MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by almosthere | 2025-11-03 22:52:46+00:00
But LLMs are effectively a very complex if/else if tree:

if the user types "hi" respond with "hi" or "bye" or "..." you get the point. It's basically storing the most probably following words (tokens) given the current point and its history.

That's not a brain and it's not thinking. It's similar to JIRA because it's stored information and there are if statements (admins can do this, users can do that).

Yes it is more complex, but it's nowhere near the complexity of the human or bird brain that does not use clocks, does not have "turing machines inside", or any of the other complete junk other people posted in this thread.

The information in Jira is just less complex, but it's in the same vein of the data in an LLM, just 10^100 times more complex. Just because something is complex does not mean it thinks.
by jdadj | 2025-11-03 22:53:02+00:00
"We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum" -- I take this to mean that these are humans that have a cerebellum but not much else.

Your npr.org link talks about the opposite -- regular brain, but no cerebellum.

Your irishtimes.com link talks about cerebrum, which is not the same as cerebellum.

Your biology.stackexchange.com link talks about Cerebral Cortex, which is also not the same as cerebellum.

And the cbc.ca link does not contain the string "cere" on the page.
by monkeycantype | 2025-11-03 22:53:05+00:00
Until we have a testable, falsifiable thesis of how consciousness forms in meat, it is rash to exclude that consciousness could arise from linear algebra. Our study of the brain has revealed an enormous amount about how our anatomy processes information, but nothing of substance on the relationship between matter and consciousness. The software and data of an operating LLM is not purely abstract, it has a physical embodiment as circuits and electrons. Until we understand how matter is connected to consciousness, we also cannot know whether the arrangements and movements of electrons meet the criteria for forming consciousness.
by Darmani | 2025-11-03 22:53:31+00:00
So

In Julia, the (+) function is commonly overloaded

The [] is as well. For things that have no shared interface. (E.g.: Int64[1][1] contains two calls to the [] generic function, which have no interface in common.)

Plenty of definitions of (+) are not commutative. E.g.: for strings.

There is some package which uses the (+) generic function internally, meant to be used on numbers. You call it instead with some kind of symbolic expression type. And it just works. Yay! This is the kind of stuff Julia afficcionados preach.

Then suddenly the package gets updated so that it uses (+) in a way which assumes commutativity.

Your code breaks.

In your world, how would you be notified of a change that some internal use of the (+) function now assumes commutativity?

Or when Julia afficionados preach the amazingness of being able to just throw a differential operator or matrix or symbolic whatever in a place, are they just overselling something and should stop?
by matx | 2025-11-03 22:53:33+00:00
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by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-03 22:53:36+00:00
> That type of logic is not inherently flawed, is it?

Inherently, no. In practice, it's riddled with biases deep enough [1] to make it an informal fallacy.

"The competition in a large market, such as CRM software, is very tough," and "there are power laws which mean that you have to rank surprisingly high to get 1% of a market" [2]. Strategically, it ignores the necessity of establishing a beachhead in a small market, where "a small software company" has "a much better chance of getting a decent sized chunk."

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03403-9

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45804756
by mindcrime | 2025-11-03 22:54:12+00:00
That's a bit outside my wheelhouse, but in regards to firefighting specifically there is another such distinction that comes up, and that is in regards to pumps that are designed to regularly pump seawater, versus pumps that primarily pump freshwater. The difference is mainly in the materials used for building the pump, and relate to the corrosive effects of seawater. You can pump seawater with a "normal" fire pump, but if you do it's imperative to flush the pump (and other hose and appliances) thoroughly with freshwater as soon as possible to avoid damage. The seawater rated pumps, on the other hand, can handle seawater all the time. As you can probably guess, the primary application of seawater rated pumps is for fireboats or onboard firefighting on other sorts of ships.
by taneq | 2025-11-03 22:54:40+00:00
All else held equal, I think so, yeah. If you have the same temperature differential, the same manner of heat dissipation, and a smaller surface area then that should mean smaller heat dissipation, yeah?

Obviously if you go from eg. a large air-cooled motor to a smaller water-cooled motor, then the smaller motor could potentially dissipate more heat, but that's a different scenario.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-11-03 22:55:03+00:00
They are designed for drastically shorter flight times. Of the airframes I am aware of that are actually flying right now (pipistrel and the beaver) both of them have a range of approximately 1/5 that of the same airframe with a gas engine.

The Pipistrel is probably the best example since it is actually available for sale in both ICE and electric. The ICE version of the airframe has 5.5 hours of cruise fuel good for 650 NM. The electric version has a payload that is 60% less, a ceiling of 12k feet compared to 18k feet, and an endurance of 56 minutes.

Basically, they are sacrificing range and payload. It isn't that electric planes can't possibly fly, its that ICE powered planes have a pretty hard to overcome advantage until battery power density increases by an order of magnitude. There are already mass market brushless motors that could replace most aircraft engines at a lower weight.

The problem is that gasoline holds 30x or more energy than a battery by weight. It doesn't matter if I can get replace 100 lbs of ICE engine with 1 lb of electric engine, because the real issue is that I would need a literal ton of batteries to replace less than 100 lbs of gas.
by gruez | 2025-11-03 22:55:33+00:00
>My interest in this discussion was to correct a groundless accusation of bad faith.

I stopped short of calling it bad faith, only saying that it "borders" on it. More to the point I don't see how your comments refutes this. The "borders on bad faith" isn't just from bring up other forms of deaths which are as a result of politics, it's to pretend that they're equivalent because they're both "deaths", ignoring the circumstances entirely. It borders on bad faith in the same way that "the golden state killer is a killer, but so was Obama" (because he was the commander in chief of the US military) is bad faith.
by throwup238 | 2025-11-03 22:55:37+00:00
I'm not sure what the GP is referencing specifically (the colonization of the Americas took hundreds of years on two continents after all) but we've got enough archaeological evidence to know that many indigenous cultures were in decline by the time the Spaniards first visited, and many entered a second decline after first contact but before they were conquered or fully economically exploited.

For example I've been studying the Mississippi river cultures [1] which left behind lots of mound villages formed into chiefdoms and paramount chiefdoms. Those cultures suffered a decline around the mid-15th century likely due to environmental changes which we can see in the distribution of villages and mounds changing. We can also see how warfare evolved based on defenses and the distribution of arable land to houses (i.e. are they clustered villages for defense or spread around their fields for efficiency?) Historians then compare them to the accounts of the Narvaez and de Soto expeditions which provides a baseline for post-contact (mid 16th), where we can also see a large decline and social restructuring before the English and French came in to finish the job (the Spaniards more or less gave up on that area as economically uninteresting except for the occasional slave raid).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_shatter_zone
by louiskw | 2025-11-03 22:56:04+00:00
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by jlarocco | 2025-11-03 22:56:13+00:00
> but aren't nearly as dangerous as motorcycles.

What a ridiculous statement.

I don't think there's any inherrent difference, but until the laws catch up the "powerful e-bikes" are clearly more dangerous. Riding a traditional motorcycle requires a license, passing a driving test, and following the rules of the road - none of which are true for e-bikes.

But I'd love to hear why you think the opposite.
by lunias | 2025-11-03 22:56:25+00:00
That's a totally different comparison. I'm sure the X5 is fine for what it is, but most people are driving around in ~30k USD SUVs. That's the type of vehicle that I'm referencing. I'm comparing it against my 2012 VW GTI w/ a lot of mods. Both vehicles cost about the same new. They have similar interior cargo space. My GTI is worth less than 15k USD. I'm not judging just based on fun, it's true that a nimble car can get you into trouble, but in my experience it also often gets you out of trouble.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-11-03 22:56:43+00:00
Where are you seeing orders of magnitude lower R2 bills? The storage price for S3 is $0.023 per GB, and the price for CF is $0.015 per GB. The operation pricing is even more similar - S3 is $5/million writes and $0.40/million reads, while Cloudflare is $4.50/million writes and $0.36/million reads.
by fjdjcjejdjfje | 2025-11-03 22:57:09+00:00
This is precisely why the AI bubble is so much worse than previous bubbles: the main capital asset that the bubble is acquiring is going to depreciate before the bubble's participants can ever turn a profit. Regardless of what AI's future capabilities are going to be, it's physically impossible for any of these companies to become profitable before the GPUs that they have already purchased are either obsolete or burnt out from running under heavy load.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-11-03 22:57:21+00:00
I note there is no conflict of interest acknowledgment that The New Yorker and its parent company, Condé Nast, own significant real estate in New York City.

Additional context: Condé Nast recently had multiple journalists at Teen Vogue fired, apparently for covering Mamdani positively.

https://bsky.app/profile/leximcmenamin.com/post/3m4qsabqfa22...

https://bsky.app/profile/leximcmenamin.com/post/3m4qetzb2j22...
by Edman274 | 2025-11-03 22:57:55+00:00
Maybe Jean Luc Picard should've lost that court case. Obviously we as the audience want to have our heroes win against some super callous guy who wants to kill our hero (and audience stand in for anyone who is neurodivergent) Data, but the argument was pretty weak, because Data often acted in completely alien ways that jeopardized the safety of the crew, and the way that those issues came up was due to him doing things that were not compatible with what we perceive as consciousness. But also, in that episode, they make a point of trying to prove that he was conscious by showing that he engaged in behavior that wasn't goal oriented, like keeping keepsakes and mementos of his friends, his previous relationship with Tasha, and his relationship with his cat. That was an attempt at proving that he was conscious too, but the argument from doubt is tough because how can you prove that a rock is not conscious - and if that can't be proved, should we elevate human rights to a rock?
by refurb | 2025-11-03 22:58:06+00:00
I have to admit that the name calling and harsh language doesn’t help in convincing me of your argument. If anything it makes me wonder why someone confident of their opinion got so upset at a few basic questions. If you’re not in the mood to debate that’s fine, don’t.

But regardless, the Supreme Court did not allow profiling based on ethnicity alone. “To be clear, apparently ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” is the direct quote from the decision.

What the court did allow are things like ethnicity, type of employment, location to be factors. That was based on the fact that those factors are directly related to job the government is trying to accomplish.

If French Canadians working illegally at tech companies in Boston are not major issue then it makes sense not to stop people that fit those profiles.
by toast0 | 2025-11-03 22:58:37+00:00
> I wish there was a high performance way of remoting graphics over SSH. How cool would it be if you could SSH to a remote machine and it just showed you the remote desktop in the terminal itself? No messing around with port forwarding, weird X servers, etc

I think there's at least three different experiences here, and they're all valid, but I don't know what you really want.

A) remote desktop --- connect to a fully formed desktop environment (with SSH to authenticate, I guess?), possibly persisted and/or shared so you can connect back and get into the same place or share with another user?

B) run a program remotely and display it on your local terminal; essentially remote X, but I gather you're looking for more performance and maybe some other nice to haves? Maybe you want to transport audio too... Maybe you don't want the crap experience remote X has become since app developers don't spend any effort on it and you kind of get what you get, which is a lot of jank.

C) images in the terminal, with high performance. PNG should be ok for that, right? Maybe an extension for lossy compression might be nice depending.
by whakim | 2025-11-03 22:58:56+00:00
Thanks for the reply! This makes much more sense now. To preface, I think pgvector is incredibly awesome software, and I have to give huge kudos to the folks working on it. Super cool. That being said, I do think the author isn't being unreasonable in that the limitations of pgvector are very real when you're talking indices that grow beyond millions of things, and the "just use pgvector" crowd in general doesn't have a lot of experience with scaling things beyond toy examples. Folks should take a hard look at what size they expect their indices to grow to in the near-to-medium-term future.
by linkregister | 2025-11-03 22:59:12+00:00
Amazon Mechanical Turk is available to anyone with internet access, though jobs have dried up in recent years. Some jobs are region locked while others are available to all locales. I'll discuss mturk for the time period of its heyday.

> My hope is that they have to work a similar number of hours to afford what someone in a first-world country would doing the same work.

Average pay appeared to be far below minimum wage for mturk workers in the United States. My expectation is workers in developing countries have far higher purchasing power for doing the same work. I would also expect an inverse relationship between high local pay and number of workers on mturk, with considerations for languages and other region-specific .

> Would it be okay if Amazon showed up to a refugee camp with supplies, but before you could get your donation, you had to put in hours on mturk?

Because mturk is made available internationally and signup is trivial, I do not agree with your analogy of coercive refugee camp labor. Though Amazon is well known for harsh and unsafe working conditions in its US warehouses, I cannot consider safety considerations for a web-based anonymized gig economy service to be comparable. Using mturk to make money is voluntary.

I personally hope for refugees and residents of developing countries to have the necessities of life and opportunities to achieve success comparable to OECD nations' residents. I think that targeted foreign aid is an important part of helping people in developing countries. Access to credit and global markets has brought the largest amount of people out of poverty in history. Our governments and importers should work to ensure people in emerging markets have safe working conditions while also giving them access to our developed countries' markets.
by mindcrime | 2025-11-03 22:59:16+00:00
(if you can find a water source that'll give you that much)

Note that, for what it's worth, fire pumps are generally rated for their capacity when drafting from a static water supply (think, pond, lake, river, etc). Basically all modern fire pumps can easily exceed their rated capacity by a pretty good margin when pumping from a pressurized source, but then you're back to your point of "do you have a source that can supply that?" Still, there are ways. In my firefighting days we had some hydrants in our district (the ones on the big 30" main that ran right down the middle of the county in particular) that could individually supply 2000gpm. And nothing says you are restricted to using one hydrant! There are also all sorts of complex water supply evolutions one can run, involving relay pumping with multiple engines, drafting and using hydrants, etc.
by sijmen | 2025-11-03 23:00:04+00:00
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The cloud software team is still small, meaning you get a chance to help set priorities, guide long-term architectural direction and figure out how to best help our users. We celebrate pragmatism, we work hard to make simple systems and we help each other to hyperfocus.

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by tsimionescu | 2025-11-03 23:01:30+00:00
I explained the experiments that you would do to figure that out: you modify parts of the system, and check if and how much that affects the consciousness. Paint the interconnects a different color: probably won't affect it. Replace the interconnect protocol with a different one: probably will have some effect. So, the paint on the interconnect: not a part of the consciousness. The interconnect protocol: part of the consciousness. If we are convinced that this is a real consciousness and thus these experiments are immoral, we simply wait until accidents naturally occur and draw conclusions from that, just like we do with human consciousness.

Of course, "the consciousness" is a nebulous concept. It would be like asking "which part of my processor is Windows" to some extent. But it's still fair to say that Windows is contained within my computer, and that the metal framing of the computer is not part of Windows.
by sailfast | 2025-11-03 23:01:47+00:00
I recall the unit economics making sense for all these other industries and bubbles (short of maybe tulips, which you could plant…) . Sure there were over-valuation bubbles because of speculatory demand, but right now the assumption seems to be “first to AGI wins” but that… may not happen.

The key variable for me in this house of cards is how long folks will wait before they need to see their money again, and whether these companies will go in the right direction long enough given these valuations to get to AGI. Not guaranteed and in the meantime society will need to play ball (also not a guarantee)
by selcuka | 2025-11-03 23:02:03+00:00
> I suppose you could prove it as much as any other feeling, by observing the way that people behave

Look up the term "philosophical zombie".

In a nutshell, you can simulate a conscious being using a non-conscious (zombie) being. It is possible to simulate it so well that an outside observer can't tell the difference. If this is true, then the corollary is that you can't really know if other people are conscious. You can only tell that you are.

For all intents and purposes I might be the only one who has consciousness in the universe, and I can't prove otherwise.
by Darmani | 2025-11-03 23:02:22+00:00
I had a quick skim of the link you gave -- it looks to be the same as it was 6 years ago when I experienced this issue.

So basically:

Generic function F is defined in file A, and has a method definition DEF in file B.

File C imports files A and B, and then calls function G that internally uses generic function F. Somewhere internally, it winds up running F with method definition DEF.

You move DEF to file D, but don't update the imports of file B.

When file B calls G, it calls F with some default implementation instead of DEF, and then you get an error from function G.

Some details here might be wrong over how exactly to imports need to be set up, as I haven't used Julia being traumatized by it 6 years ago, but that's basically it.
by elchananHaas | 2025-11-03 23:02:58+00:00
I would say, though, that for most programs any one of the most popular languages would do the trick. By this I mean Java, Go, C#. Javascript, Python, C++. All of those are general purpose multi-paradigm languages that you can code almost anything in.

That being said, some programs can only be written in one of those. Browser code is JS exclusive, low-level needs C++, secure code needs not C++. Machine Learning needs Python and high performance can't use Python. Some Windows things need C#. Those cases are the obvious ones where there is basically no choice. Beyond those, it is mostly about the team.
by isaacremuant | 2025-11-03 23:03:09+00:00
Analyzing the typing experience in vim by looking at pure keystrokes would be a mistake if you don't understand the tradeoffs and benefits of having a modal system and operating the editor without leaving the home row or needing a mouse.

Good remappings/config would also significantly alter your experience.

In the example, why would you even move with single chars and not words or to the end of line? I think it's definitely a poor example because the point of the diagram/investigation is not clearly described.
by kaoD | 2025-11-03 23:03:18+00:00
> If you told someone in 1995 that within 25 years [...] most people would find that hard to believe.

That's not how I remember it (but I was just a kid so I might be misremembering?)

As I remember (and what I gather from media from the era) late 80s/early 90s were hyper optimistic about tech. So much so that I distinctly remember a ¿german? TV show when I was a kid where they had what amounts to modern smartphones, and we all assumed that was right around the corner. If anything, it took too damn long.

Were adults outside my household not as optimistic about tech progress?