skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Home Assistant is one of the best open source projects I've come across. I've been using it for 5+ years on an older RPi and it's been pretty rock solid. Countless updates and everything just keeps on chugging.

I've landed on a mixture of MQTT and Zigbee communicating devices, the latter being much easier to set up and maintain. There's an integration for just about everything I've wanted, some better than others, but all in all just a great project.
Yes, first of all just try the game and see if it sticks. Once there is obsessive interest, you can try to guide it towards mentally stimulating ends. I don't know if I'd recommend YouTube for english native speakers, but for kids like my son, learning English from YouTube is a plus. There are lots of shitty YouTubers just goofing around, but there are some good ones like Pixlriffs (Minecraft Survival Guide), Shalz and Mumbo Jumbo that focus on building things and exploring all aspects of the game and different mods. As an example, my son learned about crop rotation from Pixlriffs, because apparently its a mechanic in the game. Can't be mad at that!
I suspect you're overstating the degree to which an LLM might be unsuitable for some types of work. For example, I'm a data scientist who works primarily in the field of sales forecasting. I've found that LLMs are quite poor at this task, frequently providing answers that are inappropriate, misleading, or simply not a good fit for the data we're working with. In general I've found very limited use in engaging LLMs in discussion about my work.

I don't think I'm calling myself a super special snowflake here. These models are just ... bad at sales forecasting.

LLMs aren't entirely useless for me. I'll use ChatGPT to generate code to make plots. That's helpful.
I don't really understand how many people on here (I've been lurking for a while), essentially pretend everything is backwards. You don't level the playing field by making it more difficult to do business, you make it easier.

BTW, I get btw a threat letter from another UK quango (I forget the name), which basically says "if you have any user data you need to pay us £60 a year". Yes you need to pay a levy for a database in the UK. It is basically a TV license for a database. I did work as a freelancer in the UK (made impossible now because of IR-35 regulation) and have a dormant company because freelance/contract is dead, so I have to inform them I don't have user data. It is just another thing to worry about when creating an online app.

> But in any case, original point also brings up the question: why is the UK allowing foreign companies to violate laws that it would prosecute British businesses for violating?

Because then we don't have any alternatives and people already use it. I also don't think the laws should exist in the first place, so I don't care if a US company is violating them.

I would love the UK to actually require IP blocks of twitter/Facebook etc, because it might actually force people to think about the issues.

> If you allow a foreign domiciled business to break laws in your country, then how the heck do you expect to ever have domestic industry? It’s strictly less risky to always be foreign domiciled.

You don't make it more difficult to do business. Many of the US tech successes were people starting up in a garage. The UK micro business did extremely well (until PC/Macs came on the scene) and that had almost no regulation or gov interference (other than standard stuff for electronics).

> This bill aims to stop that regulatory arbitrage and as such is hopefully a leveling of the playing field for the UK tech scene.

No. It is to try to censor the internet. It been going in this direction for ages. I am quite honestly fed up of people telling me that it is nothing to worry about. The UK politicians complained about replies to their tweets, after one of their colleagues had been stabbed to death. I found it honestly sickening. There is no crisis they won't use as an opportunity.
The hype of Agentic AI is to LLMs what an MBA is to business. Overcomplicating something with language that is pretty common sense.

I've implement countless LLM based "agentic" workflows over the past year. They are simple. It is a series of prompts that maintain state with a targeted output.

The common association with "a floating R2D2" is not helpful.

They are not magic.

The core elements I'm seeing so far are:
the prompt(s), a capacity for passing in context, a structure for defining how to move through the prompts, integrating the context into prompts, bridging the non-deterministic -> deterministic divide and callbacks or what-to-do-next

The closest analogy that I find helpful is lambda functions.

What makes them "feel" more complicated is the non-deterministic bits. But, in the end, it is text going in and text coming out.
Found the programmer...

You have an extremely skewed view of what "relevant software" is, if you believe this. The second you try and use a computer for anything professional, besides nerd stuff and a few key "creative" areas that Apple has cultural cachet in like music production and graphic design, you are absolutely going to find yourself reliant on some completely entrenched "industry standard" piece of software that's been around for many decades and only runs on Microsoft Windows. Autodesk still sells 3ds Max for a couple grand, and it's Windows-only. Hell, even TurboTax only runs on Windows. And if you manage to dodge that, there's bound to be some critical piece of hardware that can only be controlled from a Windows computer.

The biggest propaganda win that Microsoft pulled was getting nerds - the biggest loudmouths about software freedom - off their case. 90s style free software fanaticism is basically dead. Meanwhile the rest of the world is absolutely still locked in to Windows. Know how you can tell? Because Windows is now widely regarded as a pile of shit, riddled with adware even out of the box ("Candy Crush in the Start menu") and yet people still use it, because they have to.

>E.g. today you can just ditch Windows and install Linux on that same old laptop and wouldn't lose anything important.

I challenge you to try this with a nontechnical friend who uses a computer for work. They will be screaming at you to put it back like it was within the week. I say this as a die-hard Linux user.
I may have misunderstood, but I think that it depends a lot on the existence of a validation mechanism. Programming languages have interpreters and compilers that can provide a useful signal, while for images and natural language there isn’t such an automated mechanism, or at least its not that straightforward.
using an iPhone 13 Mini…The new "intelligence" hasn't made any difference that I can note

Hello, fellow cold-dead-hands iPhone Mini user: iPhone 13 doesn’t support Apple Intelligence, though, right?
This is moving the goal posts, though, and you know it.

In a meeting with "notes taken", there is someone tasked with doing so in an official manner usually decided by the person coordinating the meeting. It is also typically known by the meeting attendees that this is the case. Those notes are usually made available after the fact in whatever form is normal for that company. In Zoom type meetings, we all get the "recording" notice during the meeting.

What individuals do is not the point of this thread. However, we've seen plenty of examples of where individuals do record on their own devices meetings which were meant to be private but leaked later. Again, that is out of scope for the general purpose of this. Again, you know this. Or at least, you should
I wonder if Europeans view this as crony capitalism or getting fleeced?
Modelica is an excellent way to perform these simulations. Exporting a functional mock-up unit (FMU) according to the FMI standard is a first-class capability [1] that is another huge source of value, especially for systems integrators. You are able to have reasonably obfuscated models of your system in untrusted hands, and they get the full benefit of your system model. This is one area where OpenModelica is ahead of competitors including the open-source ModelingToolkit.jl [2] and related library FMIExport.jl [3].

[1] https://openmodelica.org/doc/OpenModelicaUsersGuide/v1.11.0/...

[2] https://docs.sciml.ai/ModelingToolkit/stable/

[3] https://github.com/ThummeTo/FMIExport.jl
It uses the live video feed, and you can talk with the LLM.
Germany's economy is largest and the country has run a primary surplus for decades. It's a rich country that could have done the right thing, and instead chose energy suicide. Holding themselves to the same bar as Bulgaria is pathetic.
We need a system based on verifiable proofs that will help the society to streamline selection of long running working products that will push the businesses to optimize their processes and fight for the economy share. Long working products will signal that producers can not just sell the same inferior products and reap profits. As a cause-effect it will make available many elements of the society to explore new economic models and embark on a journey in search of their application. And since everyone wants to keep consuming it will give a healthy economically-based incentive for the majority of the population to start producing tangible value.
Interesting, it has the same stylings as the old Samsung flip phones - which were horrdendous to develop for on J2Me because of various bugs and the tools not giving you any good ways to get debug data from them.
> Some animals, including humans, have curled sheets of bone inside the nose called nasal turbinates to increase the surface area for heat exchange.

These structures in fossils are used to recognize endothermy. Their appearance marks when ancestors of mammals became warm blooded.

The structures also serve to retain water, so some care has to be taken about the local climate to determine if that instead of retaining heat was the reason they evolved.
coming from what share exactly in 1998?
Agreed on Roblox. BUT it has Roblox Studio, which seems like a Unity-light. I taught my son to add different shapes, move them around, scale and rotate etc, so he could build his own obstacle courses. I think if you go down the Roblox route, make sure to focus on creation.
Ship fast they say, but do not ship that much faster.
>a LOT of things work better than they do in the West, not because of monetary incentives, but because things are simply done differently here, and some things are done better.

I'm not totally convinced though, because a lot of times when you investigate these "simply works better" claims, it's because the end users, either through culture or training, have been taught to accept bad service and not complain about it, which glosses over a lot of the real problems with some of these systems that we're told work better.
11.1% Yes, they're very valuable
15.9% Somewhat valuable but not significantly valuable
64.7% Not very valuable, other features are more important
8.3% No, they add little to no value
I didn't want to quibble about whether it's fair to call it "lying", but I think the term is misleading you. There's simply no such thing as a business relationship without time estimates. It's not a short term vs. long term or trust vs. distrust tradeoff - unless your business model consists entirely of off-the-shelf purchases, your customers will want estimates about what you'll do in the future and when.
Aren't the newest features that are branded as "Apple Intelligence" (not their other ML stuff that's been around for a while) only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and 16 line?

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-intelligence-is...

At the bottom:

> Apple Intelligence is available on iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPad with A17 Pro or M1 and later, and Mac with M1 and later.

Unless you're referring to it on a Mac or iPad or something.
> I think in almost everything in my life and in every domain, #2 or #3 is better-suited (for my preferences and needs).

I like to explore alternatives to the most popular choice, but more often than not I end up back at the #1 consensus choice.

I have some friends who simply must pick the #2 or #3 choice in every domain. They always have an elaborate justification for why it’s better. From my point of view it seems driven by contrarianism.

Some times they pick some interesting alternatives that I explore. Most of the time they end up with also-ran purchases that die off. I joke that my one friend is the best predictor of impending product line cancellation that I know. He used a Zune when everyone went iPod. He went Windows Phone when iPhone and Android were front runners. He event eschewed Instagram for some other platform that he was sure was going to win the social media wars, but was actually so unnoteworthy that I can’t even remember the name right now.
You could use it to model a CNC machine, but you'd probably need to make new components. It would also be difficult to model the changing load as the spinning tool plunges into metal, but you could model dynamic deformation and response of the machine given the loads. It is difficult to model changing 3D contacts in modelica, although a new approach to solving newton's equations, dialectic mechanics may fix this problem

NEMA isn't a type of motor, it's a connection standard used for motors. You might be able to model stepper motors with some of the components in the modelica standard library for magnetic modeling.
The way I look at Agentic systems is that there are Tools an LLM can call out to, and do work with.

Last week Wednesday I participated in Anthropic's Model Context Protocol hackathon, and built a system with my team partner Zia to automatically search and find restaurants for your dietary preferences and group size.

It also automatically downloads social media of the restaurant to get a vibe for the place.

There's a video of it in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6vGrfHFyu8

And a Github repo here: https://github.com/zia-r/gotta-eat
Ask HN: Am I the only one who hates the new AWS UI?
The new design update to the AWS UI is incredibly bad in my opinion. Literally every button is blue now.
For context: Losing this vote was intended. The government already fell apart in November, so this is the next formal step towards new elections.
This question is so super weird, because:

Ask an LLM to generate you 100 more lines of code, no problem you will get something. Ask the same LLM to look at 10000 lines of code and intelligently remove 100... good luck with that!

seriously, I tried uploading some (but not all) source code of my company to our private Azure OpenAI GPT 4o for analysis, as a 48 MB cora-generated context file, and really the usefulness is not that great. And don't get me started about Copilot's suggestions.

Someone really has to know their way around the beast, and LLM's cover a very very small part of the story.

I fear that the main effect of LLMs will be that developers that have already for so long responded to their job-security fears with obfuscation and monstrosity... will be empowered to produce even more of that.
F1's high-stakes gamble on Las Vegas GP is already paying out
The Phantom Airship Panic of 1913
> LLMs should never do math. They shouldn't count letters or sort lists or play chess or checkers.

But these aren't "gotcha questions", these are just some of the basic interactions that people will want to have with intelligent assistants. Literally just two days ago I was doing some things with the compound interest formula - I asked Claude to solve for a particular variable of the formula, then plug in some numbers to calculate the results (it was able to do it). Could I have used Mathematica or something like that? Yes of course. But supposedly the whole purpose of a general purpose AI is that I can use it to do just about anything that I need to do. Likewise there have been multiple occasions where I've needed ChatGPT or Claude to work with tables or lists of data where I needed the results to be sorted.
Debug: G=C800:5
i mean the register is kinda more of a tabloid than anything, it's real-ish news but with a loose and snarky editorial style, so... it's pretty on-brand.
Lightweight Script for Auditing VPS Security and Performance (Open Source)
Hi HN,

I created a Bash script to audit VPS/server setups, helping identify security risks and performance issues. It’s lightweight, uses standard Linux tools (no external dependencies), and is free and open source.

Features and Checks

Security Audits:
•SSH configuration (root login, password auth, non-default ports)
•Firewall status
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•Password policies
•SUID files
•Sudo logging
•Open ports and running services

Performance Metrics:
•Disk, memory, and CPU usage (detailed with percentages and raw values)
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Key Features:
•Color-coded results (Pass/Warn/Fail)
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Why I Built This

I was tired of manually performing the same checks while managing VPS instances, so I automated it. I hope others managing servers find it useful too!

GitHub: https://github.com/vernu/vps-audit
Site: https://vpsaudit.vernu.dev?ref=hackernews

I’d love your feedback, suggestions, or contributions! Let me know what you think.
Innovative Crypto Trading Platforms
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I get that but it doesn't even make sense in terms of the dream logic. Bill basically has two "confession" scenes - one with Zeigler and one with his wife and seemingly doesn't mention the stuff at the costume shop in either. However he was open to confess to Zeigler that he knew about the dead woman. This seems contradictory. I think there are two possibilities 1) it was unfinished or 2) it was intentionally left out. Both of which are very interesting.
Ok, so that 25 dB fan is a lie then because it can very easily be heard over other noise.
I wish sites like this would develop a shorthand for things like the boot analogy and automatically replace the text with the shorthand. It's an interesting analogy the first time you hear it, but it's not as applicable to everything situation that people pretend that it is.
The other problem I find is that LLMs are changing so fast, that what you evaluated 6-12 months ago, might be completely different now with newer models.

So the strengths and weaknesses quickly can become outdated as the strengths grow and weaknesses diminish.

When the first batch of LLMs people tried in 2023 had a lot of weaknesses. At the end of 2024, we can see increases in performance in speed and the complexity of output. People are creating frameworks on top of the LLMs that further increase their value. We went from thousands of tokens in context to millions of tokens pretty fast.

I can see myself dividing problems up into 4 groups:

1. LLMs currently solve the problem
2. It doesn't solve it now, but we are within a couple iteration of next generation models or frameworks to be able to solve it
3. LLMs are still years off from being able to solve this effectively so wait and implement it when it can.
4. LLMs will never solve this.

I think a lot of people building products are in group 2 right now.
Looks like Perplexity includes sponsored results at the bottom of your searches, and my UBO isn't blocking them. They seem to be fairly unobtrusive, though, and they are labeled as such. For now, at least.
"A Digital Prison": Surveillance and the suppression of civil society in Serbia
It's more that the low-quality people are way more numerous than otherwise.

For example, in the 2000s and 2010s, javascript had the lowest barrier to entry by far thanks to browser dev tools, so a lot of what you saw was people with no prior experience teaching people with no prior experience. These people are still around, and while plenty have improved, they still form the basis of modern javascript practice.
When I first setup apple intelligence on my phone, all the “summary” features seemed worthless, so I disabled them. But somehow it was still enabled for Messages. I can’t believe how bad and unhelpful it is! To add to the confusion that showing a completely inaccurate summary sows, it wasn’t even immediately clear that these were summaries - on the notification screen I thought the actual senders were writing these bizarre things.
Well you work in the field for a while, and you accumulate anecdotes of colleagues dropping tactical sleep(5000)'s so they can shave some milliseconds of latency each week and keep the boss happy.

I love those stories but I could never do that with a straight face. However, the AI field is such an uphill battle against all the crap that LinkedIn influencers are pushing into the minds of the C-suite... I feel it's okay to get a bit creative to get a win-win here ;)
This definitely resonates but I'm left wondering why there hasn't been a collective "sobering up" on this front. Not on a personal/team/company level, but just in terms of the general push to cram AI into everything. For how much longer will new s assault us in software where it ostensibly won't be that useful?

It seems that the effort required to make an LLM work robustly within a single context (spreadsheet, worddoc, email, whatever) is so gargantuan (honestly) that the returns or even the initial manpower wouldn't be there. So any new feels more or less like bloat, and if not fully useless, then at least a bit anxiety inducing in that you have no clue how much you can rely on it.
Reminds me of a similar bug in a payment processing system the company I worked for used. Long story short, overflow in Java numerical types (counting milliseconds for durations in weeks...) caused the system to go haywire and charge customers 1000x the normal amount...

It turned out very profitable for the company though. Stonewalling customers and refusing charge backs is too easy. Not picking up the phone is a good business strategy.
We're not allowed to record meetings at work, with some exceptions such as trainings. I'm not at all sure why, but I believe it has to do with merger plans. We're not working on anything particularly shady, to my knowledge.

Notes are often taken but not always. Depends on the people in the meeting.
Pure anecdote but in the meetings I have been in eyes glaze over when the SaaS salesman mentions AI in a generic way without providing any examples of how we can use it. The only way it gets any traction is when the technical wingman can answer questions about how it will account for required business logic and permissions.
Ask HN: How long do you think this AI wave will last?
Here's the orbital stuff if anyone was wondering:

- "That funding will go towards the development and launch of satellites in three orbits. Eighteen satellites will operate in medium Earth orbit (MEO) at an altitude of 8,000 kilometers, providing Ka-band services. A “LEO High” shell at about 1,200 kilometers will include 264 satellites with Ku- and Ka-band services. The system will also include 10 or more satellites in a “LEO Low” shell between 400 and 750 kilometers intended to support incubation of future technologies. "

and

- "The next step for IRIS² is a one-year design phase that will also include “consolidation” of the supply chain of contractors for the satellites. A critical design review is planned for early 2028, with launch of the satellites projected to take place in 2029 and 2030. The constellation will require 13 Ariane 64 launches, 10 for the LEO High shell and 3 for the MEO shell."

https://spacenews.com/europe-signs-contracts-for-iris%C2%B2-... ("Europe signs contracts for IRIS² constellation")

(Put together, you can constrain the mass of the satellites as <820 kg: for the LEO-High shell, 10 launches of A64, at a maximum of 21,650 kg each, divided by 264 units. That'd be intermediate between v1 and v2 Starlinks).