skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN:Matic Robot – A privacy-preserving autonomous home robot built w/ Rust
Hi HN! We're Matician (https://matician.com/)

5.5 years ago, we started building an autonomous home robot with these goals:

* Reliable autonomy — no user interventions, it should just work

* Everything on the device — no cloud storage or compute, robot-to-app data through local WiFi

* Usefulness — solve a genuine problem that will impact real people

To achieve this, we

* wrote the robot's software stack in Rust

* used only RGB cameras and Mics as input — humans can navigate with only these sensors, so why can’t a robot?

* developed SLAM and computer vision algorithms that run on-device, in real time, with centimeter-level precision and semantic understanding

* gave our robot a purpose — started with floor cleaning allowing us to develop specialized hardware for vacuuming and mopping w/o chewing up wires or getting stuck.

We're a small team of <50 people singularly focused on building something that we’ve all dreamed about: a mobile indoor robot that solves a real problem without jeopardizing our privacy. We're still developing Matic and iterating, but we’re proud of what we’ve built so far.

Let us know what you'd be interested to learn! We'll also answer questions here and look forward to your feedback :)
I can say my game(s): https://wdpauly.medium.com/trade-economy-and-supply-3a9eff92...
fall into the scope creep issue, but at the same time the complexity and scale is what makes it so interesting. If you enjoy tech/programming then making something addictive and fun may not be the point so much as the mental simulation you get from the project as a whole.
A... listicle... about how to make the internet a better place?
An eye-opening experience is no less so with glasses.
I can say with absolute certainty they did not include all books with all human knowledge.

For example I suspect chat GPT has zero knowledge of how to speak native American languages that have effectively died with no remaining speakers and no complete written history of their exact usage.
The natural numbers are ordered, yes, that's why it makes sense to talk about how "quickly" they grow. The unordered set theoretical notion of sizes of infinity arguably makes less sense here.
I never upgraded to pro and I spent like $2 on credits so far this month. I could easily see them hitting a $1b/yr which to me isn't niche market or a hype bubble.
I believe Elizabeth Holmes early on remarked "Fake it till you make it."
No. Banh mi is too crusty. The best cheesesteaks have a mushy roll, NOT a crusty one.
Ask HN: How do you verify an algorithm’s correctness
The most intuitive way I know to disprove an algorithm is by finding a counter example. But for complex algorithms it can be hard to find a counter example.

Do you have any practical advice? Should I learn formal proofs?
Quit the company I had been with almost 13 years with nothing lined up on 12/31/2022. Did first interviews with ~10 places/recruiters. Got to second interview with 3. Secured an offer with one and started beginning of March.

Best thing to happen to my career in a decade.
k8s, though?
Phind.com is so much better.

I just want to pay for the service in exchange of ensuring they won't use my data but I can't find how.
> Isn't this the entire reason you shouldn't use the stack for large amounts of data

No, the risk of stack overflow would be the typical reason

> Stacks unwind, so you can't pass around pointers to it

Sure you can, you just can't _return_ a reference to something on the stack, but within the data's lifetime you can pass refs to it to other functions

> And the stack is fast because it's often mostly in CPU cache, but that won't be true if you have 100 megs sitting there

The stack is also fast because allocation is free (pointer bump) vs. calling a free list allocator (aka malloc). Cache hits for a large buffer would likely be about the same. If the buffer were small, I would agree on the likelihood of it being in CPU cache.

> This is what the heap is for, it has nothing to do with Rust itself.

In many scenarios moves can and are optimized away, so yes, this has something to do with Rust. I will admit my use case was very contrived and is not a typical use case, but it was very valid (even if not typical).
Thanks for the reference. Unfortunately I can’t edit the comment anymore.
What about every impersonator? What if you just happen to sound like Drake? Who owns that voice?
Thanks for the explanation, but it basically converges on what the grandparent comment stated, right? I.e., unless your business deals with EU companies or operates in EU, then you are free to ignore it. And if you decide in the future that you want to deal with EU companies/operate in EU, you have the option of paying the fine and moving on.

> either pay the fine or you won't be able to do business [...] possibly even not with a company in business with a EU company

That one seems a bit sus, because it would imply that you won't be able to use GCP/Azure/AWS for cloud services, and that just doesn't sound right. Afaik they wouldn't blanket refuse cloud services to an american business that doesn't follow EU laws (in case the business simply doesn't care to operate in EU or make money from there).

Not a legal professional at all, so if someone could provide a better explanation of the situation, it would certainly be welcome.
The religious parts of this I'm not sure I can agree with really.... I'm orthodox if it matters or seems relevant.

The catholic/orthodox differences are largely just because of a thousand years of divergence, of speaking different languages and having relatively little interchange, of each individually having movements in response to internal pressures and trends not experienced by the other. Not going to get into a filioque debate on HN but the initial theological dispute, however significant you find it to be, is not the source of the most tangible differences in the two branches today. They've just each been doing their own thing for a millennium and their unique histories took them to two different places during that time.

I don't see how byzantine eunuchs indicates anything about priest celibacy, especially since orthodox priests are usually married. Eunuchs and celibate priests still come from families, they experience love and duty and allegiance and enmity. To the extent a position is admirable people will want to be in it and to the extent it's powerful people will use that power to benefit the people and things they value. No restriction on who can hold an office will by itself address those factors. Byzantine eunuchs got up to plenty of corruption and betrayal in their own right.

I assume by "barbarians" you mean the ottoman turks, but we have to be careful in reading byzantine history not to absorb byzantine attitudes about their rivals. The ottomans were a long-lived, sophisticated, and nuanced entity in their own right. Even their precursors and other byzantine neighbors were not as simple or simply motivated as byzantine or byz-sympathetic sources would indicate.
They did some fantastic journalism. Completely changed my view of Buzzfeed.

Buzzfeed in general gets flak but to people in the industry, it was quite clear that they:

1 - Understood the medium
2 - For a brief while, nailed the art of messaging within it
thanks! more power to you using Plane.
And all of this is null and void if you buy your stamps from aliexpress and for the low low effort of simply driving to a different city to throw the envelope into the postbox.
You’ll also see profound examples of unconditional love and companionship between Sasha and Ann throughout the entire book.
Our economic systems used to be very bad at scaling. They also used to be very bad at incentivizing value-add economic activity. Which system do you want?
> That doesn't make sense

And yet that's the letter of the law. R&D expenses must be amortized over 5 years. Software development must be counted as R&D.

There is no consideration in the law as written for categorizing software development differently.

That's the reason this whole scenario is a problem in the first place.
Can any of the existing open source models do the same?

ChatGPT is great but I don't want all of my queries going to OpenAI.

I'd rather shell out a considerable sum to buy the equipment to run my own.
Maybe this is why my website's page views have gone from around 500/day to 1,000 in the past month.
Twitter's rule against 'misgendering' didn't just apply to people who were engaging in harassment though, it applied to everyone, and led to many campaigners for women's rights being banned from the platform.

One example is Meghan Murphy, a high-profile Canadian feminist. She was discussing the case of a trans-identifying male who had sued several female beauticians - who offered their services solely to women - for refusing to do a Brazilian wax, which for this individual would have involved the handling of male genitalia. She referred to this male as 'him', and as a result was banned from Twitter for about four years (with her ban only being lifted after Musk's purchase of the company).

So on one side we have a trans-identifying male who was using the Canadian legal system to try to punish women for refusing to touch his penis and testicles. On the other side, a feminist writer who referred to this male as 'he' and 'him' while criticizing him for this. In applying their 'misgendering' rule, Twitter took the side of the former and sanctioned the latter.

By removing this rule, Twitter is allowing feminists like Murphy to speak freely about issues such as this on their platform.
Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster released
All 3 things which are demonstrably false, NOW.

They absolutely started by stealing things and then figuring out how to make them on their own. But that's no different than how the US built its rocket industry, or how Apple built their OS, or any number of other non-Chinese entities doing the same thing.

Let's not forget the "how it started, where it is now" meme of the whole thing
I don't disagree, but stats are hard to come by for other types of psychiatric drug. I'd be interested to know if international studies have done on the subject, because it might very well not be an ideal "proxy" for general drug usage!

But I also personally think that adderall has less side effects and better/smoother withdrawals. SSRIs and other antidepressants usually have a heavier impact on the brain too.

Now I don't doubt that Adderall is probably over prescribed, but I think that it is better to look at entire families of drugs to compensate for differences between markets.
Is it a straight up sigsegv or a catchable panic? I guess having to deal with exceptions at every memory op would be too big a burden on the optimizer, but maybe the exception could be restricted to the function prologue.
"it's just human nature" can be a powerfully self-fulfilling prophecy

We ought to exercise what agency we have in shaping social systems, but not only this, we need to remind ourselves regularly that we do have agency in order to exercise it
The lack of a universal agreement about ethics doesn't mean that having an ethical frame of reference isn't important.

"Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos." -- Walter Sobchak, The Big Lebowski
I'm not familiar with opIndia but the article you've cited is unhinged. It cites a DailyMail article which uncritically amplifies anti-trans campaigners, who are basically saying that it's a problem for trans people to publicly share stuff about their transition.

The opIndia article says "The flood of such content on TikTok, an immensely popular social media platform among the youth, is a serious problem that needs to be addressed at the earliest."

There's a lot of dumb stuff on TikTok, but trans people not being suppressed isn't really one of them. And there might be _toxic_ stuff on TikTok, but in the context of an article where youth are pushed to material about suicide, linking to an article calling for the suppression of trans perspectives as if that was part of the same problem is super shady.

As for Douyin having a different algorithm, I'd point out that within China it was still viewed as being harmful enough to kids that they put in a 40m daily time limit, and restricted it to specific hours. I'm guessing it's also not great for kids there.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934
I'd pay for a service that let me take a few pictures of the contents of my fridge and pantry and then generate a list of recipes. Sounds like a good idea for a "ducktape AI" startup.
Unfortunately for them companies like Microsoft and Google are operating in the EU, so it may not be that easy
Woof, that's a hole! Yeah I completely forgot "w", all the stage 0 stuff. There's only so much you can test with wet dress rehearsals, at some point you need to just launch a fully loaded rocket from it and see how it behaves.

> On top of that there was significantly more debris making its way to South Padre

Tim Dodd got coated in dust and sand (probably pulverized concrete) kicked up from the launch well outside the exclusion zone (iirc his studio is just over 5km). That's not just a bad sign from the engineering and politics/perception point of view, but I'm sure EPA has some feelings on that amount of rapid unscheduled geology.
Donated! Direct land acquisition by nonprofits is the future of conservation. I did the math once, and with the annual budget of The Nature Conservancy, you could purchase 20% of Nebraska in a perfectly reasonable amount of time.
>Also, why is it we never see a "reverse damage done for centuries to european and north american forests" NGO?

north american forest defense orgs are prosecuted as domestic terrorists. there are a couple "tree planting" startups but mostly they seem to be timber company greenwashing
Yes, thanks! Reposts are fine after a year or so* but as there was a significant thread 9 months ago, the current repost counts as a dupe.

The Rust Performance Book (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32147999 - July 2022 (9 comments)

Also:

The Rust Performance Book - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34877528 - Feb 2023 (1 comment)

The Rust Performance Book - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25122178 - Nov 2020 (19 comments)

* This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
It's important to remember that SLS is only funded by NASA, everything else is still pretty opaque behind Boeing's curtains.
My garage door opener broke the other week. California has a law signed by Gavin Newsom requiring all new door openers to have a battery backup. Well meaning - it is intended to allow people to get their cars out of the garage in the event of a power outage (think Paradise fires). It increases the cost of an opener around $400.

Thing is my door has a spring that allows me to lift the door with 2 fingers. There is still a chance the battery backup may not work and is unnecessary for me. It is hard to see how the manual solution would ever fail.

I can see passing a law that requires a solution for power failure but what I don't get is why they have to specify exactly what that solution is. CA has tons of such edicts. They greatly delay and increase the cost of doing just about everything with a home (it can takes years to get solar installed). So much so people tend to do things without permits to avoid the time sink and expense which ultimately defeats the purpose.
My doctor suggests that I don't take my adhd meds when I don't need it (school/work), and has had no objection for me to only take them on weekdays. That would absolutely not be the case for antideps.
This article gives me an opportunity to share a story that I’ve shared with my kids though I don’t think they believe me.

When I was a teen I heard my dad say that my uncle (his older brother) would make a habit of advice that he liked, and then keep the habit forever. For example, a long time ago someone had advised him to massage his scalp daily for healthy hair. He was in his 70s at that point and had far less grey than my much younger dad.

So, around that time I started to vigorously massage my scalp every day while taking a shower. I spend about 15-20 seconds doing so.

My uncle passed away in his mid eighties with far less grey than is normal at that age.

I’m now approaching my mid fifties with only a handful of grey and keep on getting “you don’t look your age” comments.

It may be genes or it may be this practice.
I was laid off in October, started playing with AI stuff around then (SD in August, ChatGPT/GPT APIs around December or whenever it was released)

Got hired over the last week as Founding Prompt Engineer at an AI company! May 1st start date. Extremely excited to be playing with LLMs for money!!!
It is not unsolvable.

People with the money, time, and luxury just are not capable of solving it, as they exist in ivory towers far away from real problems, and can not fathom investing in people outside their circles with solutions.
Your local newspaper subscription (physical or online) should come bundled with a NYTimes/WSJ/WP subscription.
Fun, little known fact: The Shuttle program's only successful post-launch abort was performed by Challenger in STS-51-F (not to be confused with Challenger's STS-51-L, which ended... suboptimally)
TLA+ and the like could help here. You model the system, and run a simulation to see if it hits a failure state.
I'm glad to hear from someone else who's honest about their negative experience.

Psychedelics seem to somehow have simply amazing PR: plentiful testimonies of their life-changing abilities, encouraging us to try them, but very little acknowledgement of their dark side. The subculture is very quick to brush away anything that goes against the narrative of the "mind-opening wonder drugs that big pharma doesn't want you to know about."

My experiences with psilocybin over a few months started with awe and wonder and spiritual awakening (or what seemed to be at the time), and ended with horrifying lasting harm. Insomnia, constant vivid nightmares, sleep paralysis, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, tics, and all kinds of weirdness at the periphery of conscious experience that I can't really explain.

It feels like I flashed my brain's firmware with no way to undo it. I took all the precautions I thought I was supposed to. I wish someone had warned me.
It works! Until you install a bad update that bricks critical functionality of your OS. Just rollback the update! Ok, found a copy of an older package from some repo. Oh no!! This older version requires 5 older dependencies which were updated with 32 others during the update.

5 hours later: Ugh. I'll just have to do a fresh OS install again.
And here you are, a similar stunt performed in China.

https://nitter.net/historyinmemes/status/1648843533116137472...
Anonymity is not binary. It's a spectrum. Phyical cash mailed to a company with only an account number is significantly more anonymous than a check or credit card they bill.

Perfect anonymity is probably impossible because information theory is impossible to escape. Which means you are trying to determine how far along the spectrum you can reasonably get for your particular risk profile.

Comments that pretend like perfect anonymity is the goal or act like it's binary are singularly unhelpful.
Self-driving is a spectrum, not an absolute.
eshell (emacs' shell) has it's own versions of common shell commands, written in elisp.
That's the thing. Tripping and self reflecting isn't edgy. It's been made to seem edgy. Someone died while doing drugs? Guess we should only sell beer at the psych office too so they can save us. And cut your self righteous bullshit about internet comments being uncalled for. Trauma and overcoming, i.e, the human experience, isn't new. These mega institutions sticking their whole fist up our ass is. I'm not against the idea that there needs to be 'the man'. But people are sold the idea that it's only ok or 'safe' to trip in a doctors office I think we need to get a grip. Might as well fuck in front of them too.
$10B is a lot of money, no doubt, but it only represents about a fifth of what Apple currently has in cash. How much cash does Seagate have? Probably none. So it would be more like a $60B fine for Apple.
USPS scans all envelopes.

You can get scans of all your mail through the informed delivery program.
The New London Day [0] is apparently held in a public trust [1].

I'm not clear if that totally covers its operational costs, but it sounds like a good start.

[0] https://www.theday.com/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_(New_London)
Anyone have an RSS feed for Neal.fun?
As impressive as Starship is or will be, Saturn V has definitely earned a place in the history books that cannot be undone. The first airplane flew in 1903. Just 64 years later, Saturn V was launched for the first time. The fact that it has taken us 56 more years since then to outdo it says a lot.
Glad you enjoyed it! And ouch, just tested it and indeed the sound isn't playing in iOS. I'll have a look and also fix the responsiveness
Eh. If it messed with the regular optical drive’s drivers, hooked privileged kernel functions, and generally (just like modern things like EAC) introduced holes the size a semi truck could drive through, it qualified as malware. No intent to pirate anything needed.
Locals? Don't they own 99% of Boca Chica by now?
I don't use TikTok or Insta, do I have to install them for this demonstration? Can I just ban them in my household or via parental controls?
> Most people aren't driving at the limits.

Strictly speaking, if your car is out of control, you're driving past the limits. The whole point of the parking lot exercise is to learn where the limit is. I drive like a granny, but prepare for the worst. And I've learned over the years to avoid the first day of snow in a season.
> asking different probing questions of different students might lead to accusations of arbitrary and capricious grading

But what if AI conducts it?
> the same creative explosion

What creative explosion? Trash news sites, social media? The world would be a better place without any of these.
Oh, that is weird. I just clicked on the direct links you posted, and it did indeed redirect me to their awful JS-riddled UI. It definitely didn't do that back in the day.

Thanks for the pineapple cat, though. Big fan of that part.
If you are smarter than 99 out of 100 people, there are still millions of people as smart as you in USA alone. If someone said 99.999th percentile I would agree with you, but IME being smarter than 99 out of 100 people is not that high of a bar.
> but having that gut feeling that maybe there's more to a situation than the numbers would have you believe is still something that humans can do better

In my life experience so far, humans having gut feelings it 99% of the time complete nonsense. But people forget the 99 times and that one time their gut was right they tell that story forever about how smart they were.
You know, .emacs bankruptcy is a thing...

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DotEmacsBankruptcy
Thanks for the suggestion--will surely do that!
It's not just China.

I'm in Germany, and you may have heard on the news that we have a lot of refugees/immigrants from places like Syria who we are trying to integrate into our society. A lot of them are very qualified. Some of them have since gotten advanced grad degrees from German universities.

And then we may not be able to hire them or have to severely restrict them at work, e.g. when we use Qualcomm chips which are under US export restrictions.

I don't have a very deep point to make, except to say that the human costs and the stings that come with the state of the world can go far indeed.