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I Hate Acrobat

https://www.vincentuden.xyz/blog/pdf-reader
70•vincent-uden•1h ago•46 comments

Apple M5 chip

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unleashes-m5-the-next-big-leap-in-ai-performance-for...
885•mihau•10h ago•981 comments

Claude Haiku 4.5

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-haiku-4-5
378•adocomplete•6h ago•161 comments

How First Wap Tracks Phones Around the World

https://www.lighthousereports.com/methodology/surveillance-secrets-explainer/
14•mattboulos•48m ago•0 comments

Next Steps for the Caddy Project Maintainership

https://caddy.community/t/next-steps-for-the-caddy-project-maintainership/33076
43•francislavoie•1h ago•6 comments

I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

https://blog.daviddodda.com/how-i-almost-got-hacked-by-a-job-interview
658•DavidDodda•10h ago•349 comments

Bringing NumPy's type-completeness score to nearly 90% – Pyrefly

https://pyrefly.org/blog/numpy-type-completeness/
21•todsacerdoti•1w ago•4 comments

Are hard drives getting better?

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/are-hard-drives-getting-better-lets-revisit-the-bathtub-curve/
86•HieronymusBosch•5h ago•40 comments

Pwning the Nix ecosystem

https://ptrpa.ws/nixpkgs-actions-abuse
223•SuperShibe•9h ago•39 comments

Show HN: Halloy – Modern IRC client

https://github.com/squidowl/halloy
262•culinary-robot•11h ago•73 comments

Monads are too powerful: The expressiveness spectrum

https://chrispenner.ca/posts/expressiveness-spectrum
40•hackandthink•3d ago•35 comments

Recursive Language Models (RLMs)

https://alexzhang13.github.io/blog/2025/rlm/
51•talhof8•5h ago•13 comments

F5 says hackers stole undisclosed BIG-IP flaws, source code

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/f5-says-hackers-stole-undisclosed-big-ip-flaws-sou...
115•WalterSobchak•9h ago•57 comments

Zed is now available on Windows

https://zed.dev/blog/zed-for-windows-is-here
100•meetpateltech•6h ago•28 comments

Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

https://www.unkey.com/blog/serverless-exit
272•vednig•11h ago•173 comments

ImapGoose

https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2025/10/15/introducing-imapgoose/
4•xarvatium•48m ago•0 comments

A kernel stack use-after-free: Exploiting Nvidia's GPU Linux drivers

https://blog.quarkslab.com/./nvidia_gpu_kernel_vmalloc_exploit.html
118•mustache_kimono•9h ago•10 comments

Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research

https://pearlab.icrl.org/
21•walterbell•1w ago•4 comments

Recreating the Canon Cat document interface

https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/updates/the-jasper-report
78•tonyg•8h ago•6 comments

Garbage collection for Rust: The finalizer frontier

https://soft-dev.org/pubs/html/hughes_tratt__garbage_collection_for_rust_the_finalizer_frontier/
102•ltratt•11h ago•105 comments

Reverse engineering a 27MHz RC toy communication using RTL SDR

https://nitrojacob.wordpress.com/2025/09/03/reverse-engineering-a-27mhz-rc-toy-communication-usin...
72•austinallegro•8h ago•17 comments

C++26: range support for std:optional

https://www.sandordargo.com/blog/2025/10/08/cpp26-range-support-for-std-optional
68•birdculture•5d ago•55 comments

Ask HN: Can't get hired – what's next?

10•silvercymbals•23m ago•7 comments

Gerald Sussman - An Electrical Engineering View of a Mechanical Watch (2003)

https://techtv.mit.edu/videos/15895-an-electrical-engineering-view-of-a-mechanical-watch
8•o4c•1w ago•0 comments

Things I've learned in my 7 years implementing AI

https://www.jampa.dev/p/llms-and-the-lessons-we-still-havent
115•jampa•4h ago•40 comments

Americans' love of billiards paved the way for synthetic plastics

https://invention.si.edu/invention-stories/imitation-ivory-and-power-play
52•geox•6d ago•27 comments

M5 MacBook Pro

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/
290•tambourine_man•10h ago•399 comments

Pixnapping Attack

https://www.pixnapping.com/
285•kevcampb•17h ago•67 comments

Helpcare AI (YC F24) Is Hiring

1•hsial•11h ago

The brain navigates new spaces by 'darting' between reality and mental maps

https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/brain-navigates-new-spaces-by-flickering-between-reality-a...
123•XzetaU8•1w ago•43 comments
Open in hackernews

The brain navigates new spaces by 'darting' between reality and mental maps

https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/brain-navigates-new-spaces-by-flickering-between-reality-and-old-mental-maps/
123•XzetaU8•1w ago

Comments

AlbertoGP•1w ago
A particularly interesting part that I did not expect from the title:

> Before the rats encountered the detour, the research team observed that their brains were already firing in patterns that seemed to "imagine" alternate unfamiliar mental routes while they slept. When the researchers compared these sleep patterns to the neural activity during the actual detour, some of them matched.

> “What was surprising was that the rats' brains were already prepared for this novel detour before they ever encountered it,”

e40•10h ago
Seems to support the idea that dreams are rehearsals for real life.
usrnm•8h ago
I wish some of my dreams really were
AndrewKemendo•1w ago
This matches my hypothesis on Deja vu

https://kemendo.com/Deja-Vu-Experiment.html

I think it also supports my three loops hypothesis as well:

https://kemendo.com/ThreeLoops.html

In effect, my position is that biological systems maintain a synchronized processing pipeline: where the hippocampal prediction system operates slightly “ahead” of sensory processing, like a cache buffer.

If the processing gets “behind” the sensory input then you feel like you’re accessing memory because the electrical signal is reaching memory and sensory distribution simultaneously or slightly lagging.

So it means you’re constantly switching between your world map and the input and comparing them just to stabilize a “linear” experience - something which is a necessity for corporeal prediction and reaction.

OgsyedIE•1w ago
Your work seems pretty good to me, have you seen Steven Byrne's blog theorising about symbol grounding in the brain?
AndrewKemendo•1w ago
No I havent, I’ll have to look it up, thanks for the recommendation.
shomp•11h ago
I think we should be careful about materialistic reductions of awareness. Because some rats dreamed detours that ended up being correct in waking rat life, it does not follow that all instances of deja vu are misfirings. It's a tempting connection to draw, but it does not actually explain how the detours were dreamt to begin with, and this points to a deeper question about awareness in general. If I were pressed for an analogy, I might say something like "just because all books have ink does not mean that all ink lives in books." You know what I mean? There's a superset of experiences that cannot be easily explained away by caching, as tempting as it might be.
Antibabelic•10h ago
Materialistic reduction has gotten us quite far in science.
mallowdram•10h ago
Not exactly. We don't know where optic-flow reactions that integrate senses, emotions, motor systems in the slightest. Study neural reuse or coordination dynamics. Some relationship between the brain and the world that isn't easily found in the brain alone is responsible.
idiotsecant•9h ago
Materialistic interpretations of the world around us are quite literally the only useful ones. If we didn't do that we'd be sleeping in caves and hitting each other with heavy rocks.
mallowfram•8h ago
Wrong. Materialistic only got us to a level. Now we're looking past materialism in neural reuse, coordination dynamics and ecological psychology and neurobiology. The causes are out there in contradictory correlations.
idiotsecant•4h ago
Literally everything is materialist. If it's not it either A) doesn't actually exist or B) you just don't understand it yet.

It's inherent to the meaning of the word.

mallowfram•1h ago
A word is a material? You can show me the brain state that corresponds repeatedly and with continuous accuracy a single word? I don't think so.

You can train a computer to correspond to an individual's idiosyncratic brain state for their word voxels, but no one has yet to reduce the material to a single repeatable voxel state.

“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024

The problem with the materialist POV is it doesn't solve the most basic question of brain states. No not everything is a material.

There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.

altruios•31m ago
> There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.

I understand.

There is a however a flaw in that thinking.

There is no oscillation that exists outside of some material/medium to oscillate. I agree it is important to distinguish the water from the wave. There is no light wave without the photon. Thus - I strongly suspect - there is no consciousness without the brain (or similar medium).

mallowdram•10h ago
VR cannot be essential to decoding the brain as it deals in topological maps and affinities.
aatd86•1w ago
The way it is phrased, looks like a pre computed model confronted to real data. So... our current AIs except we have incremental continuous training (accumulated experience)?

And dreams are simulation-based training to make life easier, decision-making more efficient?

What kind of next level machinery is this?! ;D

_spduchamp•1w ago
I wonder if this also relates to playing music.
mycall•6d ago
> The same brain networks that normally help us imagine shortcuts or possibilities can, when disrupted, trap us in intrusive memories or hallucinations.

There is a fine line between this an wisdom. The Default Mode Network (DMN) is the brain's "simulation machine". When you're not focused on a specific task, the DMN fires up, allowing you to daydream, remember the past, plan for the future, and contemplate others' perspectives.

Wisdom is not about turning the machine off; it's about becoming the director of the movie it's playing. A creative genius envisioning a new world and a person trapped in a state of torment isn't the hardware, but the learned software of regulation, awareness, and perspective.

Wisdom is the process of learning to aim this incredible, imaginative power toward flourishing instead of suffering. Saying "trap us in intrusive memories or hallucinations" is the negative side where there is also a positive side to it all.

mallowdram•10h ago
Wisdom is an arbitrary concept. The drive to avoid suffering is built from sensory and affective affinities and networks funnlled into the cog-mapping motor systems. Calling this wisdom is simply a simplistic narrative.
nzeid•2h ago
Yeah. Not sure "flourishing" and "suffering" form a useful dichotomy for "wisdom" to begin with. Life is way more complicated than that.
idiotsecant•9h ago
>A creative genius envisioning a new world and a person trapped in a state of torment isn't the hardware, but the learned software of regulation, awareness, and perspective.

No, it's hardware. There is no amount of 'wisdom' bootstraps pulling that will make you not schizophrenic.

mallowfram•8h ago
The brain isn't hardware, it's biology and oscillation and integrations in optic flow. It can't be dichotomized into hardware or software.
delichon•12h ago
My theory is that this darting is the mechanism of consciousness. We look inward and outward in a loop, which generates the perception of being conscious in a similar way to how sequential frames of film create the illusion of motion. That "persistence of vision" is like the illusion of persistent, continuous consciousness created by the inward-outward regard sequence. Consciousness is a simple algorithm: look at the world, then look at the self to evaluate its reaction to the world. Then repeat.
cantor_S_drug•10h ago
Is this also the reason why darting eyes movements can be linked (and is predictive of or can detect) to mental health issues like schizophrenia, etc?
mallowdram•10h ago
It's a mechanism of intelligence, not consciousness. Intel is built up from path-integration, short-cuts, vicarious trial and error that begins in very tiny local areas and expands to landmark and non-landmark navigation. This switching between vision and hippocampus has always been theorized about as the fundamental sharp wave ripple threshold of how intelligence is built as most mammals can do this, so it's not the "algorithm of consciousness".
bmikaili•8h ago
And funny enough this gets really close to the non-dualistic philosophies of zen buddhism.
bwoah•4h ago
You could probably go further upstream and make a loose comparison to the concept of dependent arising (Pratītyasamutpāda):

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da

dataviz1000•1h ago
or T.S. Eliot's `Little Gidding`
Jeff_Brown•7h ago
But why does that feel like anything? I could write a program that concurrently processes its visual input and its internal model. I don't think it would be conscious, unless everything in the universe is conscious (a possibility I can't, admittedly, discount).
delichon•6h ago
> But why does that feel like anything?

Consciousness is an attention mechanism. That inward regard, evaluating how the self reacts to the world, is attention being payed to the body's feelings. The outward regard then maps those feelings on to local space. Consciousness is watching your feelings as a kind of HUD on the world. It correlates feels to things.

EMIRELADERO•2h ago
Sure, but that still leaves the mystery of how qualia is generated in a mechanistic manner.
lanfeust6•2h ago
Yes. Still perplexing to be thrown into the world. How is it that my individual experience is in this body but not another one? Etc
Traubenfuchs•58m ago
> But why does that feel like anything?

Orchestrated objective reduction or just an emerging proeprty of:

Our 86 billion neurons, every single one deafeningly complex molecular machine with hundred million of hundreds of different receptor types, monoaminoxidae, (reuptake)transporters, connections to other neurons.

exolymph•36m ago
> But why does that feel like anything?

Anthropic principle: because it does. If it didn't feel like anything, it wouldn't. But it does, so it does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

lofaszvanitt•1h ago
This whole consciousness debate is just trumped up bs.
yboris•1h ago
Interesting idea called transparent self model by Thomas Metzinger, author of The Ego Tunnel where he explains it further.

The gist from my memory of 15+ years ago is that the brain needs to model the world and then itself within the world, creating a model that is transparent to itself, situated in the world.

nomel•1h ago
From what...my friend say, this becomes evident with LSD.

They said it clearly amplified the internal part of some visual perception loop, in fairly straightforward ways. For example, intentionally trying to see something as it wasn't (like a shadow as a snake) would make it be seen that way (the shadow would take on a clear snake appearance, and even move a bit).

Some simple examples are all the face optical illusions (Thatcher, reverse mask, etc), that show our perception of a face is in no way direct.

N_Lens•11h ago
Going to new places is really therapeutic (Barring somewhere obviously adverse), since that 'darting to reality' creates a sense of presence.

I often find myself lost in my mental maps in daily life (Living inside my head) unless I'm in a nice novel environment. Meditation helps, however.

forinti•10h ago
This takes me to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Your physical experience of something has to be analysed in accordance with your mental model of it in order to attain a diagnosis (in the book it was a motorcycle engine).

My take on this is, especially in regard to debugging IT issues, is that you have to constantly verify and update your mental model (check your premises!) in order to better weed out problems.

pessimizer•9h ago
There was a neural net paper like this that generated a lot of discussion on HN, but that I haven't been able to find since (I probably downloaded it, but that teaches me to always remember to use Zotero because academic paper filenames are terrible.)

It was about replacing backprop with a mechanism that checked outcomes against predictions, and just adjusted parameters that deviated from the predictions rather than the entire path. It wasn't suitable for digital machines (because it isn't any more efficient on digital machines) but it worked on analog models. If anybody remembers this, I'd appreciate the link.

I might be garbling the paper because it's from memory and I'm not an expert, but hopefully it's recognizable.

sirwhinesalot•8h ago
I don't know if it is the paper you are thinking of (likely not) but this idea of checking predictions against outcomes is a very common idea in less mainstream AI research, including the so called "energy-based models" of Yann LeCun and the reference frames of the thousand brains project.

A recent paper posted here also looked at Recurrent Neural Nets and how in simplifying the design to its core amounted to just having a latent prediction and repeatedly adjusting that prediction.

pessimizer•7h ago
If it wasn't a thread on HN, it's probably not. I don't think it was LeCun. It was a long, well-illustrated paper with a web version.
asdff•1h ago
It would be interesting to move beyond rats and into humans binned via navigating their local area through understanding of the street networks independent of any tooling, and those that can't get down the street without mapping software telling them what to do.

Anecdotally it is striking to see the contrast as a member of the former group talking to people of the latter. They have truly no idea where places are or how close they are to other places. It is like these network connections aren't being made by them at all. No sense of scale either of how large a place is or how far away another place might be. I imagine this dependency on turn by turn navigation with no spatial awareness leads to quite different outcomes in terms of modes of thinking.

I mean, when I think about going to a place I am constructing a mental map of the actual city map. I am considering geography, cardinal directions, major corridors and their connectivity along the route, rough estimates of distance, etc. My CPUs are being used no doubt. Others though it is like a blankness in that wake. CPUs idle. Follow the arrows. Who knows where north is? What is a mile?