MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 90s_dev | 2025-07-07 23:47:07+00:00
Oh I forgot there would be a weekly newsletter (posted on the mailing list) and an official catalog of new apps/games in the newsletter.

I also thought of how we could create a site that lets you sign up and upload your shareware games and uses public/private key pairs to generate license keys upon purchase which your app validates with the public key at runtime.

Apps would have to be compiled to wasm bytecode or lua bytecode for that to work though and not be easily crackable.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-07 23:47:33+00:00
> It is like someone inventing the aeroplane and someone looks at it and says "oh, it's flying, I guess it's a bird". It's not a bird!

We tried to mimic birds at first; it turns out birds were way too high-tech, and too optimized. We figured out how to fly when we ditched the biological distraction and focused on flight itself. But fast forward until today, we're reaching the level of technology that allows us to build machines that fly the same way birds do - and of such machines, it's fair to say, "it's a mechanical bird!".

Similarly, we cracked computing from grounds up. Babbage's difference engine was like da Vinci's drawings; ENIAC could be seen as Wright brothers' first flight.

With planes, we kept iterating - developing propellers, then jet engines, ramjets; we learned to move tons of cargo around the world, and travel at high multiples of the speed of sound. All that makes our flying machines way beyond anything nature ever produced, when compared along those narrow dimensions.

The same was true with computing: our machines and algorithms very quickly started to exceed what even smartest humans are capable of. Counting. Pathfinding. Remembering. Simulating and predicting. Reproducing data. And so on.

But much like birds were too high-tech for us to reproduce until now, so were general-purpose thinking machines. Now that we figured out a way to make a basic one, it's absolutely fair to say, "I guess it's like a digital mind".
by SatvikBeri | 2025-07-07 23:48:18+00:00
Can you set up a mailing list or something where we can keep up with updates? I'm interested in trying this as soon as it works with Claude Code.

Edit: I'd be particularly interested if there's a way to run a sort of comparison mode for a while, so I can get a sense of how much accuracy I'm losing, if any. Even at the cost of initial performance.
by dmoy | 2025-07-07 23:48:26+00:00
> the best general advice about which way to turn

At the risk of derailing into insane pedantry land, this part is kinda true, so maybe not the best analogy?

From routing efficiency: https://www.ge.com/news/reports/ups-drivers-dont-turn-left-p...

And also safety: https://www.phly.com/rms/blog/turning-left-at-an-intersectio...
by _ncyj | 2025-07-07 23:49:43+00:00
> I'm pretty sure if you lived in Taiwan you would think very differently

Well, I don't.

> And why you are so certain that Chinese entities are not?

It's not that they aren't, but they can't really. What are they gonna do if I make disparaging statements against their dictator? Deny me entry to their country? Meanwhile America is screening people's social media with immediate effect on careers and livelihood. I don't proclaim to know whether the US will use my data against me but they certainly would have more power to do so against their citizens. Who you trust really depends on where you are and which countries exert influence in your region. I personally would rather nobody have my data and self host everything.
by elliotto | 2025-07-07 23:50:57+00:00
My personal views are an animist / panpsychist / pancomputationalist combination drawing most of my inspiration from the works of Joscha Bach and Stephen Wolfram (https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/03/what-is-consciou...). I think that the underlying substrate of the universe is consciousness, and human and animal and computer minds result in structures that are able to present and tell narratives about themselves, isolating themselves from the other (avidya in Buddhism). I certainly don't claim to be correct, but I present a model that others can interrogate and look for holes in.

Under my model, these systems you have described are conscious, but not in a way that they can communicate or experience time or memory the way human beings do.

My general list of questions for those presenting a model of consciousness are: 1) Are you conscious? (hopefully you say yes or our friend Descartes would like a word with you!) 2) Am I conscious? How do you know? 3) Is a dog conscious? 4) Is a worm conscious? 5) Is a bacterium conscious? 6) Is a human embryo / baby consious? And if so, was there a point that it was not conscious, and what does it mean for that switch to occur?

What is your view of consciousness?
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-07 23:51:19+00:00
It seems like we can invent better checksums and referents than grammatical gender. Arguably that's a fascinating part of the pronoun discussions in English, being one of the last remaining bastions of grammatical gender in English (that and familial relationship words). I don't expect us to invent better things at all quickly, but it seems worth trying and it is interesting seeing various experiments.

One of the things I liked in studying lojban (a conlang of interesting background) was the use of mathematical identifiers as pronouns and "math genders" more related to linguistic role, referents like "the first noun", "the third verb" as pronouns. Referring to things by number is particularly great either, but it was interesting seeing a different approach to it.

Similarly, I think the language with the best pronouns I've experienced is ASL (American Sign Language). Signed languages have the ability to use three dimensional space in ways to anchor references that are impractical in spoken languages but so useful in signed languages.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-07 23:51:43+00:00
As of this comment, a federal court has granted a temporary restraining order against recently passed federal legislation that defunds Medicaid funds for Planned Parenthood.

https://www.abc4.com/news/national/federal-court-grants-temp...

https://www.abc4.com/news/national/planned-parenthood-medica...

https://www.abc4.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2025/07/Plan...
by OgsyedIE | 2025-07-07 23:52:22+00:00
Having a partner who plays around with political name-calling, even in defense of the fund's desired idea that anybody who doesn't want to minimize taxes must be illegitimate in some way that only needs to be devised and spread, is a bad idea for any and every fund.

Once any org stops pretending to be neutral in politics the org is forced to pick a side and can no longer fence-sit, which could lead to falling out of a window.
by UltraSane | 2025-07-07 23:54:36+00:00
Some parents take their shoe off and put it near the child seat and put it back on when you drop the child off. If you forget to drop the kid off you will realize it when you notice you are wearing only one shoe. There are also apps that you can use to log a drop off so your spouse can see and verify.

Putting a air tag or other tracker on the child with a time based geofence is also pretty effective. It should alarm if the child is not at day care when they should be and alarm if the child is near work since you normally don't bring children to work.
by antonvs | 2025-07-07 23:55:01+00:00
Hallucinations still occur regularly in all models. It’s certainly not a solved problem. If you’re not seeing them, either the kinds of queries you’re doing don’t tend to elicit hallucinations, or you’re incorrectly accepting them as real.

The example in the OP is a common one: ask a model how to do something with a tool, and if there’s no easy way to perform that operation they’ll commonly make up a plausible answer.
by elliotto | 2025-07-07 23:55:48+00:00
It seems like you are doing a lot of inferring about mammals experiencing consciousness, and you have drawn a line somewhere beyond these, and made the claim that your process is scientific. Could I present you my list of questions I presented to the OP and ask where you draw the line, and why here?

My general list of questions for those presenting a model of consciousness are: 1) Are you conscious? (hopefully you say yes or our friend Descartes would like a word with you!) 2) Am I conscious? How do you know? 3) Is a dog conscious? 4) Is a worm conscious? 5) Is a bacterium conscious? 6) Is a human embryo / baby consious? And if so, was there a point that it was not conscious, and what does it mean for that switch to occur?

I agree about the confusion of consciousness with intelligence, but these are complicated terms that aren't well suited to a forum where most people are interested in javscript type errors and RSUs. I usually use the term qualia. But to your example about existing for a few seconds without a train of thought; the Buddhists call this nirvana, and it's quite difficult to actually achieve.
by card_zero | 2025-07-07 23:57:06+00:00
This pattern?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ConeMosaics.jpg

Maybe we should put the electronics in a layer in front of the display, make them transparent, and use them to filter the light. The vertebrate retina does something like that, putting nerves in front of light sensors. Imitating evolved solutions isn't always a good idea. Nature's design process is like: start with the wrong parts for the job. Lay them out back to front. Wire them together the long way round. Adapt this design slightly and latch on to any convenient side effects. Iterate ten billion times. Now it works pretty good! Or it doesn't, but the species survives anyway, which is also fine since there is no goal.
by kragen | 2025-07-07 23:58:28+00:00
You say:

> Anyway, I would be really surprised if die-hard thoughtless style prescriptivists thought that the advice "don't use the passive voice" was meant to apply to participles.

Presumably you mean phrases including participles, not participles by themselves. But https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 "The passive in English" says:

> The relevance of participles is that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form.

So, what are you saying they do think it was meant to apply to, if every passive clause always includes a participle? I'm confused.

With respect to:

> Though I wouldn't say the same thing there; if you say "the points that are already made", that pretty much has to be an adjective. If you want it to be a passive verb, go with "the points that have already been made".

the passive-clause examples given in Pullum's blog post I linked above include "Each graduate student is given a laptop," which sounds structurally identical to your example (except that an indirect object is present, showing that it cannot be an adjective) and clarifies:

> The verb was doesn't really add any meaning, but it enables the whole thing to be put into the preterite tense so that the event can be asserted to have occurred in the past. Changing was to is would put the clause into the present tense, and replacing it by will be or is going to be would permit reference to future time; but the passive VP damaged by storms would stay the same in each case. (Notice, the participle damaged does not itself make any past time reference, despite the name "past participle".)

So it sounds like your grammatical analysis is explicitly contradicting Pullum's, which probably means you're wrong, but I'm not sure I understand it.
by pessimizer | 2025-07-07 23:58:34+00:00
It's very important for English to have 9000 vowels so we can tell where you're from within about a five mile radius, no matter how hard you try to hide it.

If you mess up every vowel in an English sentence, everybody can understand every word, but it makes everybody a little upset and a little aggressive. If you want to play it safe, just make every vowel a schwa and people will think you're from New Zealand.
by EGreg | 2025-07-07 23:59:29+00:00
Well, you have to define what you mean by "intelligence".

I think it's just not been enough time, we can take the current LLM technology and just put it in a pipeline that includes 24/7 checking work and building up knowledge bases.

A lot of the stuff that you think is "new and original ideas" are just like prompting an LLM to "come up with 20 original variations" or "20 original ways to combine" some building blocks it already has been trained on or have been added into its context. If you do this frequently enough, and make sure to run acceptance tests (e.g. unit testing or whatever is in your domain) then you can really get quite far. In fact, you can generate the tests themselves as well. What's missing, essentially, is autonomous incremental improvements, involving acceptance testing and curation, not just generation. Just like a GAN does when it generates novel images.

"Exceptional pattern matching does not imply understanding." - You'll have to define what you mean by "understanding". I think we have to revisit the Chinese Room argument by John Searle. After all, if the book used by the person in the room is the result of training on Chinese, then "the whole Chinese room" with the book and operator may be said to "understand" Chinese.

It's not just pattern matching but emergent structures in the model, that is a non-von-neumann architecture, when it's being trained. Those structures are able to manipulate symbols in ways that are extremely useful and practical for an enormously wide range of applications!

If by "understand" we mean "meaningfully manipulate symbols and helpfully answer a wide range of queries" about something, then why would you say LLMs don't understand the subject matter? Because they sometimes make a mistake?

The idea that artificial intelligence or machines have to understand things exactly in the same way as humans, while arriving at the same or better answers, has been around for quite some time. Have you seen this gem by Richard Feynman from the mid 1980s? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipRvjS7q1DI ("Can Machines Think?")
by AlotOfReading | 2025-07-07 23:59:44+00:00
Which is beside the point if the plaintiffs don't claim it as an issue. Take the anthropic opinion in the article, where the judge explicitly calls out that there's an unresolved question of whether the model outputs might be infringing that can't be ruled on because the plaintiffs only talk about the inputs.

Gonzalez is a ruling about downloading even though there was also distribution.
by felipeerias | 2025-07-08 00:01:08+00:00
The missing bit is culture: the concepts, expectations, practices, attitudes… that are evolved over time by a human group and which each one of us has picked up throughout our lifetimes, both implicitly and explicitly.

LLMs are great at predicting and navigating human culture, at least the subset that can be captured in their training sets.

The ways in which we interact with other people are culturally mediated. LLMs are not people, but they can simulate that culturally-mediated communication well enough that we find it easy to anthropomorphise them.
by alexjplant | 2025-07-08 00:01:12+00:00
> Chery specializes in making affordable, mass-market cars that look nice. (The entry-level Chery retails in Qatar for about $15,000 USD—try finding a new car of any kind in the United States for $15,000.)

This is because nobody (*EDIT: by which I of course mean relatively few) would buy it. People signal wealth, status, and even personal values by way of their vehicle in the US. Dealership financing departments ask customers how much they can afford per month in payment and work backwards from there to sell them the vehicle that they want at any cost. The average new vehicle price is around $50,000 because people are actively choosing to buy more expensive cars and trucks [1], not because there aren't cheaper ones around, and 96-month car loans are now a thing because of it.

[1] https://www.kbb.com/car-news/average-new-car-price-flirting-...*
by alterom | 2025-07-08 00:01:14+00:00
>I'm not sure if you've ever worked in a "creative" environment filled with artists

I've played in 4 bands over the past 8 years, paid and unpaid gigs, and helped organize a few events.

So, no, I haven't worked in a "creative" environment (with scare quotes), but I've played live in bars, clubs, concert venues, house parties, So Far Sounds events, art spaces, fairs, park stages, hotels, parties, and so on.

And no, those spaces weren't filled with artists (thankfully). We were the artists; the spaces were filled with the paying audience for which we performed.

Under no circumstances could anyone expect the sounds guy to just make shit work. Nor have whims.

And we've been told "no" a-plenty, because that's the real world. Sometimes you don't get to have a real sound check before going live, and you deal with it.

As a co-organizer: I can recall one person who behaved the way you describe (being clueless about gear and expecting someone else to make it work). I've seen them play in another venue, and — surprise! — their shit didn't work there either. They were a crappy musician, and a bad person. And the sound people at the other venue didn't bend over backwards for that person because why would they.

So, I don't know what artists and what spaces you work with, but the dynamic you describe isn't healthy, isn't the norm, and isn't necessary.

Most importantly: it's not a software issue for Claude to solve.
by Orbital_Armada | 2025-07-08 00:02:11+00:00
Your first source does not support your argument that paleo-anthropology believed pottery was required for boiling. Reading just the abstract it's clear that the source is auguring for the appearance of boiling earlier than the common view that fire cracked rocks (that would have been used for boiling by placing in any water container) marked the earliest point of boiling. The Upper Paleolithic mentioned as the first appearance of fire cracked rocks, and thus assumed initial boiling, is ~5,000+ years before the appearance of pottery.

Ignoring the reference to pottery the assumption that boiling must require heated rocks is probably incorrect. I think this is a common failure mode of archeology, where evidence is preserved (cracked rocks) is favored despite obvious selection biases.
by survirtual | 2025-07-08 00:02:45+00:00
You may be overthinking it.

It is simple. This world as it stands has no future, and is too stressful. It is incompatible with happy women. Unhappy women destroy this world. Not with war, but with apathy. Take away the passion to exist in women, and the planet dies.

Consistently taking away women rights, belittling them, ignoring their complaints, and making everyday life a needlessly complicated rat's nest of intricate nonsense tends to kill any desire to procreate.

Make a world worth living in, that is safe, fun, prosperous, and happy, then people will have kids again.

No one cares about your retirement. They also don't care about their own retirement. They sure as shit aren't having kids for their own retirement plans. It would be extreme narcissistic selfishness to have kids as a retirement plan, I can't imagine anyone in the real world thinking that way.
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-07-08 00:02:49+00:00
Literally the case in question here is a crystal clear example of manipulation? What possible value does this trade provide to any other market participant, and where do the profits come from if it doesn't provide value?

More importantly, there is a lot of debate around what value HFT provides to markets, all I'm saying is that in general the Indian public does not believe its a net positive and SEBI acts accordingly. Maybe you disagree, that's fine.
by dsaalgo | 2025-07-08 00:03:35+00:00
> There are three choices

There is another:

Give away as little information as you can about it.

Don’t say or agree that it’s secret or that you can’t talk about it- just be tight-lipped, and don’t divulge.

If you do it right, you will seem mysterious.

If you do it wrong, they probably won’t talk to you much again.

Win-win.
by smolder | 2025-07-08 00:03:45+00:00
> No one has come close to solving the problem of optimizing software for multiple heterogeneous CPU's with differing micro-architectures when the scheduler is 'randomly' placing threads.

I think this isn't wholly correct. The comp sci part of things is pretty well figured out. You can do work-stealing parallelism to keep queues filled with decent latency, you can even dynamically adjust work distribution to thread performance (i.e. manual scheduling.) It's not trivial to use the best techniques for parallelism on heterogenous architecture, especially when it comes to adapting existing code bases that aren't fundamentally compatible with those techniques. Things get even more interesting as you take cache-locality, io, and library/driver interactions into consideration. However, I think it's more accurately described as an adoption problem than something that's unsolved. It took many years after their debut for homogenous multicore processors to be well supported across software for similar reasons. There are still games that are actively played which don't appreciably leverage multiple cores. (e.g. Starcraft 2 does some minimal offloading to a 2nd thread.)
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-07-08 00:03:47+00:00
"Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions." - VP JD Vance, as the budget reconciliation bill was approaching final passage in the House.

The policy has been clearly stated. Getting rid of immigrants is the one and only priority. Health care policy does not matter. Budget policy does not matter.

And as we see here, rights do not matter, if they get in the way of aggressive pursuit of immigration policy.
by jfengel | 2025-07-08 00:04:22+00:00
I don't see why anything other than low water and pH are necessary. Stories about ultra long lasting honey come from the desert, which will dessicate it further.

(The stories about pyramid honey always imply that it's fresh and liquid. It's not. It's dried out and usually completely crystallized.)

There may be other effects on top of that, but if you made a sucrose solution thick enough it too will last forever.