MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Balgair | 2025-10-31 15:29:44+00:00
Neuro person here.

Yes, many neurons fire at discrete intervals set by their morphology. In fact, this DFT/FFT/Infinite-FT/whatever-FT is all the hell over neuroscience. Many neurons don't really 'communicate' in just a single action potential. They are mostly firing at each other all the time, and the rate of firing is what communicates information. So neuron A is always popping at neuron B, but that tone/rate of popping is what affects change/information.

Now, this is not nearly true of every single neuron-neuron interaction. Some do use a single action potential (your patella knee reflex), some communicate with hundreds of other neurons (pyramidal cells in your cerebellum), some inhibit the firing of other neurons (gap/dendrite junction/axon interactions), some transmit information in opposite ways. It's a giant mess and the exact sub system is what you have to specify to get a handle on things.

Also, you get whole brain wave activity during different periods of sleep and awake cycles. So all the neurons will sync up their firing rates in certain areas when you're dreaming or taking an SAT of something. And yes, you can influence mass cyclic firing with powerful magnets (TCMS).

For the cochlea here, these hair cells are mostly firing all the time and then when a sound/frequency that they are 'tuned' to is heard, then their firing pattern changes and that information is then transmitted toward the parietal lobes. To be clear too, there are a lot of other brain structures in the way before the info gets to a place where you can be conscious of it. Things like the medial nuclei, the trapezoidal bodies, the caleyx of Held, etc. Most of these areas are for discriminating sounds and the location of sounds in space. So like when your fan is on for a long while and you no longer hear it, that's because of the other structures.
by chermi | 2025-10-31 15:29:47+00:00
Ok. Maybe use it better? Or don't use it at all. Doesn't mean it's not being used to some end, unlike a hole.

Keep in mind also that the models are going to continue improving, if only on cost. Just a significant cost reduction allows for more "thinking" mode use.

Most of the reports about how useless LLMs are were from older models being used by people that don't know how to use LLMs. I'm not someone that thinks they're perfect or even great yet, but their not dirt.
by anal_reactor | 2025-10-31 15:30:46+00:00
Sure, let's stick to counting symbols. When I need to count something, there's a decent chance I'll get lost if I count beyond 10, and beyond 20 I'll get lost for sure. Even below 10, when I count it's one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine items. But when I lie I do it instantaneously, without altering the pace of the conversation. I can come up with a believable lie within the brief period between someone saying something to me, and the moment I'm expected to respond. No way I'd be able to count 10 items that fast.

Pirahã language doesn't even have numerals - that's an extreme case, but there quite a few languages where people stop counting beyond certain small number and just say "a lot". Same people though don't have issues lying to one another. Let that sink in for a while - fully grown-ass adults, fully capable of functioning in their society, not capable of counting one-two-three because the concept is beyond them.

What I'm trying to say is that all of those "requires theory of mind" statements are probably true but completely irrelevant because humans (and LLMs) have "hardware acceleration" of whatever it takes to lie, meanwhile counting is an abstract idea that requires to use the brain in a way it didn't evolve to be used. Similarly, LLMs cannot count if they aren't connected to a math engine - not because they're stupid, but because counting is really difficult.
by anonymous908213 | 2025-10-31 15:30:51+00:00
If a bank holding your money gets broken into, everything is stolen, and the bank tells you your money is gone and you're not getting it back, do you think it would be within your rights to berate them or is that too mean? Because that's what the actual analogy here is. You're allowed to be lax with your security when you're the only victim of your negligence. When your lack of security causes other people to suffer harm, of course those people are going to have an issue.
by DougBTX | 2025-10-31 15:30:52+00:00
> I want everything that passes through a function to be a copy unless I put in a symbol or keyword that it suppose to be passed by reference.

JavaScript doesn’t have references, it is clearer to only use “passed by reference” terminology when writing about code in a language which does have them, like C++ [0].

In JavaScript, if a mutable object is passed to a function, then the function can change the properties on the object, but it is always the same object. When an object is passed by reference, the function can replace the initial object with a completely different one, that isn’t possible in JS.

Better is to distinguish between immutable objects (ints, strings in JS) and mutable ones. A mutable object can be made immutable in JS using Object.freeze [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_(C%2B%2B)

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
by notepad0x90 | 2025-10-31 15:31:08+00:00
why are you asking me? shouldn't you be making the case for that instead?

Why are so many farmers relying on illegal immigrants? why are so many employers depending on them? You don't really think 11 million people are using emergency rooms while at the same time being criminals do you now? why are local pd's not concerned about this? why are cities with illegal migrants not worried about them? You don't really think people in cities would rather be victims of crime than deport illegal migrants do you? How are mayors being re-elected if they're not hard on illegal migrants but those migrants are causing crime?

Show me the economical analysis that shows they're a net-negative on the economy? Show me the hospitals complaining about emergency rooms packed with illegal migrants constantly needing ER care, because they're so clumsy? What is the crime and murder rate with illegal migrants compared to natural born citizens? Despite crime rates going down over the years, and the top causes of violent crime not involving illegal migration, why is $50B, a larger budget than the US marines! being focused on this?

I bet you'd have cheered for the rounding up of jews and slavs in europe ~80yrs ago lol.

I think your prejudice has won the battle against your critical thinking skills.
by bunderbunder | 2025-10-31 15:31:20+00:00
It reminds me a lot of the late 1990s.

We had an impressive new technology (the Web), and everyone could see it was going to change the world, which fueled a huge gold rush that turned into a speculative bubble. And yes, ultimately the Web did change the world and a lot of people made a lot of money off of it. But that largely happened later, after the bubble burst, and in ways that people didn't quite anticipate. Many of the companies people were making big bets on at the time are now fertile fodder for YouTube video essays on spectacular corporate failures, and many of the ones that are dominant now were either non-existent or had very little mindshare back in the late '90s.

For example, the same year the .com bubble burst, Google was a small new startup that failed to sell their search engine to Excite, one of the major Web portal sites at the time. Excite turned them down because they thought $750,000 was too high a price. 2 years later, after the dust had started to settle, Excite was bankrupt and Google was Google.

And things today sure do strike me as being very similar to things 25, 30 years ago. We've got an exciting new technology, we've got lots of hype and exuberant investment, we've got one side saying we're in a speculative bubble, and the other side saying no this technology is the real deal. And neither side really wants to listen to the more sober voices pointing out that both these things have been true at the same time many times in the past, so maybe it's possible for them to both be true at the same time in the present, too. And, as always, the people who are most confident in their ability to predict the future ultimately prove to be no more clairvoyant than the rest of us.
by simonw | 2025-10-31 15:31:20+00:00
https://hugovk.github.io/free-threaded-wheels/ is looking pretty healthy - 130 of the 360 most downloaded C extension PyPI packages are now free-threaded Python compatible, up from 92 on 15th August https://web.archive.org/web/20250815071755/https://hugovk.gi...

I was curious as to how that site works - it has a build script at https://github.com/hugovk/free-threaded-wheels/blob/cdae0b45... which checks the PyPI available file downloads for a package and looks for a bdist_wheel that matches this:

abi_tag = download["filename"].removesuffix(".whl").split("-")[-2] if abi_tag.endswith("t") and abi_tag.startswith("cp31"): has_free_threaded_wheel = True
by bccdee | 2025-10-31 15:32:03+00:00
> It's trivial to ensure that only one message is delivered to only one consumer if that's what you want. Consumer groups track their offset and then commit the offset, the message stays in Kafka but it won't be read again. This IMO is better behaviour than RabbitMQ

The trivial solution is to use Kafka. They're clearly saying that Kafka makes it trivial, not that it's trivial to solve from scratch.
by egberts1 | 2025-10-31 15:32:20+00:00
Oh yeah, you are better off having a separate but hardened SSH authentication server that is to be consulted by such SSH gateways, just to protect the private keys.

And use DTLS (two sets of client and server PKI , one for each direction) to guard that link between SSH gatewat(s) and SSH authentication (certificate-based) server.

The starting point of all this:

https://jpmens.net/2019/03/02/sshd-and-authorizedkeyscommand...
by iso1631 | 2025-10-31 15:32:21+00:00
> authoritarian countries that issue modern e-passports but do not allow free elections

Those tend to not issue passports (of any kind) to many citizens.

Then there's access. In America for example only half the adults in the country even have a passport, and I suspect that skews quite heavily towards one demographic. Do you think that India, Nigeria, or Russia have more equitable access?

And even if they did, what stops the state issuing extra fake passports to citizens they want to vote.

of course then there's key elements of a free election, freedom of access to the ballot paper, freedom to campaign the same as others, freedom from imprisonment because you are running against the incumbent leader, having each vote being worth the same. Many countries prevent people in jail from voting, or even people who used to be in jail. Many countries give more power to one constituency than another, almost all have some level of unequal access to campaigning.

It's not a "Free election" or "no election".

The actual casting of the vote is only part of the story.
by rchaud | 2025-10-31 15:32:26+00:00
OpenAI is raising funding based on its own forecasts for AI demand growth, and sending most of it to Oracle, MSFT, Nvidia as well as paying insiders enormous salaries.

There are some interesting parallels here with the business model described in the book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Developing countries take out huge loans from US lenders to build an electric grid, based on inflated forecasts from US consultancies they hired. The countries take on the debt, but the money mostly bypasses them and lands in the pockets of US engineering firms doing the construction, and government insiders taking kickbacks for greasing the wheels.

When the forecasted growth in industrial production fails to materialize, the countries are unable to repay the debt and have no option but to offer the US access to their resources, ports and votes in the UN.

What happens when OpenAI's forecasts of gargantuan growth fail to materialize and they're unable to sell more stock to pay off lenders? Does Uncle Sam step in with a bailout for "national security" reasons?
by ghaff | 2025-10-31 15:32:33+00:00
I very much doubt if every hotel I've stayed in outside the US has asked for my passport but certainly many/most have. Never really paid much mind.

As a US resident, I have often been asked for a drivers license in the US and it was actually an issue at one point when I had lost it though I was able to work around with some difficulty. I suspect the details were some combination of local/state/and hotel policy.
by rmwaite | 2025-10-31 15:32:50+00:00
To be honest, if you’re using a tool that stores things as trees and blobs and almost every part of its functionality is influenced by that fact, then you just need to understand trees and blobs. This is like trying to teach someone how to interact with the file system and they are like “whoa whoa whoa, directories? Files? I don’t have time to understand this, I just want to organize my documents.” Actually I take that back, it isn’t /like/ that, it is /exactly/ that.
by teiferer | 2025-10-31 15:32:59+00:00
Sorry if I got you on the wrong foot. I was merely generally rambling, not critcizing you personally or your point. Of course it's fine to discuss this, just like it's fine that people discuss pokemon or cool jazz (who am I to judge). I could have posted this anywhere in the discussion tree. I'm merely a little fed up when some tech folks make it sound like this should be top priority for humankind.

Of course you're right about the physics.

And I don't have solutions to the hard problems either. They are hard for a reason.
by bzmrgonz | 2025-10-31 15:33:05+00:00
hmm.. this is interesting... the article says "spinal fluid exits the cerebrospinal fluid (csf) flows out of the brain... I wonder where it discharges these waste products. I ask because it is believed we have a sort of chimney on our backs. I think I read this on the article of the Irish lady who could detect alzheimers years before any modern medical detection systems. But maybe it is discharged in the gut? via the mesentery, the new organ they finally named fo rthe stuff that holds our intestines together. If anyone knows where it is discharged, please comment, I'm interested in this, because I do prolong waterfasts every 3 months, and I strongly believe the brain drains waste into my mouth during that time, because the taste in my mouth is godawful, but if there are other exit points the brain discharges waste, we probably need to know about them.
by alexpotato | 2025-10-31 15:33:06+00:00
In the "cool stuff about making movies" vein:

HIGHLY recommend this YouTube channel from a movie/TV propmaker: https://www.youtube.com/@ScottPropandRoll

Covers everything from: - making fake food for eating

- how to make potato chip bags that don't crinkle

- breakaway props e.g. for hitting people with baseball bats etc
by mindslight | 2025-10-31 15:33:19+00:00
Well said. If any of this were actually about immigration, it wouldn't be nearly as alarming.

After decades of being conservative and having their politicians sell them out, Republicans got really angry and gave up on conservatism in favor of radical destructionism instead. Rather than finding better politicians to represent them, focusing on workable policy (go after the employers), generally being less gullible, and so on, they decided the appropriate response was to throw the whole idea of Constitutionally-limited government in the trash in favor of a strongman con artist promising to magically solve it all. And they've convinced themselves they're on the right path because it makes "liberals" mad. Where of course a "liberal" is anyone concerned by throwing our Constitution in the trash.
by aclements | 2025-10-31 15:33:29+00:00
I'm a long-time fan of matcha and wrote the initial prototype that demonstrated Green Tea was viable while cafe crawling in Yokohama and drinking lots of matcha. "Matcha" didn't seem like a great name for a garbage collector, but matcha is a form of green tea and "Green Tea GC" rolled off the tongue, so I called my prototype Green Tea and the name stuck.
by OutOfHere | 2025-10-31 15:33:35+00:00
There is no training dataset to map the sensor data to thoughts. We don't know the meaning of what they're thinking. It's futile without a way to develop training data.

A very limited training dataset can perhaps be created with binary choices that the animal can be trained to communicate via physical actions. With sufficient effort, an embedding model mapping thoughts to concepts can be developed. Still, how to convert the embedding vector to text is unclear.
by 15155 | 2025-10-31 15:33:45+00:00
Money is finite - where is this money coming from?

Vacuuming the (imaginary - we're using feelings here, let's not split hairs on things like 'markets') accounts of every billionaire and redistributing these funds evenly amounts to singular thousands of dollars to just citizens.

The overwhelming majority of actual taxpaying citizens don't pay enough tax to cover their per-capita share of government spending, is there some factual evidence to suggest that unlimited economic migrants would? (or could?)
by juujian | 2025-10-31 15:34:17+00:00
I passed on the machine, but we set up gpt-oss-120b on a 128GB RAM Macbook pro and it is shockingly usable. Personally, I could imagine myself using that instead of OpenAI's web interface. The Ollama UI has web search working, too, so you don't have to worry about the model knowing the latest and greatest about every software package. Maybe one day I'll get the right drivers to run a local model on my Linux machine with AMD's NPU, too, but AMD has been really slow on this.
by blauditore | 2025-10-31 15:34:46+00:00
After many years of working with computers, I'm still confused about what exactly installing means. Whenever I have to set up something by hand (e.g. some SDK), there's a good chance of spending hours trying to make everything work everywhere, mostly dealing with environment variables, where to set them, and how to make sure all the tool who need to use the thing see it. Not to speak about the slight differences between operating systems. Maybe I just suck at this.
by alphazard | 2025-10-31 15:34:56+00:00
Yes, as long as the passports implement a signing scheme, and the set of valid public keys (the electorate) can be agreed upon. If you can sign arbitrary data, then you can sign other public keys, including whatever the voting system requires.

Vitalik has a great blog post about blockchain voting.

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/05/25/voting2.html

You probably wouldn't want to use the cryptography on the passports themselves to implement the voting system. You probably want to use one of the general purpose zkSTARKs or multi-party-computation systems.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-31 15:35:14+00:00
C# is starting to get a C++ like feeling, I no longer can keep track of all features that get added every year, especially when not able to work in vLatest in consulting gigs.

Just compare C# 14 with C# 1, laundry list of features, and BCL changes.

Go, has plenty of warts caused by ignoring the history of programming languages.

Rust async/await story isn't that great, as it is kind of half done.

We could also add others to the list, each year get a few more constructs, runtime changes, standard library changes, whatever is the package manager of the year, and so on.

All have issues, then again we can go back to the famous Bjarne Stroustoup quote

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses".
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-31 15:35:18+00:00
You can just record all your changes with git commit --fixup and then do a non-interactive rebase that just applies all the changes.

You can use all the regular git tools in a rebase, in fact it would be quite useless without. You can also just jump to other branches or record a fix to a previous commit. It doesn't matter what you do in the meantime, it only cares what is the HEAD, when you call git rebase --continue, and then it only performs what commands you specify in the rebase todo. You can even change the todo list at any time.
by jonhohle | 2025-10-31 15:35:30+00:00
I also don’t understand the argument that Result is anything other than a syntactic difference between these ideas.

final Foo x; try { x = foo().bar().baz().car(); } catch (Exception e) { x = null; } return Optional.of(x);

vs.

let x = foo()?.bar()?.baz()?.car()?; Some(x)

Both eat the error. Both wrap the value. The rust is more terse, but the meaning is the same.
by sho | 2025-10-31 15:35:33+00:00
Real-world workflows? I'm all for local LLM, tinker with it all the time, but for productive coding use no local LLM approaches cloud and it's not even close. There's no magic trick or combination of pieces, it just turns out that a quarter million dollars worth of H200s is just much, much better than anything a normal person could possibly deploy at home.

Give it time, we'll get there, but not anytime soon.
by bravetraveler | 2025-10-31 15:35:52+00:00
I'm more local than anything, I guess. A Framework Desktop off in another room. 96G set aside for VRAM though I barely use it.

Kept it simple: ollama, whatever the latest model is in fashion [when I'm looking]. Feel silly to name any one in particular, I make them compete. I usually don't bother: I know the docs I need.
by jimbokun | 2025-10-31 15:36:03+00:00
> However, don't you still need to understand the entire program as ultimately that's what you are trying to build.

Of course not, that's impossible. Modern programs are way to large to keep in your head and reason about.

So you need to be able to isolate certain parts of the program and just reason about those pieces while you debug or modify the code.

Once you identify the part of the program that needs to change, you don't have to worry about all the other parts of the program while you're making that change as long as you keep the contracts of all the functions in place.
by firefax | 2025-10-31 15:36:04+00:00
I've been using Ollama, Gemma3:12b is about all my little air can handle.

If anyone has suggestions on other models, as an experiment I tried asking it to design me a new latex resumé and it struggled for two hours with the request to put my name prominently at the top in a grey box with my email and phone number beside it.
by martinvonz | 2025-10-31 15:36:10+00:00
Thanks for the detailed comment.

My target audience were the people at the conference, who are mostly long-term jj users. The topic was "Jujutsu at Google: Architecture and future plans", i.e. explaining how it works and what our plans are at Google. I'm mentioning this because I think what you're suggesting is for a different presentation, more explaining what the advantages of Jujutsu at Google are rather than how it works. My goal was not to sell the solution to this audience because they're presumably already sold on it.

Sorry if this was obvious to you and you're saying that part of my problem was that I should have chosen a different topic and/or target audience (focusing more on potential new users, perhaps).
by sougou | 2025-10-31 15:36:17+00:00
Hi HN, this is a series on a way to generalize consensus protocols and how to adapt them to existing systems.

This is part 7: Discovery and Propagation. With this, we complete everything about the protocol part of Generalized Consensus. There are a few more advanced topics to cover: They are needed for running in production.

One of our goals is to make this approach work for Postgres via Multigres. But the principles can be used to implement your own solutions also. This will make Durability and High Availability more accessible for users.
by cestith | 2025-10-31 15:36:21+00:00
I wouldn’t say either is absolute. I’d call TCP more reliable than UDP, but not necessarily reliable exactly. I’d also call UDP unreliable compared to TCP. However, that doesn’t make it broken. Reliable ordering and delivery was not part of the design or spec. It’s fit for purpose sometimes better than TCP - when you don’t need the extra reliability or have built your own around it.