MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Trenthug | 2025-05-30 10:59:41+00:00
This paper presents an original, information-theoretic model of consciousness based on belief alignment with objective descriptions. Consciousness is formally defined as the ratio between the complexity of true beliefs held by an observer and the complexity of the full inherent description of an object. The model distinguishes between three epistemic states: Consciousness (true beliefs), Schizo-Consciousness (false or misaligned beliefs), and Unconsciousness (absence of belief). Descriptions are represented as sets of statements in the form O(x)-Q(y), where objects and their qualities are mapped onto a structured semantic space.

The paper introduces both scalar and vectorial representations of belief states, allowing comparisons between observers in terms of both the amount and content of their conscious knowledge. Complexity can be quantified using bit-length encoding, programmatic code length, or entropy-based measures such as Kolmogorov or Shannon entropy. The model also incorporates a dynamic component: a belief-updating mechanism driven by external stimuli, analogous to neural or cognitive processes.

This formalism offers potential applications in comparative epistemology, cognitive modeling, and AI alignment by enabling simulations of belief evolution and mapping of conscious, unconscious, and misbelief states. It aims to contribute a rigorous framework for understanding consciousness as a structured, quantifiable process rather than a purely subjective phenomenon.
by lovestory | 2025-05-30 10:59:56+00:00
Here in the Balkans and most of European countries always have public squares or similar gathering place for each neighborhood. I was shocked when I visited some USA states that absolutely have nothing of that sort. Not even a park that is tailored for a few hours hangout sessions. Even some public spaces like parks and library gardens are filled with corporate interests like Starbucks. You absolutely are expected to spend money whenever you go out which is depressing af.
by piva00 | 2025-05-30 11:00:16+00:00
They don't need to take on the monopoly on violence to become more powerful than governments, the sheer act of repeatedly breaking laws, many times knowingly because the punishment is either not levied or they can just pay their way out of it, is an act of being above the power of the State.

Now Big Tech is such a large percentage of the USA's stock market valuation that there's no political will to reign on them, and they feel free to try to break other countries' laws since the USA's government will be backing them up if they pick a big enough fight, it's the golden goose, they know it and they use and will continue to use that power.
by rxtexit | 2025-05-30 11:00:50+00:00
IMO it is a mixture of stupidity and denial.

I am not a software engineer but I just can't imagine my job is not automated in 10 years or less.

10 years is about the time between King – Man + Woman = Queen and now.

I think what is being highly underestimated is the false sense of security people feel because the jobs they interface with are also not automated, yet.

It is not hard to picture the network of automation that once one role is automated, connected roles to that role become easier to automate. So on and so on while the models keep getting stronger at the same time.

I expect we will have a recession at some point and the jobs lost are gone forever.
by TheCapeGreek | 2025-05-30 11:01:50+00:00
UK has started doing it too.

EU I've seen is still friendly to timezone alignment instead of regional, but seems to just be less aware at all that people outside of EU might want to apply.

The remote hype has died down, political winds have changed, and in some cases regulations tightened around hiring locally first before trying to find contractors abroad (since you can't employ people directly as explained by others in this thread).
by ben_w | 2025-05-30 11:02:43+00:00
Power is a lot of things, not just muscle.

Even then: Who is more powerful, of Google and the Musk group? The latter used wealth to influence a government that is abducting people off the street for undesirable speech.

> Likewise assuming that because it is a government it is more aligned to your interests is frankly, dangerously naive.

The "δῆμος" in "democracy" is what makes it aligned; the unfortunate part is that "aligned" doesn't mean "competent" or "friendly", there's no coherent extrapolated volition here.
by jajko | 2025-05-30 11:03:01+00:00
Women tend to behave very differently in all-female group compared to when even a single man is present.

And if that man is charismatic or handsome its completely different dynamics and resulting behavior again.

Never thought about it myself but one female friend mentioned this once (how toxic their work environment becomes when there is no man), so started noticing it around.

As a married man I can understand these clubs fully. A man is never so relaxed, open and honest as when with other men, only men. I would expect the same among women, while accepting they always play their little games also just among themselves (which are very tiring for most men in long run and thus those clubs' popularity)
by tim333 | 2025-05-30 11:03:15+00:00
I had to ask chatgpt what OP meant there. It had overpowered as in "gaming culture, where an overpowered (OP) character, weapon, or ability is unusually strong"

I'm not sure they are overpowered for real life uses like filming video or playing games - people still pay like $1000 to get a good one because the cheap ones don't perform as well. Which is a problem for Humana pin like devices because the cameras etc will probably be rubbish compared to the the ones people have on their phones.
by piva00 | 2025-05-30 11:03:28+00:00
In the past week it's the third time I've read a comment on HN with this rhetoric against urbanisation/denser cities. I'm really curious on what has triggered this, has that argument appeared in some widely viewed YouTube video? Is it spreading through some other ways in social media?

It's rather bizarre to see this pattern emerge out of nowhere, three very different threads where someone comes ranting about urbanisation or dense cities.
by neomantra | 2025-05-30 11:03:41+00:00
Author here. What a Happy Friday to see this now, as I created it on April Fool's Day. I annually do silly personal projects on that day. That week I happened to be playing with MCP servers and thought it would be funny. ConAcademy is where I put weird ideas and implementations.

I will state that this specific MCP Server is pretty useless and certainly not how one would want sexual interaction, I try to indicate this in the README. But, a beginning has to start somewhere and good-giving-game is how we roll so it's on GitHub.

[Ironically two years before, my project was Buttplug-integration in a Charm-powered SSH chatroom with BubbleTea TUI. That navigated aspects of digital consent via SSH keys, making an anonymous graph of what entities could do what to other entities' devices. I think some of that is needed in an Agent-Controlled MCP future.]

I'm not the Buttplug.io maintainer, but did chat with them about this for a while on Discord. While I have your eyeballs, they are looking for additional maintainers for their project if any Rustaceans are interested. This MCP server is written in Golang but would be better in the Buttplug ecosystem if it was Rust.

My early career was in haptics research and I have several patents in it via Immersion. My master's thesis was writing a 3D haptic renderer and integrating haptics into VRML, if you remember that! I have worked on NIH grants for Sexual Dysfunction diagnostic devices and created homemade toys. Now that I just received my Neurable EEG headset, I am working on Biaerolar Beats research [1].

On the topic of vibe coding, yes I vibrated my LELO F1 with this, but this project was truly a hand job. I did try to vibe code `a2a4a2a` (A2A protocol for A2A fun) a few weeks ago, with both Claude and Gemini, but A2A protocol was too new and it was too hard for me to teach it A2A. I'd be interested in seeing how people handle this in general.

All in all, it was fun and I learned a lot about tool-calling LLMs. That week I made three MCP servers (thanks `mark3labs/mcp-go`), one for money [2], this one for sex [3], and one for drugs [4].

Although I haven't followed up on that last AgentDank [4] yet, it's probably the coolest in terms of open data and actual AI results -- just watch the video there. Bringing custom data plus SQL endpoint to a tool-calling LLM is ridiculously powerful.

[1] https://github.com/ConAcademy/biareolar-beats [2] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/dbn-go/blob/main/cmd/dbn-go... [3] https://github.com/ConAcademy/buttplug-mcp [4] https://github.com/AgentDank/dank-mcp
by palata | 2025-05-30 11:04:11+00:00
Not that I agree with the condescending parent (e.g. "you're still stuck with a C++ programmer you need to figure out how to socialize with"), but...

> Most mainstream languages fail to support anything resembling RAII

Wikipedia says: "RAII is associated most prominently with C++, where it originated, but also Ada,[3] Vala,[4] and Rust"

> Do you actually have an example of a language that does a better job at resource management than C++?

They don't necessarily offer a pattern like RAII, but what about "try-with-resources" in Java, or "use" in Kotlin that goes with `AutoCloseable`?

And what about "using" in C#?

What about "defer" in Swift?

I find those simpler than RAII.
Show HN: Glyde – One-shot AI landing pages that don't feel templated
by AdewoleJasper | 2025-05-30 11:04:30+00:00
Hi HN,

After a decade in software engineering, I left to become a full-time vibe-coder—and started building Glyde.

Glyde is an AI-powered landing page builder that creates stunning, non-templated pages in one shot—with complex animations and clean layouts—no advanced prompt engineering needed.

Most AI site builders I’ve seen either feel obviously templated, or require prompt gymnastics to get decent results. I wanted something different:

Pages that feel designed, not generated

Works out of the box — no need to write paragraph-long prompts

Built for devs, creators, and launchers

Here's an example of what Glyde built with almost zero input: https://www.loom.com/share/da3b5b4e7a984b1983ac7e5b0cf31166?...

Would love feedback from the HN crowd on how to improve it. I’m still shipping fast and pushing new ideas.

Website: https://glyde.world

Thanks for checking it out!
by pjmlp | 2025-05-30 11:05:28+00:00
It is a diservice to C++, to paint RAII as modern C++.

We were already making use of RAII in C++ compilers for MS-DOS during the C++ARM (the C++ equivalent of K&R C book), one such example would be Turbo Vision C++ variant and Borland International Datastructures Library (BIDS).

If anything, it is a pity that 30 years later, it is still something we need to educate people about, as it isn't as adopted as it should be.

EDIT:

If this is supposed to be Modern C++, at the very least provide C++23 example in 2025, instead C++ from 2011.

Meaning import std, using a custom deleter in std::unique_ptr (it doesn't manage only heap types), making use of =default to get back compiler generated member functions, as it would do the right thing in the example for the fd handle.
by ThreeToZero | 2025-05-30 11:05:38+00:00
> Is it so strange that after spending fifteen years of my life trying everything I could to get away from spending all day wrangling a big ball of mud in a Java IDE, that experience sounds pretty cozy to return to?

Relatable experience in software.

Also might lead to the reactionary conservatism she hated in those "frustrating programmers", that liked their toil of assembly and muddy type systems.
by ajross | 2025-05-30 11:06:13+00:00
For the same reason that you don't use Rc for everything in Rust. Putting all your heap management behind reference counted pointers isn't "that inefficient", no. But if you don't need the direct control over heap behavior, you shouldn't be using C++ (or Rust) in the first place.

Languages with GC-managed runtimes (Java, C#, Go, Swift, et. al.) are actually significantly more performant for almost all heap-bound use cases, actually. Reference counting kinda sucks for typical code.
by closewith | 2025-05-30 11:07:03+00:00
Why aren't they meaningfully competing with Ireland as centres for software, if that's the case?

Obviously Czechoslovakia has a great excuse, not having existed for 32 years, but neither Czechia nor Slovakia come close to Ireland, either is terms of Euro-value or number of software jobs.

Ireland's software exports dwarf Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and the Baltics combined. That's ignoring the inflated GDP figures from international IP revenue tax-dodging.
by cushychicken | 2025-05-30 11:08:50+00:00
What kind of things is it doing?

Wrote me:

- a SPI deserializer that sets a bit after 12 bits read in, to trigger a prefetch

- an SDC constraints file for the deserializer that correctly identified the SPI clock and bus clock as separate domains requiring their own statement

- a test bench that validated both that the prefetch bit was being set, and that it was being set at the proper time relative to the SPI clock

- a makefile with commands for build, headless test, and debug by loading the VCD into a waveform viewer

It always feels like LLMs can do lots of the easy stuff, but if they can't do everything you need the skilled engineer anyway, who'd knock the easy things out in a week anyway.

Nearly every part of the tool flow I just described, I would consider “tricky to get right”. Been doing this for ~15 years and it’s still tough to bootstrap something like this from scratch. ChatGPT-4o did this for me from zero in about 15 minutes.

I won’t lie: I love it. I can focus on the actual, bigger problems at hand, and not the tricky little details of HDLs.

People are either deluding themselves or ignorant of the capabilities of frontier models if they don’t believe LLMs offer a speedup in workflow.

I personally believe that most of the doubt and cynicism is due to:

1) a pretty big collective identity crisis among software professionals, and

2) a suspicion that LLMs make it so that anyone who is good at articulating the problem precisely no longer needs a software engineer as a translation specialist from specs to code.

I say this as an EE of ~15 years who’s always been able to articulate what I want, specifically, to a firmware counterpart, who then writes the code I need. I can turn years of practice in this skill into great prompts for an LLM, which effectively cuts out the middleman.

I really like it. It’s helped me take on a lot of projects that are just outside of my innate level of capability. It’s also helped me learn a lot of new things about these new software adjacent areas. ChatGPT is a great tutor!
by credit_guy | 2025-05-30 11:09:30+00:00
Actually the overhead crushes you when you employ 10000 cores. If the overhead of a process is 10% and the parallel part is 90%, then 2 cores will result in a run time of 55% = 10% + 90%/2 of the original time. And 10 cores will get you to 19%. And 100 cores to 10.9%. If you then buy 9900 more cores to bring it to a total of 10000, you just reduced the runtime from 10.9% to 10.009%. In other words, you increased your bill by a factor of 100 to reduce your run time by almost nothing.
by flohofwoe | 2025-05-30 11:10:00+00:00
> stuck with a C++ programmer you need to figure out how to socialize with.

You're obviously trolling, but:

IME Rust attracts the same 'difficult' characters that are also attracted to C++ (because both are 'puzzle solving languages' instead of 'problem solving languages') the typical Rust coder may be even worse because of the missionary fervor and 'holier than thou' attitude.
by latexr | 2025-05-30 11:10:16+00:00
> Maybe, just maybe, one beautiful day we will live in a world where there are no nuclear weapons nor need for them.

We already live, and have since forever, in a world that does not need nuclear weapons.

> A quote from Sun Tzu

The logical outcome of which being that whoever controls that class of warriors controls the world. I’m not convinced, despite what the quote seems to imply, that is better than never again shedding blood.

With all due respect to ancient Chinese wisdom, Sun Tzu had no concept of atomic bombs, autonomous drones, and weaponised diseases.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-30 11:10:30+00:00
Manual reference counting to be more precise.

When a GC-managed language uses reference counting as implementation algorith, the compiler might be able to optimize the reference counting to only occur when it is unavoidable or too costly to reason about, in a similar vein to bounds checking.

When using library types for reference counting, there is no way for the compiler to implement such optimizations, unless the types are somehow tagged with compiler intrisics so that they could apply the same kind of optimizations.
by piva00 | 2025-05-30 11:10:45+00:00
They're only potentially infinite if we figure out ways to expend an ever-increasing exponential amount of energy to capture them. Energy is cost, there's absolutely no way to know if we will figure a way to produce the energy required to extract resources from outside our planet, even less to know if we won't expend the most easily accessible resources before we can start digging for more outside of Earth.

We should be treating our accessible resources as finite, and improve the efficiency of using them, just to make sure we can keep enough until all the breakthroughs we need to explore resources outside of Earth exist.

It's like the propaganda from the oil industry, talking about how plastics are so damn important for modern life and we couldn't live without the oil industry. It's absolutely true, but it also gives a very clear argument on why we shouldn't be wasting fossil resources to be burnt for energy if we can find other ways to access energy, we should be keeping as much as possible of this finite resource (which very likely doesn't even exist in any close proximity to Earth) for its more useful material products like plastics.
by blainm | 2025-05-30 11:10:55+00:00
Living things that are good at predicting things don't die as much. There's a good reason why our auditory system is always on, even when we sleep. I suspect the reason for something like an 'earworm' is a system that's eager to predict sounds from the environment.

It's probably better to have a slightly overeager prediction system which sometimes gives false positives than one that isn't as active, because false negatives could lead to your death. That includes things like noticing that birds suddenly stopped singing. Maybe it's nothing, but you can see the use of a subconscious background process that has is eagerly making predictions that would then have an error, that could potentially save your life.

Thinking Fast and Slow has a wonderful example of the veteran firefighter who knew to order people out and then later realised that it was his ears feeling unusually warm (that was the clue to the hidden fire under the floor) that made the area unsafe.

If there are alien life forms out there, I would expect them to have evolved similar systems.
by Matthyze | 2025-05-30 11:11:38+00:00
The corruption of the tech/'hacker' subculture has been so disheartening to watch. Is this the subculture that was obsessed with cyberpunk? It took so little, too: good (but not great) salaries, mediocre tech, and a small amount of fearmongering. And suddenly we're here, convinced that corporations must be unconstrained no matter the societal effects. It's as if the cyberpunk dystopias are now seen as aspirational. Absurd and deeply sad.
by znkr | 2025-05-30 11:12:16+00:00
It’s mostly fine, until you run into memory leaks due to circles or because some part of your program holds onto the root of some large shared pointer graph and you have no idea which part. If you take it very far, like some code bases I worked with did, you discover that everything needs to be shared pointer now, because most lifetimes are no longer explicit but implicitly defined by the life time of the shared pointer that holds it.
by aiiotnoodle | 2025-05-30 11:12:20+00:00
It is done for cartographers in OpenStreetMap to map where they have been (or where others have been).

I use it to add metadata to my local area, things like business names, postboxes, benches, etc.

Mapillary is not a private cloud for your own personal Google Street Map. It's a public Google Street Map with appropriate licencing (open) for mappers to add data to OSM, using Google Street Map would be in violation of its licence.
by petesergeant | 2025-05-30 11:12:51+00:00
I wish the UK would make itself even more competitive here, although it's already pretty competitive: 2.13 unicorns per million people vs 4.41 unicorns per million people in the US; 3% of Brits work for "tech" companies as opposed to 1.8% of Americans. It's also going to feel highly similar to home to a great many Europeans.

UK already has ludicrously, insanely generous tax-breaks on small scale venture funding (SEIS), fully 1/3 of the world's top ten universities within a small radius (and another fifty great ones), first-rate banking services, strong rule of law, and pretty limited bureaucracy (outside of land planning).

"All" it needs to do is build enough houses and stop obsessing about immigrants...
by gitaarik | 2025-05-30 11:13:31+00:00
But reward models are always curated by humans. If you generate a reward model with an LLM, it will contain hallucinations that need to be corrected by humans. But that is what a reward model is for. To correct the hallucinations of LLMs.

So yeah theoretically you could generate reward models with LLMs, but they won't be any good, unless they are curated by other reward models that are ultimately curated by humans.
by natmaka | 2025-05-30 11:13:39+00:00
> The French invasion of Algeria has always seemed unique and odd to me

It began with centuries of piracy and enslavement in the Mediterranean sea, leading to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars , which in turn led to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Algiers_(1816) . All this doesn't set a path for the invader to offer equal rights to the "indigenous" population.
by yusina | 2025-05-30 11:15:06+00:00
It's because they are providing abstractions which we/the compilers use, but just doing that would be too slow, so they implement optimizations, but those are based on certain assumptions, so then the users adjust what they do to match those assumptions well, so the optimizations have now leaked into the API, and after many rounds of doing this for decades, you end up with this terrible mess we are in.
by bluGill | 2025-05-30 11:15:10+00:00
It is possible, but it isn't hard to remember the rules. The scope of where you can mess up is isolated to the single class so it is generally possible to get this right. Manual memory management is easy when the new and delete are near each other, but you often need them far removed. RAII ensures the places you can mess up are close.

A static analisys tool can enforce the rule as well- you should have one.

unfortunately though this is one area that because c++ predates RAII it can't changethe defaults without breaking a lot of code. I am saying the problem is manageable - there is a real problem though. If you make a new language learn from this mistake.
by saubeidl | 2025-05-30 11:15:12+00:00
I've become deeply disillusioned with tech. Most folks here are actively building a corporate dystopia, and like you said, it didn't even take that much for them to sell out.

The hacker spirit is dead, it's been replaced by capitalist greed :(

To quote rms:

Join us now and share the software;

You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.

Hoarders can get piles of money,

That is true, hackers, that is true.

But they cannot help their neighbors;

That's not good, hackers, that's not good.