MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Call Scientists ICT Model Info–Consciousness–Time, Need Expert Feedback
by DmitriiBaturo | 2025-11-22 14:11:09+00:00
Hi HN,

I am working on a research framework called the ICT Model (Information–Consciousness–Time). It integrates ideas from information theory, temporal structure, statistical mechanics, and dynamical systems, offering a unified way to describe “temporal stability” in physical systems as well as in cognitive and neurophysiological processes associated with consciousness.

I’m preparing a research grant proposal and I need 1–2 short independent comments about:

• conceptual clarity • potential significance • possible directions for formalisation

A full preprint (with equations and testable criteria) and discussion is here:

https://www.academia.edu/s/8924eff666

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17584782

If anyone here works in physics, math, information theory, complex systems or philosophy of time — even a couple of paragraphs would help a lot.

Anyone who prefers to leave a comment or a review privately can also contact me via direct messages on Academia.edu:

independent.academia.edu/DmitriiBaturo

Thank you!
by credit_guy | 2025-11-22 14:11:14+00:00
In a dictatorship this happens indeed. And there's nothing you can do about it.

In the US people fight back. There are courts, NGOs, law firms, journalists, people can protest, can petition their representatives, etc, etc. It is unfortunate that someone is trying to become dictator, but the point of this country is that it doesn't become a dictatorship just because one person wants that.
by bilsbie | 2025-11-22 14:11:28+00:00
> I would say I have "hyper focus", to the point where if I'm working on something interesting, I will lose track of time and am unable to redirect my attention to anything else.

I feel like knowing this tendency has made me extremely protective and avoidant of taking on tasks. I appear “lazy” to the outside observer. It’s something I’m still trying to solve.
by muzani | 2025-11-22 14:11:36+00:00
I get that it's more valuable than Superman #200, but why 9 million dollars valuable. There's a poorer quality one at 5 million, but that also means that there's other copies in existence.

It's also not the first Superman comic, what about Action Comics #1?

Why is the Call of Cthulhu (Weird Tales, Feb 1928) about $50k?

Or in terms of characters, what makes Superman worth 3x more than MARVEL #1 or Batman?
by rpdillon | 2025-11-22 14:11:54+00:00
It isn't tribalism, at least not from my side. There's a tangible, noticeable, immediate difference between buying a piece of hardware from Valve and buying a piece of hardware from Google or Apple. I really resented Valve after the Steam box debacle that left me with a $1,200 paperweight, but since then, they've done enormous amounts of work to regain my trust through tangible increases in the quality of the gaming experience, including not having to use Windows to game anymore, and providing me with open hardware that I can install whatever I want on, including using their hardware as my own personal PC when e.g. traveling.

Its weird to me that people choose what companies to buy from on the basis of whether or not the CEO owns a yacht or how rich he is. That is not the operative criteria when I choose what products to buy, but rather how well that product suits my needs and how much I trust the relationship with the company that produced it.

Valve is just miles ahead of every other manufacturer in this regard.
by srean | 2025-11-22 14:12:04+00:00
This is just low brow philosophical sounding rubbish of the same variety as "what is 'is'" nobody knows. Sounds profound though.

Matrix is just one way to organize data. When linear operators are organized this way composition of linear operators map to matrix multiplication.

But that is just one of the ways that multiplication may be defined on matrices, Hadamard products, Tensor product, Khatri-Rao product are some of the other examples. They all correspond to different mathematical structures one wants to explore or use. If linear algebraic structures is what ones to explore or use then one gets matrix multiplication.
by whynotmaybe | 2025-11-22 14:12:06+00:00
I don't think it's important to specify the target audience's required knowledge or level.

I often start to read article outside of my knowledge/competences and yes, often stop because I'm lost in terminology and don't want to read further.

But, it also happens that I want to know more and discover what specialists consider "basic knowledge".

This is the exact pattern that made me want to read your text. I knew vase mode existed but never cared for it because it's outside of my requirements for 3d printing.

Now I know and you explained it perfectly!
by mauvehaus | 2025-11-22 14:12:29+00:00
As a reminder: MIT has a research reactor smack-dab in the middle of Cambridge. It's like a block or two off of Mass Ave near Central.

They give tours, and if you're in the area, it's highly recommended. A great Boston-area date for the right kind of person.

https://nrl.mit.edu/reactor/
by adverst | 2025-11-22 14:14:45+00:00
I use monarch, I don't think it is very good as an 'investment tracker' (what wealthfolio claims to be). It's fantastic as a more general personal finance/budget tracker.

For example - I have to reclassify loads of transactions for it to track close to correctly. Say treasuries - purchase at a discount, then at maturity redeem for full amount. You can enter them as buy/sell, but then it wont properly report to cashflow, or give you a good classification as to what type of income that was.

Similar with stocks and short term/long term. It means that even though all the info is there it's not as useful as I'd like for showing total income broken out as types of income to help with tax planning etc.

I still use it so the annoyances are not too extreme, but if there were a tool that did a better job of the investment side I'd switch.

Looking at the wealthfolio features I'm not sure it handles any of that any better though, but it does seem to break out dividend/interest income.
by GuB-42 | 2025-11-22 14:15:32+00:00
The part that baffled me the most was how the decision to Brexit seem be driven mostly by immigration. But the UK was one of the few EU countries that wasn't part of Schengen. They had an actual border with the EU and could control their immigration!

Not only that but the French helped the UK keep migrants out of the island (migrants were a hot topic at the time), which meant that good relations with the French, and by extension the EU actually helped.
by rpdillon | 2025-11-22 14:15:53+00:00
Their DRM seems to be okay, but they do have some weird bugs.

My biggest gripe with Valve right now is that I bought a copy of No Man's Sky on GOG, and then I also had a copy on Steam. And so I let my son play my Steam copy through Steam Library sharing so we can play co-op while I play my GOG copy. Unfortunately, because I launched my GOG game through Steam, Steam's DRM won't let him play at the same time as me because they think we're playing the same copy.

It seems to be that they simply look at the title of the game and or the executable name to figure out what game it is, but they don't check to see what storefront it was bought from. I'm not sure about this though, I have to do more investigation.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-11-22 14:16:23+00:00
> If explicit caching is better, does that mean the agent is just forgetting stuff unless we manually save its notes?

Caching is unrelated to memory, it's about how to not do the same work over and over again due to the distributed nature of state. I wrote a post that goes into detail from first principles here with my current thoughts on that topic [1].

> Are these things really that forgetful?

No, not really. They can get side-tracked which is why most agents do a form of reinforcement in-context.

> Why is there a virtual file system?

So that you don't have dead-end tools. If a tool creates or manipulates state (which we represent on a virtual file system), another tool needs to be able to pick up the work.

> Why can't the agent just know where the data is?

And where would that data be?

[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/11/22/llm-apis/
by grayhatter | 2025-11-22 14:17:17+00:00
I don't read AI generated output.

I read and enjoy content from people who want to share something.

There is no chance I'll read anything within 0.01s of it being posted, but there is a chance I'll find it eventually. So if the first thing to read the content is all that matters, or if having complete exclusive control so that only the people you like can read it, and importantly only in the way that you decided they should read it.

Then don't bother?

But if you want to create something of value for someone else, and the exact time it takes them to find it, or the browser they use isn't actually important. Seems like it's still a good time to write stuff. Maybe even better, to resist AI content drowning out new stuff.
by bell-cot | 2025-11-22 14:17:22+00:00
Yep. Also, the pro-nuclear techno-utopians of that era promised that nuclear electricity would be too cheap too meter, nuclear-powered cars would be common, and quite a few other things.

If the public doesn't understand complex new thing X, and advocates for X have obviously told them all sorts of lies - yeah. Don't be surprised if the public becomes extremely skeptical about X.
by _pdp_ | 2025-11-22 14:17:43+00:00
I've started a company in this space about 2 years ago. We are doing fine. What we've learned so far is that a lot of these techniques are simply optimisations to tackle some deficiency in LLMs that is a problem "today". These are not going to be problems tomorrow because the technology will shift. As it happened many time in the span of the last 2 years.

So yah, cool, caching all of that... but give it a couple of months and a better technique will come out - or more capable models.

Many years ago when disc encryption on AWS was not an option, my team and I had to spend 3 months to come up with a way to encrypt the discs and do so well because at the time there was no standard way. It was very difficult as that required pushing encrypted images (as far as I remember). Soon after we started, AWS introduced standard disc encryption that you can turn on by clicking a button. We wasted 3 months for nothing. We should have waited!

What I've learned from this is that often times it is better to do absolutely nothing.
by angaroshi | 2025-11-22 14:18:48+00:00
Deve here again. Interesting, I never heard about KASM Workspaces. I can not give you a good comparison since I did not use it. But based on what I understand, yes, we are similars in the Desktop as a Service. In my case, I'm aiming to VDI, not DAAS, but is kind of the same. The main difference is the target user. I'm aiming for a non-enterprise user, a more normal PC user. I want to make the UI and lifecicle as simple as possible. I don't think in today state I reached what I wanted, but not a bad starting point. Users will tell me.
by mejutoco | 2025-11-22 14:19:34+00:00
I see. Thanks for the clarification. The 29€ monthly subscription in Berlin is more affordable than one would think from the first post. I get the point of the single ticket you made (I actually lived in Germany for 10 years) but I thought it made sense too to talk about the most common costs. I dont think most people only buy single tickets in Berlin, especially when work usually pays for part of the transport. Just making sure it had this context.
by andersmurphy | 2025-11-22 14:19:51+00:00
Sqlite can scale CQRS to 100000 events per second on a relatively small VPS. That's 10x what the author achieves with postgres.

You can scale them independently in that you can control the rate at which your views are read and the batch size of your updates.

The whole big win wirh CQRS is it allows for very efficient batching.
by swiftcoder | 2025-11-22 14:20:05+00:00
SOC2/FIPS/HIPAA/etc don't mandate zero-CVE, but a zero-CVE posture is an easy way to dodge all the paperwork that would be involved in exhaustively documenting exactly why each flagged CVE doesn't actually apply to your specific scenario (and then potentially re-litigating it all again in your annual audit).

So it's more of a cost-cutting/cover-your-ass measure than an actual requirement.
by ldoughty | 2025-11-22 14:20:22+00:00
Molten salt solar power doesn't care. It remains hot.

Advancements in solar also are improving with clouds.

Also, you know, batteries. When someone makes it cost effective to install a device to sell your car battery power on the grid we'll also have a better time managing the grid during spikes... Would be nice if that also did home battery backup in blackouts... 70 kWh would get me through most of the ones I've experienced.
by fragmede | 2025-11-22 14:20:32+00:00
yeah but is this internal project one where we kidnap homeless people and torture them in the name of science or is it because we spent $50,000 to make a new logo? Some secret are meant to be kept. Others are meant to be blown wide open. Others... Other just are, and nobody need to know. Posting that a particular woman's a slut is a shitty thing to do on Facebook, but if one of my male friends is feeling extra lonely and ready to end it all, there's a date or two I could set him up on.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-22 14:20:40+00:00
I get the lacking Linux support, but what about Windows? Most serious work happens on Windows and their SoCs seem to have much better support there.

Apple's hardware+software design combo is nice for things like power efficiency, but so in my experience so far, a Macbook and a similarly priced Windows laptop seems to be about equal in terms of weird OS bugs and actually getting work done.
by tclancy | 2025-11-22 14:22:17+00:00
Yeah, when I got restarted, instead of trying to spin up the entire old Django platform I had built for my business a decade before, I just exported the posts to text and found a good static publishing engine and stuck it all on GitHub Pages. All of the network traffic problems solved, easy to maintain and update and port. Plus I can point a custom url at it.
by gunnarmorling | 2025-11-22 14:22:37+00:00
It depends on what exactly you mean by "Atomic Transaction". If you are referring to database transactions, then DE is not that. But DE helps you implement potentially long-running multi-step business transactions, a.k.a. workflows, sometimes spanning over days or weeks. Oftentimes, these transactions are atomic, but don't satisfy the isolation requirement of ACID transactions, i.e. partial outcomes of in-flight flows may be visible to external observers.
by grayhatter | 2025-11-22 14:24:03+00:00
Wow, I really wanted to like this site. The domain name is perfect. But it's a sad example of what's wrong with the web.

The top 25% is the nav bar, ok, maybe that's reasonable? the next 25% is a "new here", please join upsell. The next 20% is another upsell, please give me your email so I can spam you. The bottom 35% is tags, and the bottom 25% is finally links... but they're mostly covered by another upsell. Holy shit!

And to top it all off, even with uBo enable there's a full sceen popup/modal add dimming the whole page, begging me to let them help me with my overwhelming debt.

WTF is wrong with people who do this stuff?!
by thunfischbrot | 2025-11-22 14:24:26+00:00
> This was probably fine 4000 years ago, when the world was looser, and people could find their place in life regardless of their particular quirks, but not so much nowadays.

Is this likely? My overgeneralizing gut feel would be that more people who would have traits which might be perceived as unusual and impede survivability 4000 years ago would be more likely to receive a chance to live a regular lifespan in most today‘s societies.
by heavyset_go | 2025-11-22 14:25:58+00:00
If it's Dell, they're one of the most prolific, if not the most, on LVFS. All of my Dell hardware gets firmware updates via fwupd. Dell is conservative with marking their BIOS updates, though, and you might have to enable the testing LVFS repository for regularly updated BIOS.

If you mean HP EliteBooks, it doesn't have to be any more complicated than 1) extract BIOS archive 2) drag & drop BIOS file 3) reboot.

You download the BIOS update .exe, run 7zip on it, and take the BIOS.BIN file and either stick it in the root of your EFI partition and it will install automatically on boot, or just run `fwupdtool install-blob BIOS.BIN` and it will install automatically on reboot.
by _djo_ | 2025-11-22 14:25:59+00:00
Cuba I have addressed.

The US was invited into South Vietnam to help defend them against an invasion from North Vietnam. We can debate the morality of the resulting war, which was questionable, but it was not a US invasion.

The US invasion of Nicaragua was in 1912, long before the modern post-WWII era of stronger international law.

Chile was not invaded by the US.

If these are the examples you have, you don’t have a strong argument.
by zbentley | 2025-11-22 14:25:59+00:00
I think this is partly right, partly misguided.

Misguided: there's now a focus on causality and precise identification based on symptoms and negative impact caused that wasn't present in the days of exorcisms and shamanism. Those eras were primarily characterized by people in positions of (often corrupt or unqualified) authority declaring diagnoses for others, largely without the consent of the diagnosed. Now, the default mode of mental health treatment is now focused on identifying symptoms according to specific rubrics, and diagnosing (or not) based on the presence of those rather than the agenda, religious feelings, or whims of people in positions of authority.

Partly right: what I described above is the default or desired diagnostic approach. We have a long way to go before it's actually performed for everyone. Coercive diagnoses are not uncommon even under modern medical/diagnostic practices: parents seek out spectrum or ADHD diagnoses for kids who aren't suffering, just not meeting parental expectations; psychotic people are handled by modern mental health systems with extremely low autonomy, etc.

Conversations here are also often confused: diagnoses for many mental health conditions are qualitative and measured not only by symptoms but by harms. The DSM and friends aren't like the diagnostic instruments for cancer or heart disease: physiological indicators are much rarer in mental health, so mental health diagnoses combine enumerations of behavioral symptoms and negative impacts caused to one's life. That implies a subtlety that's hard to come by among non-medical-professionals: you don't "have" ADHD (or OCD, Autism, etc.) in the same way you "have" an ulcer; you have those conditions if you present with a certain subset of the symptoms for the diagnosis, many of which are behavioral. Whether a particular treatment is merited has to do with both symptoms and the harms posed by those symptoms to your quality of life. So saying "I have ADHD" is a less meaningful statement than "I have some symptoms of ADHD and they seriously damage my quality of life, therefore I seek treatment".

Add to that our limited (but growing, and better than it was in past decades) understanding of pharmaceutical treatments for mental health disorders--many of the drugs we use to treat, say, depression or ADHD behave with all the subtlety of driving a bulldozer through a convenience store because you wanted to get a gallon of milk--and you have a complex area discussed using outdated binary pathological terminology. That's a recipe for suspicion and confusion.

In short, it is, as you say, hyperbolic to characterize modern mental health treatment as shamanism. But lingering corrupt medical practice and the complexity of the field for laypeople make it hard to see how, specifically, things are improving in this area.
by nickt | 2025-11-22 14:26:57+00:00
I grew up in South Hylton where the Cretehawser was basically dumped near Claxheugh Rock (good luck pronouncing that if you’re not a Mackem!) Proper fun 70’s and 80’s adventure to be had getting on board at low tide. Can’t imagine the authorities being happy with kids doing this today!

It had lots of stories associated with it and it was a strange thing to see just sitting there in a shipbuilding town. Happy to see it get a mention on the site [1] and there’s an article with better photos here [2].

[1] https://thecretefleet.com/wwi-uk

[2] https://fabulousnorth.com/cretehawser-wreck/
by Hikikomori | 2025-11-22 14:27:11+00:00
Not like Germans didn't fight the nazis. Their road to power was littered with the corpses of liberty and actual people.

But its not so much trump I'm concerned about, its the people using him (though he is using them in some kind symbiotic relationship), and that is project 2025, federalist society, christo fascist tech billionaires like Thiel, or even the CEO of ycombinator, that supports them, etc. There's a chance it could end with trump, they know that, so they're working on making sure it doesn't.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-11-22 14:27:24+00:00
Same here. People sometimes say my stuff is over engineered. What they're seeing is that I have additional requirements relate to keeping the project in a shape where I stay interested in it long enough to make progress.

Its not exactly a recipe for reliable technology but neither is what the managers are suggesting (or rather, suggesting differently today than they did yesterday) so I manage to make it work out OK most of the time.
by microtonal | 2025-11-22 14:27:24+00:00
It's very confusing with a new Zigbee standard when I thought it was being replaced with Thread

And from the same organization that co-designed and promotes Matter.

Personally, I'm very happy that Zigbee continues to be developed. I am not very enthusiastic about everything being IP addressable (even if it is just ULA) and the convoluted Thread flow where a bunch of border routers require you to initiate the pairing with a phone over BLE to hand it over to the router. I have an Eve Energy Thread + Matter plug and it requires many takes to pair it correctly. Most Zigbee devices are just a matter of permitting join on your coordinator and holding/pressing the pairing button on the device.

I wish that Apple and Google would just add a Zigbee coordinator (or just leave home automation to others) and put some effort into supporting a wide variety of devices rather than trying to disrupt a perfectly working standard. They often cannot even bother implementing the latest Matter spec timely.
by JimDabell | 2025-11-22 14:27:27+00:00
> Yes it is a scam because it says that YOLO is ultralytics.

How does that make it a scam? You know that “scam” doesn’t mean “incorrect”, right?

> There are hundreds of different YOLO implementations. Just search for some bookmarks or look in huggingface. Paperswithcode is dead now, hugging face built something similar.

Can you be more specific? The Reddit discussion you linked to described everything else as being pretty dead. What is being actively developed?