MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hackinthebochs | 2025-09-29 01:50:15+00:00
I skimmed the paper; it has a lot of issues. First it doesn't attempt to frame the theory in our current best understanding of the problem of consciousness. It doesn't say up front if its attempting to explain qualia or just give a new understanding of the functional aspects of consciousness.

The next issue is that it doesn't do much explaining. If it is attempting to explain qualia, it needs to explain how the functional descriptions on offer help in explaining why there is a qualitative feel associated with conscious states. If it's not attempting to explain qualia, then it needs to clearly identify the functional problem it is proposing to solve, then explain how the theory solves it. Many homegrown theories mistake description for explanation. Just giving existing functions a new name in the guise of a new framework doesn't explain anything. A reframing can be useful, but it should be made explicit that the theory is a reframing rather than an explanation, and what benefits this framing gives to solving various problems related to consciousness.

Another issue is that it spends too much time talking about implications and not enough time just communicating the core ideas. Each major section has like a paragraph or two. This isn't enough for a proper introduction to the section, let alone a sufficient description of the theory.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-09-29 01:50:16+00:00
"But let's say Apple does exit the EU.

Good."

Imagine if the US was to regulate so-called "tech" companies and the surveillance "business model"

Would Apple threaten to stop selling computers with their pre-installed, crippled OS

If they did, what would be left

IMHO

FreeBSD (from which Apple took its UNIX userland) would be left

NetBSD would be left

OpenBSD would be left

Linux would be left (maybe)

To name a few

If these so-called "tech" companies like Apple gave up on surveillance because surveillance was regulated, then we would still have open source volunteer-operated OS projects

I suppose some HN commenter might try to argue

that these OS projects would disappear without certain "tech companies" that do surveillance as a "business" and

that contributions from these so-called "tech" companies are keeping these OS projects going

Apple's "threat" is not credible these Silicon Valley companies have lied too many times. No one is going to believe them

These companies are hell bent on using the internet to conduct surveillance, they cannot stop

AFAIK, those open source OS projects do not try to phone home. Even if they did, the public can remove the surveillance code and re-compile

There is no "app store", no corporate restrictions on what software the computer owner can run

IMHO the compiler toolchains are nicer than "Xcode"; and there's no "Apple Tax"
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-09-29 01:50:49+00:00
I tend to go for sample books too, if I run out of a value I buy a reel. That way I only have to keep reels of the parts I use most often. For more expensive parts like many ICs I usually try to buy at least as many as the first bulk price discount on Digikey/Mouser/etc. E.g. I tend to use LT3757 switching controllers when I need to make power supplies, so buying 10 of them at $5 each is a much better deal than buying 1 at $7.50 each 10 times!
by fhe | 2025-09-29 01:51:13+00:00
one example is auto generating subtitles -- elements of this tasks, e.g. speech to text with time coding, have been around for a while (openai whisper and others), but they have only recently been integrated into video editors and become easy to use for non-coders. other examples: depth map (estimating object distance from the camera; this is useful when you want to blur the background), auto-generating masks with object tracking.
by Nevermark | 2025-09-29 01:53:39+00:00
Convenient-to-select settings should always include:

Sort:

In Alphabetical Order In Alphanumeric Order In Alphabetic-Word Order In Right-Aligned Alphabetic Order Randomly Sometimes Never By Hash Very Fast In the Background In the Foreground In the Underground In the Cloud Yes With Bubbles No Strong Opinion Of On YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS: [SELECT] Repeat: [SELECT] With Random Site Free Download Sort Extension: [SELECT] Let Facebook Emergency Backup Sort [SELECT] Who Sort?
Show HN: 4-model AI pipeline that handles 952 photo specs across 172 countries
by romanpodpriatov | 2025-09-29 01:53:42+00:00
Hey HN! After watching my mom pay $17 to get a passport photo at CVS (literally just a white background photo), and seeing “visa agents” charge $150+ for DV lottery applications (which are FREE), I went down a rabbit hole. Turns out there are 952+ different photo specifications across various documents worldwide. US passport wants 2x2 inches. DV lottery needs 600x600px. Schengen visa requires 35x45mm. Japanese visa needs specific head-to-photo ratio. It’s insane. What makes this different from competitors: Multi-Model AI Pipeline: •GFPGAN - Fixes low quality photos, enhances faces (your 2015 phone photo? Fixed) •BiRefNet - Removes backgrounds WITH accurate hair detection (curly hair nightmare solved) •MediaPipe - Validates face angle, eye level, head position in real-time •RealESRGAN - Upscales potato quality images to HD Most competitors use basic OpenCV or one model. I chain 4 models for accuracy. Real-time Compliance Validation: Instead of “upload and pray”, you get instant feedback: •Head too tilted? Shows angle needed •Shadow on face? Highlights problem area •Wrong dimensions? Auto-fixes •Background not uniform? AI replaces it This catches issues BEFORE you waste money printing/submitting. Photo Vault System: Nobody talks about this problem: families need photos for multiple documents over time. Built a vault system where you can: •Store original + processed versions •Generate for different documents from same source •Share vault with family (one photo session for all kids) •Import from previous orders Perfect for immigrant families dealing with constant paperwork. Privacy Architecture: •Photos process → deliver → DELETE immediately •No training on user photos •No permanent storage unless you explicitly use vault •Client-side processing where possible •2FA + OAuth available Technical details: •Frontend: Next.js + React •AI Pipeline: Python + FastAPI •Models: Hosted on CPU instances (low price) •Database: PostgreSQL for specs, Redis , Celery for queues •Payment: Stripe (no crypto bs) Pricing: $3.99 single photo, $2.49/photo in bundles. Intentionally undercut everyone because $50 for a cropped photo is criminal. The boring numbers: •30k+ photos processed •15 second average processing time •99.7% acceptance rate at government offices •Supporting 172 countries Why I built this: The visa/immigration photo industry is built on information asymmetry. People don’t know requirements → panic → overpay for “professional” help. It’s a $2B industry built on cropping photos to specific pixels. My goal: Make it so cheap and easy that the predatory “visa consultants” go extinct. Ask me anything about the AI pipeline, compliance validation logic, or why passport photo requirements are stuck in 1990! P.S. Yes, it handles the infamous “no smiling” requirement. The AI actually detects smiles and warns you. Because apparently showing happiness is a security threat
by rtpg | 2025-09-29 01:53:56+00:00
I have witnessed a lot of kinda spurious pinning going on. Or like "ok we need to fix the bounds for this transitive dependency for a bit" and then it just sticks around.

Over a decade that's once a month, which is a lot though!

I think sometimes people will hear advice like "pin your deps" and do a `pip freeze | requirements.lock.txt`, without really absorbing that pinning transitive dependencies like this is generally not what you want.

You want a lock file! But you tend to want transitive dependencies that aren't locked down to get upgraded when you upgrade your direct dependencies. But it's a subtlety that can get lost in the noise.
by unsungNovelty | 2025-09-29 01:54:48+00:00
This is an interesting point you make. But didn't we solve all of these context issues already? I don't remember getting any ads like his in Duckduckgo since I've started using it. Nor do for the ads we used to get when everybody used contextual ads.

The only issue is going to be that you will have to handle this when you implement ads for your website/app. And each of them will have to do it.
by stevefan1999 | 2025-09-29 01:55:27+00:00
I kind of like branchless programming, because in SIMD programming, some of its concepts are directly borrowed from branchless techniques, for example using bit masks to represent which vector to enable scatter and gather for.

For example, I can give it an array A and a vector V and a mask which output another vector O, then if the specific position i in the bit mask is 1, then O[i] will pick this element from A[V[i]], otherwise just A[i].

In Python this may sound like [A[V[i]] if M[i] else V[i] for i in range(len(V))], so it is very branchy, but in SIMD this would just be a bunch of SIMD operations without branch!

Speaking of which, this is particularly informative about what "branchless programming" really are: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predication_(computer_archit...

If you want to learn about the ultimate form of branchless programming, check out Church encoding: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding and https://gautier.difolco.dev/2025-09/extreme-branchless-expr-...
by marcosdumay | 2025-09-29 01:55:33+00:00
It applies to LLM code, but if you take the law at face value, it's a very damaging one. Cleverness should be used to make your code easier to verify, not harder.

He said it with a very specific idea in mind, and like most of software engineering "laws", if you know enough to know when to apply it, you don't need the law.
by kragen | 2025-09-29 01:56:15+00:00
I'm not on a VPN, my only "content blocker" is uBlock Origin, and I'm guessing your TV-remote-challenged dad isn't in Argentina and doesn't use the browser inspector.

Also, "my unintellectual friend doesn't have problems" is not a valid response to complaints about anti-intellectual discrimination. "Use of developer or inspection tools" is literally on the WSJ's error-message page; it isn't some kind of wacky idea I thought up. (Unlike your "content blocker" theory.)

Also, you responded to my comment by insulting me. That's not cool. Possibly if you aren't willing to engage in higher-quality discussion you don't belong here. I see you seem to be coming to the same conclusion; in one of your recent frequent flames you described HN as a "trash website": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45401666
by bigger_cheese | 2025-09-29 01:58:05+00:00
>There are no "higher level details" in software development, those are in the domain of different jobs like project managers or analysts. Once AI can reliably translate fuzzy natural language into precise and accurate code, software development will simply die as a profession. Our jobs won't morph into something different - this is our job.

I'm the non-software type of Engineer. I've always kind of viewed code as a way to bridge mathematics and control logic.

When I was at university I was required to take a first year course called "Introduction to Programming and Algorithms". It essentially taught us how to think about problem solving from a computer programming perspective. One example I still remember from the course was learning how you can use a computer solve something like Newton's Method.

I don't really hear a lot of software people talk about Algorithms but for me that is where the real power of programming lives. I can see some idealized future where you write programs just by mix and matching algorithms and almost every problem becomes essentially a state machine. To move from state A to State B I apply these transformations which map to these well known algorithms. I could see an AI being capable of that sort of pattern matching.
by rtpg | 2025-09-29 01:59:14+00:00
Really still kicking myself for not majoring in robotics in school. I wanted to program, so I studied computer engineering but hadn't really absorbed that much in classes. But I will likely never have access to all the robotics stuff my school had, nor the guided learnings.

Never too late to try stuff out of course, but very little beats structured higher ed education in relatively small classes (think there was only about 24 people in the robotics major?)_
by topherPedersen | 2025-09-29 02:00:15+00:00
I agree with this. My bosses boss thinks that AI is going to end up doing 95% of our work for us. From my experience (so far) AI coding follows the 80/20 rule, it can get you 80% of what you want for 20% of the time/effort. And the ratio might be more like, it'll get you 80% of what you want IMMEDIATELY, but it can't get you the last 20%, it needs a human to get it over the finish line.

It's super impressive in my opinion, but if you think it's going to straight up replace humans right now, I think you probably aren't a software developer in the trenches cranking out features.

I'm sort of a Neanderthal when it comes to understanding AI, but I don't think AI in it's current form works like a human. Right now, it kind of just cranks out all the code in one fell swoop. A human on the other hand works more iteratively. You write a little bit of code then you run it and look at an iPhone simulator, look at Figma designs, and see if you're getting closer to what you want. AI doesn't appear to know how to iterate, run code, look at designs, and debug things. I imagine in 100 years it will know how to do all that stuff though. And who knows, maybe in 1 year it will be able to do that. But as of right now, September 28th, 2025 it can't do that yet.
by viccis | 2025-09-29 02:00:28+00:00
If you have to consciously modify habits to live in a "real" lifestyle, then that's a simulacrum. His definition of "real" is not "it exists".

For example, Baudrillard talks about the fact that the second a primitive society is discovered and efforts are made to ensure they are undisturbed and stay stuck in their primitive culture, that culture is now simulacral. (From SAS: "Of course, these savages are posthumous: frozen, cryogenized, sterilized, protected to death, they have become referential simulacra, and science itself has become pure simulation.")

>someone writes in a book that it does it doesn’t change that the ways real people actually live their lives are, ipso facto, real lifestyles that exist, it just means the book is wrong

I'm not making normative statements about your lifestyle, I'm clarifying terminology that's very very specific to the book Simulacra and Simulation, written by Baudrillard, which is what this post is about. If you want to use a different meaning for simulacrum than Baudrillard's, then that's fine, but it would be helpful to define it.
by Uptrenda | 2025-09-29 02:00:42+00:00
Incredibly out-of-the box, whoever made this. Gives me severe eye strain but I am impressed at the creativity here! Awesome.

Btw small suggestion: might make the game more playable if the snake could loop-back around if it went out of bounds. It would make up for some responsiveness issues. Then just have failure being if you eat yourself.
by bsoles | 2025-09-29 02:00:49+00:00
One of the first PCBs that I have tried to build as a 16 year old was a guitar pedal circuit from a German electronics magazine (Elo?).

I used the sun as a UV source for the photoresist exposure, boiled iron chloride in my mom's Pyrex containers, stained bunch of her towels permanently yellow in the process. And the circuit didn't work. It is still a sore point from my youth that I remember occasionally.
by cwmoore | 2025-09-29 02:01:30+00:00
Thank you for the clarification. Can't read the paper.

Who was it that was quoted often a decade ago that described the intellectual variance difference between the sexes?

The research concluded that women are smarter (just kidding) that men have much greater variance while women are generally closer to the mean and one another in abilities.

Since differences between the sexes exist, I would also expect differences among the sexes to cluster for evolutionarily relevant reasons.
by jmogly | 2025-09-29 02:02:37+00:00
I think dismissing social realities as not being part of that hard, unyielding reality is a mistake. Part of intelligence (maybe a different part) is being able to bend the social fabric to achieve desirable outcomes. The other thing is you don’t always know why people do what they do, the world is a very subjective place. The people at work who don’t call things out, they might just be collecting a paycheck and are happy to not call things out. The poor conservative from Florida, they might actually hate immigrants more than they care about quality healthcare.
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-29 02:04:30+00:00
That isn’t necessarily bad… but the dogma normal people get from the index crowd is that they have less risk and low cost.

Since we’re living in an era that looks more like 1905, there’s alot of skew and the public doesn’t get access. In the 90s, companies would IPO and we were exposed to risk and gain with small caps. Now, it’s more like the standard oil trust - big private and sovereign funds are more influential.

I think we’re entering an era where active management will become critical.
Show HN: Free developer-first OneNote alternative
by Isaac-Westaway | 2025-09-29 02:04:44+00:00
Hey Everyone, been working on a note-taking app called janta (Just Another Note Taking App) the past few months.

You can try it out at app.janta.dev (you will be redirected to app.janta.dev/canvas/temporary, which is the locally-stored whiteboard you can access)

I felt limited with OneNote, Excalidraw, and other infinite-canvas style apps, so I built an alternative. You have access to code-editors, Desmos graphs, and rich text editors (SlateJS). This is because the canvas is designed in a way that allows web components to exist on the same layer as pen-strokes, so you can annotate code, circle points-of-inflection, and programmatically generate graphs using matplotlib.pyplot!

This is a beta release, and feedback would be awesome!
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-29 02:06:17+00:00
> I don't want to put leading zeroes before every all the single digit numbers in my file names.

> ... it would be great if I could just trust that every device will understand numbers.

Strings are not numbers, even if some part of their content "looks like a number."

> I will add that I'm plenty "smart" enough to understand that "10" comes before "9" in a strictly alphabetical sense, and I still want my file managers to sort "9" before "10".

Problem is, this is your preference for a specific situation. Which may not be another person's preference in the same situation nor yours in a different situation.

So what are programs to do?

Display strings in a consistent, documented, manner. Which is lexicographical ordering in all cases lacking meta-data to indicate otherwise.
by viccis | 2025-09-29 02:06:28+00:00
>Not yet, I will put it on my book backlog.

It's very good but be warned that it's very much written in the continental philosophy style, so it can come across as inscrutable to people not used to French 20th century philosophy at times.

>vs trying to recreate a past that is gone

The real challenge is that sometimes it's like this, which a simulation. But sometimes we're trying to recreate a past that never existed, and that's when it becomes simulacral.
by dangus | 2025-09-29 02:08:05+00:00
I think this is potentially bad investment advice.

1. Your long-term investments should never be something you sell in an emergency. That’s what your 6-12 month emergency fund is for.

2. Giant tech companies like Microsoft have a highly diversified customer base. If you avoid investing in Microsoft you’re just investing in one of their customers or vendors, so if Microsoft is doing badly in a recession it’s a pretty safe bet that a whole bunch of other companies unrelated to software are doing poorly.

3. If choosing to minimize the chance of lost investment gains during a job loss means giving up long term returns by choosing less performant investment choices then you could just be making your overall probabilities worse.

4. You can’t actually assume that job cuts equal lower stock prices, they can often do the opposite. E.g., Microsoft has been having layoffs all year but their stock is up over 20% YTD.
by SCAQTony | 2025-09-29 02:08:15+00:00
Fair critique — and I’ll own that the paper emphasizes reframing more than exhaustive exposition. To be precise:

• I am not claiming to solve the Hard Problem of qualia. I position qualia as an evolved data format, a functional necessity for navigating a deterministic universe — not as metaphysical mystery. • What the paper does aim to explain is the predictive, timeline-simulating function of consciousness, and how errors in this function (e.g. Simulation Misfiling) may map to psychiatric conditions. • The “implications” section is deliberately forward-looking, but I agree the exposition could be expanded. That’s the next step — this is a framework, not the final word.

If nothing else, I hope the paper makes explicit that reframing consciousness as a predictive timeline simulator is testable, bridges physics + neuroscience, and invites experiments rather than mysticism.
by xenadu02 | 2025-09-29 02:10:02+00:00
If you've never used the BMC on a server... it is all 100% garbage. Software mostly written by embedded folks who haven't got a clue. It is absolutely garbage software on the whole (and no matter what vendor you get the board from). Go ahead and hit up the web interface then do a bit of "View Source". If you are imagining the rest of that stack is any better than my friend have I got a Beautiful Bridge in Brooklyn to sell you!

If it were me I'd assume the majority of BMC firmware out there from all vendors: 1. Is full of many many exploitable vulnerabilities 2. To the extent they patch holes it will be whack-a-mole because the economics do not permit large investments in software quality. 3. Many server owners will never install a patch anyway.
by stevefan1999 | 2025-09-29 02:10:36+00:00
That depends on how you define branch.

Say in Rust:

let foo = if bar { 1 } else { 2 };

And

let mut foo; if bar { foo = 1; } else { foo = 2; }

Despite they looked the same, functions the same and effectively the same, but the first one is the conditional move, and the second one would be a jump initially (until further compiler optimization kick in)

You will notice that for conditional move, you "get" a predictable expression for the result, but with branched jump, it's like you "get" a bunch of arbitrary statements, that writes to the expression. It may end up folding so both will essentially be compiled to cmov, but the way to representation of the assignment is different. You can be certain with conditional instructions, but you can't be certain with branched jump, otherwise we don't need branch prediction.

In fact, the way conditional instructions work is due to Church encoding, that you created a lambda function that calls the left or right function depending on the input evaluation, which can be seen as implicitly embedding the branch.
by gkanai | 2025-09-29 02:11:22+00:00
Japan has a digital national ID ("MyNumber" is the name). There was a lot of pushback before it passed but it did pass. It is now the main ID that is used for national health insurance and other government services. The rollout has been rocky with bugs and whatnot, but in the past 2 years or so there's been no drama. The ID is now supported in iOS and is coming to Android soon too, so one can have their ID on their phone instead of carrying around a physical card.
by anileated | 2025-09-29 02:11:59+00:00
Yup.

Since the author of the app mentioned reverse engineering, analyzing audio is a way that immediately came to mind. It should be quite precise, too, only at the expense of extra CPU cycles.

I did not imply that there is no API to get head tracking data (even though Google search overview straight up says that). It’s mostly a thought experiment. Kudos for digging up CMHeadphoneMotionManager.