MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fsmv | 2025-06-14 16:38:36+00:00
The creator of IIT doesn't understand the universality of Turing machines. He thinks that because in CPUs the physical transistors don't have as many connections as neurons in the brain, that it's fundamentally limited and cannot be conscious.

He even goes as far as to say that you cannot simulate the brain on a CPU and make it conscious because it's still connection limited in the hardware. If you understand computer science you know this is absurd, Turing machines can compute any computable function.

He says "you're not worried you will fall into a simulated black hole are you?" but that is an entirely different kind of thing. The only difference we would get by building a machine with hundreds of thousands of connections per node is faster and more energy efficient. The computation would be the same.
by orochimaaru | 2025-06-14 16:38:43+00:00
McKinsey generally ruins most things they touch. Engineering is a different field that McKinsey may claim it has expertise in but has none. Most McKinsey roles are high responsibility and low accountability. Nobody really cares whether their recommendations have worked long term as long as the CEO makes their bonus in the next 6-8 months.

With this I'm not sure what the goal is. If it is to change the process heavy culture of the pentagon to be more automated I'm hopeful. Yes, there is a revolving door between pentagon officials and the prime defense contractors. But I think that is currently a symptom of how the pentagon works, as in, you need to understand the process AND how the product will be used.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-14 16:39:09+00:00
You have a point. I also noticed that the philosophical discussion seems light and completely ignores anything before Descartes. That’s a bad sign. Philosophy beginning with Descartes is riddled with all sorts of bad metaphysics in a way that, say, Aristotelian metaphysics is not. And materialism, which falls squarely into the Cartesian tradition, by definition excludes the possibility of intentionality which is central to consciousness.
by klabb3 | 2025-06-14 16:40:02+00:00
> 4 : Second Order Selves (e.g. cat). Where access consciousness begins. Theory of mind. Self-awareness. Inner narrative. Anticipating the reactions of predator or prey, or navigating a social hierarchy.

Cats and dogs most definitely anticipate actions of other animals and navigate (and establish) social hierarchy. Is this even a trait of consciousness?

I’ve spent much time thinking of qualitative differences between human and close animals. I do think ”narrative” is probably one such construct. Narratives come early (seemingly before language). This lays the foundation of sequential step-by-step thinking. Basically it lets you have intermediate virtual (in-mind) steps supporting next steps, whether that’s through writing, oral communication or episodic memory.

An animal can 100% recall and associate memories, such as mentioning the name of a playmate to a dog (=tail wagging). However, it seems like they can neither remember nor project ”what happens next” and continue to build on it. Is it a degree of ability or a fundamental qualitative difference? Not sure.

In either case, we should be careful overfitting human traits into definition of consciousness, particularly language. Besides, many humans have non-verbal thoughts and we are no less conscious during those times.
by einsteinx2 | 2025-06-14 16:40:02+00:00
> It kinda reminded me of the trash can mac. I wonder if it was inspiration for it

Ironically the trash can Mac actually looked strikingly similar in size and shape to actual small trash cans that were all over the Apple campus when I worked there. I’d see them in the cafeteria every day. They were aluminum though, but otherwise very similar. I always wondered if they had anything to do with the design of the computer, even if only subconsciously.
by rjpower9000 | 2025-06-14 16:40:20+00:00
> I mean, you can. "Have an initial idea. Define a utility function. Apply gradient descent".

> It's just that all three steps are really really hard.

Haha, I was hoping for something a little easier than that! I'm not sure gradient descent would apply for all problem spaces, but I get the gist of what you're saying.

> TDDs insight is that gradient descent is relatively easy if the utility function is one-dimensional and monotonic. (Bonus point, it still works with the set of initial ideas being empty)

That's sort of what I was driving at. I certainly won't argue you can't, with time and patience, at least exhaustively enumerate a solution space.

My impression of the TDD literature e.g. things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_Priority_Premis... is that they're pushing an idea that you can systematically walk through a set of transformations and get a program, that we can thus avoid the "really really hard" steps you mention.

This hill-climbing style matches closely with the monotonic utility function you mention. And if there are lots of interesting problems where this works for people, then that's great. I certainly won't object to having a system for approaching problems, and the general idea of trying to avoid adding complexity too early.

My original motivation was really just observing what appeared to happen when you apply these techniques _outside of their scope_. The failure mode becomes this sort of fascinating circling around a local minimum, with local changes that don't really make progress towards the ultimate goal. This is exactly what you'd see in an ML domain so it's kind of interesting to see it in the real-world.

Mea culpa: that was the part I found really interesting. I likely tried to stretch the point too broadly. Ultimately what I wanted to convey was there's no general way to avoid the hard part.
by beaugunderson | 2025-06-14 16:40:32+00:00
> Point being the people implementing it usually know it’s a bad idea and so do the people asking for it. But politics and incentives are aligned with it being safer for the individuals to go along with it.

we've gone through HITRUST several times and I just told them we weren't going to do forced password rotation since NIST had updated their guidance. it was fine!

and every time we get a vendor security questionnaire I just say "no, we don't do this because it's old guidance" and link to NIST... no one has ever complained.
by treetalker | 2025-06-14 16:40:35+00:00
Not sure if they're underrated, but on MacOS: Alfred (of course) and big ups to Shortcat.

Shortcat is probably the lesser-known and underrated of the two. It invokes a Spotlight/Alfred-type command palette that provides access not only to all commands in the system and application menus, but also allows the user to click on various parts of the screen using only the keyboard.

I'm also a fan of TextSoap and HoudahSpot, which I do think are underrated.

And Keyboard Maestro, of course.

On iOS, Vibration Alarm is a free app that will allow you to easily set an alarm to wake up in the morning but will only vibrate your phone or Apple Watch so you don't wake up your partner or anyone else in the house.

Cross-platform, I love Glossika for language learning. The number of languages it offers is unmatched, and it's simple system of many repetitions of sentences in your native and target languages (paired with spaced repetition of you want it) gets the job done. I use it to keep up my Spanish fluency; I have enough Russian to understand a lot; and basic conversational French with probably 80% comprehension of whatever French I come across.
by JoachimS | 2025-06-14 16:40:54+00:00
Which has nothing to do with SAAB AB, the defence company.

SAAB Automobile was split out from SAAB AB in 1990 with General Motors (GM) taking a 51% stake, and was fully a part of GM ten years later. GM then tried to build SAABs on GM platforms which meant the quality tanked and tanked the company too. And as another posted, What was left became Nevs.

Wikipedia has a good writeup on SAAB, with its many divisions. It's a bit like Volvo. Both companies have had divisions that makes automobiles, heavy vehicles and other types of products. Volvo Cars was sold off from Volvo AB to Ford. The heavy vehicle division of SAAB (Scania) is now part of Volkswagen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_AB
by 0_gravitas | 2025-06-14 16:41:31+00:00
So, this works only for a subset of ads, specifically, ads that are CPC (cost-per-click) (sometimes called CPL -> cost-per-link), this wouldn't work for CPA campaigns (cost-per-action), which only pay out when a sign up or some other arbitrary action is performed by the user.

The larger adtech companies will have some form of bot-activity-detection, _but_ plenty will let it all just slip on by. (I've personally written a Babashka script at $job that checks performance of our publishers, and flags any fraudulent-seeming activity)
by kragen | 2025-06-14 16:41:42+00:00
I'm sure at least one proposed extension has a constant time conditional move, but I don't know of a ratified extension has one. But as T-Head demonstrated with the V extension, shipped silicon can implement non-ratified extensions, and as the fast interrupt handling in WCH's CH32V003 demonstrates, shipped silicon can extend the architecture in ways that haven't even been proposed as extensions. But I don't know of any shipped silicon with a constant time conditional move, either.

For most people, though, using "byzantine" bitops in their security-critical code is less important than being able to run it on a processor that doesn't implement IME or other presumable US backdoors. (Huawei backdoors, though?)
by moandcompany | 2025-06-14 16:42:20+00:00
Adding some additional context on most of the above:

Yes, as commissioned US military officers they become subject to UCMJ.

USDS and DDS employees are/were civilian federal employees with capacity for legal authority to act on behalf of the US Government.

DoD and its branches have uniformed service members subject to UCMJ, but they also have many civilian employees with decision making authority and ultimately the services report to civilian secretaries; the ratio of uniformed service members (e.g. enlisted, and commissioned officers) to civilians can vary greatly by service. Another main difference to consider beyond UCMJ would be eligibility to be considered a combatant versus not; not all uniformed personnel should be considered combatants. "Authority" is not exclusive to uniformed personnel.

Many DoD programs can be led or managed by civilians, typically a GS-15 which is roughly equivalent to O-6 (e.g. Army/Air Force/Space Force Colonel, Navy Captain)

If I recall correctly, Palantir's main starting point beyond some of its fraud-tracking origins at Paypal were through its attempts to compete in the DCGS-A / replacement acquisition in DoD.

Crowdstrike had Dmitry, but its main US Government ties were through Shawn Henry, a former director of investigative operations at the FBI; Crowdstrike had a few business lines in its early days, which included its intel/research/analysis services, breach investigation/remediation services, while it was developing its endpoint protection products/platform.

---

And to the upstream parent comment:

> The key difference is the DDS folks were not uniformed military. That can make all the difference when trying to sell your product or service to a military decision maker.

A lot of DoD acquisitions, developments, operations decisions end up being materially informed by civilian personnel that are direct employees of the US Government, contractors supporting the US Government via Federally Funded Research and Development Corporations (FFRDCS, labs, etc.), other contractors, etc. In some cases, it seems like the DoD programs are entirely reliant (i.e. dependent) on their contractor support (via FFRDCs, labs, etc).

Some of this comes from the fact that the typical active duty officer's assignment duration in a particular role (e.g. acquisition program manager, chief engineer, etc) ends up being two years or less before a permanent change of assignment (PCA). Having organic civilian staff in these roles can be essential for maintaining continuity and can be a key part of a program/mission's success.

(Also worth noting that in a lot of cases where the head of a program is a civilian employee, it's not uncommon to find that are military retired, prior service but separated, and/or also a reserve officer in the same or very adjacent field)
by kazinator | 2025-06-14 16:43:48+00:00
> AT&T licensed it free of charge to academic and government users in the seventies — until everyone was locked in.

More nuance: firstly, there is a story, which may be urban legend, that Thompson and Ritchie secretly gave source code to user groups, by leaving tapes in a predetermined outdoors location to be picked up.

That set aside, AT&T was operating under a some kind of consent decree from 1956 which prevented them from entering the computer business. Which means that Unix couldn't be sold as a product. This is why they distributed it for just cost.

When they got out of that decree, that's when they started to view Unix as a business asset.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-06-14 16:43:51+00:00
Are you a woman? Do you take homona birth control other than the "Mini pill"? My wife read online that it's not safe to take typical hormonal birth control on the standard pill if you get migraines with auras, because it increases your risk of stroke and mentioned her migraines to her gyno, who was like "Oh shit yeah we have to put you on the mini pill then." Which was crazy, because aura migraines wasn't on the laundry list of possible conditions on the intake form. Anyway, she got fewer migraines after changing birth control, so...maybe relevant?
by kendow | 2025-06-14 16:47:00+00:00
Hi community, We’re launching Nexli, a modular workspace platform built for startups, tech teams, and freelancers. Think of it as a customizable operating system for work: you activate only the tools you need (task manager, chat, mind map, notes, etc.) within each workspace.

We started building Nexli after years of jumping between tools like Trello, Slack, Notion, and Figma, which made workflows scattered and expensive. Our goal is to keep teams in flow by centralizing collaboration while reducing tool overload.
by ljm | 2025-06-14 16:47:13+00:00
The accessibility angle is what concerns me. The demos of the Music app, for example, seemed much less clear. You’re gonna have to mess around with whatever settings they provide to turn it off if you have impaired visibility.

It gives off a weird 2.5D HUD effect that works well enough in first-person games (which is basically simulating AR), but is just harder to read and kind of unmoored from the main UX on a flat screen.
by GMoromisato | 2025-06-14 16:47:20+00:00
> And my training has always emphasized living with ambiguity until one comes up with a satisfying resolution.

I wish more people had this attitude, particularly towards LLMs. We're at an interesting point in time where we don't know how LLMs will evolve. Maybe we've hit the plateau and LLMs won't get any better. Even in that case, it will take decades for their effect to be felt in the entire industry, much less the world. Or maybe they will continue to improve on their way to ASI.

My point, though, is that if you're worried about user control over their computing environment (which I 100% understand), then LLMs might be the best solution. I think they could be the only practical solution, as all others seem like pipe dreams.
by cebert | 2025-06-14 16:47:37+00:00
> “To equal the hydrocarbon emissions of about a half-hour of yard work with this two-stroke leaf blower, you'd have to drive a Raptor for 3,887 miles, or the distance from Northern Texas to Anchorage, Alaska.”

This is an incredible comparison. However, there are significantly more vehicles on the road than individuals blowing leaves for two hours a day regularly.
by kazinator | 2025-06-14 16:47:41+00:00
> While he kicked off the movement, Richard Stallman himself has proven to be a controversial figure. He left the Free Software Foundation in 2019 after he made some controversial statements about the Epstein scandal that followed his own pattern of unpleasant behavior.

Am I off the mark in thinking that this really doesn't belong here and detracts from the article?
by amluto | 2025-06-14 16:48:01+00:00
That seems wrong. If you have a cable with a literally infinite bend radius and lay it on a perfectly smooth sea floor, it will be supported in the middle and nowhere else, because the Earth is round. If you lay it on a real sea floor, the length of the longest unsupported span will depend on the shape that the installed cable takes, and whether the cable breaks in that shape will depend on the bend radius it tolerates.
by Bender | 2025-06-14 16:48:02+00:00
Has there has been discussion previously on whether DMing other HN users is a feature that the community wants?

Many here do not like the idea of a DM or even being emailed so I would not get my hopes up.

Based on my memory of past discussions I think the best you can do is hope the person you are trying to reach has put an email alias in their public profile or perhaps ask them in one of their recent comments something like "Off Topic: Looking to contact you regarding [n] thread, my email is in my profile" or something to that affect and use an email alias you know is related to HN so that when you start getting botted/spammed to oblivion you can either create rules or discards or just delete the alias.
by Lerc | 2025-06-14 16:48:05+00:00
I can think words in conversations as if I am writing a story (actually thinking about it it's more like reading a script), but as far as I can tell I don't experience what most people describe as an internal monologue, I also have aphantasia which I understand is a frequent co-occurrence with a lack of an internal monologue.

Obviously I'm conscious (but a zombie would say that too). I can certainly consider the mental states of others. Sometimes embarrassingly so, there are a few boardgames where you have to anticipate the actions of others, where the other players are making choices based upon what they think others might do rather than a strictly analytical 'best' move. I'm quite good at those. I am not a poker player but I imagine that professional players have that ability at a much higher level than I do.

So yeah, My brain doesn't talk to me, but I can 'simulate' others inside my mind.

Does it bother anyone else that those simulations of others that you run in your mind might, in themselves, be conscious? If so, do we kill them when we stop thinking about them? If we start thinking about them again do we resurrect them or make a new one?
by taeric | 2025-06-14 16:49:12+00:00
Adding late to this, as I didn't get to actually look at this video yesterday.

I would still agree that you can do better than the examples I'm finding, but I am not entirely clear why/how the dragon curve is honestly any better here? The prolog, notably, does not draw the curve. Just being used to generate the sequence of characters that describes it. But... that is already trivial in normal code.

Actually drawing it will get you something like this: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Dragon_curve#Prolog. Contrast that with the Logo version and you can see how the paradigm of the programming language can make a giant difference in how the code solution looks.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-06-14 16:50:02+00:00
In the world permeated by computing devices, a lot of people could benefit from being computer-literate in the sense that they have a passing familiarity of what a program is made of (at least that conditionals and loops exist, and by having flawed logic in them you get bugs), and that they could whip up a scrappy spreadsheet with a couple of formulae using a computer or even their phone.

It's more or less like with reading and writing ("I can write" doesn't mean "I'm a writer"), or driving, or other artifacts of modern life.
by majormajor | 2025-06-14 16:50:30+00:00
I'm curious if anyone has seen business improvements along the lines of "this let us discover something that led to 5%+ or >$5M improvements" (percent or absolute depending on how big the company is) from these kinds of efforts?

I've been in a couple of the "we need to unify the data tables to serve everyone" exercises before decided to focus on other parts of the software stack and a lot of it just seemed like "the video game people model it differently because they're doing different analysis, and if you unify the base layer to support everybody's type of analysis, it's not going to change that there's still a bunch of independent, not-talking-to-each-other analysis going on." (This is specifically different from the much LARGER sort of problem which is more a copypasta one - Finance's accounting doesn't agree with Legal's accounting and nobody knows who's right, which is one dataset needed in multiple places, vs multiple datasets needed in different places.)

I think this mostly sidesteps that - they aren't forcing everyone to migrate to the same things, AFAICT - and is just about making it easy to access more broadly. Is that right?

And confusion-reducing definition things - "everyone uses the same official definitions for business concepts" - I'm all for. Seen a lot of that pain for sure.
by monadoid | 2025-06-14 16:50:54+00:00
hey thank you for posting this. I'm sorry to hear about your condition but happy LSD was able to help a bit.

One unsolicited idea from a stranger: consider trying it again! I was in a similar situation for a long time (found it helpful but no strong desire to try it again), but multiple trips over time ended up being very helpful - for me at least.
by kendow | 2025-06-14 16:52:07+00:00
Thanks for checking this out!

We built Nexli after feeling overwhelmed by tool fragmentation—Slack for chats, Trello for tasks, Notion for docs, Figma for sketches... all in different tabs, with duplicated users, costs, and chaos.

Nexli is our attempt to bring it all together into one modular system where you only enable what you need: tasks, notes, mind maps, real-time chat, even a services marketplace for freelancers.

We’re live and eager to hear what you think.

What’s the one thing missing from your current workflow that you'd love to see solved? Or what part of Nexli would you want to go deeper into?

Every piece of feedback helps us build something better—with the community, for the community.
by alwillis | 2025-06-14 16:53:00+00:00
> Apple's models are not competitive.

1. You have no way of objectively assessing this.

2. Apple’s been using machine learning, neural networking and other AI technologies in their operating systems before most of these AI companies even existed.

3. Apple was the first to ship AI-specific hardware (Neural Engine) in the iPhone X in 2017

> Google, OpenAI, Anthropic ... Or even Meta to have a better on-device "lite" model before Apple.

Google's "lite" model Gemma 2B has 2 billion parameters and their Gemini Nano has 1.5 billion. The largest lite model Meta tops out at 1.5 billion.

The model demonstrated at WWDC has 3 billion parameters [1] with 2-bit and 4-bit quantization. So Apple has already surpassed Meta and Google when it comes to LLMs on smartphones from the jump. Seems pretty competitive.

3rd party developers will have access to it as well. If the task requires a more comprehensive model, it can access Apple's Private Cloud Compute [2] seamlessly. Sounds like a win-win to me.

This model is also exposed to automation; you'll be able to create custom workflows that incorporate AI very easily.

[1]: From Apple's press release:

A key component of Apple Intelligence is a new on-device Foundation Model. This model, with approximately 3 billion parameters, has been engineered for efficiency and is optimized to run directly on Apple's latest silicon. To achieve this, Apple has employed advanced quantization techniques, including 2-bit and 4-bit quantization for the model's weights and an 8-bit KV cache, which significantly reduce the model's memory and computational footprint without compromising performance

[2]: "Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud" https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/