MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dkarl | 2025-05-26 17:16:46+00:00
We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them.

Sure, a computer or an LLM isn't alive, but we have no idea if "being alive" is what is required for conscious experience.

The only argument I have for believing that other human beings experience things is that it would be extremely improbable if I was the only one, and the other mechanistic automatons looked and talked like me but didn't experience like me. I can see that humans are animals, so the common origin of animals and our cognitive and behavioral similarities give us good reason to believe that other complex animals experience things, though possibly radically differently.

None of that gives us any clue what the necessary and sufficient conditions for conscious experience are, so it doesn't give us any clue whether a computer or a running LLM instance would experience its existence.
by kouru225 | 2025-05-26 17:17:04+00:00
Admittedly, I wrote this comment only thinking about modern pessimism cause it feels like it's become so commodified that it's just a parody of itself at this point. If we're gonna start talking about the classics, then I can't badmouth anyone. No doubt they're important reads and, whether I agree with them or not, they're canonized as part of the history of thought, which IMO is more important than "truth"
by ModernMech | 2025-05-26 17:17:16+00:00
> I tried it too and I know this test for a while. Not only did Claude respond correctly, I also wrote it in German.

You're missing the point though. If it worked for you when you tried it, that's great, but we know these tools are stochastic, so that's not enough to call it "solved". That I tried it and it didn't work tells me it's not. And that's actually worse than it not working at all, because it leads to the false confidence you are expressing.

The strawberry example highlights like all abstractions, AI is a leaky one. It's not the oracle they're selling it as, it's just another interface you have to know the internal details of to properly use it beyond the basics. Which means that ultimately the only people who are really going to be able to wield AI are those who understand what I mean when I say "leaky abstraction". And those people can already program anyway, so what are we even solving by going full natural language?

> I created single page html Javascript pages for small prototypes withhin 10 minutes with very little repromting.

You can achieve similar results with better language design and tooling. Really this is more of an indictment of Javascript as a language. Why couldn't you write the small prototype in 10 minutes in Javascript?

> I can literally generate an image of whatever I want with just text or voice.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy doing this all the time. But AI images are kind of a different breed because art doesn't ever have to be "right". But still, just like generative text, AI images are impressive only to a point where details start to matter. Like hands. Or character consistency. Multiple characters in a scene. This is still a problem in latest models of AI not doing what you tell it to do.

> I can have a discussion with my smartphone with voice.

Yes, talking to your phone is a neat trick, but is it a discussion? Interacting with AI often feels more like an improv session, where it just makes things up and rolls with vibes. Every time (and yes I mean every) I ask it about topics I'm an expert about, it gets things wrong. Often subtly, but importantly still wrong. It feels like less of a discussion and more like I'm being slowly gaslight. This is not impressive, it's frustrating.

I think you get my point. Yes, AI can be impressive at first, but when you start using it more and more you start to see all the cracks. And it would be fine if those cracks were being patched, or even if they just acknowledged them and the limitations of LLMs. But they won't do that; instead what they are doing is pretending they don't exist, pretending these LLMs are actually good, and pushing AI into literally everything and anything. They've been promising exponential improvements for years now, and still the same problems from day 1 persist.
by ujkhsjkdhf234 | 2025-05-26 17:17:19+00:00
>This plan assumes the current mercurial administration stays their course on stablecoin to replace USD as reserve currency and future administrations also going along with it.

You are operating on the assumption that there will be fair election in 4 years and that Dems will retake the White House. Both of those are unlikely. Trump has almost killed democrarcy in 3 months. I'm sure he'll get the job done in another 3.75 years.
Show HN: A Lichess-Inspired chess app I built to improve my portfolio
by bberkay | 2025-05-26 17:18:32+00:00
Hello, as a jr. dev, I was thinking of developing a chess app to practice JavaScript and TypeScript. It was going to include basic rules like piece movements on the board, move calculations, etc. However, after working on it for a while, I realized this was somewhat more complex than I thought and decided to expand the project's scope enough to add it to my portfolio. For this, I added features I could implement from those I saw on lichess. Since I don't have much of a circle to get feedback from, I thought of sharing it on Reddit. If you have time and if it interests you, any kind of feedback would be very valuable to me. Thank you in advance.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-26 17:18:39+00:00
My problem with invite codes is precisely the association to someone (metadata). It is a double-edged sword, because I would think twice before inviting someone (good!), but at the same time I do not want to be responsible for what they do, nor do I want to be associated to it. As for payment information, I would rather not provide that just to use an instant messenger, for example. Thankfully we have metadata-free IMs (e.g. Ricochet Refresh, Session, Briar). That said, I would not dismiss the idea of invite codes so quickly.
by jonmagic | 2025-05-26 17:18:54+00:00
After nearly 14 years of using a cpap (https://theprogrammingbutler.com/blog/archives/2014/02/13/sl...) and then bipap religiously I was able to switch away recently.

All I do now is use now is a piece of kinesthetic tape to make sure my mouth stays closed and that somehow works. I’d just done another sleep study to see if I had options other than the bipap because it’s been filling me with air since I was intubated and put on life support overnight a few years ago. I’ve been miserable the past few years and doctors couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Bipap helped a bit but not completely.

I’d even turned down the cpap and then bipap to the lowest settings, which was enough to help me have a great night of sleep, but still the balloon effect. Then I was chatting with a family member and they mentioned trying and liking taping, something they saw on TikTok, and I told them it was a terrible idea. They assured me it was helping them avoid the snore and they woke up less dehydrated and better rested.

So I gave it a go. I wear my Apple Watch when I sleep and have been able to confirm on at least 3 occasions before I started taping that the sleep apnea stats always lined up with when I was experiencing the effects of apnea. The first night I taped but still used the mask and was fine the next day albeit filled up with air. Then I tried a night taping without my cpap and someone to monitor me and make sure I didn’t die and I couldn’t believe when I woke up in the morning completely rested and not feeling awful from the balloon effect.

I’m not suggesting what worked for me will work for anyone else, but thought I’d share as my quality of life has gone way up the past few months.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-26 17:19:27+00:00
The fact that it's stupid doesn't make it untrue.

Under-resourced public sector entities often reach for the easiest solutions: Facebook and Twitter.

Consequently, those channels are a major portion of their disaster communication plans.

If services don't want to assume the responsibilities of being critical utilities, then they shouldn't work so hard to establish monopolies.
by glitchc | 2025-05-26 17:19:31+00:00
> We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them.

From an epistemological perspective, this is gibberish. Just because we do not know the reason why something happens doesn't mean it doesn't happen nor is it stopped from happening.

The rest delves into solipsism which is an odd place to start from to prove the existence of an alternate lifeform. In solipsism, your own existence is suspect.
by lgas | 2025-05-26 17:19:31+00:00
I wrote a similar implementation a while back[1]. The major difference is that mine only allows rules of the form "n is divisible by m" whereas the one from the post allows arbitrary predicates over n. Wouldn't be that hard to update though.

[1] https://gist.github.com/lgastako/d4fa392cbe85cbfae7dfa5e18c1...
by zkmon | 2025-05-26 17:19:49+00:00
Nothing wrong with the situation. At some point in history, humans did not need to spend their entire time in finding food, raising kids, taking care of family and community etc. So they got into services business, selling services to each other. One kid polishes a fine pebble and exchanges it with the other kid for a nicely carved wood piece. Their elders don't see value in any of these and shout at them to go and hunt for more food. But the services thrived, outpacing the real needs of the humans. Technologies and tools evolved claiming magical abilities. Sane humans only care about their basic needs. So they just use the magical tech for the basic needs, which makes perfect sense.
by brookst | 2025-05-26 17:20:20+00:00
Mandating 100% availability sounds like regulating pi to 3.0.

It can’t be done. If someone is on a home network whose router has been compromised and is part of a ddos attack, there’s no way their innocent HTTP traffic is getting through. Ditto if their machine has been compromised. Lots of scenarios where an innocent user must be blocked, unless the entire internet is reinvented. Which is beyond the scope of my project.
by mouse_ | 2025-05-26 17:20:23+00:00
I find it extremely challenging to believe you actually think that. I can't even host my own email anymore without all of my messages getting filtered as spam, because if your email service doesn't play nice with Google, then you might as well not exist. Not to mention youtube, adsense, Android (Google is trying to kill AOSP to sink their claws more deeply into Android in light of the recent antitrust suits),

Google owns too much. They're easily on the same level as standard oil and the railroad tycoons.

When a company is paying millions annually, just towards psychologists, to keep people hooked, telling people "lol just turn the computer off" is disingenuous at best.
by elric | 2025-05-26 17:20:38+00:00
I will keep beating this horse to death, but the vast majority of those who cannot tolerate CPAP are improperly titrated and/or have a mask that isn't right for them and/or are having leaks. Often all of the above.

That 4 hours is just another symptom of a medical establishment that's not interested in treating patients, but is only interested in numbers. If you want maximum benefits from CPAP, you have to wear it all night every night. If you can't do that, there's a problem that needs to be addressed.

It would be more accurate to say that 40% of people who are offered CPAP are not receiving proper guidance and followup. This is not their fault. This is not CPAP's fault. This is one of medicine's biggest failures.

And yeah, UARS is an entirely different shitshow. It's finally starting to be recognized, hopefully that will lead to improvements for patients.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-05-26 17:20:51+00:00
That’s certainly a style of argument and contains (with "basic logic") an informal fallacy[0].

To quote N. Chomsky when he made an analogy: "When you have a theory, there are two questions you'd need to ask: (1) Why are things this way? (2) Why are things not that way?"[1]

I get it, this post-truth century is difficult to navigate. Engineering achievements get picked up through a mix of technical excitement and venture boredom, its fallacies are stylized by growth hackers as this unsolvable paradox that seems to fit just the right terminology for any marketing purposes, only to be piped through one hype cycle that just paints another picture of the doomsday of capitalism with black and white colors. /rant

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axuGfh4UR9Q&t=9438s
by gjm11 | 2025-05-26 17:20:52+00:00
I'm not a fan of the glib "everyone knows AI systems don't really think, they are just stochastic parrots, all they do is regurgitate ideas they've stolen" schtick, but this article is the reverse of that only worse.

Today's AI systems are pretty impressive but they are absolutely not, not even slightly, the equivalent of Einstein + Hawking + Tao. The reason they get used a lot for tasks along the lines of "rewrite this so it sounds smarter" is that that's what they're best at.

If we did as the author seems to want and tried to use these systems to solve the kinds of problems we need Einsteins, Hawkings and Taos for, then we would be in for one miserable disappointment after another. Maybe some day -- maybe some day very soon -- they'll be able to do that, but not now.

An article proclaiming that today's AI systems are at the level of Einstein mostly suggests to me that the author's own intellectual level isn't much higher than that of the AI systems he falsely equates with them. That seems unlikely, but I don't have a better explanation for how someone could write something so very far from the truth.
by sshine | 2025-05-26 17:21:37+00:00
Yes, that’s easy.

Here’s a very small example:

https://github.com/sshine/nix/blob/main/shared/home-manager....

My servers don’t have that many dotfiles because most server software can be configured in /etc (zsh, vim), while my work computers have a lot of dotfiles symlinked into ~/.config/ via Nix, e.g. VSCodium, ghostty, …

Most people prefer to Nix up their dotfiles, which provides some advantages (e.g. universal styling via Stylix), but the main drawback that I’m not buying is: I can’t share my app-specific config with non-Nix users.

But if you’re looking for a cheaper (in terms of complexity) dotfiles manager: https://github.com/yarlson/lnk
by Teever | 2025-05-26 17:22:24+00:00
When this conversation comes up it is typically mentioned that employers have mechanisms of enforcement that are tied to their basic accounting required for taxes as well as surveillance cameras that are also meant to watch customers for theft. They also have the ability to contact law enforcement and have their employees arrested for theft.

There is an asymmetry in this relationship however where employees don't practically have recourse when their employers steal from them.
by storus | 2025-05-26 17:22:38+00:00
The same complaints come from my doctor friends - they are now also being run as a factory where each procedure has a certain allotted time and they need to fit each patient into it. Like you have 10 minutes for a GP task, 15 minutes for psychotherapy, 3 minutes for X-Ray etc. They are complaining about it a lot, it makes them feel like robots.
Ask HN: Weirdest programs you ever made?
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-26 17:23:18+00:00
I made a few odd apps in my time:

* cli utility that shows a rainbow unicorn flying across your screen, useful to run when all tests passed

* irc client using only named file pipes, so that channels were files you could pipe to stdout and write to via stdin

(Can't remember any others.)

What about you?
by JadeNB | 2025-05-26 17:23:22+00:00
> Y’all should try espanso for your latex needs.

I definitely understand why macro-expander programs can be useful, but I'm always a bit puzzled about the idea of combining them with a macro language like (La)TeX. Why introduce two layers of macro indirection? Maybe it just doesn't fit my use case, which doesn't mean it can't fit anybody's; but, more intriguingly, maybe it would come to fit my use case if I understood what it can add, so I wonder if you could describe how it's useful to you.
by bwfan123 | 2025-05-26 17:23:32+00:00
Have you wondered why japan, which is a powerhouse of electronics and manufacturing does not have any large software companies ? Software is different from manufacturing.

The mindset, mentality, and culture required to do new software for an ambiguous problem is different from the mentality to produce boilerplate code or maintain an existing codebase. The later is pure execution and the former is more like R&D.
by bilater | 2025-05-26 17:23:43+00:00
So if Google innovates with AI, it's a problem because they're hiding their "ten blue links." But if they don't, they're suffering from the innovator's dilemma and are going to die with their ten blue links. The fact is, Google is so big that they're always going to upset some people.

Embracing AI and moving forward is the only thing they can do.
by K0balt | 2025-05-26 17:23:54+00:00
Of course, but the cutoff I one of perception more than physics. The airplane is “not flying” right up until the lift generated is infinitesimally more than the weight of the aircraft. Likewise, during “flight” there are times when the lift is less than the weight, during descent. So the line seems clear but it is a matter of degree. The aircraft is not doing anything fundamentally different during the takeoff roll than during flight, it is all a matter of degree. There is no magical Change in physics or process.
by nullstyle | 2025-05-26 17:23:57+00:00
> People would’ve said the same thing about ELIZA.

I believe this to be the case because the appearance of thoughtfulness is a smooth function, not a line in the sand. Why are you bringing consciousness into this discussion? Consciousness isn't thoughtfulness.

> Again, why should we believe that LLMs are capable of thought, other than the fact that they vaguely “seem” to communicate with conscious intent?

I define "to think" as the act of applying context to a model. What do you define it as? Given my definition, llm inference seems plainly to be an act of thought.
by speff | 2025-05-26 17:24:01+00:00
That seems like a really small number? To compare - total US retail shrink in those years combined was a little over $300B[0] - averaging about 1.5% of sales. $1.5B seems like a rounding error when talking in those terms.

[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-retailers-cite-rising-theft-...
by EA-3167 | 2025-05-26 17:24:13+00:00
These aren't drugs that I'd choose to take when a proven therapy like the use of a CPAP exist, the list of potential serious adverse reactions isn't trivial at all. Most amusingly insomnia is a known risk of atomoxetine.

I understand that this might be a viable option for people who simply cannot tolerate CPAP therapy, have tried alternatives and found them lacking, and aren't surgical candidates... but I certainly hope it never becomes a first line treatment. My concern would also be that insurance companies will see this as a much cheaper option and try to force it on people who would otherwise tolerate CPAP therapy.
by ZekeV | 2025-05-26 17:24:21+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building Harmonized AIOS — an Artificial Intelligence Operating System that connects directly with the APIs business owners already use (like Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, Stripe, and Notion) to offer intelligent suggestions and take action on them with a click.

Think of it as your backend cofounder: it reads your emails, tracks your calendar, checks your finances, and surfaces a daily command center of what's most important. But instead of just summarizing — it acts. Need to reply to a client? Schedule a meeting? Chase a late invoice? AIOS asks for your approval and gets it done.

Why we're building this Running a modern small business means juggling 10+ SaaS tools. Context switching and fragmented dashboards eat up hours. AIOS pulls the signal from the noise and turns business data into daily decisions.

We are starting by integrating:

Gmail and Calendar for communication and time management

Slack for internal team sync

Notion and Trello for task management

Stripe for financial updates and actionables

More integrations are coming (e.g., Zoom, QuickBooks, Shopify, Salesforce), and we’re letting users choose what tools matter to them.

What AIOS actually does Each morning, you get a Pulse — a dynamic brief of what’s going on in your business:

Upcoming meetings + suggested prep

Unread priority emails (and smart replies)

Financial snapshot + follow-ups

AI-suggested tasks based on goals or workflows

Click a suggestion, and AIOS executes using API permissions you've already granted.

Privacy and control We take permissions seriously — users must explicitly grant OAuth access to each service. AIOS logs every action it takes and seeks confirmation for anything sensitive.

Our waitlist is live now, and I’d love feedback on:

Which integrations you'd want first

Where you think AI is most useful vs. dangerous in this workflow

Thanks for reading — happy to answer any technical, product, or privacy questions in the comments.

— Zeke (founder)
by throwpoaster | 2025-05-26 17:24:37+00:00
Let's be conservative by taking GDP for only the middle year. In 2022 American GDP was 26 trillion (rounded down). Let's also gross up the stolen wages from your comment to 2.6 billion.

That's 0.01% -- one percent of one percent. That's a background noise level, or simple error rate level, or rounding error level. And because of our conservative assumptions, over those three years GDP is actually maybe 3x higher and the reported wage theft per year maybe 20% of the figure used, so it's more like approx 0.002%.

If wage theft is "just normal business in the US" it's not a very big business!
by Spivak | 2025-05-26 17:24:57+00:00
Does it actually matter that Discord is closed or would the problem still exist if Matrix won and the content contained within was nonetheless still not indexable by search engines and communities were invite only?

Because the fact that Discord is flourishing is I think a direct result of it not being a part of the giant amalgamated omniplatform indexed by search engines. Being shielded from the masses is the point. There aren't megaphones in small private communities where the social dynamics of repeat interactions are in play. People aren't competing to say the most outrageous rage-bait for engagement.
by AshleyGrant | 2025-05-26 17:25:08+00:00
Because, for the most part, we aren't doing damned thing about it. "Rolling coal" is inherently a very public act of law breaking, but I doubt a single person has ever been pulled over by any American cop for it. The EPA and certain states were trying through other enforcement mechanisms to fight it, but with Trump in office, it's basically encouraged to "delete" your Diesel emissions equipment if you aren't in commercial operation.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-26 17:25:32+00:00
I think there was a vision early in the evolution of the web that user-supplied stylesheets would be a lot more commonly used than they turned out to be.

Things like colors, contrast levels, font sizes, are often matters of personal preference, and the browser (in theory) is the common place to manage those. Each site should not have to reinvent this feature.