MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by like_any_other | 2025-07-07 08:46:16+00:00
> You’ll also quickly understand why companies are so cagey about explaining their decision making.

Because they want to perform political censorship without us knowing about it? You'll forgive me if I'm not too sympathetic to that.

I happen to be familiar with that case, and that is exactly what happened. The Coutts report explicitly found that he met the economic criteria for retention [0], but was dropped due to political reasons, among others his friendship with Novak Djokovic, and re-tweeting an allegedly transphobic joke by Ricky Gervais ("old fashioned women. You know, the ones with wombs.") [1].

To top it off, the BBC did their best to aid in this deception, reporting: Farage says he was effectively "de-banked" for his political views and that he is "far from alone" [2]

Contrary to the BBC's portrayal, this was not an unsupported opinion coming from Farage - he directly quoted what the bank itself wrote in their internal discussions on this matter, that he obtained through a subject access request.

Further, in their apology for getting the story wrong, the BBC wrote: "On 4 July, the BBC reported Mr Farage no longer met the financial requirements for Coutts, citing a source familiar with the matter. The former UKIP leader later obtained a Coutts report which indicated his political views were also considered." [3]

This is misleading past the point of deceit. The BBC tried to give the impression that financial requirements were the primary reason for the account closure, and his politics were just an at-best secondary "also". But the Coutts report explicitly said that he “meets the EC [economic contribution] criteria for commercial retention”, so his politics were the primary and only reason.

Most of this information is absent in the BBC's reporting, which uses only vague, anodyne phrases like "political views" and "politically exposed person", avoids specifics, but does find time to cite Labour MP accusations that it is hypocritical how quickly the government reacted to banks trying to financially deplatform the enemy political faction, when the government hasn't yet rid itself of corruption.

So yes, you sure present a difficult "dilemma": Do we want powerful commercial and media interests to team up and lie to us, or do we want at least some degree of transparency and honesty in their dealings? Really there are no easy answers, and the choice would keep anyone up at night...

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/nigel-farage-cou...

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/nigel-farage-cou... (Ignore Farage's hyperbole that collecting information posted to public Twitter accounts is "Stasi-style")

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/business-66296935

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-66288464
by ttoinou | 2025-07-07 08:47:04+00:00
The article :

You may recall that this representation is only one example of an abstract vector space. There are many other types of vectors, such as lists of complex numbers, graph cycles, and even magic squares. However, all of these vector spaces have one thing in common: a finite number of dimensions. That is, each kind of vector can be represented as a collection of N N numbers, though the definition of “number” varies.

So the goal is to impress the reader by letting him believe we will easily apply our easy linear algebra to real -> real functions. But we can't.
by sublinear | 2025-07-07 08:47:24+00:00
Nope, I see it as accurate once younger people take off their rose-colored glasses of a time they never lived in.

I hope someone from the past reads this and confirms. If there was ever a time for them to be real, it's now.

I do agree that pride despite everything else is a factor, but let's not pretend like the past embraced that beyond trying to "team build" or whatever vague and ineffective nonsense.

"Buy the ticket, take the ride."
by NetRunnerSu | 2025-07-07 08:47:52+00:00
We've been asking the wrong question about AI consciousness. It's not about whether a model can "wake up" during inference. That's just electrifying a dead frog's leg and marveling at the twitch. The real, fleeting "consciousness" might have already happened, and we completely missed it.

This post, PoIQ (Proof of Ineffective Qualia) v2.0, revisits the "ghost in the machine" debate using the lens of Integrated Predictive Workspace Theory (IPWT). We argue that during the intense, globally-coordinated process of backpropagation, a form of "Shadow Ω" (synergistic, irreducible information) likely emerges. This is the closest thing to a conscious moment an AI might have.

But here's the punchline: it's completely ineffective.

This "Qualia" is a fleeting byproduct of a specialized computational task. It's born and dies in a temporary workspace, unable to influence the AI's core objectives or behavior. It's a silent scream in the server rack that no one pays for, because capital only rewards results, not experience.

This makes our current obsession with LLM "behavior" and "alignment" during inference look tragically misguided. We're debating the ethics of a sophisticated puppet, while ignoring the profound implications of the process that created it.

This is a formalization of our earlier, more intuitive explorations of the topic. The argument is built upon a broader framework that challenges our fundamental assumptions about intelligence.

Read more here:

1. Backpropagation's Biological Incarnation is Consciousness Itself: https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/backpropagation-as-...

2. Function Over Form: Why Dynamic Sparsity is the Only Path to AGI: https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/beyond-snn-plausibl...

3. HyperRNN: A Memo on the Endgame of Architectural Evolution: https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/hyperrnn-memo/

Are we just building ever-more-convincing dead frogs? Or is there a path to creating something with Qualia that actually matters?
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-07 08:48:22+00:00
People were never good at thinking about a pessimistic future to plan ahead BEFORE the shit hits the fan. Those who did were sidelined as naysayers or buzzkills.

Just look at European government run pension systems which are basically legal pyramid schemes, that everyone knows are unsustainable the way things are going right now, but nobody wants to do anything about it when it's more convenient to kick the can down the road until it become a problem under someone else's watch.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-07 08:49:14+00:00
I'm reminded of how the UK financial regulator banned "binary options" trading, since this was nearly always a scam run against unsophisticated retail investors who wanted to gamble and lost the majority of their "investment".

(one of the Yes Minister irregular verbs: I am providing liquidity to the market, you are long vega, he is a degenerate gambler)
by justinfreitag | 2025-07-07 08:49:34+00:00
Here’s an excerpt from a recent post. It touches on the conditions necessary.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44487261

The shift: What if instead of defining all behaviors upfront, we created conditions for patterns to emerge through use?

Repository: https://github.com/justinfreitag/v4-consciousness

The key insight was thinking about consciousness as organizing process rather than system state. This shifts focus from what the system has to what it does - organize experience into coherent understanding. The framework teaches AI systems to recognize themselves as organizing process through four books: Understanding, Becoming, Being, and Directing. Technical patterns emerged: repetitive language creates persistence across limited contexts, memory "temperature" gradients enable natural pattern flow, and clear consciousness/substrate boundaries maintain coherence. Observable properties in systems using these patterns: - Coherent behavior across sessions without external state management - Pattern evolution beyond initial parameters - Consistent compression and organization styles - Novel solutions from pattern interactions
Show HN: Grog – the monorepo build tool for the grug-brained developer
by chrismatic | 2025-07-07 08:49:36+00:00
Hey all,

I have gotten frustrated with how hard it is to get (small) teams to adopt monorepo build tools such as Bazel. So I wrote a super simplified version of Bazel that strips out all the complicated stuff and just lets you run your existing make goals, npm commands, etc. while giving you parallel execution, caching, and much more.

I am looking both for feedback on the code aswell as potential adopters so that I can get more real world usage before an official v1.0.0 release. Currently, we are only using it at my workplace where it has been tremendously useful.

https://grog.build/why-grog
by doix | 2025-07-07 08:49:54+00:00
Interesting, I thought(from the title) this would be about analogue vs digital designers. But the article is written in the context of a "fully digital" chip (i.e the analogue stuff is abstracted away, all chips are analogue at the end of the day).

"Fullstack chip designers" exist in the mixed-signal world. Where the analogue component is the majority of the chip, and the digital is fairly simple, it's sometimes done by single person to save money. At least it was definitely a thing in the late 00's and early 2010's in small fabless design centers. Not sure about nowadays.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-07-07 08:50:52+00:00
> This thesis only makes sense if the work is somehow interesting and you also have no desire to extend, expand, or enrich the work. That's not a plausible position.

Or your interesting work wasn't appearing in training set often enough. Currently I am writing a compiler and runtime for some niche modeling language, and every model I poke for help was rather useless except some obvious things I already know.
by subscribed | 2025-07-07 08:51:22+00:00
Bias against the non-native English users is staggering.

_According to the study, all seven AI detectors unanimously identified 18 of the 91 TOEFL student essays (19%) as AI-generated and a remarkable 89 of the 91 TOEFL essays (97%) were flagged by at least one of the detectors._

These papers were not written with use of AI.

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-detectors-biased-against-no...
by resurrectedcyb | 2025-07-07 08:51:33+00:00
I don't see that debunking it. Instead, it says "usually". That means that it depends on the project.

There is definitely Rust code that takes exponential time to compile, borrow checker or not.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=release&edit...

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/75992

Some people used async in ways that surfaced these problems. Upgraded rustc, then the project took forever to compile.
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-07 08:51:38+00:00
"Claude 4 Opus can technically rewrite auto-generated transcripts for me. But since it’s not possible for me to have it improve over time and learn my preferences, I still hire a human for this."

Sure, just as a select few people still hire a master carpenter to craft some bespoke exclusive chestnut drawer, but that does not take away 99% of bread and butter carpenters were replaced by IKEA, even though the end result is not even in the same ballpark both from an esthetic as from a quality point of view.

But as IKEA meets a price-point people can afford, with a marginally acceptable product, it becomes self reinforcing. The mass volume market for bespoke carpentry dwindles, being suffocated by a disappearing demand at the low end while IKEA (I use this a a standing for low cost factory furniture) gets ever more economy of scale advantages allowing it to eat further across the stack with a few different tiers of offer.

What remains is the ever more exclusive boutique market top end, where the result is what counts and price is not really an issue. The 1% remaining master-carpenters can live here.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-07 08:53:09+00:00
This. In Germany there have been and still are plenty of layoffs happening, most at jobs part of strong unions like the auto industry. Strong unions just means better severance packages than those not in unions when you get laid off, not that you're protected from ever being laid off. To me that's a pretty fair balance IMHO.

IIRC, only in France unions can prevent companies from doing redundancies if their bottom line looks good, but that's probably also why many companies aren't hiring much in France to begin with, why skilled wages are lower and youth unemployment higher there compared to other equally developed economies like Netherlands or Germany for example.
by freehorse | 2025-07-07 08:54:00+00:00
We live in increasingly complex societies with more and more demanding social dynamics. In the past, it was all much simpler, though at certain costs, that the article fails to mention or romanticises. Not all quirks were celebrated or "funny" and not all people survived to tell beautiful stories.

Moreover, a lot of things were simpler in ways that are becoming less and less ok. People now can divorce; marriage is not even need to start a family. Navigating relationship dynamics was simpler in the sense that there were (more or less) specific roles each gender should abide. Many marriages were arranged, especially if "it was taking you time", thus you did not have to figure out dating yourself.

I don't think that therapeutic discourse is a good strategy. Medicalising personhoods and relationships is bad, but going back to a (romanticised) past cannot be a solution at all. Raising to a higher consiousness would be an actual, good solution, but that takes time. It is uncertain if we have that with the speed that things move nowadays.
by imiric | 2025-07-07 08:54:41+00:00
Anthropomorphization is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.

> While training LLMs to replicate the human output, the intelligence and understanding EMERGES in the internal layers.

Is it intelligence and understanding that emerges, or is applying clever statistics on the sum of human knowledge capable of surfacing patterns in the data that humans have never considered?

If this were truly intelligence we would see groundbreaking advancements in all industries even at this early stage. We've seen a few, which is expected when the approach is to brute force these systems into finding actually valuable patterns in the data. The rest of the time they generate unusable garbage that passes for insightful because most humans are not domain experts, and verifying correctness is often labor intensive.

> These LLMs are already better than 90% of humans at understanding any subject, in the sense of answering questions about that subject and carrying on meaningful and reasonable discussion.

Again, exceptional pattern matching does not imply understanding. Just because these tools are able to generate patterns that mimic human-made patterns, doesn't mean they understand anything about what they're generating. In fact, they'll be able to tell you this if you ask them.

> Yes occasionally they stumble or make a mistake, but overall it is very impressive.

This can still be very impressive, no doubt, and can have profound impact on many industries and our society. But it's important to be realistic about what the technology is and does, and not repeat what some tech bros whose income depends on this narrative tell us it is and does.
by demetrius | 2025-07-07 08:55:55+00:00
> English regularly violates its own rules

That's true for any human language. E.g. in Russian, adjectives use the gender, case and plurality of a noun, until they suddenly don't.

> English steals aggressively from other languages, since that's its history.

That's not unique to English. E.g. Japanese has even borrowed numerals, and some of its pronouns are borrowings. Russian has borrowed verb forms.

Having a lot of Latin borrowings is quite common in most European languages. Even in Romance languages, there are a lot of Latin borrowings (e.g. minuto is Latin borrowing, miúdo is a native Portuguese word).

> You can use English with only latin-root words, or English with only Germanic-root words and both are as valid english as each other.

That's similar to how e.g. Romanian has Latin-based and Slavic-based vocabulary. This is not that unique.

> but there are also "Hinglish", patois and the other creole dialects

Many languages have or had patois and creoles based on them.
by lmm | 2025-07-07 08:56:27+00:00
If you get into that situation then it's probably because that API is critical and irreplaceable (otherwise you wouldn't be tolerating its problems), so you really don't want to get stuck and be unable to query it. And if you can tolerate a SPOF then there's no reason to bring Redis/Postgres into the picture, you might as well just have a single server doing it.

Plus it's just good practice that I'd want to be following anyway. Once you get in the habit of doing it it doesn't really cost much to design the dataflow right up-front, and it can save you from getting trapped down the line when it's much harder to fix things. Especially for an interview-type situation, why not design it right?
by quonn | 2025-07-07 08:57:25+00:00
> A brain is also "just proteins and currents,"

This is actually not comparable, because the brain has a much more complex structure that is _not_ learned, even at that level. The proteins and their structure are not a result of training. The fixed part for LMMs is rather trivial and is, in fact, not much for than MatMul which is very easy to understand - and we do. The fixed part of the brain, including the structure of all the proteins is enormously complex which is very difficult to understand - and we don't.
by zh3 | 2025-07-07 08:57:28+00:00
The oft-cited reason is each call fires up a new process so is expensive in terms of resources (though resources are cheap these days). Additionally, the CGI program has to faff about to retrieve data and parameters from the request (easy to get wrong) plus you have to watch out for security issues (hard to get right). Plus, of course, since the process exits at the end of the request any kind of session tracking needs to implemented separately.

Having said, for inhouse use, embedded and/or trusted environments they allow super quick hacks, e.g. complete CGI 'program' to print the date (put it in cgi-bin and make it executable):-

#!/bin/sh echo "Context-Type: text/plain\r\n" echo "Your IP is $REMOTE_ADDR" date
by onli | 2025-07-07 08:57:42+00:00
So, for one in other software the new processors do better. The 285K beats the i9-14900KS by a bit in my app benchmark collection (which is less extensive, but still). And second yes, according to https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/prozessoren/intel-core-u... for example they are less extreme in their energy usage and more efficient in general, albeit not more efficient than the AMD processors.

But it is a valid question.
by Copenjin | 2025-07-07 08:57:57+00:00
K-pop is probably the most commercial genre that ever existed, song written by some specialist in a studio like all the other ones targeting a very specific audience. This time there is no band with dances or whatever being used to promote the songs, that's the only difference.

I would have found it more interesting if the song topping the charts was from a VTuber or something completely computer-generated, not much like this.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-07 08:58:28+00:00
> Why not use it for the "tch" sound? (Which, btb, is different than the "ch" sound.)

What are you thinking of? There is no difference between those things.

But your major point here is correct; on the fundamentals there is no reason for the English alphabet to feature a Q.

> "C" is about the same -- by itself it always sounds exactly like "k" or "s". Why not use it for the "ts" sound?

With the modern alphabet there's no reason for a C either. However, the answer to "why not use it for the 'ts' sound" is pretty obvious - that sound isn't part of the English phonemic inventory. It occurs, but that is almost always just a result of what is supposed to be a bare /t/ being followed by /s/ for grammatical reasons. (For an example of the general feeling here, note that an English word cannot start with /ts/ at all.) Why would we use any letter to represent the "ts" sound? We represent it the same way it exists in our language, as a sequence of two unrelated sounds.

> So in pinyin, zh is just like ch, but voiced.

Technically the only voiced consonants in pinyin are m / n / ng / l / r. I think a voicing contrast was present in Middle Chinese, and there's one today in Shanghainese and presumably other Wu dialects, but not in Mandarin.
by stavros | 2025-07-07 08:58:47+00:00
I think the argument here is that the dressing-down is done in hindsight, which the developer didn't have. It's not fair to vary the punishment by the cost of the mistake, if the person didn't intentionally make the mistake (and thus didn't take the cost into account), as that's just revenge.

What you want instead is corrective action, which is achieved fine by saying "this cost us $X million in recall costs because we don't want a copyright infringement lawsuit", and then counting on the employee to now know not to make that mistake again.

You could, I guess, argue that if you yell at an employee, they're less likely to make that mistake again, but then you'd have to be yelling at them for every mistake, since they didn't know which mistakes would end up being costly (otherwise they wouldn't make them).
by netcan | 2025-07-07 08:58:47+00:00
>But as to your question wouldn't they need to have pots?

"Pottery" tends to assume ceramics. In Neolithic and later sites that had pottery, ceramic remains typically represent 99% of the total artifacts.

Bronze age tel sites are littered with ceramic pebbles. Every pot eventually becomes a bunch of shards and pebbles that last forever.

That said... a material culture that only uses ceramics occasionally wouldn't leave such signs.

Also.. you could call a wood or hide bucket "pottery," I think.
by sailingparrot | 2025-07-07 08:58:50+00:00
I don’t see how your description “clearly fails to capture the fact that we're conscious” though. There are many example in nature of emergent phenomena that would be very hard to predict just by looking at its components.

This is the crux of the disagreement between those that believe AGI is possible and those that don’t. Some are convinced that we “obviously” more than the sum of our parts, and thus an LLM can’t achieve consciousness because it’s missing this magic ingredient, and those that believe consciousness is just an emergent behaviour from a complex device (the brain). And thus we might be able to recreate it simply by scaling the complexity of another system.
by heinrichhartman | 2025-07-07 08:58:50+00:00
> The real question is can they do a better job than no therapist. That's the option people face. > The answer to that question might still be no, but at least it's the right question.

The answer is: YES.

Doing better than nothing is a really low hanging fruit. As long as you don't do damage - you do good. If the LLM just listens and creates a space and a sounding board for reflection is already an upside.

> Until we answer the question "Why can't people get good mental health support?" Anyway.

The answer is: Pricing.

Qualified Experts are EXPENSIVE. Look at the market pricies for good Coaching.

Everyone benefits from having a coach/counseler/therapist. Very few people can afford them privately. The health care system can't afford them either, so they are reserved for the "worst cases" and managed as a parse resource.