MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-15 20:32:15+00:00
Benn Jordan is a musician who is probably one of the most critical of the current copyright regime in his space. For context, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4

Copyright exists to enrich the interests of the publishers of a work, not the artists they funded. A long time ago, copyright was a sufficient legal tool to bring publishers to artists' heels, but no longer. Long copyright terms and the imbalance of power between different wealthy interests allowed publishers to usurp and alienate artists' ownership over their work. And the outsized amount of commercial interest in current generative AI tools comes down to the fact that publishers believe they can use them to strip what little ownership interest authors have left. What Benn is doing is looking for new tools to bring publishers to heel.

IP is fundamentally a social contract, subject to perpetual renegotiation through action and counter-action. If you told any game publisher in the early 2000s, during the height of the Napster Wars, that they'd be proudly allowing randos on the Internet to stream video of their games being played, they'd laugh in your face. But people did it anyway, and everyone in the games biz realized it's not worth fighting people who are adding to your game. Even Nintendo, notorious IP tightwads as they are, tried scraping micropennies off the top of streamers and realized it's a fool's errand.

The statement Benn is making is pretty clear. You can either...

- Negotiate royalties for, and purchase training data from, actual artists, who will then in exchange give you high-quality training data, or,

- Spend increasing amounts of time fighting to filter an increasingly polluted information ecosystem to have a model that only sorta kinda replicates the musical landscape of the late 2010s.

A lot of us are reflexively inclined to hate on anything "copyright-shaped" because of our experiences over the past few decades. Publishers wanted to go back to the days of copyright being a legal tool of arbitrary and capricious punishment. But that doesn't mean that everything that might fall afoul of copyright law is automatically good or that generative AI companies are trying to liberate creativity. They're trying to monopolize it, just like Web 2.0 "disintermediation" was turned into "here's five websites with screenshots of the other four". That's why so much money is being poured into these companies and why a surprisingly nonzero amount of copyright reformists also have deeply negative opinions of AI.
by lynndotpy | 2025-04-15 20:32:29+00:00
Ah yes, Mr. Swirl Face.

This was pretty different though. The decensoring algorithm I'm describing is just a linear search. But pixelation is not an invertible transformation.

Mr. Swirl Face just applied a swirl to his face, which is invertible (-ish, with some data lost), and could naively be reversed. (I am pretty sure someone on 4chan did it before the authorities did, but this might just be an Internet Legend).
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-15 20:32:36+00:00
It's not wrong.

We were doing great in 2000.

[EDIT] Plus of course there's the '01 crash in here, which doesn't help matters, as those never do.

Bush pushed through a huge tax cut while launching two extremely expensive wars, one of which was definitely not necessary (arguably, neither of them were a good idea—I'd have argued that at the time, certainly).

Then, financial crisis. You (under orthodox modern political-economy and national fiscal policy guidance) usually try to reserve your biggest deficit spending for exactly these kinds of cases. We had no "cushion" because we'd wasted it on tax cuts and wars. The deficit goes very unwisely deep.

Then, Obama. Tax cuts not reversed under the democrats. Wars not ended (fast enough). More expensive foreign adventures, in fact, though not really comparable to the budgetary catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan. At least the economy recovers, but we don't get back to what should be baseline levels of deficit spending, we stay way too deep in the red.

Then, Trump. More tax cuts. Deeper in the red.

And wouldn't you know it, another disaster! Covid. If only we weren't already in awful territory with our budget... but we are, and deficit spending beats a bad recession and still seeing bad budget results due to a weakened economy, so, more spending it is, because that is what you do in these cases, you're just not supposed to start from such a poor position.

Biden. Little done to fix any of that, aside from doing a pretty good job managing Covid on the econ side (which, I have my complaints, but credit where it's due)

Trump again. We're likely to see tax receipts drop due to IRS cuts and a declining economy, this time for no good reason. And they're talking tax cuts... again.

So yeah, we were on track to need decades of very-careful policy to let our GDP catch up with our debt, without making big cuts. And we'd have to raise taxes back to late-90s levels for that to work, anyway.

That many years of responsible management weren't gonna happen. Tax increases evidently aren't, either. Realistically, we were on track to eventually hit and have to work through a crisis over this, probably early in the back half of this century.

This administration appears to be moving that point many, many years earlier, though.
by mantas | 2025-04-15 20:32:39+00:00
Don't want to make hypothetical shoes? Fine. One day soldiers may end up marching barefooted and loosing a battle though.

IMO the global economy eventually self-levels. Either you go up the chain so far that you eventually go off the rails by being unable to make basic stuff. And eventually being eaten by more hungry people with the basic skills. Or you keep yourself down by forcing yourself to not loose basic skills. Former gives you a short moment of glory with a high price for future generations. Later forces people to be more ascetic if that's the right word.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-15 20:33:15+00:00
"This was the right way to do it forty years ago, so that's why the experience is worse" isn't a compelling reason for a user to suffer today.

Also, in this specific case, this ignores the history around LLVM offering itself up to the FSF. gcc could have benefitted from this fresh start too. But purely by accident, it did not.
by simne | 2025-04-15 20:33:29+00:00
This is known thing in economy science.

Most easy to use model of information inequality.

What I mean, usually professional know about his specialty magnitudes more than average person from other specialty.

On other side, market economy have extremely huge number of products on market. For example, USSR in best its years have about million part numbers nomenclature.

How free market economy solve these issues? - They just create infrastructure of entrepreneurs - intermediate actors, who help average person to find product best fit for him.

Unfortunately, in Russia entrepreneurs considered as enemy of society. So they have extremely low number of professional entrepreneurs and people just cannot find products in Russia, and shopping near entirely on global market, mostly from China, and Russian engineers just cannot sell their products.

Why internal market is important. Well, another model - micro-economy pf business. To make business, one need to make three things: 1st somewhere got knowledge, what to do (marketing); 2nd somewhere got investments (money) and invest them into make ready for market product (finance market, loans, credits, angels, vc funds); 3rd make sells (marketing). Unfortunately, only part of make product (without money) is really strong side of Russians, but they are really weak in marketing and their finance market is on very early stage of development. And as I already mentioned, in Russia entrepreneurs considered as enemy, but also they demonized all business, all things touching credits, investments and finances.

And when you trying to go abroad, you definitely will got harder access to finances or investments from other country, then yours. So, usually, exporters enter new country with powerful backup from their own country, and in Russia such backup is just not exist, or to be honest, it exist only for very limited circle of people close to top powers.

As said one American professor, Russians trying to get milk without a cow.
by jaymzcampbell | 2025-04-15 20:33:40+00:00
The older I get the more this kind of commentary (the OP, not you!) is a total turn off. Systems evolve and there's usually, not always, a reason for why "things are the way they are". It's typically arrogance to have this kind of tone. That said I was a bit like that when I was younger, and it took a few knockings down to realise the world is complex.
by salawat | 2025-04-15 20:33:44+00:00
It is not. The care denial, coupled with financial siphoning to pad a risk pool is a form of inflicted harm. I do not qualify unreasonable financial shenanigans as exempt from being considered violent. I in fact find it aggravates above traditional violence because it is systematized, and automated, thus amplifying the scope and reach of the harm caused.

To constrain violence to physicality is to ignore and minimize the myriad creative ways we've concocted as a society to inflict harm. Maybe to you it seems to dilute meaning, but to me that's more of an indication of a dependence on the narrowed definition on your part, than a problem with the increased scope per se.
by consumer451 | 2025-04-15 20:33:53+00:00
I agree, but this only works if one is willing to accept a changing racial profile/culture. It appears that many people do not accept this idea. Not just in the USA, but look at Japan or South Korea, for example.

To me, the really interesting question is how to stop what appears to have been inevitable for the last 40+ years: when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment.

The reason that I find this important is that even though I personally have no problem with race/culture mixing, in-fact I love Korean BBQ tacos... eventually with the immigration solution, there is an end state where all societies and countries are economically advanced, and have negative birth rates. What then? As a Star Trek fan, I have ideas about post-scarcity.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-15 20:35:11+00:00
It would seem techniques like this have been used in domains like astronomy for a while.

> The reconstruction of objects from blurry images has a wide range of applications, for instance in astronomy and biomedical imaging. Assuming that the blur is spatially invariant, image blur can be defined as a two-dimensional convolution between true image and a point spread function. Hence, the corresponding deblurring operation is formulated as an inverse problem called deconvolution. Often, not only the true image is unknown, but also the available information about the point spread function is insufficient resulting in an extremely underdetermined blind deconvolution problem. Considering multiple blurred images of the object to be reconstructed, leading to a multiframe blind deconvolution problem, reduces underdeterminedness. To further decrease the number of unknowns, we transfer the multiframe blind deconvolution problem to a compact version based upon [18] where only one point spread function has to be identified.

https://www.mic.uni-luebeck.de/fileadmin/mic/publications/St...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_deconvolution
by int_19h | 2025-04-15 20:36:03+00:00
I'm not so sure about that. This was in comparison to e.g. walking object graphs in Python, C#, and JavaScript using the usual APIs (i.e. where querying one one-to-many relationship looks like Foo.Bars rather than joins, and using map/fold/filter or equivalents). I would expect there to be a lot more of that kinda stuff in the training set than SQL.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-15 20:36:08+00:00
I have intense respect for the history of gcc, but everything about using it screams that it's stuck in the past.

LLVM has a lot of problems, but it feels significantly more modern.

I do wish we had a "new LLVM" doing to LLVM what it did to gcc. Just because it's better doesn't mean it's perfect.

Basically, you can respect history while also being honest about the current state of things. But also, doing so requires you to care primarily about things like ease of use, rather than things like licenses. For some people, they care about licenses first, usability second.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-15 20:36:26+00:00
I purchased my telescope and mount from a "local" store. It was >30 miles away in the metroplex, but it was a physical store with human employees. I went in with an idea of what I wanted to buy, but the person there asked me a whole slew of questions to ensure I was going to be happy with the purchase. They then also knew that my selected scope and selected mount would need an additional adapter plate that I would not have known about if I bought the items online. When I went to pick it up, they opened the boxes with me and helped me assemble the whole thing with a quick walk through on operating the mount. The only thing missing from this white glove service were the literal white gloves.

A year later, I wanted to buy a scope as a guide scope, and they had sadly closed. Telescopes are clearly a niche market, and even though it was a proper store the market just wasn't there to sustain the rent. There are plenty of places to go online to get similar advice, but nothing online can replace the experience of having someone right there showing something to you.

Sadly, the longer the internet exists, the less I'm liking it. It is soulless and just sucks the soul out of humanity more than it adds.
by defgeneric | 2025-04-15 20:36:34+00:00
This is a lot of words to say "I don't believe him". None of us really knows, and it's not worth speculating about, because the case is about something much bigger now. It's about the limits of executive authority, separation of powers, and rule of law.

> he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador

What evidence is there for this "near certainty"? Your argument here should be with asylum laws, not this individual.

For what it's worth, the situation in El Salvador at the time he left (when he was a minor) does make the claim somewhat credible. There's plenty of evidence that the choice for male youths at that time was leave or join whichever gang controlled your area. The idea that everyone is an "economic migrant" ignores the reality of the situation, which is far more complex.
by layer8 | 2025-04-15 20:36:39+00:00
Testing that it doesn’t have text doesn’t help if the text was a bitmap in the first place.

Normally the use case is that you still want to distribute it as a PDF, usually consisting of many pages, and without loss of quality, so the printing/scanning/screenshotting option may not be very practical.

No, the real solution is to use an editor that allows you to remove text (and/or cut out bitmaps), before you add black rectangles for clarity.
by const_cast | 2025-04-15 20:36:44+00:00
No, it's definitely this, and I'm confident in saying that because I do, actually, try to have open conversations with these people. And they always back down and undermine _their own beliefs_. It's a strange kind of paradox, in which they support a set of actions but wish to be immune from any obvious consequences of said actions. Despite those consequences being, you know, the draw of said actions.

For context, a lot of people in my family vote right always. Trust me, I have engaged with people on the right and conspiracists, and the common theme is their reliance in a distrust for the people and actions they themselves support. It's an almost supreme lack of conviction, juxtaposed with a religion-like blind faith.

If it's any consolation to you, or anyone, this isn't a new thing. You can see this kind of behavior throughout history in all populist movements that have gone sour. Their supporters stuck in a type of purgatory, where they must ignore what is actually going on while absentmindedly following the messaging. When asked "so what happens now?", they do not know. But they are certain it will be okay.
by jchw | 2025-04-15 20:36:46+00:00
But again, you then get (much) worse UX than plaintext HTTP, it won't even remember the certificate. The thing that makes TOFU work is that you at least only have to verify the certificate once. If you use a self-signed certificate, you have to allow it every session.

A self-signed certificate has the benefit of being treated as a secure origin, but that's it. Sometimes you don't even care about that and just want the encryption. That's pretty much where this argument all comes from.
by wredcoll | 2025-04-15 20:36:53+00:00
I was criticizing your explanation. I don't think it made a persuasive case. This is how discussions work. Or at least, arguments.

I also disagree with your point that "schools have drifted in the values they support". It's probably more accurate to say the right wing has sprinted in the opposite direction of the typical values of a university.

I also don't think this has anything to do with a rise in authoritarianism, it's far more likely to attribute such a thing to fear and desperation, whether real or invoked by influencers for a specific reason.
by marklubi | 2025-04-15 20:37:16+00:00
I told our VP of engineering the other day that the problem they're having is putting everything into locked-in/managed services when you should be owning your product.

The service I built has 99.99% availability, most of that was achieved by putting it in K8S clusters in multiple regions behind a CDN. Only managed service I rely on is SQL with better guaranteed uptime than I have (also way cheaper than doing it ourselves).

Aside from SQL, I can lift-and-shift almost all of our services at a moments notice. The only problem would be slightly degraded database query time, but we do a lot of caching in the clusters.
by alir8zana | 2025-04-15 20:37:54+00:00
Thank you for these new UI components! The library looks impressive. The MIT license and optional nature of these components are definitely steps in the right direction. Though I wanted to share some thoughts on the business model. The subscription-based approach for core editor functionality presents challenges when competing with fully open source alternatives. The product quality and developer experience with Tiptap are truly excellent, but having an editor as a subscription service can be difficult to justify for many projects. I think the cloud services make perfect sense as premium offerings, but it would be worth considering a different approach for the base editor experience. Perhaps offering a premium one-time purchase option for entrepreneurs could bridge the gap. A feature rich premium template without requiring deep knowledge of ProseMirror/Tiptap internals would definitely be something interesting. For future components, I'd love to see commenting threads with Hocuspocus live notifications. Also, an AI toolbar similar to Notion's implementation would be valuable. The TipTap template is different from the notion UX. The content edits in the notion implementation happen in a separate AI-specific editor and users can suggest changes there, rather than in the main editor. Again, thanks for the continuous improvements to Tiptap.
by taylodl | 2025-04-15 20:38:01+00:00
I don't understand the criticism. Once upon a time, flying in an airplane was on the forefront of technology and only "professionals" did it to do important stuff such as weather data collecting. Now, commercial aviation exists and everybody and his brother flies to hither and yon for the most mundane purposes.

Shouldn't we be celebrating that spaceflight is following the same trajectory? Sure, it's for the mega rich, but so was early air travel. It took a few decades to become common for the masses, but we had to start somewhere!

I bet many of us here on HN would glady pay a few thousand dollars to take this trip. In order for that to happen we need these trips to make the whole process mundane. We'll know we're there when hardly anyone is paying much attention to these launches.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-04-15 20:38:06+00:00
>But I would like to say that sci fi that applied to computers, AI, automation, were just dreams of a different world, because those technologies hadn’t been exploited yet. Even many of the dystopias feel innocent with today’s knowledge of where it went. Such as 1984, imo.

On this I definitely agree, especially on the last part. Specifically, when I read the science fiction of previous decades, and see how its descriptions of a surveillance state compare to the surveillance capacities that literally get applied today by so many states (with varying degrees of authoritarianism), the old sci fi seems absurdly quaint.
by lostdog | 2025-04-15 20:38:15+00:00
I come here to read interesting technology news, and most of the Doge stories are not interesting technology news. It would suck if HN were full of boring stuff that I can read elsewhere.

I do care a lot about the current situation, and I keep up to date by reading all the other sources that cover politics and the economy. I flag most politics articles because they lower the quality of HN.

If something is either very novel or very interesting it should definitely make it to the front page. But most stuff that gets flagged is getting the right treatment.

However, the one you posted does look kind of interesting. It probably got flagged by people who are even more sick of politics polluting HN and are flagging reflexively.
by BrendanEich | 2025-04-15 20:38:22+00:00
You may be crushed to learn that, while I did stop working on standard JS in Sept. 1997 when we finished ES1 (started in Nov. 1996), turning to found Mozilla and then Firefox to restart the browser market, which enabled restarting JS standards at Ecma in 2005, I then led the ES4 effort, forged the Harmony peace between ES3.1 and ES4 factions, and continued to work on the standardized language in committee through 2018 March.

BigInt was my last collaboration (with Daniel Ehrenberg). It's in ES2020 and all the engines now. Don't be bitter!
by kccqzy | 2025-04-15 20:38:25+00:00
I didn't peruse the source code. I just read the linked article in its entirety and it says

> The computation is quite slow. In order to stay as flexible as possible, I'm using the Monte Carlo method. Which means the calculator is running about 250K AST-based computations for every calculation you put forth.

So therefore I conclude Monte Carlo is being used.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-15 20:38:29+00:00
> I regret not having had the chance to visit the states in the 80s.

Every one if the problems you complain of was far worse in the 1980s, except maybe the “expensive” one because all the others drove down desirability. so I don't know why, if they are problems for you now, you would regret missing the opportunity to experience them at their more intense levels then.

Like, seriously, urban crime rates were many times higher, homelessness share of the population was higher (and rising more rapidly), etc.
by graypegg | 2025-04-15 20:38:56+00:00
That sort of makes me wonder if the best form of censoring would be solid black shape, THEN passing it through some diffusion image generation step to infill the black square. It will be obvious that it's fake, but it'll make determining the "edges" of the censored area a lot harder. (Might also be a bit less distracting than a big black shape, for your actual non-advisarial viewers!)