MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arghwhat | 2025-04-28 08:35:01+00:00
To be clear, a derivative work is copyright of the one creating the derivative, not the original author.

The question is whether creating the derivative work of that specific transformative nature is allowed. Unlike assets taken verbatim, this requires evaluating the exact instance. A binary decompilation is importantly not a simple translation, as that would be entirely unusable - rather, it is like creating blueprints for a finished building.

This is in part why licenses aim to manage and in part restrict you through a contract with the author, using a formally granted usage right to the entity as leverage for complying with a bunch of conditions, orthogonal to the copyright.

Your point stands though, my statement was not as accurate as it could have been.
by bambax | 2025-04-28 08:35:24+00:00
I wrote a novel in French a couple of years ago that I want to translate to English. The way I do it is paragraph by paragraph: copy/paste a paragraph in OpenRouter (Sonnet or Gemini), get back the translation, and rewrite/adjust it.

It works well but copying/pasting back and forth gets old very fast, and it would be better if the process was done inside the word processor. For some reason (various reasons) I still use Office 2003, which doesn't have any AI feature. (It does have a "translate" function but it's awkward to use and not very good.)

So I wrote a macro to send selected text to OpenRouter and replace with the response (with a system prompt that says to only output the translation, otherwise most models start with "Here's the translated text:")

I had never written a macro in vba; I got started with Sonnet and adjusted many parts with the help of StackOverflow (which turns out to have more information about vba than Sonnet...)

And finally it worked; and it turns out to be an incredible boost to translation productivity!
by xlbuttplug2 | 2025-04-28 08:35:30+00:00
> In conclusion, our findings suggest that moderate dietary choline intake, ranging from 332.89 mg/d to 353.93 mg/d, is associated with lower odds of dementia and better cognitive performance.

Gemini tells me that amounts to ~850mg of alpha GPC or ~1900mg of citicoline. Eggs it is then.
Ask HN: Recommended resources for C++ bindings generation project?
by mog_dev | 2025-04-28 08:36:19+00:00
I'm creating a C++ binding generator for GStreamer from GIR files with full RAII memory management. Looking for books, articles, or documentation on binding generation techniques, GIR file parsing, and implementing RAII patterns in generated code. Not interested in existing solutions as I want to build from scratch, but any educational resources would be valuable. What literature or references would you recommend for someone tackling this kind of project?
by roenxi | 2025-04-28 08:36:55+00:00
JK Rowling is famous, wealthy, a public figure and female. I guarantee you she has received death threats and the police have shrugged it off as not a credible problem.

Whether they are public or not is more of an academic detail, but given the level of hostility aimed at her it is a pretty safe bet that someone has somewhere whether or not it was reported on the internet. If someone wants to die on the hill of every claim being cited then fair enough, at least it is a principled hill. But this is like asking for a cite that US political debate got heated. Rowling has genuine anti-fans out there, I've seen totally spontaneous wild hate sessions break out against her in my wanderings through the internet. It'll have spilled out into real-world protest somewhere.
by smoke998 | 2025-04-28 08:37:46+00:00
I’m working on Catchcam - https://hackaday.io/project/199220-catchcam-speed-camera-det..., a privacy-first, offline speed camera detector for drivers. Unlike apps like Waze or Radarbot, Catchcam doesn’t track your location or require an internet connection. Just plug it into your USB socket, and you’re good to go.

Key features:

• Built-in speaker and LED for alerts

• Preloaded with 66,000+ known speed camera locations (more to come)

• Easy updates via drag-and-drop on your PC

It’s been a fun project to build, and I’m excited to see it help drivers stay away from speeding tickets while keeping their data private.

I’d love to hear your thoughts or suggestions!
by ragebol | 2025-04-28 08:38:04+00:00
Interesting, I'm also involved in a project to do yield prediction, but with a ground-vehicle with camera's on top to drive between strawberry and blueberry plants.

Yield prediction is huge indeed, because overshooting your prediction means seller stuff for a lower price. Undershooting means paying for someone's product to make up for the difference. Probably there's quite a bit of matchmaking in between those under and overshooters and someone making a good buck out of that too.
by benterix | 2025-04-28 08:38:32+00:00
> But humans often write things which are false.

LLMs do it much more often. One of the many reasons in the coding area is the fact that they're trained on both the broken and working code. They can propose as a solution a piece of code that was taken verbatim from "why is this code not working" SO question.

Google decided to approach this major problem by trying to run the code before giving the answer. Gemini doesn't always succeed as it might not have all packages needed installed for example, but at least it tries, and when it detects bullshit, it tries do correct that.
by foldr | 2025-04-28 08:38:35+00:00
The original post said that people had placards “calling for the death of JK Rowling”. It may be that the poster’s overall point does not rely on this specific factual claim. But don’t try to muddy the waters around this: it’s a straightforward factual claim and people are right to ask if it can be sourced. So far it has not been.
by dalke | 2025-04-28 08:38:44+00:00
To share a related river issue, a few years back the city of Gothenburg, Sweden switched how they allocate students to a school. It used to be the student would get a school in their specific section of the city ("statsdel"). The new one lets you choose a school, specified in rank order, even if it's in another part of the city.

You could select from a list of schools, with distances given as straight-line distance (or perhaps as route distance? I can't tell from the articles I've read), which meant some of the schools across the river were considered "close".

In one case, a student had a 45 minute commute to get to school, due to waiting for the ferry. The parents listed it as their 5th choice, based on the stated distance. The more critical factor should be travel time, but the computer system doesn't take mass transit schedules into account.

As a contributing factor, the list of schools did not include the name of the stadsdel in the list of schools. This extra sort of reverse geocoding - trivially available - might have helped them realize the issue.

One news story about it, in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vast/kaos-i-antagningssyst...
by maxbond | 2025-04-28 08:38:51+00:00
I'm working on a Kaggle competition about predicting subsurface models - a map of the geologic layers beneath a given area - from seismic data.

I don't expect to place competitively but I learn a lot from these competitions. I like competitions like this that are connected to physical problems and datasets (though sadly this one is largely simulated), I learn as much about the broader world as I do deep learning. I've always idly wondered how seismology worked, and now I have an excuse to dig into it.

It's also given me a greater appreciation for the "seismology" we perform in our day to day, like knocking on things to see if they're hollow, or (as I learned here a while back) the way battitores test the porosity of cheese by knocking on it with hammers.
When open science is open but not for everyone
by fxlrnrpt | 2025-04-28 08:39:49+00:00
...or how cancel culture made its way to academia

An actor misbehaved - you stop going to its movies. A company got involved in some shady shit - you stop buying from it. Sounds like sound logic aligned with an image of having principles, right? Well, how about not allowing folks into academic conferences? And not because they personally did something you do not like, but because they come from a certain country?

My name is Andrey. I am ex-big tech software engineer who decided to switch to academia and went back to school. One of the best tech schools in Russia - Skoltech. The one that is currently being cancelled.

Long story short:

My extremely talented colleagues (the ones I look up to on daily basis) have been rejected from CVPR (a top tier academic conference) purely because of their affiliation with Skoltech.

Specific papers:

- Switti: Designing Scale-Wise Transformers for Text-to-Image Synthesis (Yandex, HSE, MIPT, Skoltech, AIRI, ITMO); - Color Conditional Generation with Sliced Wasserstein Distance (Skoltech);

- MaterialFusion: High-Quality, Zero-Shot, and Controllable Material Transfer with Diffusion Models (HSE, AIRI, Skoltech);

- Good Keypoints for the Two-View Geometry Estimation Problem (Skoltech, Slamcore).

Screenshot - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gpm-cEdWQAIU4uU?format=jpg&name=large

Why it matters:

There are only a handful of respected conferences that truly matter in academia. You want to be heard? Publish there or perish.

Why it is wrong:

As humanity, we are where we are because even at darkest times we find a way to talk and collaborate. If you do not like someone personally, surely you do not have to play with them. It is basic free will. But do you want to live in the world where people cancel others based on their origin as a whole group? What if it is not about business and profit, but about making the world a better place together through science?

One could argue that it is only Skoltech - a single uni in Russia. Guess what? It is not. Other top-tier schools (HSE, MIPT) are under sanctions and face the same treatment. And not only schools. A few companies that have the resources to fund the research are in the same boat. You want to do good research in Russia - not too many options.

I get that conferences hosted on the US and EU soil have to comply with the laws. It is inevitable. Yet these laws are there to restrict for-profit business, not academia!

The world is dark and full of terrors. It is hard to navigate living from one crisis to another. Yet people somehow manage to keep their obsession with science. They keep grinding and want to share their findings with the world. Since when this kind of behavior should be punished? Could you remind me when division of millions of people into "good" and "bad" worked well? Ever? WTF?

Final message:

World is complicated and unfair, but we can make it better bit by bit. Not through division, but through staying connected and doing our best to find common ground. Science and non-profit are universally good for all of us. Shall we start there?
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-28 08:39:52+00:00
That's just drivers normalising the breaking of the speed limits. If you raise the limits just because drivers are going faster, then the drivers will just increase their speeds until again, a majority of drivers are breaking the limit.

Speed limits should be defined to reduce the harm from the inevitable crashes e.g. we have a lot of 20mph limits here in the UK in cities such as Bristol which are designed to reduce pedestrian deaths.

Personally, I think roads are poorly designed - they often prioritise speed which then encourages drivers to go faster (e.g. long sight lines, sweeping corners etc) and then a speed limit is applied. I think the better alternative s to design roads so that drivers naturally travel slower, or at least the careful ones do.
by sim7c00 | 2025-04-28 08:41:01+00:00
i know its likely going to be an annoying question. but i cant find quick info on where my screenshots are sent and what kind of data is retained / how privacy etc. will work.

since this is device screenshots, kinda (not the same i get it) reminds of MS trying to grab the screens. It might be good to put some explicit text on such matters to reassure / inform people around it.

it was the first thing that came to my mind. (sorry, a bit biassed mind!)

also, kinda wondering why not photos too? what happens if the submitted picture is not a screenshot but a photo or a drawing? does it filter those out?
by amszmidt | 2025-04-28 08:41:39+00:00
> A recent HN submission shows a ./configure system made from scratch using makefiles, which parallelizes the tests. That could be a good starting point for a C on Linux project today.

Not everything is C, or GNU/Linux. The example also misses much of the basic functionality that makes GNU autotools amazing.

The major benefit of GNU autotools is that it works well, specially for new platforms and cross compilation. If all you care about is your own system, a simple Makefile will do just fine. And with GNU autotools you can also pick to just use GNU autoconf .. or just GNU automake.

Having generated files in the release tarball is a good practise, why should users have to install a bunch of extra tools just to get PDF of the manual or other non-system specific files? It is not just build scripts all over the place, installing TeX Live just to get a PDF manual of something is super annoying.

Writing your own ./configure that works remotely as something users would expect is non-trivial, and complicated -- we did that 30 years ago before GNU autoconf. There is a reason why we stopped doing that ...

I'd go so far to think that GNU autotools is the most sensible build system out there...
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-28 08:42:16+00:00
<< And yet, guns and ammo freely available and unrestricted outside of automatic weapons and the like? Yeah. Can’t wait to move off-grid someday. (Yes, obviously American)

Have you actually tried to purchase guns or ammo lately? There are genuinely few states, where freely available and unrestricted can be used without an asterisk attached.
by benterix | 2025-04-28 08:42:19+00:00
> But we will never check the result of an LLM because of the statistical margin of error in the feature.

I don't follow this statement: if anything, we absolutely must check the resut of an LLM for the reason you mention. For coding, there are tools that attempt to check the generated code for each answer to at least guarantee the code runs (whether it's relevant, optimal, or bug-free is another issue, and one that is not so easy to check without context that can be significant at times).
by nickwatson | 2025-04-28 08:44:29+00:00
I agree. In all honesty I was just following on the trend that has been popularized by OpenAI/Google so it is more relatable but will mention the "literature review" as you suggest, it's a good idea.

I didn't give the wording too much thought in all honesty - was just excited to share.

Where would you suggest to put the literature review text? Readme.md?

What about something like "synthesized findings from sources across the internet" or something like that.

When I see the word literature, I immediately think of books.
by chaosprint | 2025-04-28 08:46:17+00:00
After trying to start a business for a year, I basically gave up negotiating with VCs.

My current goal is to spend half of my time on the development and maintenance of open source projects, such as Glicol (https://glicol.org/).

The other half of my time is to do some business that can generate profit from day 1.

I just found that the VC model is not suitable for my current situation.
by perihelions | 2025-04-28 08:47:07+00:00
That's a way to view it!

The reason I'm not falling back on OCR is because the general case is full of things, like math equations and inset graphics/diagrams, that can't be OCR'd. The only robust way to deal with those is to treat them as graphical atoms: "this bounding box can be moved around, but should not be split up into pieces".
by autoexec | 2025-04-28 08:47:21+00:00
The serfs can become kings

The odds of a poor person becoming a rich person in America is extremely low and socioeconomic mobility in the US is getting worse all the time. I'd guess that most poor people have better odds of getting hit by lightning. A lot of new millionaires are property owners. Anyone who gets their money from real estate is not a serf.
by tpm | 2025-04-28 08:47:27+00:00
And also intimidation and threats. All of the the regimes collapsed swiftly once Gorbachev declared there will be no Soviet military response, like there was in 1956 and 1968. One wonders what would have happened if Poland in 1981 didn't feel like the Soviets will repeat that; there are some reasons to believe they would not.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-28 08:47:38+00:00
I am not sure why you are being downvoted. The potential for abuse is clearly in place. It did not happen in our timeline yet, because it would likely cause an uproar, but to me writing was on the wall, when, way back when, Elon sent an update to a Tesla during a disaster to change a battery behavior.
by Beretta_Vexee | 2025-04-28 08:49:19+00:00
English is not my native language. I am referring to fatigue caused by thermal cycling. Annealing for one year is done to test the chemical stability of the alloy and ensure that there is no migration or segregation of alloy elements.

There may be unstable hydrodynamic phenomena in a pipe or heat exchanger, which generates a large number of thermal cycles. Such as the instability of a vortex in a mixing or heat exchange zone.

This is a different ageing mechanism. It is very complicated and time-consuming to test in the laboratory.
by amszmidt | 2025-04-28 08:49:45+00:00
> A good way to make sure your project won't cross compile is to use Autoconf. Rampant use of Autoconf is the main reason distros gave up on cross compiling and started using QEMU. Developers who use Autoconf and who don't know what cross-compiling is will not end up with a cleanly cross-compiling project that downstream packagers don't have to patch into submission.

Cross compilation for distributions is a mess, but it is because of a wide proliferation of build systems, not because of the GNU autotools -- which have probably the most sane way of doing cross compilation out there. E.g., distribution have to figure out why ./configure is not supporting --host cause someone decided on writing their own thing ...

> The main idea behind Autoconf is political. Autoconf based programs are deliberately intended to hinder those who are able to build a program on a non-GNU system and then want to make contributions while just staying on that system, not getting a whole GNU environment.

Nothing could be further from the truth, GNU autoconf started as a bunch of shared ./configure scripts so that programs COULD build on non-GNU system. It is also why GNU autoconf and GNU automake go such far lengths in supporting cross compilation to the point where you can build a compiler that targets one system, runs on another, and was build on a third (Canadian cross compile).
by LiamPowell | 2025-04-28 08:49:59+00:00
TLDR: You can define a maximum size of any child classes as a property of the parent class, meaning you can have things like arrays of arbitrary child types without having to know all the possible child types in advance and without using pointers.

After some Googling it seems like no other language has implemented a similar feature before, which is surprising with how simple and useful this appears to be for embedded applications.
by roenxi | 2025-04-28 08:50:11+00:00
Let me google that for you: https://celebrity.nine.com.au/latest/jk-rowling-slams-transg...

I'm just saying, I didn't even check before this comment. And who knew? bunch of death threats targeting Rowling with activists trying to make sure everyone can find her in meatspace in case the threat makes her quieten down. "Did she receive death threats" is really not the part of this to try and question. And if you want to make a point about did someone do it while at a protest - I mean yeah. Yeah they did. Maybe nobody bothered to record it, because that sort of thing is routine and boring.

If someone wants to attack the police response part that I have no idea about. Maybe they did respond and it was exemplary - that is the sort of thing that does need a source. But the death threats part is just another year as a public figure. There are a lot of death threats out there. And it'd spill over to placards.

EDIT And it turned out to be remarkably easy to find a citation, note the "decapitate TERFs" link 2 comments up. As expected. It's easy to tune out because in practice calling for the death of someone at a protest is in practice a pretty minor thing to do. Which TERFs do they want to decapitate if not Rowling? Is there fine print on the back of the sign that exempts her? Its Sky News so I I'll admit that is possible.
by latexr | 2025-04-28 08:50:32+00:00
> without the cognitive bias that many of us will carry.

It is naive and incorrect to believe LLMs do not have biases. Of course they do, they are all trained on biased content. There are plenty of articles on the subject.

> Would you jump into the ocean and start trying to talk with them, or would you look up what is already discovered?

Why resort to straw men arguments? Of course anyone would start by looking up what has already been discovered, that doesn’t immediately mean reaching for and blindly trusting any random LLM. The first thing you should do, in fact, is figure out which prior research is important and reliable. There are too many studies out there which are obviously subpar or outright lies.
Ask HN: Engineers and Academics: are you worried about entering the US?
by padolsey | 2025-04-28 08:51:02+00:00
What's your risk calculus if you've impending travel to the US, whether on ESTA, H1Bs, O1s, or others? There's obviously been many stories with concerning acts committed by ICE and CBP. Are people worried about entering atm? Worried about being detained or questioned or having devices looked at? Are your companies changing their recommendations?

I'm asking as I've put off work travel for the time being and know others that have done so, but I don't know if we're being alarmist.
by metalman | 2025-04-28 08:51:31+00:00
I walked into this thread looking for an opening to rip a bit on disney. But WOW, food?, actualy weaponising food?, no, even a condemed man gets a last meal I'd get it if he had dug deap and found some dirt on disney's practices and suppliers, or done something like changed the menue's on the web site to say that the food contained fecal concentrate. But to mess with allergins......no....people with real food allergy's just die.....we lost one from our crew....likely a cross contamination....another one died on the farm kitty corner to mine, bee sting on open farm day, both young women, leaves a mark terrifying for the family's and friends of people with allergies to think that someone would actualy target them. hope the fucker is real sorry, and finds a way to make amends
by rdtsc | 2025-04-28 08:51:50+00:00
> which is, by the late 1970s at the latest, or practiced pure Stalinism where everyone who wavered, got purged in an instant and thus generations kept being genetically filtered for obedience.

That’s a good point. The system worked so “well” before, during and a bit after WWII was because of the absolute terror and demand for obedience. With the willingness to kill, enslave, starve and terrorize people by the millions, one can achieve “great” economic results and military victories.