MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-12 20:57:58+00:00
> So what's alive, the numbers? Maybe the silicon holding the numbers? What if we print them out? Does the book become conscious?

Indeed, those are exactly the questions you need to ponder.

It might also help to consider that human brain itself is made of cells, and cells are made of various pieces that are all very obviously machines; we're able to look as, identify and catalogue those pieces, and as complex as molecular nanotech can be, the individual parts are very obviously not alive by themselves, much less thinking or conscious.

So when you yourself are engaging in thought, such as when writing a comment, what exactly do you think is alive? The proton pumps? Cellular walls? The proteins? If you assemble them into chemically stable blobs, and have them glue to each other, does the resulting brain become conscious?

> Even if you're a materialist, surely you think there is a difference between a human brain and a brain on a lab table.

Imagine I'm so great a surgeon that I can take a brain out someone, keep in on a lab table for a while, and then put it back in, and have that someone recover (at least well enough to they can be interviewed before they die). Do you think is fundamentally impossible? Or do you believe the human brain somehow transmutes into a "brain on a lab table" as it leaves the body, and then transmutes back when plugged back in? Can you describe the nature of that process?

> You take a dead persons brain, run some current through it and it jumps. Do you believe this equivalent to a living human being?

Well, if you the current precisely enough, sure. Just because we can't currently demonstrate that on a human brain (though we're getting pretty close to it with animals), doesn't mean the idea is unsound.
by nwienert | 2025-06-12 20:58:26+00:00
Pretty valuable to have people who see A to be true, have presumably seen some of B to be true too (trivial to see with the many replication crises) - and then to do their best to disseminate that to the general public so change can be made. I see no problem there, and I'd hate for the case where people were afraid to make content covering it because they were waiting for years for huge studies (which could also be poorly done) to 'prove' it.
by derefr | 2025-06-12 20:58:49+00:00
Cloudflare isn't a cloud in the traditional sense; it's a CDN with extra smarts in the CDN nodes. CF's comparative advantage is in doing clever things with just-big-enough shared-nothing clusters deployed at every edge POP imaginable; not in building f-off huge clusters out in the middle of nowhere that can host half the Internet, including all their own services.

As such, I wouldn't be overly surprised if all of CF's non-edge compute (including, for example, their control plane) is just tossed onto a "competitor" cloud like GCP. To CF, that infra is neither a revenue center, nor a huge cost center worth OpEx-optimizing through vertical integration.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-12 20:58:51+00:00
Maybe we can finally get shows/movies that are faithful to the books instead of whatever slop we normally get (Looking at you WoT). Obviously a book != a script (like script for a show/movie, not a code script) but with LLMs I feel confident it could generate a script that could be reviewed directly or review the final video then go back and tweak the script as needed ("Ahh crap, it misunderstood the 'you' in that sentence and the wrong character just spoke in the generated video, let me fix that and re-gen that scene").
by matheusmoreira | 2025-06-12 20:59:20+00:00
> They gotta follow the constitution.

No, they don't. They can do whatever they want and nobody can do a thing about it. Whatever they write on a paper becomes law, simply because police enforces it.

The fact they weren't and aren't following the constitution was a major cause of January 8th. Censorship is unconstitutional in Brazil, especially that of a political nature. And political censorship is exactly what they engaged in. They just happened to use euphemisms like "fake news". I remember one case where they censordd a documentary before it was even published. A priori censorship, something not seen in these lands since the military dictatorship.

> And judge criminals.

Supreme court's purpose is to judge politicians with immunity and assorted privilges. Not common citizens.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-06-12 20:59:42+00:00
Had that on the WiFi system at a facility I used to work from for a while.

When you connect to their WiFi, you go to a guest portal to connect to the internet. The guest portal grants your MAC address 24 hours of access. Meaning one day you get to work at 9, the next day you get in at 8:55, you’ll have 5 minutes more of WiFi before things just stop working and your system takes a minute to realize you need to reauth with the captive portal
by freedomben | 2025-06-12 20:59:47+00:00
(I am a layman here so take this with a grain of salt) I believe you are correct, however no campfire will have enough airflow to get that hot unless you have a bellows or some other way of injecting air into it, and you'd have to have it structured in a way that it can efficiently burn the fuel. I'm not much of a blacksmith but had a friend who was into it and whose dad also was, and we did a pretty fair amount of "experimenting" as kids :-D I know from experience that elevation makes a big difference too, though I've never measured.

Would be fascinating for someone with knowledge of this to weigh in!
by db48x | 2025-06-12 21:00:17+00:00
> The kind of research NIH funds: long-horizon, high-risk, mechanism-level discovery, is not something corporations will just pick up the tab on…

Except that there are plenty of counterexamples to that idea. Bell Labs employed thousands of researchers and they made many foundational discoveries alongside the thousands of inventions that were merely development of the existing phone system. The list of foundational discoveries made there is so long that is hard to imagine. Just off the top of my head it includes the transistor, the integrated circuit, the operating system, lasers, fiber optics, CCDs, solar cells, etc, etc. Nyquist and Shannon worked there and discovered the mathematical foundations of information theory, including entropy, bits, communication channel capacity, etc, etc.

They were ridiculously productive and fantastically profitable, but these days with taxpayers funding research most corporations don’t bother any more.

The articles you link to have much to say about how research is currently done, but do not even purport to say that this is the only way it could ever be done.
by bsder | 2025-06-12 21:00:46+00:00
> Also, there are TONS of rules about fire AND entire departments for dealing with it safely when it gets out of control.

Erm, that was my point, made far too obtusely, apparently.

We, as humans, have lots of things that are super-useful, yet dangerous. And we mitigate that through laws, regulations, and government. And, when they are dangerous to other people beyond an individual use, we have lots more of those laws, regulations, and government.

AI should probably have some liability laws around it like a human would if they said, did or encouraged the same things.
by nhecker | 2025-06-12 21:01:10+00:00
My shallow understanding is that utilities and grid operators need to manage the supply/load ratio carefully to keep the grid's operating frequency in a very narrow band, centered around 50 or 60 Hertz. If supply outstrips demand, and assuming supply can't react [quickly enough], the operating frequency starts to rise as all the rotating masses connected to the grid gain momentum from the additional power. If the operating frequency increases too much outside of design parameters that could end badly.

So one solution is to incite demand (with negative rates) for folks to ramp up their use of electricity (into e.g., a dump load resistor bank), bringing demand back in line with supply, and bringing the operating frequency back under control.

I hate the waste, agreed. But it would be irresponsible of the operator to bank that extra supply energy into the momentum of spinning things owned by the consumers just so they could pull it out later by intentionally under-supplying. E.g., an aquarium's big water pumps designed to spin only so fast or produce so much pressure might not like being operated at 110% the rated speed at random times of the day.

related links:

https://fnetpublic.utk.edu/frequencygauge.html (you can watch the grid frequency fluctuate in real-time, here!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_frequency
by wrboyce | 2025-06-12 21:02:02+00:00
I love reverse engineering, but it is strictly a hobby (fortunately? Unfortunately? Honestly I’m not sure!).

Anyway, I’d heartily recommend Microcorruption[1]. It’s really good fun, uses a fairly simply assembly flavour (msp430), and introduces new concepts at a nice cadence.

Shameless plug: I’ve written up a bunch of the solutions in “tutorial form” on my blog[2], but I am incredibly slow at getting new posts out (although I do have the next ~4 levels in nearly-complete drafts).

[1]: https://microcorruption.com/

[2]: https://lovesexsecretgod.com/
by evanjrowley | 2025-06-12 21:02:11+00:00
In the future, US citizens wanting to exercise their 4th amendment right against unlawful seziure of their biometrics will do so by ceasing to breathe.

Because you can't require a warrant for biometrics that you impart to the (public) environment around you, like fingerprints on a door handle, saliva on a discarded cigarette, or in this case... air.
by daedrdev | 2025-06-12 21:03:07+00:00
When the grid has to much money for 10 seconds, the cost of finding an having a productive asset that is ready to accept such a short burst of energy means that paying people to throw it away can easily be cheaper, leaving you with net positive money that can be used towards keeping people warm. Real systems involve tradeoffs, and so there will always be some short enough time frame where throwing away energy is better for society and human welfare than building infrastructure to use it. Everyone already using the energy gets it for free when prices are negative.
by edanm | 2025-06-12 21:03:07+00:00
So Israel has been conducting genocide against Palestinians for decades? That's simply preposterous. There's zero reason to think so, and many, many reasons to think it's not true.

> since decades before its for for-show semi-diseengagement from Gaza

So when Israel does do what Palestinians supposedly want - completely remove all its citizens from the territory and hand it over to Palestinians to control - then it's all "for show"? In what way exactly? What should Israel do then that would satisfy you/Palestinians?

> (heck, even for decades before it fostered the creation of Hamas while it occupied Gaza to split Palestinian resistance from its unified backing of the less Islamist, more pan-Arab nationalist PLO.)

You're kind of skipping over the part where Israel engaged in a peace process with the PLO, signed the Oslo accords with them, recognized them as the official representatives of the Palestinian people in the form of the Palestinian Authority, continued working towards peace with the PA until 2008 (ending in, as always before it, an offer for a two-state solution presented to the PA by Olmert, which they rejected). And has worked in security cooperation with the PA since.

Although to be clear, I think Israel has not engaged in any meaningful attempt at peace since 2009, and has in fact done quite the opposite. Criticism of Israel propping up Hamas on purpose to weaken the chance of a two-state solution is a valid one, but it happened after Israelis got largely disillusioned with the idea of any peace being reached, given the multiple failures of PA leadership to sign 2SS deals with Israel, and the simultaneous launching of the Second Intifada.
by jmmv | 2025-06-12 21:03:48+00:00
There are a few factors to the slow boot:

* The SD card I'm using in there is not the fastest. Easy fix.

* The kernel has some annoying pauses, particularly in WiFi initialization, that add a couple of seconds of delay. To fix this, I wanted to do driver loading via modules once the shell is already up and running, but unfortunately NetBSD hasn't modularized those drivers yet and it didn't seem trivial to do. Should be possible though.

* The rc startup framework is sluggish. I've been pondering a rewrite in native code to avoid huge shell scripts and to allow for parallel execution of early boot services, and that should help -- but it isn't done. (Ideally I'd just replace init with my own thingy.)

* The file system is not read only, so there is an initial fsck that adds a bit of a delay. I want to get to a point where it _is_ read only, which would eliminate this pause.

All in all, agree that 10 seconds is very far from "instant boot", but there is a lot of room for improvement.
by aeve890 | 2025-06-12 21:03:48+00:00
>As the recently released Apple study demonstrates, LLMs don't reason, they just pattern match

Hold on a minute I was under the impression that "reasoning" was just marketing buzzword the same as "hallucinations", because how tf anyone expected GPUs to "reason" and "hallucinate" when even neurology/psychology don't have a strict definition of those processes.
by dheera | 2025-06-12 21:04:10+00:00
It's actually not that difficult to pick up quantum mechanics and quantum computing if you have a solid foundation in linear algebra. QC really just reduces down to "applied linear algebra on crack".

If you're in AI, you might be pleased to know that the probability distribution of a particle in its various energy states is related to the softmax of the negative values of those energies times temperature, which is where the concept of LLM "temperature" comes from. If you have linear algebra background, those energies are the eigenvalues of a Hamiltonian. Physics is actually quite beautiful.

Getting into industries is another issue though, it seems every company favors credentials over learning ability these days. If you haven't published 1500 papers on the subject you're automatically rejected.
by codekarate | 2025-06-12 21:04:21+00:00
ahh, thanks for flagging the browser issues

don't want to build the "meta-course" but we are going to improve the getting started instructions.

Basic steps are: 1. Copy the command on the course page in your terminal 2. Open that folder up in your editor and make sure the Mastra MCP Docs Server is available to your editor 3. Say something like "start mastra course" to your code agent and it should start working

Still very experimental though and depending on editor/model the results do vary a bit
by GJim | 2025-06-12 21:04:44+00:00
So Americans/Irish/English/Scots/Welsh/Australians are all being "colonialist" when they refer to Wien as 'Vienna', Čechy as 'Bohemia', Abertawe as 'Swansea' and La Manche as 'The English Channel'?

Do you know how ridiculous you sound?
by edanm | 2025-06-12 21:06:51+00:00
You're right, but the parent wasn't saying Israel has a vast spy network, they said Israel has the "biggest spy network ever invented, which is woven into practically all software and tech infrastructure we use in the West [...]".

That goes far beyond the realm of reality and parent is right to ridicule it.

Israel has (presumably) a pretty great spy network, but mostly around its immediate enemies. It's certainly much smaller than many other countries' spy networks, I imagine.
by theamk | 2025-06-12 21:07:50+00:00
Well, you gotta draw the line somewhere, right? You can ssh into all sort of weird places, like native windows machines, or routers which expose their own shell, and you cannot expect them to be as usable as the regular ones.

The systems with non-POSIX non-interactive shell are firmly in the "special" category. If a user decided to set their _non_interactive_ shell to fish - they know they are heading for trouble and should not be surprised. I would not worry about such users in my scripts for example.
by zerd | 2025-06-12 21:08:33+00:00
> it wasn't a widespread GCP outage.

If this wasn't widespread, what is?

Incident affecting API Gateway, Agent Assist, AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, Apigee, Apigee Edge Private Cloud, Apigee Edge Public Cloud, Apigee Hybrid, Cloud Data Fusion, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Logging, Cloud Memorystore, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Run, Cloud Security Command Center, Cloud Shell, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Workstations, Contact Center AI Platform, Contact Center Insights, Data Catalog, Database Migration Service, Dataform, Dataplex, Dataproc Metastore, Datastream, Dialogflow CX, Dialogflow ES, Google App Engine, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Bigtable, Google Cloud Composer, Google Cloud Console, Google Cloud DNS, Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud Dataproc, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Storage, Google Compute Engine, Identity Platform, Identity and Access Management, Looker Studio, Managed Service for Apache Kafka, Memorystore for Memcached, Memorystore for Redis, Memorystore for Redis Cluster, Persistent Disk, Personalized Service Health, Pub/Sub Lite, Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech, Vertex AI Search
by psunavy03 | 2025-06-12 21:08:40+00:00
Having flown tactical jets off an aircraft carrier into Afghanistan . . . you seem to be conflating "dangerous" with "inherently unforgiving." Flying jets in combat against a peer foe is dangerous. Flying them in peacetime is inherently unforgiving. "Dangerous" occurs when I as an aviator can be taken out by something not under my control or that of my pilot or fellow aircrew.

The reason verbiage matters is because many people fear flying because they look at it as some kind of gamble as opposed to something where risks can be mitigated down quite a bit by the act of being safety-conscious. Even flying multi-plane low-levels or opposed large force exercises are not "dangerous" per se, so long as everyone plays by the rules and takes it seriously. Civil aviation is so safe because of a culture of making it safe.
by bloomingeek | 2025-06-12 21:08:49+00:00
I've always been a list maker. It feels good to put a check mark next to a finished item. I once read an article declaring that list making can turn into a form of bondage. I thought this might have value, so I quit making lists. This was a mistake, because without the list I had problems prioritizing tasks. (And I'm a little forgetful.) Things get done when I list.
by oofbey | 2025-06-12 21:09:26+00:00
Cool - thanks for explaining that. I totally see how each has its place.

I imagine it's pretty complex to take the raw scan data and generate 3dgs. Are these algorithms simple & standard, or do they take a fair amount of tuning & tweaking to do a good job? Adapting these to work well with hard-edge ovals seems like it would take some work, and a lot more work to get them to output a mix of ovals & fuzzy blobs. But if you could do that, I agree the combination would be amazingly expressive.
by nxobject | 2025-06-12 21:10:08+00:00
Re context and overthinking:

> One thing I noticed from early access: if you don’t give it enough context, it does tend to overthink.

I agree with this – that being said, I find that simply asking at the end of a prompt "Do you need any clarifications before you continue?" does a pretty good job at helping AI pin down details as well.
by Xevion | 2025-06-12 21:10:29+00:00
Then why'd you pick a 50+ character password? No one made you do that. That's your fault, not Apple's.

- As you said, it's a multi-platform account, so probably multiple devices in multiple locations will need the password. Meaning you won't have easy access to your password manager. - Popular account, so you'll likely be using it often, probably re-typing or pasting it.

Common sense says that manually typing out a password was a likely scenario.

Switch to a phrase-based password. It'll still be really secure, and you'll be freed from your self-inflicted woes.
by hollerith | 2025-06-12 21:10:47+00:00
According to your logic, the Germans should harangue the Azerbaijanis till they change "Almaniya" (the word for Germany in their language, which probably derives from the French "Allemagne") to "Deutschland".

The Finns call Germany "Saksa", those Finno-imperialists!

The Poles call it "Niemcy".
by arp242 | 2025-06-12 21:10:54+00:00
> Recursive resolvers depend on a hierarchy of name servers—root, TLD, and authoritative—many of which are geographically and administratively dispersed. Attempting to localize DNS strictly within national or continental boundaries goes against the core architecture of how name resolution works.

No one is trying to "localize DNS strictly within national boundaries". Just first first step your computer makes in resolving it.
by mikepurvis | 2025-06-12 21:11:04+00:00
Remember how 1Password used to install itself as a custom keyboard that could "type" your passwords into arbitrary text fields anywhere in the OS, before password management specific hooks were added?

It would be nifty if your phone could just connect to other devices as a BT keyboard and type in passwords there too. Probably not worth the actual fuss of pairing a BT device, but if that part were not so painful it could be quite a nice solution.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-06-12 21:11:27+00:00
> As the recently released Apple study demonstrates, LLMs don't reason

Where is everyone getting this misconception? I have seen it several times. First off, the study doesn't even try to qualify whether or not these models use "actual reasoning" - that's outside of the scope. They merely examine how effective thinking/reasoning _is_ at producing better results. They found that - indeed - reasoning improves performance. But the crucial result is that it only improves performance up to a certain difficulty-cliff - at which point thinking makes no discernable difference due to a model collapse of sorts.

It's important to read the papers you're using to champion your personal biases.
Ask HN: Weather
by iambateman | 2025-06-12 21:11:51+00:00
It is absolutely pouring outside. But my weather app thinks it’s just cloudy.

Why is it that weather apps seem to be less accurate in the early summer time? So often it’s spot on with “the rain will stop in 20 minutes” but then there’s these storms that everyone on the ground knew were coming but the radar couldn’t predict.
by coffeeenjoyer | 2025-06-12 21:11:56+00:00
> If you're a software engineer, you know not to depend on these kind of things, and there's no way to expect the library / framework author to reason about how people are using it.

Libraries and frameworks, I assume you meant open-source here, are a different thing.

A phone for which I paid a good amount of money, now doesn't let me use a different operating system anymore while maintaining the same (or arguably better) high level of security. Something which was possible thanks to the hard work of the GrapheneOS community, for the past ~looks at wikipedia~ 6 years... But that is no more, because the binary blobs cannot be forked like you would normally do in the case of FOSS libraries.

> What if someone else came up and said I'm using Pixel as a doorstop, and now that Pixel has a camera bump, it doesnt work anymore - I hate the company. Strange indeed.

Well luckily they can't physically alter the phone which I already own. If I didn't like the looks of the new Pixel, then I simply would not purchase it.

What Google can do though, is (indirectly) stop me from using it the way I envisioned before I bought this nice computing device, the way many others have been enjoying before me.

Anyway, I wasn't just talking about whether Google are wrong or not to do this. They understand what the consequences of their action are, and that just makes it shitty in my opinion. Am I upset? No, just disappointed.

> This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".

I view your position to put up a snarky defense based on weak analogies, for Google nonetheless, equally strange. "I'm on the internet where people can have different opinions, and I'm upset".