MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-06-14 09:31:46+00:00
"Reals" (tragically poorly named) can be interpreted as physical ratios.

That is: Real numbers describe real, concrete relations. For e.g., saying that Jones weighs 180.255 pounds means there's a real, physical relationship -- a ratio -- between Jones' weight and the standard pound. Because both weights exist physically, their ratio also exists physically. Thus, from this viewpoint, real numbers can be viewed as ratios.

In contrast, the common philosophical stance on numbers is that they are abstract concepts, detached from the actual physical process of measurement. Numbers are seen as external representations tied to real-world features through human conventions. This "representational" approach, influenced by the idea that numbers are abstract entities, became dominant in the 20th century.

But the 20th century viewpoint is really just one interpretation (you could call it "Platonic"), and, just as it's impossible to measure ratios to infinite precision in the real world, absolutely nothing requires an incomputable continuum of reals.

Physics least of all. In 20th and 21st century physics, things are discrete (quantized) and are very rarely measured to over 50 significant digits. Infinite precision is never allowed, and precision to 2000 significant digits is likewise impossible. The latter not only because quantum mechanics makes it impossible to attain great precision on very small scales. For e.g., imagine measuring the orbits of the planets and moons in the solar system: By the time you get to 50 significant digits, you will need to take into account the gravitational effects of the stars nearest to the sun; before you get to 100 significant digits, you'll need to model the entire Milky Way galaxy; the further you go in search of precision, the exponentially larger your mathematical canvas will need to grow, and at arbitrarily high sub-infinite precision you’d be required to model the whole of the observable universe -- which might itself be futile, as objects and phenomena outside observable space could affect your measurements, etc. So though everything is in principle simulatable, and precision has a set limit in a granular universe that can be described mathematically, measuring anything to arbitrarily high precision is beyond finite human efforts.
by KaiserPro | 2025-06-14 09:31:49+00:00
> If the display is naturally transparent, I don't see the need for a non-opaque UI.

You're right, but it depends on the screen type. It turns out that just being transparent isn't actually good enough, you really want to be able to dim the background as well. This means that you can overwrite the real-world object much more effectively.

but that adds a whole level of complication.
by necovek | 2025-06-14 09:32:06+00:00
I have a somewhat older, but higher-end m475dn. Last year, scanner calibration mechanism started failing, and printer couldn't complete the init sequence anymore: it can't be used as a printer anymore either.

It has only seen home office use, and didn't run through the second set of toners.

No service shop wants to touch it either, so I've got a 30kg paperweight.

This is why we need all software and firmware to be free software.
by surgical_fire | 2025-06-14 09:33:07+00:00
Out of curiosity, what you can do in, say, Word or Excel that you can't in the LibreOffice versions?

I keep seeing this claim, but it is never substantiated.

I am not trying to be a prick and throwing a trick question in your direction btw. It is an honest question as someone that only needs those applications occasionally, and could switch to LibreOffice without issues.
by anthk | 2025-06-14 09:33:24+00:00
Boot sector Lisp bootstraps itself.

https://justine.lol/sectorlisp2/

Also, lots of Lisp from https://t3x.org implement numerals (and the rest of stuff) from cons cells and apply/eval:

'John McCarthy discovered an elegant self-defining way to compute the above steps, more commonly known as the metacircular evaluator. Alan Kay once described this code as the "Maxwell's equations of software". Here are those equations as implemented by SectorLISP:

ASSOC EVAL EVCON APPLY EVLIS PAIRLIS '

Ditto with some Forths.

Back to T3X, he author has Zenlisp where the meta-circular evaluation it's basically how to define eval/apply and how to they ared called between themselves in a recursive way.

http://t3x.org/zsp/index.html
by fuzzfactor | 2025-06-14 09:33:45+00:00
I've still got a couple small business models along these lines that are over 20 years old now. Still running possibly because I always turn them fully off when not using them. No hibernation, sleep or other monkey business.

One Dell has an early 64-bit mainboard but only a 32-bit CPU in that socket, just fine for Windows XP and will also run W10 32-bit (slowly), mainly dual booting to Debian i386 now since it retired from office work. Puts out so much heat I would imagine there is a lot of bypassed silicon on the chip drawing power but not helping process. IIRC a 64-bit CPU for that socket was known to exist but was more or less "unobtanium".

Then a trusty HP tower with the Pentium D, which was supposedly a "double" with two x86 arch patterns on the same chip. This one runs everything x86 or AMD64, up until W11 24H2 where the roadblocks are unsurmountable.
by gavinray | 2025-06-14 09:34:51+00:00
I do a similar thing, except I email random people whose content or materials have helped me, or I appreciate.

Everything from professors, musical artists, authors, and professionals.

I never expect to get anything back but it's surprising how often I do.

My thoughts are that, if I did/wrote something that improved someone's life, even a one-word "thanks" would feel really good.
by graemep | 2025-06-14 09:35:01+00:00
> ou're still yet to come across anyone like that, as you're misinterpreting the word "leave" for reasons beyond me.

I think you are misinterpreting people who are either physically moving out, or who want their country to leave the union. DO you really know people who claim they will do the impossible/meaningless?

> There's nothing stopping anyone from claiming any area as theirs and then imposing rules on them, trivially bypassing this notion. Examples include: not in my backyard, not in front of my house, not in this city, not in this country, etc.

Really? How would they impose their rules on others? I have a neighbour who does not like me marking in front of her house, but there is nothing she can do about it other than make a request.

TO change things at city or country level you need to have the power to impose it, so only the government can do it.
by tylerhou | 2025-06-14 09:35:37+00:00
> in general regexs are very slow

I really don't think this is true. If you assume that the string is ASCII, a well-optimized regex for a pattern of this type should be a tight loop over a few instructions that loads the next state from a small array. The small array should fit completely in cache as well. This is basically branchless. I expect that you could process 1 character per cycle on modern CPUs.

If the string is short (~100 characters or less, guessing), I expect this implementation to outperform the find() implementation by far as find() almost certainly will incur at least one more branch mispredict than the regex. For longer strings, it depends on the data, as the branchless regex implementation will scan through the whole string, so find() will be faster if there is an vowel early on in the string. Find still might be faster even if there are no vowels; the exact time in that case depends on microarchitecture.

For non-ASCII, things are a bit trickier, but one can construct a state machine that is not too much larger.
by Veen | 2025-06-14 09:36:31+00:00
The "as far as we know" in premise one is hand-waving the critical point. We don't know how or if conscious arises from purely physical systems. It may be physical, but inadequately replicated by computer systems (it may be non-computable). It may not be physical in the way we use that concept. We just don't know. And the fact that we don't know puts the conclusion in doubt.

Even if consciousness arises from a physical system, it doesn't follow that computation on a physical substrate can produce consciousness, even if it mimics some of the qualities we associate with consciousness.
by maccard | 2025-06-14 09:37:49+00:00
> But when I was an infant -- which is not that long ago, parents were advised otherwise

Medicine is wild. Lots of things that were taken as gospel even 15 years ago have been completely flipped on their head. The NHS massively changed their advice last year on asthma treatment and it’s basically the opposite of what they said before. We’ve seen the same with musculoskeletal injuries, nerve injuries and just general recovery.
by Grazester | 2025-06-14 09:38:41+00:00
Blackberry killed Blackberry. Were you alive during that period of time or did you just read about it? Blackberry was so slow to react to the changing technology and the demand for a (decent)full touch device(the Storm 1-2 was trash). I guess BlackBerry either had their head up their ass or were afraid of killing off their biggest money maker, a phone with a Keyboard that the industry no longer wanted. By the time they had a possible candidate ready with the QNX based platform(2012) it was way too late.

Palm and Nokia did have very good OS's at the time and well HP killed Palm and then Microsoft Nokia(those two turkeys)

Android wasn't great but Google iterated very quickly and had the clout to go with it at the time.
by joshuaissac | 2025-06-14 09:38:46+00:00
OpenJDK includes HotSpot and the class libraries. OpenJDK licences do not cost money, even if you use the one from Oracle past a certain patch point. Builds of OpenJDK from other vendors like Red Hat and Microsoft are based on the OpenJDK source code from Oracle.

Oracle JDK is the non-free version that shares the same code base as OpenJDK. Oracle provides a restricted licence for this build, under which it is free to use in certain cases, up until specific patches. Later patches (usually a few years after the initial release date) require a licence fee. This does not apply to Oracle OpenJDK, which is released under the GPL.

If you want to avoid HotSpot altogether, the other options include Graal (used with OpenJDK class libraries), IBM OpenJ9 and IKVM.NET.
by khalic | 2025-06-14 09:40:36+00:00
> Villalobos et al. [75] project that frontier LLMs will be trained on all publicly available human-generated text by 2028. We argue that this impending “data wall” will necessitate the adoption of synthetic data augmentation. Once web-scale corpora is exhausted, progress will hinge on a model’s capacity to generate its own high-utility training signal. A natural next step is to meta-train a dedicated SEAL synthetic-data generator model that produces fresh pretraining corpora, allowing future models to scale and achieve greater data efficiency without relying on additional human text.

2028 is pretty much tomorrow… fascinating insight
by jajko | 2025-06-14 09:40:42+00:00
I see this daily in our banking megacorp. We have IT security team(s), which permeates all other IT activities like ink on paper. On its own its a good approach obviously, we weren't for example hacked or scammed in any high profile case, ever.

But there is no limit to how much additional security you can bring, so they do bring all of it. Recently had to get new Tomcat distribution deployed via Chef tool, of course our own package of it. Now it runs under 2 unix users, each owns various parts of Tomcat. Main startup config (options.sh) is owned by root, to which we will never ever get access, one has to do all changes in a complex approval and build process via Chef. Servers disconnect you after 2-3 mins of inactivity, if you deal with a small cluster you need literally ie 16 putty sessions open which constantly try to logout. And similar stuff everywhere, in all apps, laptops, network etc.

All this means that previously simple debugging now becomes a small circus and fight with ecosystem. Deliveries take longer, everything takes longer. Nobody relevant dares to speak up (or even understands the situation), to not be branded a fool who doesn't want the most security for the bank.

I would be mad if this would be my company, but I go there to collect paychecks and sponsor actual life for me and my family so can handle this. For now at least.
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-14 09:41:21+00:00
> because people accuse Apple of copying others if they take time to do something right

Windows Vista had a translucent UI nearly two decades ago, that should be enough time for Apple to figure out if it's a good or bad idea to copy ;)

There's also plenty of computer games which experiment with translucency in their UIs.

If the Apple UI designers would look out of their ivory tower from time to time they could have realized that translucent UIs are an exceptionally stupid idea after the very shortlived "oooooh fancy shaders" novelty effect is over.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-06-14 09:45:02+00:00
> Either way, it is a sobering take on the AI hype.

Is it? Do you think it's a coincidence that this scheme (whatever it truly was) somehow "worked" from 2019 and happened to "bust" right when things like bolt & all hit the market? Excluding the management fraud with declaring more contracts, this thing produced solutions for 5 years. Now similar solutions can be 0-shot with pretty much the same consistency and quality. Sure, the quality is shoddy at best and there are huge problems (security, scalability, maintainability, etc.) but the happy path usually works.

Remember, we're just 2.5 years post chatgpt and now we have 0-shot abilities similar to what a company employing 700 devs used to provide. I think that's huge. This very much fits the overhyped in the short term (for the problems listed above) and underhyped long term (if this is where we're at 2.5 years later, where will we be in 5-10?).
by npteljes | 2025-06-14 09:45:04+00:00
I think if a layman picks a niche, and really goes into it, then the layman has a fair chance beating the professional in that specific niche. So, you are not wrong with this feeling at all. What professionals have in their favor is a higher level overview of the subject, and experience with similar subjects. Usually this means that while they might not know a niche in an out by heart, they can discover it very quickly, or consider things that are not fitting into that specific niche.

Also, these journalists might not be professionals at all.
by gylterud | 2025-06-14 09:45:07+00:00
There is nothing uncomputable with the cantor diagonalisation. The Russians gladly accept it, I assure you. Here is a Haskell implementation:

diag :: (nat -> (nat -> Bool)) -> (nat -> Bool)

diag f n = not (f n n)

The following argument is also constructive. Just like in classical mathematics, crustructive mathematics proves the negation of A by assuming A and deriving a contradiction. (But you cannot prove A by assuming it’s negation and deriving a contraction):

Assume a surjectiom f :: nat -> Bool. Then there is x such that f x = diag f. Since these two functions are equal, they take equal values when we evaluate them in any point. In particular f x x = diag f x, but since diag f x = not (f x x), by definition, we have that f x x = not (f x x). This is a contradiction since not does not have fixed points.

( I made nat a type variable here since this works for any type / set )
by stevenhuang | 2025-06-14 09:45:55+00:00
Rather, the fact we don't know means...

> you can't trivially rule out LLMs being conscious.

Which is the actual conclusion. That's all.

The one trying to read more into it by claiming a stronger conclusion than warranted (claiming this is all "doubtful") is you.

> Even if consciousness arises from a physical system, it doesn't follow that computation on a physical substrate can produce consciousness

This is incoherent.
by kace91 | 2025-06-14 09:46:39+00:00
This is not surprising at all.

I was a student taking an android dev course when the first iteration of material design came out. My classmates and I had the running joke of “this is an amazing design guide, someone should send it to google”.

You’d see even the most specific principles being broken, the left menu in gmail for example interacted with the header exactly the opposite way the guide said it should.
by dbspin | 2025-06-14 09:49:23+00:00
One of the things I really couldn't stand about living in Germany. The Ruhezeit (quiet hours) are one thing, but literally every building I lived in in Berlin had whacko neighbours that would immediately complain and threaten to call the police if I had two or three friends over, early evening any day of the week. Just talking, without music playing etc. I don't know how people can live that way long term. Or more significantly why. On the other end of the scale it's perfectly normal for multiple competing trash companies to begin collecting bottles and bins daily from a given housing block - starting as early as seven AM. So you get both no rest and no relaxation.
by lithocarpus | 2025-06-14 09:54:00+00:00
That particular study doesn't support that saturated fat causes heart disease.

What it does is suggest that eating more saturated fat in some people raises the LDL cholesterol metric, and others have showed a correlation between a higher LDL cholesterol level and heart disease.

This particular study doesn't make the claim that it's causing heart disease, but so far all the studies I've seen that are probably used in the meta analysis do the same thing. To interpret these studies as showing saturated fat causes heart disease is to use correlation to claim causation. That's the problem I saw with a cursory look at a bunch of the sat fat studies. Meta analysis is problematic because it takes dozens of these studies and makes a claim but when you go into the details the studies themselves either have major flaws or don't support what the meta analysis claims.

As far as moderation and all I agree. Though of course we disagree on which foods are harmful and those should be moderated down to a very small amount. I think moderation with some things - processed foods for example, and I include 99% of what is for sale in a grocery store that has more than one ingredient, is zero or very close to zero. I try to eat only things whose ingredients are recognizable as mechanically separated whole pieces of a single species.

I would bet if there were a study that watched a cohort eat more saturated fat than another and monitored health outcomes, they wouldn't strictly control for saturated fat alone, if you could look at exactly what everyone is eating, they'd probably have the one cohort eating fast food burgers and processed meats and dairy vs the other eating more vegetables - or something along similar lines that confounds the results.

A fairer comparison would be to have two groups both eating healthy / real food diets, but one uses canola or sunflower oil for everything and the other uses butter or coconut oil, and monitor total health outcomes over a longish period. It might not take that long even a year should show a difference. I've only seen two studies that tried to do that and both showed that though the LDL cholesterol was higher in the sat fat group, mortality was higher in the other group, but I'm not claiming they prove anything.
by safety1st | 2025-06-14 09:54:47+00:00
I don't really agree. I use multiple LLMs every day and I feel like I get the most mileage out of them when I think about them as exactly that. Super good text transformers that can paraphrase anything that's been posted to the Internet.

There are a complexities beyond that of course. It can compare stuff, it can iterate through multiple steps ("Reason," though when you look at what it's doing, you definitely see how that term is a bit of a stretch). Lots of emergent applications yet to be discovered.

But yeah, it's math (probabilities to generate the next token) and code (go run stuff). The best applications will likely not be the ones that anthropomorphize it, but take advantage of what it really is.
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by Setas | 2025-06-14 09:56:25+00:00
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by khalic | 2025-06-14 09:56:32+00:00
You should look into LoRA, it’s a partial retraining method, doesn’t require nearly as much as retraining the whole model. It’s different from what this paper is suggesting. The self improvements in this paper even sets the rules for the improvements, basically creating new data out of what it has.

LoRA paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685
by rsanheim | 2025-06-14 09:58:13+00:00
> Any physical process can be computed

Um, really? How so? Show me the computations that model gut biome. Or pain, or the immune system, or how plants communicate, or how the big bang happened (or didn’t).

And now define “physical” wrt things like pain, or sensation, or the body, or consciousness.

We know so little about so much! it’s amazing when people speak with such certainty about things like consciousness and computation.

I don’t disagree with your main point. I would just say we don’t know very much about our own consciousness and mindbody. And humans have been studying that at least a few thousand years.

Not everyone on HN or who works with or studies AI believes AGI is just the next level on some algorithm or scaling level we haven’t unlocked yet.
by 18672959660 | 2025-06-14 09:58:40+00:00
The system uses TokenID (Token identity) as the unique identifier of the application. The permission management service manages the AT (Access Token) information of the application through the TokenID of the application, including the application identity APP ID, sub-user ID, application clone index information, application APL, application permission authorization status, etc. When using resources, the system will obtain the permission authorization status information of the corresponding application through the TokenID as the unique identity identifier mapping, and perform authentication accordingly to control the resource access behavior of the application.
by illiac786 | 2025-06-14 10:00:55+00:00
That is also true in medicine, as a side note. If you have a specific combination of conditions, or a rare condition, you will know more about it than doctors. The good ones know this and accept it. The bad ones are offended you know more than they do in this area – or simply go into denial.

In the end, each body is a niche, which each one is uniquely positioned to know better than anyone else. But it’s hard to accept, for medical personal sometimes, and often for the patients themselves. They tend to want the doctor to be the all-knowing god.