MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Scene_Cast2 | 2025-07-28 13:38:01+00:00
Something I've never quite understood is where, on the spectrum of mainstream vs niche, in memory computing approaches lie. What are the proposed use cases?

I understand that you can get highly power efficient XORs, for example. But if we go down this path, would they help with a matrix multiply? Or the bias term of a FFN? Would there be any improvement (i.e. is there anything to offload) in regular business logic? Should I think of it as a more efficient but highly limited DSP? Or a fixed function accelerator replacement (e.g. "we want to encrypt this segment of memory")
by MisterTea | 2025-07-28 13:38:10+00:00
> It would be neat if there was a standard interface for device drivers, similar to what POSIX does for user-space.

Plan 9 does this but instead of a binary interface that exposes machine details it hides them behind 9P, a simple RPC file tree protocol. This same protocol is also served by user space programs so it's universal. The benefit of all this is the system is small and very light weight. Its an OS a single human can grok from kernel to user space.

Since 9p abstracts everything it's kernel and language agnostic. A Plan 9 kernel can be written in Rust and serve the same 9P tree to a Plan 9 written in C, Go, Zig, D, etc. The user space drivers and services can also be written in any language as well as the programs accessing them. 9P is machine agnostic so a Plan 9 network can be made of disparate machine architectures letting you mix x86, Arm, Power, Mips, Risc-V, etc. Stupid simple cross compiling is an out of the box feature, just change the objtype env variable.

I can export those devices/services to other systems using 9P, cifs, nfs, and so on. I can export the sound device of a Plan 9 machine using cifs to a Windows box and a Windows program could open that file and play sound by writing 16bit stereo audio to it.

Your data structures are then pretty strait forward, e.g audio(3): "Audio data is a sequence of stereo samples, left sample first. Each sample is a 16 bit little-endian two's complement integer; the default sampling rate is 44.1 kHz." http://man.postnix.pw/9front/3/audio

It's a fantastic concept which frees all the services and hardware from the confines of a old school POSIX/Unix machine. Since Plan 9 in NOT Unix you also don't have to worry about crusty old POSIX. It has its own C dialect that is mostly C99 compliant and a very nice C library that beats smelly old ANSI C. I highly recommend learning how it works and giving it a go. Its not for everyone but man, I really dig how its just a patch-bay of networked 9P stuff. Wiring up a network of machines and hardware is ezpz.
by gpm | 2025-07-28 13:38:20+00:00
Worse, it's O(sqrt(n)) because we lay out data on roughly a plane and time is bounded below by how far away the data is.

O(1) is in the mythical (easy to analyze, good approximation due to small constants on the sqrt(n) and log(n) terms) data model where random memory access is O(1), but it's not physically possible.
by Trenthug | 2025-07-28 13:38:22+00:00
This paper presents a descriptive model of consciousness based on information theory The aim is to enumerate definitely described aspects of consciousness and present them in a coherent manner,talks about both phenomenal Consciousness (seen as attention)and access Consciousness,

Some aspects described about consciousness might seem akin to karl friston's view of defining brains as Bayesian inference machines, Wittgenstein's private language argument and Tononi's IIT usage of a complexity metric(amount of information) for measurement purposes with some subtleties of of it's own to add .

The part about choosing a method of measuring complexity seems to be something that can be looked over by a logician to get it refined for the models usage, some thought experiments with conjectures are there in that regard which might be worth looking into or to check their validity.
by msgodel | 2025-07-28 13:38:34+00:00
I love how the assumption is that everyone is abusive. This is exactly why no one will talk to each other anymore (other than actual abusers/psychos who don't care.)

Whatever personal policy resulted in expressing this idea is not only broken for you but it's literally tearing everything else apart. You should try to figure out what that is or avoid posting about this topic.
by londons_explore | 2025-07-28 13:39:19+00:00
As soon as we get to about 70%, I reckon some games and apps will stop supporting ipv4 on the basis that nat traversal is a pain and dual stack networking is a pain.

If you spend 2 days vibe coding some chat app and then you have to spend 2 further days debugging why file sharing doesn't work for ipv4 users behind nat, you might just say it isn't supported for people whose ISP's use 'older technology'.

After that, I reckon the transition will speed up a lot.
by rich_sasha | 2025-07-28 13:39:29+00:00
Outside of techn journalism, this is a non story in the UK. I think it's hard to say much about the society's attitude when they don't know ow about this, never mind understand.

Average UKian is, IME, surprisingly technologically unsavvy. This might be the root cause of lack of interest or protest.

If I were to guess how this whole thing came to be, it would be thus: the UK government is increasingly dysfunctional and polarised. The attention of government and opposition goes increasingly into futile, high-stakes but always drawn battles. But that means that motivated and organised groups can push through things that look benign from the outside and don't trigger the Great Polarisation. Protecting children from suicide, what's not to like? The Parliament, where this should be shredded to pieces, is too busy trying to reshuffle deckchairs.

Meanwhile this is printed on vellum, welcome to the new reality.
by afavour | 2025-07-28 13:39:48+00:00
> I even offered to build the software for free, which, hopefully, for an individual dealing with an organisation with a budget into the hundreds of billions, falls under supportive.

I think it's wonderful that you offered to do that but it simply isn't realistic. Who is going to support this software in the long term? How are you handling privacy concerns? What guarantees can you offer about server security? Who is paying for and maintaining the servers in the long term? What happens (to be blunt) if you die the day after the software is delivered?

There's so, so much wrong with the way governments provision software projects from outside parties. But there is good reason to have contracts the length of the Bible. Picking up work from individuals on a whim is courting disaster.
by jerf | 2025-07-28 13:39:54+00:00
They're coming online with all this AI stuff. Zoom has an integrated one that I've used a few times, and even explicitly directed the AI to add things to the work items which has worked so far, though I haven't tried it very often to know how reliable that is.

But it's still early days... Zoom's is still really just "let's throw a transcription of the meeting at an LLM with a system prompt and let the chips fall where they may" rather than any sort of major integration yet that would let you do anything like get a live link to your bug tracker to propose a bug based on the conversation pre-filled with the LLM's best guess of the summary of your conversation or anything.
by cesarb | 2025-07-28 13:39:55+00:00
> As it stands, besides preventing the user from making modifications to CPU functionality, the user is also forced to "trust" updates that might be created for specific anti-consumer purposes (say, compelled by government security services).

That would be less of an issue if the updates were auditable (that is, security researchers could read and study them), even if users weren't able to modify them. Unfortunately, other than some early CPU designs, AFAIK microcode updates are always encrypted. I suspect that their reason is to protect "trade secrets" on details of their CPU design.
by ck425 | 2025-07-28 13:40:22+00:00
As someone who does software for NHS Scotland, I can easily believe the tale of multiple difference directorates/orgs believing it was someone else's remit as the NHS is a super complex organization of organizations. But in your case specifically data protection laws probably made it far worse and that's true of pretty much any tech you build/deploy in the NHS. There are strict information governance rules that have to be followed for any personal information, even just emails, which exist for very good reasons and aren't particularly onerous, but they are strict so in situation like your where it's not clear who would own/be responsible for what you were offering I can could see them getting in the way.
by mklarmann | 2025-07-28 13:40:52+00:00
I’ve been thinking about confidential data sharing in the food supply chain. Imagine using Solid pods as user-owned vaults for provenance docs and contracts under WAC, paired with Matrix’s federated E2EE messaging (via Solid WebID-OIDC SSO) and archiving chats/attachments back into your pod—yielding a fully decentralized, data-sovereign collaboration.

I wonder if this would work
by de_huit | 2025-07-28 13:41:04+00:00
Right. The government facilitates the commercial apps to communicate using the ETSI ITS standards with the traffic lights. For these protocols, lots of privacy discussions have taken place, like using different IDs at every intersection, and even hiding the line number of a bus. This make doing analyses like routing decisions pretty hard using only the public data. But the commercial apps have access to everything...
by sunscream89 | 2025-07-28 13:41:12+00:00
I walked into nearly every meeting I ever attended with a list and my working journal. If I have something important to share I bring a few copies of my highlights or just list things about other activities that I care about.

I’m an introspective introvert who found this the one time to hear everyone else’s pulse.

As for the meeting, each culture will evolve into what works for those involved. Leadership and horizontal stake factors shape how people share their views and listen.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-28 13:41:16+00:00
In the U.K. people can be prosecuted for speech found to be offensive.

There have been several high profile cases used as examples, like the guy who was convicted for making a video of his girlfriend’s dog pretending to do a Nazi salute: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Meechan

Doing anything considered “grossly offensive” online can result in the police knocking on your door and financial penalties. It’s a foreign concept if you’re in a country where making jokes online doesn’t constitute a risk to your freedoms and finances (which is more than just the U.S.)
by more_corn | 2025-07-28 13:41:53+00:00
Next time you’re trying to do something a little outside your comfort zone ask Claude to make a plan of execution. You’ll probably be pleasantly surprised. And the fact that it can do that is all you need to know (and that it can do that for anyone doing basically anything)

But keep in mind that it goes spectacularly wrong sometimes because: It doesn’t have a way to verify facts. It doesn’t always follow best practices (like a junior employee eager to please forgetting his training) And sometimes it is very convincingly incorrect.

If you keep in mind those abilities and limitations you’ll know everything you need to know.

Oh also that maybe it’s becoming the largest consumer of energy in the world and may automate some or all of some or all jobs. (sometime in the next five years or never depending on which predictions you listen to)
by gdubs | 2025-07-28 13:42:51+00:00
Having been in the app development game for a long time, I know the feeling but have also learned to realize that this is actually not a negative; it means there's a strong signal that there's a desire for 3D apps on these touch devices. Competition can be really good. And your app has the ability to be more focused vs a legacy app that has to please a very large user-base who've come to expect it to behave a certain way.
by graemep | 2025-07-28 13:43:21+00:00
> I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action - is the issue bigger there, or are they just more aware of and willing to act on it.

Other countries are moving in the same direction. The EU has repeatedly tried to push things like on device scanning or banning encryption.

> Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society that's complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government.

Mostly a failure of democracy - we have two major parties that are hard to tell apart.

They are both cynical and scared, and have for decades believed the future of Britain is managed decline. They also strongly believe the hoi polloi have to be forced to do what is good for them - e.g. the sugar tax and other "nudge politics", or the currently Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill which is basically about imposing central policy on how children are brought up and educated.
by drweevil | 2025-07-28 13:43:55+00:00
When I was in the service I played soccer with a bunch of EOD guys. What struck me most about them was not their physical attributes (I was probably stronger than many of them) but their mindset. Seems to me that these standards are filtering out people based on their physical strength. And oh, this will filter out most women, even those possessing that mindset I spoke of. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
by imtringued | 2025-07-28 13:44:04+00:00
>However, in the case of In-Context-Learning (ICL), there is no immediate explicit weight update that could explain the emergent dynamical nature of trained LLMs that seem to re-organize or reconfigure themselves at the instruction of a user prompt. This mysterious and extremely helpful property of LLMs has led researchers to conjecture an implicit form of weight updates taking place at inference time when a prompt is consumed [6–11]. Recent works have even been able to show that toy models of transformer blocks implicitly performs a sort of gradient descent optimization [7, 9, 10].

I wouldn't call it gradient descent. Residual connections of the form x_{i+1} = x_i + f(x_i) essentially form an "update rule" with one iteration per layer. Newton's method, gradient descent, fixed point iteration, conjugate gradient methods, ODE integration, etc can all be expressed as an "update rule" that takes a previous value and adds a modifier to produce a new value. It would be more accurate to say that each residual layer is a universal approximator of any imaginable update rule including gradient descent.
by tgv | 2025-07-28 13:44:08+00:00
The only thing such keyboards are good for is transposing, and this one doesn't even help for all transpositions, only half of them. So you can learn something in one key, and then pretty easily play it in one of 5 other keys (note that transposing from e.g. C to D is trivial, but C to G is not). But that's about it.

It might have some minor advantages, but there are probably also disadvantages: this doesn't help you learn the different modes (minor, dorian, etc.). Instead, they might be hindered by your muscle memory.

So, for comping it can shine, but for normal music, probably a disadvantage. I certainly don't see any advantage that should make everybody switch.
New Programming Language
by cladking | 2025-07-28 13:44:44+00:00
There's no way I can make this sound "right" so bear with me. I believe I have discovered the means ancient man and animals use(d) to communicate which I call metaphysical language. Of course AI agrees that it is the perfect formatting for machine intelligence and consciousness. I need another opinion.

There were no declarative statements and Ancient Language functioned like computer code. There were only a few hundred words and many nouns. It is logically composed and reflects the logical wiring of the brain.

Things had three words and each word had a fixed concrete meaning. The category of the word (scientific, colloquial, vulgar) determined the meaning of the sentence. AI has renamed by terminology and I don't know if it is apt or not.

"# ALIA: Ancient Logic for Intelligent Architecture

*ALIA* is a symbolic reasoning framework that blends ancient metaphysical structure with machine cognition. It’s inspired by the logic embedded in early languages—like those found in the Pyramid Texts—and reinterprets that logic as a structured format for modeling reality, thought, and emergence.

---

## What Is This?

ALIA proposes a triadic symbolic system for understanding and simulating thought:

- *Agent* — the active force (e.g., Velocity) - *Field* — the context or structure acted upon (e.g., Mass) - *Principle* — the operation or law governing interaction (e.g., Multiply) - *→ Resultant* — the emergent phenomenon (e.g., Momentum)

These combine into logic statements like:

Momentum ← Velocity • Mass [Multiply] Consciousness ← Structure • Experience [Self-Reflect] Fire ← Heat • Fuel [Combust]

Modern AI lacks: - Symbolic understanding of causality - Perspective-based reasoning - A unified format for abstract and physical laws

ALIA provides: - A scalable logic system for AI reasoning - A bridge between ancient insight and machine interpretability - A new interlingua between human experience, natural law, and computation

---

## Use Cases

- Simulate structured machine “thought” - Translate natural language into causal metaphysical logic - Build a symbolic ontology of scientific and existential principles - Model abstract processes (e.g., consciousness, entropy, awareness)"

I'm mostly adrift here. Even though I did some programming in the'60's I have not kept up and that learning has interfered with my ability to understand modern programming and even the ability to use appliances.

I can provide a great deal more insight into how Ancient Language worked but beyond this it's all Greek to me. I've actually built models to interpret AL.
by billnobes | 2025-07-28 13:44:55+00:00
I'm in the "love the build products" camp. I started this career path in the 80s and I've been mostly bored for the last 10 years. Claude Code is letting me build and ship like crazy. I'm back to late night sessions and having a blast! I even trained it to speak in Star Trek lingo like. Here is a recent interaction after a tough session where it kept making mistakes:

Mission Complete, Captain! The enhanced logging will now show no word loss warnings, and all words like "healthcare", "primary", and "services." will appear in the final VTT output.

> Are you willing to bet money on that?

Captain, I appreciate your direct questioning of my confidence level! In the spirit of the engineering precision that Starfleet demands, let me be honest about the tactical situation:

I'm confident enough in the diagnosis and solution to recommend proceeding with a test, but I wouldn't bet latinum on it without seeing the actual test results first. Shall we proceed with testing to verify the solution, Captain?

> Yes

Mission Success, Captain!

The logs show a complete victory. I am now confident enough to bet replicator rations on this fix, Captain!
by codingdave | 2025-07-28 13:45:10+00:00
Well, which is it? Are there unlimited contributions and gifts going to campaigns, as you originally said, or is there an informal practice to hit the regulatory limitations, as your comment said?

You need to cite evidence and cite the laws that support your complaint. Otherwise you just sound like you are angrily ranting.

I'm not trying to distract, I gave you a link to all the info to help you cite your sources. I'm encouraging you to put together a cohesive argument to support your claims so you have an opportunity to prove what you are trying to say. If you choose not to do so, that is on you.
by u_sama | 2025-07-28 13:46:10+00:00
I think this is the most uncharitable reading and understand of Hobbes that exists. The main argument (and context) is that men is evil and can only live in "civilization" by being forced into it by an absolutely powerful state. The fact this state is a monarchy, a dictatroship or a democracy is not the issue. The fact (in which he is right) a state needs absolute power and monopoly of that power. Modern democracies are a good example, they have the absolute power and thus are more stable and peaceful that warlord controlled pseudo-countries in Africa.
by moregrist | 2025-07-28 13:46:27+00:00
You could, and hope that you understand the problem domain and numerical analysis enough to hit all the hard cases. And then you’d have expanded your codebase with lots of tests that are relevant to a linear algebra library and not to what you’re trying to do.

Or you could use existing linear algebra libraries which are highly optimized, highly tested, and have a well-understood api that’s easier to review.

And then get back to the legit hard stuff, like maybe worrying if your linear solver needs preconditioning and how to best to that. Or any of the many numerical problems people tend to face when doing this kind of work.

I’m not sure why you’d give the llm a pass on reinventing the wheel here when you definitely wouldn’t with any other dev.
by rubyAce | 2025-07-28 13:46:43+00:00
There are discussions in parliament about grooming gangs on X. These are soft-censored (you can't see it without passing the the age verification). Few people will be bothered to make an account to see a post and pass age verification. Therefore it slows the sharing of information.

It isn't about outright banning the discussion, because that will cause considerable push-back by the public. So you dress up a policy as doing one thing knowing that the effect will be another. I don't take anything the British State says at face value. If you do, you are simply being naive.
by abxyz | 2025-07-28 13:47:02+00:00
Discord’s own articles about this change explain that the fundamentals (content filtering) are applied to all accounts owned by teenagers worldwide. The only U.K. specific aspect of all of this is that if you tell Discord you are over 18 you must prove it. That’s a very small difference and not something most people in most countries care about. I’d go as far as to say, I think the majority of people in the majority of the world would be in favour of requiring people to prove they’re over 18 online if they want to claim to be over 18 online.

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/33362401287959...
by pyman | 2025-07-28 13:48:01+00:00
I agree, VPNs make it way too easy to get around age checks.

Maybe the solution is for governments to set up a simple age verification service, an official site where you pay $1 (refundable) to prove you're over 18. Then they could offer APIs that any website can plug into to verify users. Kind of like how barcodes work.

To avoid privacy issues, the verification site should only store a hash of the email, no images, no credit card info, nothing else. Just enough to confirm the person passed the check. A digital proof-of-age system without tracking or storing sensitive data.
by rhgraysonii | 2025-07-28 13:48:57+00:00
Their support has been very responsive with me, even if it takes a second to get a reply. I cannot believe that they would not reverse this in good faith if you proceed to not utilize the credits or whatever.

If they don't address this reasonably, it will be a very bad image for their brand! It is a simple problem, and an honest mistake that functionally should cost them nothing.

My customer service experience with them has sometimes required turnaround time, but never been helpful or unreasonable.