MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by siglesias | 2025-10-13 16:18:16+00:00
I would encourage deeply digging into the intuition that brain states and computer states are the same. Start with what you know, and then work backwards and see whether you still think they aren’t different. For example, we have an intuitive understanding of what kinds of flavors (for us) are delicious versus not. Or what kinds of sounds are pleasant versus not. Etc. If I close my eyes, I can see the color purple. I know that Nutella is delicious, and I can imagine its flavor at will. I share Searle’s intuition that the universe would be a strange place if these feelings of understanding (and pleasantness!) were simply functions not of physical states but of abstract program states. Keep in mind—what counts as a bit is simply a matter of convention. In one computer system, it could be a minute difference in voltage in a transistor. In another, it could be the presence of one element versus another. In another, it could be whether a chamber contains water or not. In another, it could be markings on a page. On and on. On the strong AI thesis, any system that runs steps in this program would not just produce functionally equivalent output to brains, but they would be forced to have mental states too, like imagining the taste of Nutella. To me, it's implausible that symbolic states FORCE mental states, or put another way that mental states are non-physical (we think about how states like pain, euphoria, drunkenness, etc, are physically modulated through drugs..you'd have to modify this to say that they're really modifying symbolic states somehow). Either the Chinese Room is missing something, our understanding of physical reality is incomplete, OR that you have to bite the bullet that the universe creates mental states when systems implement the right program—but then you’re left with the puzzle of how it is that there is a tie between the physical world and the abstract world of symbols (how can causing a mark on a page cause mental states).

So what’s the physical cause for consciousness and understanding that is not computable? If for example you took the hypothesis that “consciousness is a sequence of microtubule-orchestrated collapses of the quantum wavefunction” [1], then you can see a series of physical requirements for consciousness and understanding that forces all conscious beings onto: 1) roughly the same clock (because consciousness shares a cause), and 2) the same reality (because consciousness causes wavefunction collapses). That’s something you could not do merely by simulating certain brain processes in a closed system.

1) Not saying this is correct, but it invites one to imagine that consciousness could have physical requirements that play in some of the oddities of the (shared) quantum world. https://x.com/StuartHameroff/status/1977419279801954744
by kxyvr | 2025-10-13 16:18:18+00:00
I'm an applied mathematician and this is the most common layout for dense matrices due to BLAS and LAPACK. Note, many of these routines have a flag to denote when working with a transpose, which can be used to cheat a different memory layout in a pinch. There are also parameters for increments in memory, which can help when computing across a row as opposed to down a column, which can also be co-opted. Unless there's a reason not to, I personally default to column major ordering for all matrices and tensors and use explicit indexing functions, which tends to avoid headaches since my codes are consistent with most others.

Abstractly, there's no such thing as memory layout, so it doesn't matter for things like proofs, normally.
by jvanderbot | 2025-10-13 16:18:23+00:00
This feels like video game analysis. Unit is likely to die, therefore do not spend resources on unit. Leave unit behind.

There is no world in which I would leave a family member or close friend to die in the woods alone, especially if I have no idea what germs are, why people die when they bleed, and am listening to a voice I have heard my whole live cry out in pain. Even if I knew for sure they were going to die, I would sit with them, or move them, or something.

Thought experiment: Would you visit your mother or father in the hospital knowing they were going to die that day? I mean there's nothing you can do, why bother??
by caelum19 | 2025-10-13 16:18:47+00:00
2 benefits:

* very quick finality

* it works without needing to trust coral and coral's ability to stay operating or identify who else to trust

There are some down the line benefits as well to immutable open records. Attestation mechanisms are really elegant and in the works, they make way more sense being built on top of low-level peer distributed consensuses.

I will say though, one negative aspect of crypto is that the community being stakeholders from very early on gives us pressure to accommodate stakeholders with no interest/understanding of the tech (who might have just been sold on vibes), which makes giving the right people good first impressions difficult at times. The whitepaper is kind of outdated and abstract, the github (https://github.com/Coral-Protocol/coral-server/) gives a more direct problem solving view. I suppose it'd make sense to include the community more on the direction we want to go re: realness
by gwd | 2025-10-13 16:19:10+00:00
I think I'm still a bit confused... so, in the languages which cannot produce understanding and consciousness, you mean to include "machine language"? (And thus, any computer language which can be compiled to machine language?)

On your interpretation, are there any sorts of computation that Searle believes would potentially allow consciousness?

ETA: The other issue I have is with this whole idea is that "understanding requires semantics, and semantics requires consciousness". If you want to say that LLMs don't "understand" in that sense, because they're not conscious, I'm fine as long as you limit it to technical philosophical jargon. In plain English, in a practical sense, it's obvious to me that LLMs understand quite a lot -- at least, I haven't found a better word to describe LLMs' relationship with concepts.
by crawfordcomeaux | 2025-10-13 16:19:19+00:00
We need only look at the cultures of the Aka, Bayaka, and Mbuti tribes, who all split off from the same tribe 150k years ago & still share many of the same cultural norms oriented around counterdominance, matrifocal care, and singing as a means of protection & decision-making.

Their cultures can show us what it took to survive and thrive in a jungle with numerous large predators. These tribes carry wisdom we can apply in our daily lives.
by amiga386 | 2025-10-13 16:19:31+00:00
Reminder that Google owes Russia more money than exists in the world, for continuing to disobey the Russian law which commands them to allow the Russian state to upload its propaganda on Youtube.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxvnwkl5kgo

Ofcom are basically the UK's Roskomnadzor. Tell them to go fuck themselves with a copy of the OSA.

I'm from the UK and would gladly fuck all of them with a copy of the OSA, but I'd rather that the law were repealed. In the meantime, I'm telling everyone how to use VPNs and Tor Browser, and to never give anyone their real identity details on the internet.
by mcswell | 2025-10-13 16:19:31+00:00
I have two uses for 'cat':

1) Piping the contents of some file into a process.

2) Showing the contents of some short file.

Now (1) is better done with redirection (< or >). The only time I use cat is when I'm testing some pipeline where I only want a few lines of input, so I use 'head' or something similar. Once I have the pipeline working right, I edit the command line to replace 'head' with 'cat'. Easier than re-arranging whole words.

And it's rare that (2) is the right solution--too often I find that the file was longer than I thought, and I have to use 'more' (actually 'less').

So a replacement for 'cat' that does color coding sounds pretty much useless to me.
by pegasus | 2025-10-13 16:19:37+00:00
Social media won't die, but it can be replaced with something that is better in every way, but especially better at actually enriching our lives, rather than better at gluing us to screens and feeding us ads. It rests on us to create these decentralized systems. I think local-first software and some ideas from crypto are some good first guideposts on the way there. AI can surely help too, if used judiciously.
by suriya-ganesh | 2025-10-13 16:19:44+00:00
Lets say the scientist takes $0 home (which is ridiculous btw). even then you would need the almighty "funding" to setup a lab, recruit participants, etc.

Anybody doing science at a University is definitely doing it at a significant discount to their salary (phds are paid ~$50K at the high end) at a private company.
by contrarian1234 | 2025-10-13 16:20:00+00:00
If they build gas plants then they'd be so much more entangled in conflicts in the middle East (and Russia) . I'm not sure that that would be fantastic for anyone, the Chinese included

I wouldn't be surprised is the anti coal movement has been pushed by the petrostates

Coal sucks but it does ensure energy independence (as does solar and wind)
by Cpoll | 2025-10-13 16:20:10+00:00
I hate percentages without numbers. And the fentanyl numbers apparently weren't impressive enough, so they cherry-picked a subset to get 9000 (the summary is correct, the headline is inaccurate).

> 2015 and 2023, fentanyl-related deaths rose from 264 to 4,144 among older adults (a 1,470% increase) and from 8,513 to 64,694 among younger adults (a 660% increase). Within the older population, deaths involving both fentanyl and stimulants grew from 8.7% (23 of 264 fentanyl deaths) in 2015 to 49.9% (2,070 of 4,144) in 2023 -- a staggering 9,000% rise. In comparison, among younger adults, fentanyl-stimulant deaths rose from 21.3% (1,812 of 8,513) to 59.3% (38,333 of 64,694) over the same period, a 2,115% increase.

And without stats for other types of ODs and for population size to compare against, it's hard to draw conclusions. Not to say that I dont't there's an opioid epidemic.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-13 16:20:10+00:00
So because of open source code there isn’t a duopoly when it comes to phones that anyone cares about, operating systems, etc?

Neither Microsoft or Apple are staying up late at night concerning themselves with Linux or is Apple and Google staying up late worried about Fdroid.

In fact, there are more Linux VMs running on Azure than Windows VMs. Every large tech company supports open source to a certain degree to “commoditize their complements” or to get a foot in where they aren’t competitive.

Is there a “reasonable service” that is open source for any of the major cloud providers? ChatGPT? The various AI assisted coding products? Hell even JetBrains products?
by ben_w | 2025-10-13 16:20:25+00:00
> This assumes that the economy and the governments will happily suffer the electricity and financial demands that Sam and co would give and the world would accept. Even if Sam's words were true, it is still a leap of faith because there is no data backing those words.

Most economic growth since electricity became economically relevant assumes that, the only thing that changes are the names of who (supplies and) demands the energy.

> Even if Sam's words were true, it is still a leap of faith because there is no data backing those words.

Ignore Sam's, assume mine in the hypotheticals of my comment: even something slower than Musk's ongoing failure to make FSD is still a massive increase over the status quo that justifies the price, yet it can do so in a way that's still not going to feel like a radical shift to live through.

> My take in 2025 is that AI companies (other than the big ones like OpenAI) are going to struggle getting funding.

Mine is that there's definitely a bubble overall, but not necessarily in any single player: who wins the pop and who disappears is unclear, but whoever does survive can easily reduce spending when there's no competition and they're consequently not having to put 1/3rd of their compute budget into the next marginal improvement needed to beat whoever else just beat them.
by topdrops66 | 2025-10-13 16:20:55+00:00
In early October 2025, cryptocurrency markets suffered a dramatic crash, marked by massive liquidations, sharp price drops across major assets, and a wave of uncertainty. What triggered the drop? How deep was the fall, and could this be a turning point for crypto markets?

https://topdrops.in/crypto-currency-meltdown-2025-what-the-1...

Cryptocurrency2025, Cryptomarket, Cryptocrash, 2025cryptocrash
by fundad | 2025-10-13 16:21:26+00:00
The people who should read this article and won't are actually an anti-growth movement. The silicon valley bros I work with are lapping up the sabotage because they want a lower standard of living in America and less science and innovation because they are already comfortable enough. Their sites are set only on the short-term gains of anti-Muslim and anti-abortion sentiment and "though talk" on immigration. Results are not that important. They claim that there would be enough funding if universities funded it with their endowments.

The anti-government sentiment is frankly anti-American. Even the ones who are naturalized don't know the basics about how ballots are validated ("If my wife vote with a provisional ballot, couldn't just anybody?"). I thought there was some testing for naturalization but it must be easy to cheat.

Anyone who convinced themselves that "economic anxiety" was actually a thing should talk to any MAGA or "centrists" about the present state of the economy.
by drob518 | 2025-10-13 16:21:53+00:00
That was the first thought I had, too. When the dot-com bubble burst, every VC was slapping companies together to try to forestall the black mark of having a “failure” and balance sheet write off that they would have to show the LPs (investors) in the next LP meeting. It got so bad that someone described it as “tying together two rocks and seeing if they will float.” Needless to say, most didn’t. So, this makes me wonder if we’re seeing the first signs of the bursting of the AI bubble which we all know we’re in the middle of. Maybe it’s legit and there is real “synergy” or whatever, but the fact that this is two companies within the same VC portfolio makes it suspect.
by mjburgess | 2025-10-13 16:22:25+00:00
"opening a door" is an observer-relative purpose

Yes, you can intepret systems as having a goal and realise that goal using a vareity of different devices.

Reality itself doesnt have purposes, there are no goals. "A device that opens a door" isnt a physical process, it's a goal.

Go do the same with chemistry, physics, biology -- no, actual relaity doesnt have purposes. Hexane isnt methane, gravity isnt electromagnetism, the motion of air molecuels isnt the emission of light.

Any time "one thing can serve the purpose as another" you are, by definition, working in the world of human intention.

Your entire observer-relative purpose-attributing "engineering mania" here is anti-naturalistic dualism. Reality is a place of specific causes, not of roles/pruposes/goals/devices

Fire is the thing which is a plasma disposed to burn in oxygen which results from a specific chemical/etc. process etc. etc. There is no "water fire".

Insofar as an object can causally interact with another such that it "pushes it out of the way" -- the property had by all such objects relates to the pauli exclusion principle (essentially) and refined by surface area, volume, density and the like. To "open a door" is to displace wood in a certain location, to do that is to exist such that the femionic structure of the wood is excluded from that place.
by rcullins | 2025-10-13 16:22:28+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. I understand the challenges of a small volunteer team trying to deal with old technology. I also have 20+ years in SaaS, so I get the scalability and reliability concerns.

Marketing would be key. I'm thinking about this market because I know that as much as we'd like to think every church is unique, there's a lot of consistency in, say, conservative Baptist churches, so I think there's a place for a solution that attempts to guide congregations toward best practices through templating, intelligent defaults, automation, etc. so they can get up to speed quickly. The kind of churches I'm used to in rural New England (< 100 attendees) are often all volunteer, no one with real tech chops, and use something like Google Sites or Wordpress for a website. So having something that doesn't require managing hosting, design, etc for their website, and has straightforward all-in-one options for other tools (integrated with the church website) seems like it would be a good approach to begin, if the price point were right.

Marketing-wise, I'd likely start with my own pastor/church networks and go from there.
by b-karl | 2025-10-13 16:22:31+00:00
So maybe we are talking too much about AI as a tech bubble (like the dotcom bubble) and it is actually closer to an arms race like the nuclear programs or space race? For better and for worse there are a lot of secondary value and ventures created from those and one could see AI ventures in a similar light.

A key difference is of course, at least in the US, that the research is led by corporations as opposed to research institutes and government.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-10-13 16:22:35+00:00
> Why couldn’t the companies with excess profits just pay they employees more in salaries?

They could, but why should they? Which advantage get the shareholders from this?

The only reason why a company with excess profits "should" pay the employees more is if

i) for a given role, the expected results of potential applicants varies a lot (i.e. the company has an incentive "to hire the best of the best")

ii) the market for these exceptional talents is tough (i.e. if the company does not hire the best, someone else will; additionally, if the company does not pay the employees really well, they will be poached)
by linuxftw | 2025-10-13 16:22:36+00:00
Many people are saying this is symbolic and cannot be enforced. Unfortunately, that's just not true. Look at what happened to the founder of Telegram. Some jurisdiction decides you're violating their laws, all you need to do is catch a connecting flight or take a vacation on their soil or a place that will eagerly extradite, and you're a political prisoner.

What happens if one of the officers of 4Chan or Gab is on a flight to Paris and the plane is redirected to London? Well, they're going to prison. The UK is a police state.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-13 16:23:13+00:00
Stallman doesn’t exactly make reasonable arguments that appeal to most people and his lifestyle based on his belief system is laughable.

And when most consumers look at open source alternatives to commercial software and hardware they are already “shitty”.

Are you really going to say that you would hand an open source product to most users and hand them a product by Apple or Microsoft and they would say the open source alternative is “better” for them?
by AlotOfReading | 2025-10-13 16:23:17+00:00
I've worked in both IoT lighting and automotive, so I'm comfortable comparing the two. This also isn't offered as a defense.

The big auto OEMs are just as sensitive to absolute BOM cost optimization, regardless of the percentage increases. I don't think this was a bootslot issue though, regardless of the word "bricked". Even as backwards and ill-advised as auto software can be, generally accepted practice is that updates are impossible while the vehicle is in motion. This is usually enforced by systems shared across multiple OEMs through the tier system.

The situation sounds more like a disastrously buggy new firmware.

I wouldn't put either past stellantis though. The auto industry already scrapes the bottom of the proverbial barrel sometimes, and stellantis isn't exactly known for their top of market compensation.
by jesuslop | 2025-10-13 16:23:37+00:00
Think OpenGL used all those 2,3,4D critters at API level. It must be very hardware friendly to reduce your pipeline to matrix product. Also your scene graph (tree) is just this, you attach relative rotations and translations to graph nodes. You push your mesh (stream of triangles) at tree nodes, and composition of relative transforms up to the root is matrix product (or was the inverse?) that transform the meshes that go to the pipeline. For instance character skeletons are scene subgraphs, bones have translations, articulations have rotations. That's why it is so convenient to have rotations and translations in a common representation, and a linear one (4D matrix) is super. All this excluding materials, textures, and so on, I mean.
by swyx | 2025-10-13 16:24:23+00:00
> Data startups Fivetran and dbt Labs will merge in an all-stock deal, creating a combined data infrastructure company with nearly $600 million in annual revenue, the two companies told Reuters.

last update we had was Fivetran had 200m in 2023 and 300m in 2024 (https://www.fivetran.com/press/fivetran-surpasses-300m-arr-d...)

if Fivetran continued at same pace in 2025, that means it's at 400m ish and dbt was at 200m. not bad for dbt.
by trod1234 | 2025-10-13 16:24:54+00:00
Electricity transfer is orders of magnitude more cheaply transmitted than any physical quantity of gas as the power is up-converted to around 750kV which only wastes a few hundred watts in the actual transmission (across thousands of miles).

California Air Emission Regulatory which is already on the books cannot comply with the plants so it makes sense that they are being built outside the state.

Natural Gas has the benefit of being simple to start up and shut down the needed turbines, compressor, exchanger, 1st and secondary loops based on demand. There's still some pollution, but compared to coal the pollution is a few percent in comparison (afaik). It burns more cleanly. Newer plants usually use the most efficient equipment at that time (within the tradeoffs chosen) so costs are often less (though poor material choices may offset this when corruption/fraud is found).
by jhallenworld | 2025-10-13 16:25:25+00:00
On the Oct 10 drop, I made a list of a bunch country specific ETFs to see who is and who isn't so correlated with the US.

oct 10 drop yield ytd total return mchi china -5.73 2.19 28.48 ewh hong kong -4.22 3.54 23.05 qqq nasdaq 100 -3.47 0.46 12.4 argt argentina -3.34 1.39 -16.04 currency problems ech chile -3.2 2.18 24.8 ewz brazil -2.98 5.42 26.49 spy USA: s&p 500 -2.69 1.08 9.15 epu peru -2.62 3.5 52.16 metals norw norway -2.44 4.06 22.77 ews singapore -2.38 3.59 28.19 ewn netherlands -2.31 1.91 25.28 ewx s&p emerging -2.08 2.81 8.58 ewa australia -1.75 3.02 9.26 enzl new zealand -1.65 2.25 -0.59 eww mexico -1.65 4.07 35.96 ewi italy -1.6 2.7 38.21 tur turkey -1.59 1.83 -9.71 currency problems ewq france -1.44 2.79 19.85 ewc canada -1.32 1.69 20.96 divo usa cc -1.07 4.58 8.43 ewp spain -0.68 2.68 52.85 ewd sweden -0.59 4.28 24.82 eden denmark -0.52 1.83 1.93 ewl switzerland -0.275 3.63 20.78 efnl finland -0.21 3.97 31.54 pin india 0 2.09 -4.03

(Edit: here are a few more)

btc bitcoin -3.72 19.71 aaau gold 0.97 48.3 dxy dollar -0.69 -2.91 ashr CSI-300 -4.0 .95 22 (domestic China) fltw taiwan -4.8 1.34 23

They are all correlated- even if the countries are different, it's the same set of investors. But if you have to pick one... Finland? Switzerland, Sweden and Norway have low debt / gdp.
by bobbyprograms | 2025-10-13 16:25:25+00:00
I’m building a goroutine capable typescript JIT. So far I have lexical scope, closures goroutines and GC.

Since I’m using AI to build it and have limited context window I started with the hardest first. So it only supports int64 now.

If you want to help

https://github.com/turbobuilt/technoscript