skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right now, nobody knows from whence personhood rises. There's not even any way to prove that all natural humans have the same thing whenever we speak of consciousness — indeed, we know that our conscious experiences vary wildly, not only between individuals but for any individual over time, and there's 40 or so competing definitions of the word.

Some of the stuff that happens to the body clearly impacts our states of consciousness. Blood-alcohol levels, for example. So if I take your statement at face value: OK, so you simulate at least some of the rest of the body, perhaps all of it. So what? Still a simulation.

You can also think of it this from the opposite direction, where someone might try to argue against a purely material origins of consciousness by saying "the brain doesn't work if you take it out of the body" — that this is in fact true, doesn't mean the brain isn't the bit doing the thinking.

You can take Searle's position (why yes, I do have a philosophy qualification, albeit a mediocre one): "No one supposes that computer simulations of a five-alarm fire will burn the neighborhood down or that a computer simulation of a rainstorm will leave us all drenched."[0], but that only works if a mind is a substance of its own kind rather than the emergent result of the processes that gave rise to it. The components of a simulated rainstorm will still interact with each other as those of a real one, if given sufficient fidelity.

Perhaps minds are emergent from some quantum shenanigans, as Penrose says[1]. Then it would take a quantum computer rather than a classical one[2].

> I wonder if Black Mirror ever did an episode about someone unwillingly personality-cloned into a computer, then killed, with everyone around him acting as though this were normal and he — still conscious — was a non-person?

What you describe is a P-zombie, and as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie will show, there's no consensus over this even amongst philosophers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_intelligence#:~:text...

[1] but it would be horrifying if he's right specifically about microtubules, because those are in basically every living cell, and hence if they do mediate consciousness then potatoes would be conscious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...

[2] While it's technically possible to simulate quantum processes classically with an exponential slowdown, those kinds of technicality also make the entire universe and everything in it into a Markov chain, I prefer to only point out such things to show the limitations of making such arguments.
Interesting takeaway (paraphrased):

>Algorithms are not programs and should not be written in programming languages and can/should be simple, while programs have to be complex due to the need to execute quickly on potentially large datasets.

Specifically discussed in the context of concurrent programs executing on multiple CPUs due to order of execution differing.

Defining programs as:

>Any piece of code that requires thinking before coding

>Any piece of code to be used by someone who doesn't want to read the code

Apparently he has been giving this talk for a while:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyLy7Fu4FB4

(previous discussions of it here?)

Interesting that the solid example of simplifying finding the smallest item in a set to finding the smallest value equal to or less than that value and starting the search with the value negative infinity was exactly "Define Errors Out of Existence" from John Ousterhout's book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy-of...

as discussed here previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27686818

(but of course, as an old (La)TeX guy, I'm favourably disposed towards anything Leslie (La)mport brings up)
But I think they’re inherently safer? I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some sort of wide ban of lithium batteries on planes at some point. Maybe sodium ones would be allowed and they’d have that specific utility. “AirSafe Power Certified”
So they provide full information on what happened, with all legal papers attached at the end, and a link to a site that gives you a list of all "blocked sites" that where effected by that order.

While the outcome is quite unfortunate, the way they provide all info here seams like a plus in my book here.

If a state/entity comes after your org tomorrow, and you got to either fight legally or leave the market (like cisco in the story), what would you do?
I find Grans Remedy powder does a great job if you apply it every time!
It is common these days to see in large companies multiple teams developing isolated RAG applications.
This is similar to the problem of "Shadow IT" back in the early cloud era - causes a big headache to IT teams.

I work at Vectara, and we see this all the time.
Wondering how others are experiencing this?
The problem with the patents are largely misunderstood. Most importantly the patents do not directly apply to the individual consumer downloading and decoding such audio/video content. The patents only apply to commercial settings - the sales of software that can encode or decode audio and video in the MPEG formats, and sales of audio and video content encoded in those formats. This is why Mozilla made a big fuss over not wanting to include H.264 decoding in Firefox years ago, because they feared they'd have to spend a bit of their money since they are after all a commercial endeavour. No, really, it was never about wanting to "protect" users, it was always about their earnings. You can happily encode AAC audio and H.264 video and share it free of charge with everyone, and they can always listen to and watch that content, without any worries.

And pardon the nitpick but it's H.264 and H.265, not x264 and x265.
We appreciate China for its strong push toward open-source AI. Without models like DeepSeek and Qwen, the U.S. was set to dominate AI with closed-source systems, charging tens of billions in rent every month while deciding who gets access based on politics.

"Hey, Eritrea, you're authoritarian—you can't use our democratic AI until you democratize."
"Hey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, you're not authoritarian—you can have our AI."

Once again, thank you, Chairman Xi, for saving us from this nonsense.
So I haven't been a C++ programmer for almost 20 years now (I would have considered myself very experienced with it at the time) and STL was the Standard Template Library for me back then. Is the Standard Template Library no longer in (widespread) use? Would any modern C++ programmer use it anymore?
I mean, everybody dies.
Surely there is a middle ground where its at least possible to install apps that apple haven't approved[1]? I also like the idea of the _higher_ bar that the app store is supposed to have (not that this bar is always met), but the lack of any alternative is really crappy.

[1]: https://atp.fm/628 & https://mastodon.social/@rileytestut/114043540322770608
The French legislation is targeting all major resolvers, Quad9 is not really any better or worse than others just for this.

A niche resolver may get away under the radar, but only because they were not targeted.
Sorry for your loss.

But may I ask, about the comment "I love tech, but tech doesn't love me"

Where does this really arise from?

I have some theories and feel free to tell me which one is the right one:-
1)Does this arise from the fact that tech is excessively used to create AI coder assistants to take the coders out in the first place

2)Does this arise from the fact that you feel as if you are a working machine in a cog, like most of what coders do in tech is unethical or useless in terms of human resourcefulness (asking because I saw one hackernews post about it some day where the guy was a microsoft engineer working on some project that he believed to have no impact other than surveillance)

Because these were the two theories as to why you might feel like that way. And I am genuinely interested in what you believe.

Curious for your response!
SpaceX Rocket Leaves a Glowing Spiral in the Sky, Visible Across Europe
> It's extraordinary to me when anyone claims that the "MSM" is left leaning.

It’s not that weird when you consider where they get that opinion.
Epictetus would hate this trend to outsource mental work
How/why did you pick these 7?

Using your link: Ukraine, USA, UK, Brazil, & India all rank higher than Iran and Belarus. US & Ukraine rank higher than Nigeria and Romania.
Sometimes we even treat sodium chloride as leftover byproduct[1]. "[...]as of August 2016, it covered 98 hectares (240 acres) and contained approximately 201 million tonnes of salt, with another 900 tonnes being added every hour and 7.2 million tonnes a year." 7 Megatonnes of unused salt a year. The problem with using sodium from that mountain - what to do with leftover chlorine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Kali
Garry Kasparov recently made the same connection in this piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/pu...

> Berezovsky, who elevated Putin to power from behind the scenes, was soon exiled and replaced with more compliant oligarchs. He also met a grisly end—found hanged at his Berkshire mansion at 67—a precedent that might give pause to anyone thinking of risking his business empire to play that gray-cardinal role for the likes of Trump and J. D. Vance.
> Apple app store review process "good faith pro-consumer effort"

Comedy gold here!

What if they would trust the users to install whatever they wish (from other sources) and THEN provide this marvellous service in addition?
Was all set to purchase a Bosch and the local shopsaid their quality has plummeted in recent years, recommend a Meile for the same price. Was told they get far fewer repair requests with this brand.
Megastudy finds a simple way to boost math progress
Open-Sourcing OpenPubkey SSH
> I guess they are trying to be the Apple of the AI world...

They're looking more like Alta Vista.
I’m more worried about stepping on something sharp.
So stupid. Internet nerds claiming squats and deadlift build a nice physique. Whereas everyone who lifts knows a dyel deadlifter who can deadlift 600 lbs.

Bench is the only compound that gives good upper body aesthetics
"DPK format extends the legacy PK3 format with dependency mechanism and versioning", for example: https://wiki.unvanquished.net/wiki/Formats/DPK

BUT: "The archive format uses the PKZIP container (the well-known zip format) with a .dpk extension.".
fun fact

did you know that in EU way back in imperial times some of the worker protection rules where not introduced by angry workers by companies which realized that having well rested and healthy worker will long term produce much better results and then countries following up by enforcing it to boost their countries productivity (and internal stability)?

(and yes I _very_ grossly oversimplified it including lumping all EU countries together even through they had very different inner political histories)

The reason I'm pointing it out is because recently some people seem to be forgetting that at the core a lot of work protection isn't rooted in "being social/nice to your citizens" but in "having a more internal stable and international competitive" country.
There is a move towards software again, as ime a lot of the "AI" oriented investment was around hardware [0].

In my opinion, it was a side effect of how hardware became sexy again as an investment story, though in action, the fabless players like Nvidia and the diversified players like Broadcom that could take full advantage of that "AI" and "Hardware" story because of better margins.

I've also been very open about my opinions that companies that sell a foundational model cannot build a strong long term moat, as an overtrained or specialized models will outcompete foundational models in PoCs and domain specific applications, and the actual hardware needed isn't that exhorbitant as DeepSeek has shown (that said I don't think they spent $6m - it was probably in the $20-50m range, but even then fairly reasonable for most organizations).

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/u...
I not trying to justify it, but if you actually look and check research about people who been caught stealing there is huge difference for them between stealing TV that dropped from a truck vs stealing from a porch vs stealing from inside the house even though it's the same TV.

Theft is theft, but for monkey brains there is huge difference between stealing someone wallet from a pocket vs picking dropped wallet and not returning it. So my point is that doors and locks work not because it's good technical measures, but due to how average Joe percieve social construct about them.

And for grey area activities online there is no such social construct because there is no percieved connection between bunch of email addresses and real people. Also in some countries it's totally legal to send you tons of physical mail spam.
Platforms-on-K8s: Book about Platform Engineering on Kubernetes
Anytime my (developed and well-educated) country's government tries to build or have built any IT system it ends in disaster. I wish we could have what you have, but at this point I don't trust my government to do anything themselves when it comes to digital.
HTTPS does nothing for security. (Except in very rate and specific cases that aren't important here.)

> The only variation worth considering is "is https enough?"

Enough for what exactly? Since this charade clearly isn't about security, what exactly is the metric for "enough"?
One thing that's nice in LangGraph is the flexibility in what a node is. A node doesn't have to be an agent it can be any State manipulation function. So you can create nodes that exclusively do preprocessing or postprocessing and get your run loop as close as possible to just ainvoke on your graph repeatedly.

You can have a subclass of your Node class be an AgentNode class and then subclass that for each type of Agent and then when you declare your Graph object you pass in the data to instantiate the AgentNode with the type of data it needs. It is a bit weird that LangGraph doesn't have a default Node class but it sort of makes sense that they want you to write it in a way that makes sense for how you use it.

I do highly recommend abstracting your graph into Node and Edge classes (with appropriate subclasses) and being able to declare your graph in a constant that you can pass to a build_graph method. Getting as much code reuse as possible dramatically simplifies debugging graph issuses.
So when he promises fully autonomous driving is going to happen this year, you believe him?
I'm usually skeptical of doomer articles about new technology like this one, but reluctantly find myself agreeing with a lot of it. While AI is a great tool with many possibilities, I don't see the alignment of what many of these new AI startups are selling.

It makes my work more productive, yes. But it often slows me down too. Knowing when to push back on the response you get is often difficult to get right.

This quote in particular:

>Surveys confirm that for many workers, AI tools like ChatGPT reduce their productivity by increasing the volume of content and steps needed to complete a given task, and by frequently introducing errors that have to be checked and corrected.

This sort of mirrors my work as a SWE. It does increase productivity and can reduce lead times for task completion. But requires a lot of checking and pushback.

There's a large gap between increased productivity in the right field in the right hands vs copying and pasting a solution everywhere so companies don't need workers.

And that's really what most of these AI firms are selling. A solution to automate most workers out of existence.
I'm not sure he could have. He operated almost entirely on hype. I think the reason he's so addicted to terribly stale memes is that memes carried his popularity during his peak but none of the "real life Tony Stark" comparisons were ever really justified beyond mundane superficialities.

He stylized himself as "founder" of PayPal and Tesla, and "chief engineer" at SpaceX, but he's none of the things and even the specifics of his supposed university degrees seem dubious upon investigation. He has also repeatedly demonstrated a lack of basic practical knowledge in domains he publicly talks about while allegedly having deep technical knowledge from committing entire sections of text books to memory. He knows how to seem like a genius without actually having the hands-on experience to back it up.

He has been widely successful as a hype man and somehow managed to keep things going while continuously ovepromising and underdelivering. But I find it difficult to imagine that resulting in a positive as long as the purposes are ultimately entirely self-centered. He seems to be desparately trying to look "cool" and be admired - even going to the lengths of pretending to be world class at a number of challenging video games by paying people to boost his accounts and by widely exagerating his real participation in competitive e-sports. He's extremely insecure and unable to handle challenges to his qualifications or authority.

I find it plausible that at one point he did have the aspiration to be the man who put the first man on Mars but it wasn't driven by the motives he has claimed (multiplanetary species etc) because that would require acknowledging the global requirements to sustain such a project over the long term. Instead it seems to have been entirely about creating a legacy and a perception of himself. I guess if his desire was to be mentioned in future history text books he has achieved that - but not for landing reusable rocket boosters.
When does a professional come into play? You assumed you're deficient, you asked chatgpt, and now you're asking for anecdotes from HN. Go get some blood work done and talk to a professional who actually knows about these things.
Being radicalized by the Internet isn't an excuse for teenage Isis fighters, nor is it one for a 55 year old man.
> the same cows make milk

lol what?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milcher
Related:

Samsung Electronics Says Co-CEO Han Jong-Hee Has Died at 63 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43466951 - Mar 2025 (no comments)
I mean if I was so hungry I felt like falling over and dying, or my concentration was so impacted by hunger I had no choice but to eat.
I'd have him more the Incitatus to Trump's Caligula.
The binary would be downloaded on the end user’s machine, inside a sandbox and then the “recipe” would be executed to create a working extension. This avoids various “redistribution” restrictions entirely since we aren’t shipping the binary itself.

That makes me wonder, why not just download the source code and compile it. You're definitely not distributing any binaries that way.
Is "I don't have social media apps on my phone" the new "I don't even own a tv"?
But Elon lies too, and frequently. Worse still, at least some his lies seem to be motivated by a childish need to score brownie points and/or worship from random internet users. His continuing claims of being a "top player" in online games spring to mind.
> It's a real shame OpenAI didn't succeed with their core and most fundamental mission of being open and improving humanity as a whole

You frame it like they sincerely had this mission at all. Which I doubt seriously. Why would anyone who funded them have such aim?
Isn't that more or less what all abstraction is about, getting an interface that allows you to work with the "what" but not the "how". When I call file open, I get the "what", a file to work with, but not the "how", DMA access, Spinning rust, SSDs, could be an NFS in there who knows.

Yes, the "hows" have impacts on performance. When implementing or selecting the "how" those performance criteria flow down into "how" requirements. As far as I am concerned that is no difference from correctness requirements placed on the "how".

Coming from the other direction. If I am hard disk manufacturer I don't care about the "what". I only care about the "how" of getting storage and the disk IO interface implemented so that my disk is usable by the file system abstraction that the "what" cares about. I may not know the exact performance criteria for your "what", but more performance equals more "whats" satisfied and willing to use my how.
The article does not make the claim that it is a Trump admin complaint. It states it as a fact

> The 1944 treaty also instructs Mexico to make Rio Grande water deliveries to its northern neighbor. Over the years, however, Mexico has accrued a significant Rio Grande water debt and has fallen behind on its water-sharing payments.
I lived in Brazil during hyperinflation, and the transition to the Real. During that time we would go buy groceries at the first moment after a paycheck, filling up carts to last as long as possible because prices would be changing not just every day but a few times a day, grocery stores would employ people whose only job was to remark prices on the shelves in the morning, afternoon, and evening.

At the time I don't think many people believed that yet another currency change (we had gone through the Cruzado, to Cruzado novo, to Cruzeiro, to Cruzeiro real in a span of 8 years) would solve it, I was too young to understand the plan and it just felt like another annoying swap of currency I needed to do.

The URV (real unity of value) was this abstract thing we could use as benchmark against the previous currency (Cruzeiro real) and the new one being introduced (Real, the one living to this day), the more sweeping changes were broad fiscal reforms, and removing the stupid indexation between prices and wages.
Anthropic didn’t build shit, it’s got the same closed output rules as ClosedAI and xAI and Perplexity and the Gemini API. Send them your precious questions and code and what do you get back? Output you with a prohibition era policy telling you not to use it to compete with their thing that does everything. That’s such a dumb deal, I immediately think people are dumb when I hear them mention using closed output AI services. Government protections for explicitly anticompetitive services? What a joke!
Reminds me of: "People think software development is just writing code. But it isn't just writing: it requires planning, experimentation, research, and consideration of style and structure."

Writers everywhere: "Excuse me?"

I'm tired of all these bullshit attempts to establish one word for doing it poorly and a different word for doing it well. It's a dumb idea that teaches nobody anything and does nothing to raise the level of professionalism in the industry. Let's take a common word that people use to describe what they do and declare it to be pejorative; that'll show them! I'm disappointed that somebody with such extraordinary theoretical achievements would lower himself to such empty corporate consultant level rhetorical bullshit.

I'm sure the talk is fine, but right now I feel like I don't need to listen to it.
This was something I didn't understand when choosing between "Computer Science" and "Software Engineering" as a major in college.

At its simplest:

"Engineering Software" is what people who build software products do.

"Science with a Computer" is something that people doing real calculations, simulations, etc do.

I, too, forget that the tools we use to build complex solutions can still be used by people who don't live in a text editor.
I strongly agree with this argument. Both sides are equally guilty of fueling a culture of baseless accusations. While it's a broader issue across the Western world, it's especially pronounced in the U.S. It's reached a point where words have lost their weight and meaning.