakes at (much?) higher rates than humans were doing, which was costing Amazon more processing returns or other customer service inquiries.

4. Amazon wants to control the experience of buying a product through them, from start to finish. If they can't do that, they just become a commodity product aggregation site. An agent making purchases for someone can find the same product from another retailer, perhaps with better pricing, faster shipping, a better return policy, etc.

Of course, if other sites allow agents to make purchases, and that eventually becomes the way a significant number of customers want to shop, Amazon will have to get on board.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-04 22:14:30+00:00
It's because it's a microblogging platform.

That's just what it's meant for, low effort swipes, shitposting, retweets out of context etc.

It is notable that in order to actually accomplish their "We want a platform where a celebrity says something and you instantly get that something", Twitter had to do a lot of work and pain curating who "celebrities" are. The alternative is everyone getting a waterfall of shit, because the vast majority of people do not have PR agencies between them and their tweet button, and do not have anything important or meaningful to say that is better said fast and short than long and naunced. The entire point of microblogging is to eschew nuance.

That's absurd full stop.

Why would you ever want to know whatever low effort comment sparked thanksgiving dinner arguments at other people's thanksgivings?

> I love her videos, but her Bluesky posts have less subtlety than I would expect from someone of her intelligence and scientific training.

Please tell me which of "Water fluoridation is a well understood treatment, and people who are telling you it's bad for you are just lying", "<Knitting trivia>" or "Target is doing poorly as a business right now" or "ICE doing gestapo things" is "unsubtle", or why any of that should be "subtle", which is a strange choice of word.
by nitwit005 | 2025-11-04 22:15:29+00:00
Imagine someone in the year 1900 started talking about moon landings, and risk of extinction from atomic weapons. A clearly unhinged individual.

That the claims appear extreme and apocalyptic doesn't tell us anything about correctness.

Yes, there are tons of people saying nonsense, but look back at events. For a while it seemed as though AI was improving extremely quickly. People extrapolated from that. I wouldn't call that extrapolation irrational or conspiratorial, even if it proves incorrect.
by jMyles | 2025-11-04 22:15:44+00:00
Cynically, I imagine that a more difficult and less accurate system is desirable insofar as it can launder criminal behavior as computer error and absolve the perpetrator of whatever kidnapping / assault charges they might otherwise face.

Ostensibly, if ICE are acting within the scope of their duties, there are limits to the ways in which they can be charged with violations of state laws. An baroque system of identification allows them to claim they were acting in that scope.

In this way, it is perhaps similar to the widespread acceptance of drug-sniffing dogs which are no better than a coin flip (see Florida v. Harris, for example), and which can be trained to signal whether drugs are present or not.
by ctvo | 2025-11-04 22:15:57+00:00
You've been spamming this in a few threads.

A private business can 100% refuse service to you. Examples with regards to "delegation":

- If you come in using a form of non-cash payment that doesn't belong to you.

- If you're purchasing a car, and are filling out paperwork under someone else's name. FYI, you can buy cars on Amazon.com.

- If you attempt to pick-up a pre-order or an item earmarked for someone else.

...

Of course some businesses are more or less restrictive base on fraud chance, yada yada, but you get the idea. You're not being oppressed. Go shop elsewhere.
by skylurk | 2025-11-04 22:16:04+00:00
Hmm, it never worked well for me. People just get more entrenched and resentful? What I have found works is to try and find some common ground and build up some level of mutual respect from there.

For example, I also grew up in a cult of southern baptist flavour. I've seen some fucked up shit too. Where the cult was a majority, they did a lot of shunning and shaming and that sucked. I just don't think that's right.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-04 22:16:42+00:00
While the whole genocide thing is a bit of an odd angle (though hardly a new one, the author themselves links to the FSF statement on free software used for evil), I get the idea of checking for corporate installs.

The next step wouldn't be anything crazy like "MDM detected, send invoice to corporate"; there are too many false positives. It's better to use the MDM profile information to filter out the larger corporate MDM providers (InTune etc.) and filter out school MDMs before taking any action.

Most software isn't important enough to pirate if the company in question needs to comply with certain standards (ISO etc.) where an auditor might catch such a popup and make it a problem. Plus, IT probably wants you to stop downloading freeware onto corporate devices anyway. Risking being slightly annoying to people with corporate devices may very well help more people than it hurts.

Most software license violations I've spotted were purely accidental, at least at the start. An (occasional?) popup saying "hey, you need a corporate license to use this product for business use" may be enough to scare people away from your software (ending the violation). Convincing someone with financial power to buy your software is harder than making people seek out an alternative, but at least your software is less likely to be used by freebooters.
by ethin | 2025-11-04 22:16:51+00:00
I always find the claims that we'll have AGI impossible to believe, on the basis that nobody even knows what AGI is. The definition is so vague and hand-wavy that it might as well have never been defined in the first place. As in: I seriously can't think of a definition that would actually work. I'll explain my thought process, because I may be over-analyzing things.

If we define it as "a machine that can match humans on a wide range of cognitive tasks," that begs the questions: which humans? Which range? What cognitive tasks? I honestly think there is no answer you could give to these three alone that wouldn't cause everything to break down again:

For the first question, if you say "all humans," how do you measure that?

If we use IQs? If so, then you have just created an AI which is able to match the average IQ of whatever "all" happens to be. I'm pretty sure (though have no data to prove) that the vast super-majority of people don't take IQ tests, if they've ever even heard of them. So that limits your set to "all the IQ scores we have". But again... Who is we? Which test organization? There are quite a few IQ testing centers/orgs, and they all have variations in their metrics, scoring, weights, etc.

If you measure it by some other thing, what's the measurement? What's the thing? And, does that risk us spiraling into an infinite debate on what intelligence is? Because if so, the likelihood of us ever getting an AGI is nil. We've been trying to define intelligence for literally thousands of years and we still can't find a definition that is even halfway universal.

If you say anything other than all, like "the smartest humans" or "the humans we tested it against," well... Do I really need to explain how that breaks?

For the second and third questions, I honestly don't even know what you'd answer. Is there even one? Even if we collapse the second and third questions into "what wide range of cognitive tasks?", who creates the range of tasks? Are these tasks ones any human from, lets say, age 5 onward would be capable of doing? (Even if you answer yes here, what about those with learning disabilities or similar who may not be able to do whatever tasks you set at that age because it takes them longer to learn?) Or, are they tasks a PhD student would be able to do? (If you do this, then you've just broken the definition again.)

Even if we rewrite the definition to be narrower and less hand-wavy, like, an AI which matches some core properties or something, as was suggested elsewhere in these comments, who defines the properties? How do we measure them? How do we prove that us comparing the AI against these properties doesn't cause us to optimize for the lowest common denominator?
by yalok | 2025-11-04 22:16:51+00:00
Amazon support family sharing for the same home address - 2 adults and 4 children I think can share the same Prime

My wife and I used to share 1 account, but then I wanted to buy her a gift that had to be a surprise - so had to create a new account and add it as part of the family to the original one…. Then kids grew up and wanted to make small orders themselves, and I didn’t want them to see our order history…
by throwaway902984 | 2025-11-04 22:17:24+00:00
Not who you were responding to:

It is misremembering to frame their actions as recommendations, when they took action themselves, acted first, and asked for permission later. There were infamous public displays of being given carte blanche on the spot after employees told them they didn't have just that. They put metaphorical "heads on pikes" so that they wouldn't have to face questions again outside of court.
by andreybaskov | 2025-11-04 22:17:46+00:00
Interesting. Amazon ToS actually has a section about agents - https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

And they even provide a definition of what an Agent is:

"Agent” means any software or service that takes autonomous or semi-autonomous action on behalf of, or at the instruction of, any person or entity.

Though to me it raises even more questions. What is a software that takes "autonomous" action on my behalf. Is curl "autonomous"?
by janice1999 | 2025-11-04 22:18:15+00:00
The idea authoritarianism reduces crime or increases efficiency or put more bluntly "at least Mussolini made the trains run on time" is a fallacy. Crime still happens, it's just that those connected to the regime are protected from consequences, see for example the blatant corruption in Russia or the untouchable "Princelings" (CCP officials offspring) in China.

And no, Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time - he took credit for rail improvements started before he took power and then led his country into disastrous wars that destroyed it.
by 9rx | 2025-11-04 22:18:41+00:00
Why's that? Its is most advantageous to ensure that other people are kept in the dark.

If they are willing to pay to level the playing field perhaps it might be worth your while to fill them in. The old scholastic business model — gotta pay to play. But to take precious time out your day to fill them in to your own personal disadvantage...?

In other circles where people have well-rounded feelings you might find someone willing to do it just for the warm fuzzies it gives them. But technically skilled people are generally void of such emotion. That is often what compels them towards technology in the first place.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-04 22:18:49+00:00
I love the bubble that much of HN is in. In most of the US, most senior+ software developers are not making over $176K. They are working at boring old enterprise companies. (Yes I’ve done a stint at BigTech and I know what comp is like there and have friends that work at Amazon, Netflix, Nvidia and Google).

I’m no longer strictly a software engineer nor do I live in Atlanta any more. But that’s where I spent most of my career. If you look at the well known companies headquartered there like Delta, Coke, Home Depot, GE (large headquarters there), etc.

Very few of their developers are making over $176K. You see the same in most other tier 2 cities where most software developers work in the US.

Hell most of the job postings by YC companies here on HN aren’t offering their developers over $176K.
by stickfigure | 2025-11-04 22:19:29+00:00
1. There is no subscription.

2. I paid less than $200 for it.

3. The device lets me control the thermostat remotely. I can turn on the heater when coming home from a trip, or turn it off if I forgot when I left.

4. I can just say "Hey Google, turn up the heat" out loud.

I don't care if Google knows about the temperature of my home. I absolutely would buy the product again.
by devilbunny | 2025-11-04 22:19:38+00:00
I'm entirely on board with this - and I'm driving a 2001-model car at least partly because of it (my other goal is that my state has antique tags that you buy once and never pay for again - when the car is 25 years old). But what can you buy in the US that doesn't cripple the car (well, at least the entertainment system) in the process?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-04 22:21:08+00:00
> where do we draw the line?

Perplexify has shown itself to be a bad actor [1][2][3], and possibly incompetent, too [4].

We need to draw a line, eventually. But it’s far from urgent. And I don’t think Perplexity should be the one deciding.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-unde...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/perplexity-ai-loses...

[3] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/reddit-sues-to-b...

[4] https://brave.com/blog/comet-prompt-injection/
by ModernMech | 2025-11-04 22:22:35+00:00
The government is hyper efficient right now. The only efficiency guaranteed under authoritarianism is the will of the authoritarian gets executed without any checks or balances, which is very efficient. Trump wants tariffs, Trump gets tariffs, despite laws saying he can't. Trump wants troops in the cities, Trump gets troops in the cities despite laws saying he can't. Trump wants to bomb boats, Trump gets to bomb boats -- no committees, no votes, no reviews, no assessments -- just exploding boats. Trump wants to bulldoze the Whitehouse, well then by God it's gone the next day. Talk about efficient!

That this doesn't translate into benefits for you personally or the citizens generally does not mean the system is not working very efficiently right now.

"Efficient" is a word that has a positive connotation, but in the context of authoritarianism it means something very very bad for liberty, freedom, civil rights, and democracy -- all things that get in the way of authoritarian efficiency.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-11-04 22:22:44+00:00
That’s like Peter Norvig’s definition of AGI [1] which is defined with respect to general purpose digital computers. The general intelligence refers to the foundation model that can be repurposed to many different contexts. I like that definition because it is clear.

Currently, AGI is defined in a way where it is truly indistinguishable from superintelligence. I don’t find that helpful.

[1] https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
by jongjong | 2025-11-04 22:23:11+00:00
Based on my personal experience, I feel like we've already had AGI for some time. Just based on how centralized society has become. It feels like the system is not working for the vast majority of people, yet somehow it's still holding together in spite of enormous complexity... It FEELS like there is some advanced intelligence holding things together. Some aspects of the system's functioning seems too clever to be the result of human intelligence.

Also, in retrospect, something doesn't quite add up about the 'AI winter' narrative. It's hard to believe that so many people were studying and working on AI and it took so long given that ultimately, attention is all you need(ed).

I studied AI at university in Australia over a decade ago, did the introductory course which was great; we learned about decision trees, Bayesian probability and machine learning; we wrote our own ANNs from scratch. then I took on the advanced course, expecting to be blown away by the material, but the whole course was about mathematics, no AI theory; even back then there was a lot of advanced material which they could have covered (e.g. evolutionary computation) but didn't... I dropped out after a week or two because of how boring it was.

In retrospect, I feel like the course was made boring and irrelevant on purpose. I remember I even heard someone in my entourage mention that AI winter is not real... While we were supposedly in the middle of it.

Also, I remember thinking at the time that evolutionary computation combined with ANNs was going to be the future... So I was kind of surprised how evolutionary computation seemingly disappeared out of view... In retrospect though, I think to myself; progress in that area could potentially lead to unpredictable and dangerous outcomes so it may not be discussed openly.

Now I think; take an evolutionary algorithm and combine it with modern neural nets with attention mechanisms and you'd surely get some impressive results.
by Marshferm | 2025-11-04 22:23:36+00:00
Probably the key on-set invention of the talkie era is the role of script supervisor, of the notion of keeping track of continuity and the continuity script, which records in code each take, its length, and differences in lens, exposure, subtle details in continuity (when a sip is taken, which hand holds it).

Strangely she left no records, was rarely if ever interviewed, and her invention was overshadowed by her own ability as a writer and her domineering husband who took credit for her work.

Notice the Columbia link makes no note of her core contribution to the film industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Y._Mason