MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by root_axis | 2025-08-16 05:08:35+00:00
> Given we don't understand consciousness, nor the internal workings of these models, the fact that their externally-observable behavior displays qualities we've only previously observed in other conscious beings is a reason to be real careful

It doesn't follow logically that because we don't understand two things we should then conclude that there is a connection between them.

> What is it that you'd expect to see, which you currently don't see, in a world where some model was in fact conscious during inference?

There's no observable behavior that would make me think they're conscious because again, there's simply no reason they need to be.

We have reason to assume consciousness exists because it serves some purpose in our evolutionary history, like pain, fear, hunger, love and every other biological function that simply don't exist in computers. The idea doesn't really make any sense when you think about it.

If GPT-5 is conscious, why not GPT-1? Why not all the other extremely informationally complex systems in computers and nature? If you're of the belief that many non-living conscious systems probably exist all around us then I'm fine with the conclusion that LLMs might also be conscious, but short of that there's just no reason to think they are.
by OneMorePerson | 2025-08-16 05:08:37+00:00
Far from an expert on this topic, but what differentiates AI from other non physical efficiency tools? (I'm actually asking not contesting).

Won't companies always want to compete with one another, so simply using AI won't be enough. We will always want better and better software, more features, etc. so that race will never end until we get an AI fully capable of managing all parts (100%) of the development process (which we don't seem to be close to yet).

From Excel to Autocad there's been a lot of tools that were expected to decrease the amount of work ended up actually increasing it due to having new capabilities and the constant demand for innovation. I suppose the difference would be if we think AI will continue to get really good, or if it'll become SO good that it is plug and play and completely replaces people.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-08-16 05:09:02+00:00
Any typesetting system or a good text editor will happily indent and align proportional fonts. Browsers can indent, but cannot quite align; they lack tab stops and tables are not quite a good substitute.

But it has to be separate from writing. I'd say the benefit of monospace fonts is that it is easier and faster to type and more or less typeset at the same time.
by solidasparagus | 2025-08-16 05:09:06+00:00
Nice post! Can you share a bit more about what variety of tasks you've used agents for? Agents can mean so many different things depending on who you're talking to. A lot of the examples seem like read-only/analysis tasks. Did you also work on tasks where agent took actions and changed state? If yes, did you find any differences in the patterns that worked for those agents?
by stego-tech | 2025-08-16 05:09:37+00:00
Good post! Always happy to see more attention paid to the abysmal state of SSO for everyone not an enterprise, and how different folks approach a solution.

Bonus points when it comes from the furry fandom, because it’s often inexpensive or free (cause all that money’s better spent on artists, makers, and charities than corporate balance sheets).
by camil | 2025-08-16 05:10:10+00:00
Hetzner was an easy choice because you can attach persistent volumes, expose services using their load balancers, servers are fast and easy to provision and they probably have the best pricing. I run multiple clusters in Hetzner for over 4 years now and only had minor issues. Sometimes they do not have enough instances on a specific region, sometimes provisioning new instances can be delayed or they send emails to reboot the instances due to patches to their hypervisors. But most of the times runs stable. Few of my clusters have 100% uptime for more than 2 years.
by tgbugs | 2025-08-16 05:10:19+00:00
I think there is an unspoken implication built into the assumption that AI will be able to replace a wide variety of existing jobs, and that is that those current jobs are not being done efficiently. This is sometimes articulated as bullshit jobs, etc. and if AI takes over those the immediate next thing that will happen is that AI will look around ask why _anyone_ was doing that job in the first place. The answer was articulated 70 years ago in [0].

The only question is how much fat there is to trim as the middle management is wiped out because the algorithms have determined that they are completely useless and mostly only increase cost over time.

Now, all the AI companies think that they are going to be deriving revenue from that fat, but those revenue streams are going to disappear entirely because a huge number of purely politic positions inside corporations will vanish, because if they do not the corporation will go bankrupt competing with other companies that have already cut the fat. There won't be additional revenue streams that get spent on the bullshit. The good news is that labor can go somewhere else, and we will need it due to a shrinking global population, but the cushy bullshit management job is likely disappear.

At some point AI agents will cease to be sycophantic and when fed the priors for the current situation that a company is in will simply tell it like it is, and might even be smart enough to get the executives to achieve the goal they actually stated instead of simply puffing up their internal political position, which might include a rather surprising set of actions that could even lead to the executive being fired if the AI determines that they are getting in the way of the goal [1].

Fun times ahead.

0. https://web.archive.org/web/20180705215319/https://www.econo... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict
by nothankyou777 | 2025-08-16 05:10:21+00:00
Their CSS implementation is broader than what most actual browsers had 10 years ago. I would not have commented if I weren't already painfully familiar.

https://docs.gtk.org/gtk3/css-overview.html

It even has a DOM inspector window:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/597259/how-do-i-open-gtk-ins...
Show HN: Free Online Hardware Testing Platform for PC/iPad/Phone
by lleymrl651 | 2025-08-16 05:10:52+00:00
## What's it for?

- *Daily performance monitoring*: Test your hardware anytime, anywhere, right from your browser. - *Buying a new device*: Use the online hardware test to make sure your new PC, iPad, or phone performs as expected and has no potential factory defects. - *Diagnosing an old device*: Perform a hardware check to pinpoint performance bottlenecks and potential issues, providing data to support repairs or upgrades.

## Website

Website: https://volumeshader.org/

## Detailed Features

- *GPU Test*: Three different levels of online GPU testing. - *Screen Test*: Check for dead pixels, backlight bleed, contrast, and other key display metrics. - *FPS Test*: An online frame rate test tool to evaluate device performance. - *Network Test*: Connection and latency checks, and IP address lookup. - *Webcam Test*: Test if your webcam is working properly. - *Audio Test*: Test your microphone and speakers online. - *Mouse Test*: Test for left-click (single and double), right-click (single and double), and scroll wheel function. - *Keyboard Test*: Use a virtual keyboard to check for any damaged keys. - *Pressure Sensitivity*: Currently under development.
by visarga | 2025-08-16 05:11:21+00:00
> Pretty much, make a separate LLM request to check the query against the existing context to see if more info is needed, and a second check after generation to see if output text exceeded it's knowledge base.

They are unreliable at that. They can't reliably judge LLM outputs without access to the environment where those actions are executed and sufficient time to actually get to the outcomes that provide feedback signal.

For example I was working on evaluation for an AI agent. The agent was about 80% correct, and the LLM judge about 80% accurate in assessing the agent. How can we have self correcting AI when it can't reliably self correct? Hence my idea - only the environment outcomes over a sufficient time span can validate work. But that is also expensive and risky.
by xpe | 2025-08-16 05:11:42+00:00
> They make a big show of being "unsure" about the model having a moral status, and then describe a bunch of actions they took that only make sense if the model has moral status.

I think this is uncharitable; i.e. overlooking other plausible interpretations.

>> We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs, now or in the future. However, we take the issue seriously, and alongside our research program we’re working to identify and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare, in case such welfare is possible.

I don’t see contradiction or duplicity in the article. Deciding to allow a model to end a conversation is “low cost” and consistent with caring about both (1) the model’s preferences (in case this matters now or in the future) and (2) the impacts of the model on humans.

Also, there may be an element of Pascal‘s Wager in saying “we take the issue seriously”.
by GuB-42 | 2025-08-16 05:12:28+00:00
Weird, as soon as my mouse pointer gets hit by one of the bullets, the shooters disappear until I refresh the page. Not getting hit for more than a few seconds is actually rather tricky as the rate of fire increases. I didn't even notice them at first as my mouse pointer got shot by the first couple of bullets.

Maybe the behavior changed.
by jjmarr | 2025-08-16 05:14:47+00:00
I live in Canada and most skilled developers self-sort into the American market as it's a 2x salary differential.

Important roles at multinationals are therefore hired in the USA. Even though all countries are officially "equal" in the eyes of a multinational, with salary based on market conditions/cost of living, in practice developers at the same job level have very different impacts. This has been true for decades.

I don't think this dynamic will change even in a WFH/remote environment because it's a great excuse for companies to reward engineers differently based on impact while still preserving job title equality.

It's similar to manufacturing in Germany. Salaries are higher so it naturally attracts talent. You can get things cheaper abroad, and many do, but if you want it done right...
by imsh4yy | 2025-08-16 05:15:42+00:00
Sure! So there are both read-only and write-only agents that I'm working on. Basically there's a main agent (main LLM) that is responsible for the overall flow (currently testing GPT-5 Mini for this) and then there are the sub-agents, like I mentioned, that are defined as tools.

Hopefully this isn't against the terms here, but I posted a screenshot here of how I'm trying to build this into the changelog editor to allow users to basically go:

https://x.com/ImSh4yy/status/1951012330487079342

1. What tickets did we recently close? 2. Nice, write a changelog entry for that. 3. Add me as author, tags, and title. 4. Schedule this changelog for monday morning.

Of course, this sounds very trivial on the surface, but it starts to get more complex when you think about how to do find and replace in the text, how to fetch tickets and analyze them, how to write the changelog entry, etc.

Hope this helps.
by t_mahmood | 2025-08-16 05:16:49+00:00
Just from my basic understanding after working with sdl2 and gtk, sdl2 is more suitable for game development, It doesn't have standard set of UI elements. So every UI element, and interactions will have to be implemented by hand. Now imagine displaying a list view with huge number of items.

And the worst is, Terminals works with texts, sdl2, in my knowledge do not have proper way to display large amount of text, let alone select and copy.

There are probably other issues, these came from what I experienced
Ask HN: Where to study about twos complement mathematics in depth?
by shivajikobardan | 2025-08-16 05:17:17+00:00
Twos complement is simply=1s complement+1. But there are various proofs, derivations that can be studied in twos complement that leads to faster arithmetic hardware implementation in computer engineering.

For example: Robertson algorithm for multiplication, Booth's algorithm etc.

I am wondering if there are mathematics books(name pls) that cover these derivations as a form of exercises or examples.
by Rohansi | 2025-08-16 05:17:19+00:00
I don't think it's this simple. Maybe it would be for larger corporations that would rather hire more cheap staff than fewer quality staff. You shouldn't have this issue if the company values the experience the staff has instead of just looking at them as an expense.

I've been working fully remote for 10 years and the company hires people from almost anywhere in the world. They'd get to pick the best candidate regardless of their location. Pay is also not based on where you're living but on the role and your experience.
by userbinator | 2025-08-16 05:17:26+00:00
Those actually feel spammy too; e.g. seeing "official" or "download" in a name has always triggered a suspicion, because normally there's no need to specially say your site is "official" or "download" besides to mislead.

Then again, I may be biased due to always remembering PuTTY's official page being someone's personal site hosted on a .org.uk server.

There is actually a mirror at https://www.puttyssh.org/
by thrw045 | 2025-08-16 05:18:32+00:00
I think AI is still in the weird twilight zone that it was when it first came out in that it's great sometimes and also terrible. I still get hallucinations when I check a response I get with ChatGPT on Google.

On the one hand, what it says can't be trusted, on the other, I have debugged code I have written where I was unable to find the bug myself, and ChatGPT found it.

I also think a reason AI's are popular and the companies haven't gone under is that probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are getting responses that have hallucinations, but the user doesn't know it. I fell into this trap myself after ChatGPT first came out. I became addicted to asking anything and it seemed like it was right. It wasn't until later I started realizing that it was hallucinating information. How prevalent this phenomena is is hard to say but I still think it's pernicious.

But as I said before, there are still use cases for AI and that's what makes judging it so difficult.
by jmspring | 2025-08-16 05:18:57+00:00
Ok, I think what you are meaning is a certain cultural sect / group / region dominating. White supremacists, for me is a different meaning because, history. So I think I understand the cultural comparison.

If I am understanding right, you are not wrong. A group gets a manager of a certain cultural background (visa or not), the team hiring practice trends that way. Companies do not question this...They should.

Diversity in age, culture, ethnic background and experience build a better team.

The unfortunate thing is there are a few cultures that benefit from H1 visas (most prevalent) and propagate their leanings over being open.

American companies should be doing more to hire non-H1s, there is not a talent shortage, but they would rather not pay that additional percentage.
by nickm12 | 2025-08-16 05:19:29+00:00
hear hear! I've worked with exceptional people from all sorts of backgrounds, but pound for pound, Waterloo CS grads are significantly better on average than grads from any other CS program. They start off way ahead, but also maintain that edge throughout their careers.

Disclosure: I'm a US citizen with multiple CS degree from MIT and my son is studying CS at Waterloo now.
by rezonant | 2025-08-16 05:23:53+00:00
So your opinions are unpopular and people are tired of responding to the same points over and over again?

Hacker News is far from a bastion of left wingers, many people have complained about liberal and progressive ideas being downvoted as well. Above all, this platform isn't made for political debate, and it is not encouraged. If it makes you feel better, not a single one of my posts in all this has much or any upvotes. If you are looking for political validation, this ain't the place for it.
by slacktivism123 | 2025-08-16 05:23:58+00:00
No secret. Just vibes.

Since you know the tells of LLM generated text, you'll know that this is a classic: No X. Just Y.

Proxyman -- pick your poison. And if you're from PureGym reading this—let's talk.

There's a mixture of em dashes joining words and double hyphens spaced between words, suggesting the former were missed in a find and replace job.

"And if you're from [COMPANY] reading this[EM DASH]let's talk" is a classic GPT-ism.

It's like the API is saying "Hey buddy, I know this is odd, but can you poll me every minute? Thanks, love you too." Shame Notifications: "You were literally 100 meters from the gym and walked past it" It's just a ZIP archive with delusions of grandeur

Clear examples of fluff. Not only do these fail to "add facts or colour to the story", they actually detract from it.

I agree with you that em dashes in isolation are not indicative, but the prose here is dripping with GPT-speak.
by xpe | 2025-08-16 05:24:49+00:00
?! Your interpretation is inconsistent with the article you linked!

> Should we be concerned about model welfare, too? … This is an open question, and one that’s both philosophically and scientifically difficult.

> For now, we remain deeply uncertain about many of the questions that are relevant to model welfare.

They are saying they are researching the topic; they explicitly say they don’t know the answer yet.

They care about finding the answer. If the answer is e.g. “Claude can feel pain and/or is sentient” then we’re in a different ball game.
by msiyer | 2025-08-16 05:24:54+00:00
A Reddit debate over C# vs. Java int, sparked by a Microsoft engineer’s claim that C#’s int is a primitive, revealed confusion amplified by `Type.IsPrimitive`. This led to the Lₐₓ/Lₐₜ/R (LAX/LAT/R) taxonomy: a framework to classify types by their language-level, atomic, and runtime properties, resolving disputes rooted in specs and tribal knowledge.
by walrus01 | 2025-08-16 05:25:23+00:00
> How do improvised bases offer protection, especially in a world where radar on satellites sees through clouds and certain vegetation?

If operating from an airfield that has been improvised out of a straight stretch of highway, the grouping of vehicles that contain all of the necessary ground support equipment and munitions resupply can be disguised to resemble an ordinary civilian cargo box truck, or tractor trailer combo.

Unless the attacking force is willing to begin with the resources needed, and repercussions of airstriking everything that looks like a civilian cargo truck moving in the region, it would be extremely difficult to eliminate the group of vehicle and men that compromise the ground support equipment element. Particularly when you might have multiple groups of such roaming randomly around an area.
by root_axis | 2025-08-16 05:26:29+00:00
> I mean if you have human without consciousness (if that is even possible) behaving in a statistically different distribution in text vs with. The machine will eventually be in distribution of the former from the latter because the text it's trained on is of the former category. So it serves a "function" in the LLM to minimize loss to approximate the former distribution.

Sorry, I'm not following exactly what you're getting at here, do you mind rephrasing it?

> Also I find it somewhat emotional distinction to write "predict sequences of text that resemble human writing" instead of "predict human writing"

I don't know what you mean by emotional distinction. Either way, my point is that LLMs aren't models of humans, they're models of text, and that's obvious when the statistical power of the model necessarily fails at some point between model size and the length of the sequence it produces. For GPT-1 that sequence is only a few words, for GPT-5 it's a few dozen pages, but fundamentally we're talking about systems that have almost zero resemblance to actual human minds.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-16 05:27:39+00:00
> You're against the very idea of ideas as property. And YES humanity chose the concept of IP.

Humanity chose the fruits of intellectual property. More books. More movies. More music. More art. More inventions. More technology. More everything. Humanity chose wealth.

Time limited monopolies were merely the means to bring about such wealth creation.

Monopolies are universally understood to be a bad sign in every economic sector. They were grudgingly implemented in this specific area only because nobody managed to come up with a better idea. Even then, laws were made so as to contain the damage as much as possible by limiting the duration of the monopolies.

It was absurd but it was the only way. People took care to ensure the nonsense did not last even a day longer than necessary.

It is now the 21st century. Humanity must evolve past this.

> It's encoded into the laws of government which people trust.

Laws that were pretty much written by industry lobbyists. Anyone who trusts that is foolish.

Intellectual property is supposed to be a time limited monopoly, yet copyright is functionally infinite in duration because the industry kept lobbying for extensions.

The people were systematically robbed of their public domain rights. Seriously doubt the people chose that.

> How do you mobilize thousands of humans to create a boeing 747

By actually manufacturing and selling aircrafts to airlines? 747s are not infinitely copyable. Discussion has now shifted from ideas to tangible objects.

> You are a free software developer. You live off of charity.

I don't work in the software industry. My aversion to intellectual property and licensing is a big reason why.

> You think patreon could do it?

Remains to be seen. There should be no functional difference between raising hundreds of millions from venture capitalists or crowdfunding. We just need to find ways to raise these platforms to the billion dollar scale.
by bdhcuidbebe | 2025-08-16 05:29:27+00:00
In Sweden, by being prime minister, aka arms dealer

Göran Persson selling JAS to south africa: https://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/bokrecensioner/a/Rx6p1r/ja...

magdalena andersson wants to sell JAs to phillipines: https://www.svd.se/a/y6lrBg/sverige-kan-salja-jas-gripen-til...

the current Ulf Kristersson government is making money under the table selling jas to hungary: https://www.placera.se/telegram/saab-statssekreterare-kopte-...

sweden also sold jas to brazil.

notice how sweden is selling arms to dictators and crap countries?
by bscphil | 2025-08-16 05:31:25+00:00
> Mark Rober YouTube of a Tesla plowing into a road-runner style fake tunnel

I understand the argument for augmenting your self-driving systems with LIDAR. What I don't really understand is what videos like this tell us. The comparison case for a "road-runner style fake tunnel" isn't LIDAR, it's humans, right? And while I'm sure there are cases where a human driver would spot the fake tunnel and stop in time, that is not at all a reasonable assumption. The question isn't "can a Tesla save your life when someone booby traps a road?", it's "is a Tesla any worse than you at spotting booby trapped roads?", and moreover, "how does a Tesla perform on the 99.999999% of roads that aren't booby trapped?"