MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pegasus | 2025-10-13 11:20:19+00:00
It's definitely bucket-like for me, and I can attest meditation empties it. Whenever I stop meditating, mental busyness and subconscious anxiety slowly build up. Half hour a day is enough to keep it away. I just keep bringing my attention back to the breath, trying to feel into the physiological need to breathe (which is usually occluded or distorted by mental activity). Whenever I feel I am actively holding to some tension, I allow myself to release it. That's all in terms of instructions, and for me it works wonders. I look at it as the equivalent of flossing for the brain ;)
by vinhnx | 2025-10-13 11:20:28+00:00
Kindly let me know how your experience about Zed integration, I have done the ACP integration and merge to upstream Agent Client Protocol spec from Zed. The integration experience is quite magical, honestly. It's working in Zed , though for tool calls I'm still improving https://github.com/agentclientprotocol/agent-client-protocol...
Show HN: Aspera – Hybrid symbolic-LLM agents for production
by christianrth | 2025-10-13 11:21:06+00:00
Hi HN,

I built ASPERA after deploying an LLM-based fraud detection system that was too slow and expensive for production use. The core insight: you don't need LLMs for 95% of cases if you have deterministic business logic.

The architecture combines symbolic reasoning (rule-based, instant, free) with LLM inference (only for novel/uncertain situations). A confidence threshold determines which path to take.

Technical approach: - Custom DSL for defining concepts, inferences, and intentions - Symbolic reasoner evaluates deterministic rules (O(n), ~40-50ms) - LLM adapter handles edge cases via Groq/OpenAI/Anthropic - Three-tier memory system (episodic, semantic, working) - Full decision trace for explainability (critical for regulatory compliance)

Production deployment results (60 days, 500K user fintech, 3M transactions): - Latency: 45ms avg (vs 1.2s with pure LLM approach) - Cost: €0 for 95% of decisions (vs €0.003/req) - Accuracy: 94.2% (vs 78% baseline) - False positives: 5% (vs 15%) - Fraud prevented: €1.2M

Benchmarks vs LangChain on classification tasks: - 28× faster (42ms vs 1,200ms) - 100% cost reduction - Full explainability vs black box

I'm publishing the full paper on Zenodo with methodology, raw data, and statistical analysis (p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 2.4).

The interesting trade-off: you sacrifice some adaptability for massive gains in speed, cost, and explainability. For production systems with known business rules, this is the right trade.

Open questions I'm wrestling with: 1. Optimal symbolic/LLM ratio - does 95/5 generalize or is it domain-specific? 2. How to auto-learn symbolic rules from LLM interactions over time? 3. Offline LLM fallback for cases where internet isn't available?

Code/paper: [if public, otherwise say "available upon request for validation"]

Happy to answer technical questions or discuss hybrid architectures.
by Zarathruster | 2025-10-13 11:21:09+00:00
> No, his argument is that consciousness can't be instantiated purely in software, that it requires specialized hardware. Language is irrelevant, it was only an example.

It's by no means irrelevant- the syntax vs. semantics distinction at the core of his argument makes little sense if we leave out language: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#SyntSema

Side note: while the Chinese Room put him on the map, he had as much to say about Philosophy of Language as he did of Mind. It was of more than passing interest to him.

> Instead, he believes that you could create a machine consciousness by building a brain of electronic neurons, with condensers for every biological dendrite, or whatever the right electric circuit you'd pick. He believed that this is somehow different than a simulation, with no clear reason whatsoever as to why.

I've never heard him say any such thing, nor read any word he's written attesting to this belief. If you have a source then by all means provide it.

I have, however, heard him say the following:

1. The structure and arrangement of neurons in the human nervous system creates consciousness.

2. The exact causal mechanism for this is phenomenon is unknown.

3. If we were to engineer a set of circumstances such that the causal mechanism for consciousness (whatever it may be) were present, we would have to conclude that the resulting entity- be it biological, mechanical, etc., is conscious.

He didn't have anything definitive to say about the causal mechanism of consciousness, and indeed he didn't see that as his job. That was to be an exercise left to the neuroscientists, or in his preferred terminology, "brain stabbers." He was confident only in his assertion that it couldn't be caused by mere symbol manipulation.

> it is in fact obvious he held dualistic notions where there is something obviously special about the mind-brain interaction that is not purely computational.

He believed that consciousness is an emergent state of the brain, much like an ice cube is just water in a state of frozenness. He explains why this isn't just warmed over property dualism:

https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/paller/dialogue/proper...
by skywhopper | 2025-10-13 11:21:10+00:00
Ugh, lots of problems with this research, its apparent goals, and how it’s being presented. Number one for me is just that ADHD is not that simple and is definitely not a binary state. They even allude to the fact that most other ADHD literature indicates as much, but they are promoting the idea that they’ve invented a way to identify the neurodivergent with a quick eye test. Sorry, but they haven’t.

Their control group almost certainly has some people with undiagnosed ADHD, and although they don’t describe their recruitment methods, I suspect they (unintentionally but knowingly—the participants are all college students) excluded a lot of folks through how they identified potential participants.

They fact that three quarters of their ADHD participants were on stimulant medication already indicates they’ve oversampled on those folks, and honestly I’m guessing their stats reflect more the effect of Adderall and Ritalin on visual processing than they do the effects of ADHD.

But one of the things that’s often misunderstood about ADHD is that whatever the physical underpinnings of the sorts of neurodivergence that get classified as “ADHD symptoms”, a key aspect of whether or not someone “has ADHD” is not whether their brain functions in a different way that “typical” people, but instead whether or not those symptoms cause regular distress in their daily lives.

In other words, you may exhibit many of the physical and behavioral markers of ADHD but if those traits aren’t making you struggle, then you don’t “have ADHD”. And so any physical test is going to be unable to ever be entirely reliable, because there are lots of folks living their lives who would flag on the test but who don’t “have ADHD”. The study results even hints at that with a much worse rate of identifying neurotypicals successfully.
by xtiansimon | 2025-10-13 11:22:02+00:00
>> “His argument is much narrower: consciousness can't be instantiated purely in language.”

> “No, his argument is that consciousness can't be instantiated purely in software…“

The confusion is very interesting to me, maybe because I’m a complete neophyte on the subject. That said, I’ve often wondered if consciousness is necessarily _embodied_ or emerged from pure presence into language & body. Maybe the confusion is intentional?
by samrazer | 2025-10-13 11:23:22+00:00
Thank you for your honest feedback and for taking the time to share your experience. I completely understand your reaction, and I’m truly sorry that the ads caused you to leave the site. Your input is invaluable, and I’ll review the ad placement and settings carefully to make the experience better for all users.

I hope you might consider giving the site another try in the future — I’m committed to making it as smooth and enjoyable as possible.
by wilkystyle | 2025-10-13 11:23:22+00:00
My configuration[0] doesn't quite meet all of your requirements, but you might be able to get some ideas from it. If you delete my hacky and very opinionated color theme configuration, it's 418 lines.

- I use Neovim in the terminal, so that's where I configure the font (Hack Nerd Font Mono) [1], which I install via homebrew on macOS[2].

- LSP: Can't recommend mason.nvim and mason-lspconfig enough. Install LSP servers with mason.nvim, and then mason-lspconfig handles automatically configuring and enabling whatever you've installed.

- I'm using mini.icons[3]

- For the file browser, I highly recommend Oil.nvim[4], which I discovered from this video by TJ DeVries[5].

- I was using fzf-lua, but switched back to Telescope because it was a better fit for me personally (I missed C-k to automatically append a file glob to live_grep. I missed being able to toggle the previewer. I missed being able to hit Esc and move around the picker input box with Vim motions)

Might be misunderstanding "splits I can manage with the keyboard", but (Neo)vim is pretty configurable here! I actually just use the default keybindings of e.g.

- `C-w` then HJKL to move

- `C-w C-v` to open a side-by-side (vertical) split

- `C-w C-q` to close the current split

- `C-w C-o` to close other splits (make current split the only one)

- `[NUMBER] C-w C-w` to jump to the [NUMBER]th split.

- `C-w o` to jump back to the last split you were at

[0] https://github.com/wilkystyle/nvim

[1] https://www.nerdfonts.com/

[2] https://gist.github.com/davidteren/898f2dcccd42d9f8680ec69a3...

[3] https://github.com/wilkystyle/nvim/blob/db16245731dea45f0c58...

[4] https://github.com/stevearc/oil.nvim

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r1mMg-yVZE
by jbverschoor | 2025-10-13 11:24:41+00:00
That's simply not true. "we" are misusing HTML to create applications because the tooling and distribution are so good. ReactNative / NativeScript, and probably more allow you to create apps using native or html implementations of the interface.

It's just that people start with HTML, and then it's just easy so slap Electron around it.

Think of ReactNative / NativeScript like QT/wxWidgets but they are compatible with html too
by TaupeRanger | 2025-10-13 11:24:57+00:00
The study doesn't show that donation is a good thing. Showing a miniscule reduction in blood markers is not the relevant variable - what you'd actually care about is: do I liver a longer or better life because of this intervention? There simply isn't any evidence that a tiny reduction in PFAS from blood donation results in any improvement in any clinical outcomes. Because we don't know either way, it's also possible that there would be harms from this - as blood donation is not entirely risk free, exposing people to syncope while driving after giving blood, skin complications like infections, or other rare issues we don't even know about.
by kmm | 2025-10-13 11:25:25+00:00
I sort of understand the reasoning on why Arxiv prefers tex to pdf[1], even though I feel it's a bit much to make it mandatory to submit the original tex file if they detect a submitted pdf was produced from one. But I've never understood what the added value is in hosting the source publicly.

Though I have to admit, when I was still in academia, whenever I saw a beautiful figure or formatting in a preprint, I'd often try to take some inspiration from the source for my own work, occasionally learning a new neat trick or package.

1: https://info.arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex.html
by anentropic | 2025-10-13 11:25:36+00:00
> it does seem possible that caloric excess in the absence of significant dietary fat does not drive obsesity / metabolic disease in the same way.

FWIW this is exactly the opposite hypothesis to that of the Keto diet (whereby consuming fat in absence of carbs does not drive obesity / metabolic disease)

To me seems more likely they were just burning more calories
by tetris11 | 2025-10-13 11:25:38+00:00
> Various theories existed for his size, including that his mother choked on a gherkin while pregnant, but he probably had a growth hormone deficiency caused by a pituitary gland disorder.

> No details of his captivity were recorded except that he claimed to have grown to 45 inches (110 centimetres) during this time, doubling his height after 30 years of age,[9] which he attributed to the hardships he had suffered.

Hormones are amazing, I wonder if there's any literature on what triggered his later growth
by yvdriess | 2025-10-13 11:26:47+00:00
Related discussions:

- CHERI with a Linux on Top https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487629

- Why not object capability languages? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43956095

- Ask HN: Why isn't capability-based security more common? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45261574
by rendaw | 2025-10-13 11:27:04+00:00
The peach on the author's CRT looks pretty awful, as does the photo. I'm curious what sort of CRT produced the meme image. Maybe it can't be done by a real CRT, but the author's CRT doesn't look anything like the example from the CRT database they have below.

They also said the impression is different since it's so close up - what does it look like at the size you'd really see it in game?
by dash2 | 2025-10-13 11:28:32+00:00
Everyone understands that some monozygotic twins have very similar IQs, and some have very different IQs. This is just natural variation, and not news at all. If schools make twins have very different IQs, that's important evidence for environmental effects on IQ which may well be interesting. But the problem is that maybe causality went the other way.
by pj1115 | 2025-10-13 11:30:06+00:00
I'm not sure I agree with 'minimal ads'. On a 27" monitor, 3 banners and an ads privacy pop-up don't take up much screen real estate, but visually some pages have as much ad as content. It's not a great experience when you're competing with other free (or OSS) products. If you're really only looking for feedback, you might have better luck if you aren't trying to monetising the people giving up their time!

Congrats on building this for yourself, I can certainly see the benefit of building writing tools to suit your own needs.
by doublerabbit | 2025-10-13 11:31:02+00:00
FBSD Host > Jail > [FreeBSD bHyve Vm] > Jails

You have web services you desire to host. Let's call our first jail, infrastructure.

Within our infrastructure jail we want to create a Virtual Machine for actual web services.

You have a AMP stack and you wish to keep MySQL, Apache and PHP isolated. Security right?

We construct a VM named Web Services running FreeBSD. This VM now enables us to construct more jails to handle isolated MySQL and Apache/PHP instances. These jails have no idea about the host underneath as they're being hosted in a floating hive.

The VM is now the host so all jails connected traditionally via a Bridge and this is where netgraph comes in. However to explain NG over HN would be painful.

bHyve too isn't just limited to a single jail, you could then create a second jail on the FBSD host and construct the same. "Network Infrastructure" where you handle routing between jails.

So you now have two jails, each running virtual machines isolated from each other running hierarchical jails.

In my case I have a storage virtual machine. Using ZFS, space is dynamic and storage jail within issue all my nfs zfs shares, my smb shares et cetera. This makes backups easy as all I ever need to do is backup the storage virtual machine.

A media jail where I hold all my streaming services and a network jail where all things network infrastructure go. Routers, monitoring, dns et cetera.

You can go deeper than that. I was playing with a host where you had a, VM, Jail with hosted a dedicated firewall for jails which hosted jails for services.

Host > Jail > VM > FW Jail > Service Jail A > Jail A, B, C

And because all is contained in a virtual machine, I just power off the VM and backup the raw image.
by UncleMeat | 2025-10-13 11:31:25+00:00
Hardly. 1983 claims have been cut to ribbons by the courts. Suing the individual officials for violating your rights is basically impossible because of extremely broad qualified immunity for the cops and even stronger prosecutorial immunity for the DAs. Suing the state office is also extremely difficult since you have to show a ridiculous pattern of violations rather than just that your rights were violated in this case.
by piskov | 2025-10-13 11:32:28+00:00
Also real kicker from 2022:

The UK used its National Security & Investment Act (2021) to order divestment of Nexperia’s Newport Wafer Fab in Nov 2022. The UK ordered them to sell 86% of the stake due to National Security concerns

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/acquisition-of-ne...
by ta1243 | 2025-10-13 11:33:01+00:00
So at 90 most people will have died by 95, and those that don't a significant proportion have severely life limiting health events, both mental and physical (strokes, heart attacks, falls etc)

What happens to 90 year olds in America that need a few weeks in ITU and a couple of months on a warn from a stroke when they can't pay?
by kcexn | 2025-10-13 11:33:21+00:00
poll is the POSIX specified I/O multiplexer so it has the advantage of being portable. Windows even supports a version of poll called WSAPoll.

If you must implement your own event loop and you want your application to be portable, poll is still a good place to begin.

O(N) demultiplexing time in the pollfd array is also not as brutal as it seems on modern hardware. The pollfd structure itself is only 8 bytes wide, so you can comfortably pack thousands of them into the L1 cache. Copying all of the elements that have an active event into a new smaller array before processing them is going to be fast enough for most cases.
by Egidius | 2025-10-13 11:34:51+00:00
Thank you. That means a lot. I hope to fully finish it by the end of the month as it's still riddled with small bugs. But feel free to fork it: https://github.com/danielterwiel/terwiel.io

Should be as easy as updating all data in the data/ folder and you can get your own version. Mind you: getting the SVG logos right is the hard part
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-13 11:34:56+00:00
Even those, who should know better, choose to not think about the consequences and in masses opt for spyware and non-free software, out of convenience, or laziness. I mean, look at all the computing professionals (?), who use Google Chrome instead of Chromium or Ungoogled Chromium, or another browser entirely. Look at all the web developers, who only test on Chromium-derived browsers, maybe even only Google Chrome. Look at all the IT departments, who mandate use of Windows in companies. Instead of being part of the change, they are part of the dystopia.

I think we have a severe problem, due to influx of too many people, who don't actually care, even though they should be knowledgeable enough to see the consequences. Maybe the paycheck is the only thing that counts for them, but they are actively contributing to the process of us all losing our freedom. If we lose our freedom (more than we have already) in the digital realm, we will lose it outside of the digital realm as well. For example imagine there are no longer any auditable open source/free software messengers you can use and all you can do it trusting proprietary vendors, who can introduce any backdoor they like. What tool will you use to organize protests? What if messenger makers agree to introduce state determined blackouts? Or secretly report your activity to the state and police, so that they appear at your door, before your protest even started? How will you organize any critical number of people, without digital freedom to do so in this day and age?

Our freedom is at stake, but most people don't care, even if you tell them. We are too damn comfortable for our own sake.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-10-13 11:35:12+00:00
He brought so many unique contributions to the field. Top 10 in philosophy of mind imo. Sad that he chose to tarnish his legacy by preying on his students for decades. I find the lack of discussion in here around his misconduct very telling. There is so much to learn here regarding the way we revere bright minds like his that might not have the brightest of morals
by Zufriedenheit | 2025-10-13 11:35:25+00:00
A story from a german town: We have an 200 year old bridge, which can't be used anymore. It's a small bridge only about 100m long and 5m high i would guess. The state owned railroad wants to replace it. Everybody agrees. Local people are happy. They simple want to build the new one right next to the old one and then take the old one down. But still in spite of everybody agreeing it took 20 years!! to get the permit. They have finally started construction 5 years ago and the costs have doubled multiple times and are now in the hundreds of millions. They say that hopefully in another 5 years from now they might be finished with construction. For all those years the locals have to take a long detour because the bridge can't be used. I have recently read how in china they finished the tallest bridge of the world in a 3 year construction and the cost was less than our little bridge here. After hearing about this i realized how doomed we are. We have regulated our selfs into a total standstill. I can understand if we are maybe 10-30% slower due to better environmental protection, but if me are slower and more expensive by a factor 10, then we are just not competitive at all. This reads like satire but it is actually happening.
by christianrth | 2025-10-13 11:35:37+00:00
Author here. Some additional technical details:

*Why symbolic reasoning?*

Most production AI doesn't need the full flexibility of LLMs. Fraud detection, compliance checking, rule validation - these have well-defined logic. Using an LLM for "if amount > €5000 AND velocity > 0.8 then flag" is overkill.

*The DSL:* ```aspera concept fraud_risk { signals: ["amount", "velocity", "location"]; weight: 1.0; }

inference detect_high_velocity { when (signals.velocity > 0.8 AND signals.amount > 5000) { then increase concept: "fraud_risk" by 1.0; } }

intention block_transaction { trigger: "fraud_detected"; strategy: [ if (concepts.fraud_risk > 0.7) then "block"; if (concepts.fraud_risk > 0.4) then "review"; else "approve"; ]; }
by 0x37 | 2025-10-13 11:35:54+00:00
These may be objectively superior (I haven't tested), but I have come to realize (like so many others) that if you ever change your OS installation, set up VMs, or SSH anywhere, preferring these is just an uphill battle that never ends. I don't want to have to set these up in every new environment I operate in, or even use a mix of these on my personal computer and the traditional ones elsewhere.

Learn the classic tools, learn them well, and your life will be much easier.
by gcanyon | 2025-10-13 11:35:57+00:00
And yet we report gun deaths per year, smoking rates, sea warming, etc. etc. The error isn't in producing or considering an aggregate result, but in ignoring where it came from. Since this is an internet forum and not a policy think tank I think that error is largely moot.

Or put another way: it was a simple question that the ggp can answer or not as they choose. I was just curious for their perspective.