MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Amorymeltzer | 2025-10-30 18:30:44+00:00
>Aphantasics might skip over descriptive passages in books—since description aroused no images in their minds, they found it dull—or, because of such passages, avoid fiction altogether. Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to imagine. Of course, for people who did have imagery, seeing a book character in a movie was often unsettling—because they already had a sharp mental image of the character which didn’t look like the actor, or because their image was vague but just particular enough that the actor looked wrong, or because their image was barely there at all and the physical solidity of the actor conflicted with that amorphousness.

I definitely have aphantasia, but this description really didn't connect with me. I don't have a mental image of something, I have the vague sense of knowing what that thing looks like. I read both fiction and non-fiction fervently. I frequently am annoyed at film adaptation, since they conflict with what (I have a vague sense of knowing) the character looked like.

However:

>Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to imagine.

I do find that, once I've seen a movie or show adaptation, that portrayal becomes much more compelling in the mind than the book. The quintessential example for me is the snake exhibit's glass in the first Harry Potter book/movie.
by namibj | 2025-10-30 18:31:11+00:00
In the lower 48 you'd just size the solar to handle winter and find a way to use summer electricity, like electro winning metal from ore or running low-capex high-power chemical synthesis steps like making ammonia without natural gas.

Having energy cost related scheduled (winter) downtime gives the plants proper maintenance windows.

With free power but only during surplus peaks in summer when the grid can't transmit a large utility solar farm's entire production, and the day/night/weekday time shifting batteries are also already fully active, you could (looks like the math checks out) electrolytically refine iron ore into iron metal (for later smelting in an arc furnace) just about cost-competitively with (coal-fired) blast furnace operation. The key is to skip most overhead by operating them only to eat otherwise-curtailed production and connecting them to the DC bus between the MPPT and the grid inverter (same as the day/night shifting battery).
by p337 | 2025-10-30 18:31:19+00:00
Wait, what data are you seeing where most cyber attacks are originating from the US? I work in security at a place with some of the best threat intelligence globally, and there are indeed attacks from the US, even the government, but the idea that MOST cyberattacks originate from the US would be completely shocking to me. Is there some qualifier you're not including or maybe you misremembered "most targeted" as originated?

I'm not really trying to get into the political part of it fwiw.
by twoodfin | 2025-10-30 18:31:21+00:00
Great links!

I don’t see how SteveB’s “bad app” was out of bounds. IBM was telling these analysts a bad app couldn’t bring down OS/2. As someone who used (and liked!) OS/2 at the time, this was indeed false: IIRC OS/2 in this era had a single-threaded UI loop, and a misbehaving app could (and occasionally did) block input for all apps and corrupt the UI.

You could argue about the difference between this and a Windows “UAE”, but to the user the experience was a broken, unusable OS/2.
by godshatter | 2025-10-30 18:31:25+00:00
As a person with aphantasia, I can see actual images when I'm on the edge of sleep, and I can see actual images when I'm dreaming, but I can't get anything like that to show up when I try to "picture" something. Just black with static.

It is difficult to describe, but so many people talk about it as if they are seeing something and I never have - I've always assumed it was a figure of speech of some kind to visualize something.
by altruios | 2025-10-30 18:31:28+00:00
"where" the mind's eye is also variable. And may be moveable.

For a time, my mind's eye was 'on the floor, sideways, behind "my driver seat"'. With some effort, it is now 'in front' of me, closer than where my vision is, occupying some space between where my vision is, and where I perceive my sense of self to be.

The efforts were a combination of trataka flame training, training to remain conscious through the process of falling asleep (for lucid dreaming), and drawing (seeing an image, quickly memorizing it, and drawing it from the mind's eye projection {as in, literally trying to see the image on the blank page without access to the reference image}).
by kbrkbr | 2025-10-30 18:31:34+00:00
I don't find it so surprising, because I can recollect sounds, voices, songs. The same thing, another sense.

So it's probably like hearing "inner" sounds, just with motion pictures.

I wonder if there are also sound aphantasts, but it's highly likely.

Different to the case described at the beginning of the article I have lots of memories. But they are stories of what happened, not movies.
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-30 18:31:44+00:00
For me I can "see" things in my minds eye and it almost doesn't matter if my eyes are closed or not. The detail isn't perfect and it's unlike anything else I would ever "see", such as a blurry image or simple drawing. I can manipulate the image in my mind, rotate it or fold it over, etc.

The longer I think about a specific part the more detail I can see in that part. Unlike when I look around and see infinite detail all at once, my minds eye only sees the detail when I really focus on generating it.
by lawrencechen | 2025-10-30 18:31:45+00:00
Yeah this is honestly pretty expensive to run today.

> I’m not sure an LLM can really capture project-specific context yet from a single PR diff.

We had an even more expensive approach that cloned the repo into a VM and prompted codex to explore the codebase and run code before returning the heatmap data structure. Decided against it for now due to latency and cost, but I think we'll revisit it to help the LLM get project context.

Distillation should help a bit with cost, but I haven't experimented enough to have a definitive answer. Excited to play around with it though!

> which parts of the code change most often or correlate with past bugs

I can think of a way to do the correlation that would require LLMs. Maybe I'm missing a simpler approach? But agree that conditioning on past bugs would be great
by Ozzie_osman | 2025-10-30 18:32:19+00:00
> Microsoft said that using Azure in this way violated its terms of service and it was “not in the business of facilitating the mass surveillance of civilians”. Under the terms of the Nimbus deal, Google and Amazon are prohibited from taking such action as it would “discriminate” against the Israeli government. Doing so would incur financial penalties for the companies, as well as legal action for breach of contract.

Insane. Obeying the law or ToS, apparently, is discriminatory when it comes to Israel.
by gamedna | 2025-10-30 18:32:20+00:00
I absolutely love ventoy and iventoy. They are amazing! Now I use this device : the IODD ST400 and never looked back. https://www.iodd.shop/IODD-ST400-USB-30-External-Encrypted-H... . The screen lets you pick, and swap the ISO on the fly, even enabling multiple to be mounted at the same time. This device even supports virtual hard drives and virtual floppy drives.
by parpfish | 2025-10-30 18:32:22+00:00
it reminds me a bit of the debate in psychology back in the day of propositional vs. analogical representation.

there was a long running debate in the literature about how mental information (like images) were represented: a bunch of discrete language-like symbols OR a more continuous image-like format.

two very different philosophies about how the information was stored and processed, but the tricky thing is that they were completely indistinguishable experimentally -- any effect you observe and try to attribute to one scheme could be accommodated in the other.

with respect to the afantasia debate, it could be that everybody has the exact same mental experience but one camp describes it in a propositional (non-image based) framework the other group describes it in an analogical (imge-based) framework
by Fade_Dance | 2025-10-30 18:32:30+00:00
At first I had some suspicion that perhaps the findings were partly a result of interpretation of the question. After all, I don't generate a crystal clear image of what I'm thinking about - the image has some amorphous qualities and comes in and out of focus.

But dreams are ultra-visual experiences for me, to the extent where I will occasionally have flashbacks or deja vu to dream images that were exceptionally strong.

So that nullified my suspicion! That said, I do wonder if it's a spectrum, in that some people are more or less visual in their thinking, and on the extremes people may get the capability snipped, as the dim visual hum fades to black and background noise.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-30 18:32:56+00:00
which part of Oregon is that though? The part that is on fire and suffering from massive insurrection, or the part that wants to secede from the state and become part of Montana? Either way, your optimism seems very out of place. Even if one city makes changes, that doesn't define it as a trend. The rest of the country is not following

edit the embarrassing
by deltarholamda | 2025-10-30 18:33:04+00:00
Quite a lot of the low-hanging fruit from pharma has already been picked. The modern business model for pharma involves coming up with a patentable new drug that does the same thing as an older drug that's now out of patent and available for manufacture as a generic.

Making pharmaceuticals subservient to the whimsy of the stock market is a bad idea. It introduces incentive distortions where none should be.
by abetusk | 2025-10-30 18:33:10+00:00
I've only skimmed the article but it seems to relate memory with aphantasia, which I haven't heard before. I'm a bit skeptical of this take.

Note that people aphantasia tend to score better at scene recall, at least in some metrics, than people without ("Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory" [0]). I think the idea is that people with aphantasia tend to build language "scaffolding" to describe relations rather than relying on a visual representation.

If true, this might be why people with aphantasia tend to gravitate towards some engineering and science disciplines.

There's a lot of people lamenting the loss of minds eye visual imagery but a potential benefit is to have a lifetime's practice of using language to reason and quantify relationships between pieces of knowledge.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7856239/
by darth_avocado | 2025-10-30 18:33:12+00:00
Chicken burrito costs $11.50 without any additions before taxes where I am. Closer to $12.85 with taxes.

Chipotle lists its portion size for protein to be 4oz which roughly translates to 27g of protein IF they don’t skimp on the portions (which they usually do. Unless the rest of the ingredients make up for 33g of protein, it’s very hard to get what you’re suggesting at Chipotle anymore.

On the other hand, the Mexican truck down the street sells $3 street tacos with way more meat.
by sebastiennight | 2025-10-30 18:33:39+00:00
I hope that @roberdam reads this and implements those into his PWA.

OP, enabling: - deposits (and withdrawals) - a matching logic (which we can do manually I guess, by doubling the deposit amount) - and correct calculation of compounding (if I had $100 for 11 months and add $100 in december, I shouldn't see the value compound $200 for the whole year)

would be great.

Bonus points if there was some kind of password (even hardcoded) so that the kids can't just click the gear icon and write themselves a blank check of $1,000,000
by hinkley | 2025-10-30 18:33:40+00:00
After having my credit card locked by stupid fraud prevention algorithms on my honeymoon, I had a long chat with them before going overseas a second time.

And that was the day Visa had a full on outage. We would walk into one shop, try to buy stuff, get declined, then go into the next and get accepted because they were running in offline mode.

Got a nice big bill from my cellphone carrier for making the call to visa to ask them wtf as well.
by lukeinator42 | 2025-10-30 18:33:45+00:00
also, the common ancestor of mammals and birds did not have a tympanic ear, so sound localization evolved differently in the avian vs. mammalian hearing systems. A good review is here: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/physrev.0002.... How the brain calculates interaural time delays is actually an interesting problem as the time delays are so short, that it is less time than a neuron has to fire an action potential.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-30 18:33:52+00:00
> (a) Double-down on investments in EVs (billions of USD!), even with a soft US market for EVs, hoping you might compete globally.

> (b) Become a parochial, US-only, business hoping to squeeze what you can out of a gradually shrinking industry

It's (c) invest in plug-in hybrids that work everywhere. US customers demand something that can do a road trip without stopping to charge? No problem, and on top of that it will get 40+ MPG. European customers paying high gas prices? No problem, it has a 150 km all-electric range so if you keep it charged you never have to put gas in it.
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-30 18:33:59+00:00
> to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options

Microsoft for a loooong time had that figured out pretty well:

- The stuff that people needed every day and liked to customize the most was directly reachable. Right click on the desktop, that offered a shortcut to the CPL for display and desktop symbols.

- More detailed stuff? A CPL that could be reached from the System Settings

- Stuff that was low level but still needed to be exposed somewhat? msconfig.

- Stuff that you'd need to touch very rarely, but absolutely needed the option to customize it for entire fleets? Group Policy.

- Really REALLY exotic stuff? Registry only.

In the end it all was Registry under the hood, but there were so many options to access these registry keys depending what level of user you were. Nowadays? It's a fucking nightmare, the last truly decent Windows was 7, 10 is "barely acceptable" in my eyes and Windows 11 can go and die in a fire.
by bitwize | 2025-10-30 18:34:05+00:00
Fonts are an interesting case. The field of typography is kind of migrating from the "fuck you, pay me" ethic of the pure design space into a more software-like "everyone wins" state, with plenty of high-quality open-source fonts available, whereas previously we had to make do with bitmap-font droppings from proprietary operating systems, Bitstream Vera, and illegal-to-redistribute copies of Microsoft's web font pack.

I think this is because there are plenty of software nerds with an interest in typography who want to see more free fonts available.
by eptcyka | 2025-10-30 18:34:05+00:00
The protocol is reliable in the sense that the protocol provides guarantees where either party can know that the other party received something. UDP provides no such guarantees. I'm a fan of using UDP where applicable, I loathe TCP-in-TCP, not at all a fan of head of line blocking, but I don't need to call UDP reliable just because it is a great protocol with it's own usecases.
by DaSHacka | 2025-10-30 18:34:09+00:00
Okay, suit yourself, I don't exactly care. Most of the thread was about running Windows applications on Linux, wine is just one means to an end in that regard. I merely suggested another that may work for your specific use case, while still allowing you to retain Linux on root, as I do on my system.

Also, unless you're talking about desktop motherboards that you bought directly from the manufacturer, any laptops you have almost certainly have an embedded OEM Windows license key burned into them from the factory (and that's obviously without getting into any massgrave chicanery).

I suppose the difference in our views is pragmatic versus philosophical. I don't care whether something is running through a translation layer on Linux or technically "on Windows" in a stripped-down VM with telemetry removed, so long as my core system remains Linux and I can minimize my exposure to Windows without any application support hurdles.
by the_af | 2025-10-30 18:34:50+00:00
No, I've talked about this with a friend with aphantasia, and that's not it.

While I'm willing to concede there's probably different degrees of visualization (which in my mind also explains why some people are able to draw "from memory" and others are less apt), there's also people who absolutely cannot visualize at all.

My friend:

- Cannot visualize AT ALL. If you ask him to picture a red circle, he cannot do it. He cannot visualize the color red.

- If you ask him to picture the face of his mother, he cannot do it. All he sees is darkness. (We've wondered about this, how can he tell it's his mother when he sees her? He has no difficulty identifying faces, he just cannot visualize them at all if they are not in front of him. Not "not close enough" -- AT ALL).

- He cannot mentally reproduce music, no matter how imperfectly. I can "hear" the opening soundtrack of Star Wars (with reasonable fidelity), he cannot.

- He cannot taste in anticipation something he enjoys, like flavorful coffee. I can anticipate drinking a good coffee, and get some sort of sensorial stimulation/anticipation even before I get the coffee. He cannot, at all. And he does enjoy good coffee.

It's not about a difference in terminology, he really cannot visualize/mentally experience anything if it's not actually happening.

----

Finally:

> I don't think anybody is "literally" envisioning things, as in hallucination

I am. It's not exactly a hallucination because there's no confusion about what's real and what's not, but "hallucination" is pretty close to what actually happens in my mind. I can visualize pretty much anything I've experienced, and some things I haven't too, like green elves dancing on my keyboard. I've always been a visual person.

I can draw things "from memory" and it's pretty much putting into paper what I'm seeing in my mind.
by colechristensen | 2025-10-30 18:35:01+00:00
There are a bunch of places in California where humans shouldn't live that PG&E is required to provide electricity to and then getting blamed for setting fires... which I suppose it did set those fires but much of the state is being required to subsidize these inhabited uninhabitable places either through paying for fire damage or paying the incredibly expensive process of burying power lines which doesn't fundamentally alter the risk or rate of wildfires.

One of the many questionable political situations in California.
by danans | 2025-10-30 18:35:26+00:00
From the abstract:

> First, we prove mathematically that transformer language models mapping discrete input sequences to their corresponding sequence of continuous representations are injective

I think the "continuous representation" (perhaps the values of the weights during an inference pass through the network) is the part that implies they aren't talking about the output text, which by its nature is not a continuous representation.

They could have called out that they weren't referring to the output text in the abstract though.
by lukan | 2025-10-30 18:35:32+00:00
"I can't imagine a scenario where at 55 years old, you would miss the 5% of your summer income you invested back in high school."

If those 5% were the question of whether to go with the group on a adventure together or not - and you end up alone at 55 years and not invited .. you might have rather invested different back then. But on the other hand I don't think those 5% of earnings with 17 make a difference later.

The only real difference they can make, if they made you start a habit of saving income for important purchases. (But not really fore retirement at that age. But each to his own)
by JKCalhoun | 2025-10-30 18:35:40+00:00
Ha ha, as I understand it, phase is imaginary in a Fourier transform. Complex numbers are used and the imaginary portion does indeed represent phase.

I have been told that reversing the process — creating a time-based waveform — will not resemble (visually) the original due to this phase loss in the round-tripping. But then our brain never paid phase any mind so it will sound the same to our ears. (Yay, MP3!)
by zephyrthenoble | 2025-10-30 18:35:40+00:00
I think an interesting different way to talk about aphantasia is not, "Can you see an apple when you close your eyes" but more along the linked of, "Can you mentally edit the visual reality you see?"

A common exercise while being in the back seat of a car while I was young was to imagine someone in a skateboard riding along the power lines on the side of the road, keeping pace with our car.

It's not literally overriding my vision, it's almost like a thin layer, less than transparent, over reality. But specifically, it's entirely in my mind. I would never confuse that imagery with reality...

Having said that, I think that is related to the way our brains process visual information. I've had an experience when I'm driving that, when I recognize where I am, coming from a new location in not familiar with, I feel like suddenly my vision expands in my peripheral vision. I think this is because my brain offloads processing to a faster mental model of the road because I'm familiar with it. I wonder if that extra "vision" is actually as ephemeral as my imagined skateboarder.
by vorbits | 2025-10-30 18:35:48+00:00
But what does it mean "visualize" ? I can "think" of an apple and all it's detail, but I wouldn't describe any visual sensation. If I had to draw the apple I could draw it detail, right down the the variation in colors on it's skin. But no sense of this experience feels like a visual sensation. It feels like "thinking". To me, the act of closing my eyes emphasizes that this isn't a visual sensation for me, because with my eyes closed, I see darkness.
by reenorap | 2025-10-30 18:35:53+00:00
The point is that mandates forcing people, like my son, who already had COVID to take the vaccine were absolutely wrong. And it also exposed him to the possibility of getting myocarditis from the vaccine, which is openly a risk talked about by the CDC now but was denied before.

Natural immunity has been proven time and time again to be much more longer lasting and more effective than vaccination. Once you had COVID, there is no reason whatsoever to force people to get vaccinated. That is simply anti-science.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-10-30 18:36:21+00:00
No, if there was a study I would join it. I wish I had done an MRI in my "pre" state, the change was very rapid.

You'll see a bunch of people always pile into these aphantasia threads and basically show a bias towards their own qualia being the only type of existing experience and the whole thing being mere semantic differences to describe the same mental function.

It really boggles my mind, it's like in HS when I told people I was mildly color blind and they literally took it as being "like, blind?". I get that from a bunch of high schoolers, it's very odd to see in what are presumably adults on this site.

Those people are simply incorrect, I and many like me didn't have congenital aphantasia, it's well established in the literature.
by 1bpp | 2025-10-30 18:36:23+00:00
I still struggle to believe that some can't. There's just always been an abstract 'canvas' separate from the one signals from my eyes end up on and I can 'draw' on it by thinking about visual stimulus, and it's hazy but perceptibly there, the same way I 'hear' a song when I think about it. When this subject comes up I also always want to ask if people with aphantasia can hear sounds or music in their head. Or a taste or smell, etc..