MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Spivak | 2025-04-12 14:14:23+00:00
> Anyone who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong.

Hear hear! Words to live by for even moderately complex issues.

The best you're likely to get in this is the constructed rationalizations of puppets who are blissfully unaware of the strings that tug at them. And this applies to everyone involved— the people for whom having kids is just what you do, as well as the people who have an intense anxiety about it. The decision for each individual probably happened long long before the explanation that justifies it.
by light_hue_1 | 2025-04-12 14:14:26+00:00
This it totally the wrong analysis.

Think of AI tools like any other tools. If I include code I'm not allowed to use, like reading a book I pirated, that's copyright infringement. If I include an image as an example in my image editor, that's ok if I am allowed to copy it.

If someone decides to use my image editor to create an image that's copyrighted or trademarked, that's not the fault of the software. Even if my software says "hey look, here are some cool logos that you might want to draw inspiration from".

People are getting too hung up on the AI part. That's irrelevant.

This is just software. You need a license for the inputs and if the output is copyrighted that's on the user of the software. It's a significant risk of just using these models carelessly.
by DrFalkyn | 2025-04-12 14:14:27+00:00
The Plaza Accord was 1985. And it wasn’t just between the US and Japan. iIf included France, Germany and the UK.

The Japanese economy continued to grow until the mid 1990s. I think the real culprit was low birth rate in the prior 20 years did not train the next generation of productive workers. China, South Korea most of Europe face similar issues
by throwawee | 2025-04-12 14:14:27+00:00
Keep your head down or bail. Being right doesn't matter if you aren't calling the shots; you can't cash in those I-told-you-so points for anything.

Sometimes a project gets funded by someone who wants the team to look and act a certain way and actual productivity doesn't even factor in. You're not 'right' if you've fundamentally misunderstood what you're doing there in the first place. Either take their money and play along or leave. That's the call you can make.
by toast0 | 2025-04-12 14:15:11+00:00
We just pushed code, compiled, and hotloaded... Pretty much ignoring the release files; we had them, but I think the contents weren't correct and we never changed the release numbers, etc.

For otp updates, we would shutdown beam in an orderly fashion, replace the files, and start again. (Potentially installing the new one before shutting down, I can't remember).

Post facebook, more of boring OS packages and slow rollouts than hotloading.
by ta998 | 2025-04-12 14:15:25+00:00
(Software dev working for a European manufacturer of industrial automation equipment)

We just hit pause on a major product development effort in order to go back and re-evaluate some of our vendor choices. Specifically to see how we can eliminate as many dependencies on US companies as possible. Fortunately we were relatively early in a 18-24 month development cycle for a somewhat complex hardware device.

The company already started a project two months ago to look at how we can migrate off AWS and Azure and instead use domestic alternatives for our online systems.

For the hardware components this is a bit more work, but it looks like we can find replacements for most of the key items. Though there are a few components where we would have to rearchitect some of the systems to eliminate US components.

For us it is simple: we need stability and predictability. We have long development cycles and long lifecycles for the things we make. Stopping development and trying to eliminate things that depend on the US is a bit unreal and shocking, but management have to deal with the world as it is.

I know some of my colleagues at other companies in the sector are going through similar exercises.

Right now changes are taking place that will not be visible for years, but that will stick around for decades. The current administration in the US is doing real, long term damage to the US.

It is really weird for us (Europeans) to read hacker news and it see mostly indifference to what is happening in your country. You probably should worry a bit more about this than you do.
by cbondurant | 2025-04-12 14:15:58+00:00
This is definitely going in my bookmarks.

Though I think as long as video conversion requires uploading to a jobserver, you're probably better off just invoking ffmpeg directly. Would suffer a lot from upload and download times on files that large. Though I wouldn't be surprised if problems like that become minimal if/when the video conversions can also run pure out of WASM as well.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-12 14:16:11+00:00
look, quickest example if it IS or it IS NOT ip theft is - go to any image generation ML wizardry prompt machine and ask it this :

"generate image of jack ryan investigating nuclear bomb. he has to look like morgan freeman."

(and do it quickly before someone in FAANGM manually plays with something altering result of that prompt)

problem is opposite, is "original" work IP a original in itself or is it just remix

or someone just gave lawyer some generic text and make it arbitrarily protected for adding 0.000000001% to previous work.
by SilasX | 2025-04-12 14:16:46+00:00
>Even if we accept the house-of-cards of shaky arguments this essay is built on, even just for the sake of argument, where Open AI breaks my copyright is by having a computer "memorize" my work. That's a form of copy.

No, it isn't, unless you're also going to call it copyright infringement when search engines store internal, undistributed copies of websites for purposes of helping answer your search queries.

Edit: or, for that matter, accessing a website at all, which creates a copy on your computer.
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-12 14:17:24+00:00
> If I've "learned" Harry Potter to the level where I can reproduce it verbatim, the reproduction would be a copyright violation

Of course not: in fact, memorizing has always been a right. (Edit: that would depend on what is meant with "reproduction" though. As written elsewhere, properly done quoting is of course fair use.)

> If I can paraphrase it, ditto

Even more so: people have lost legal actions because they sued authors of parodies.
by zx10rse | 2025-04-12 14:17:26+00:00
There is craftsmanship in software.

It is just the reality that we live in you are not gonna exactly hear from A list celebrity talking about what a wizard Ken Thompson is but you are gonna spot the celebrity secure a brand deal wearing some monstrosity like RM.

As much as like and appreciate mechanical watches let's not kid ourselves you are talking about CNC machines and cad models rest of it is marketing from the 70's quartz crisis.

Given that just Apple watch outsold the whole swiss watch industry I am not sure if VC we will be here in 200 years but some piece of software will be probably still running.
by edanm | 2025-04-12 14:17:57+00:00
> But do you get notified when I chat with Bob about Israel? Or get a notification when someone says something bad about Israel?

No. I'm not trying to prove myself to you - I'm sure that someone is actively monitoring mentions of Israel, though I doubt the Israeli government particularly cares what happens on HN - it's fairly niche.

I do sometimes search for mentions of Israel in HN search, sometimes including comments, but I don't do it that often.

> OK, let me know why I am mistaken to name Israel killing civilian including children a war crime.

I think any decent person mourns innocent people being killed, on either side. I personally also mourn for non-civilians being killed - it's not like Israeli soldiers trying to defend their country are people that should be killed, and it's not like most Hamas militants who (in their mind) are defending themselves from a foreign occupier deserve death either. I have far less sympathy for the leaders who know better.

But to your question - killing civilian, both morally and in a legal sense, is not in general a war crime unless those civilians were directly targeted, or unless their targeting was disproportionate to valid military aims.

Whatever you may think of Israel, Hamas has custom-designed their war to make it extremely difficult to rescue Israeli hostages, and extremely difficult to get to Hamas, without killing civilians. Btw, the more "evil" you think Israel is, the more evil and cynical this makes Hamas - since they knowingly protect themselves with the lives of the civilians under their care.

So Israel killing civilians is not, in itself, proof of a war crime. It's a sad fact of reality that civilians die in war. Especially ones in which one side is exploiting their civilians to save themselves.

That all said, there is no doubt that many war crimes have been committed. Some are documented and Israel has investigated them and taken steps to stop the people committing them. Some are swept under the rug. I imagine many are never reported. I don't think Israel is especially moral or especially immoral - this is just true of any war.

> Also explain why the recent war crime of killing red cross members (again) is not a war crime .

I don't have all the facts and neither do you. From what we've seen so far - it definitely seems like a war crime. I reserve judgement because I have some faith in the IDF - you rush to condemn Israel for the opposite reason, I imagine. I've also seen many stories turn out to be far more complicated after investigation than any immediate, attention-grabbing headline would suggest.

In any case, I think this should be investigated and, if it was a war crime, for the perpetrators to be prosecuted.
by sys_64738 | 2025-04-12 14:19:55+00:00
The result isn't about this specific case. This set the precedent to allow ICE to come and pick up random people and get them deported. This is called opening the floodgates. People don't really understand or see the distinction until it's too late. Then they're deported. Don't be fooled or be a fool. They will come for you as everybody has a turn.
AI in Software Testing
by ashbate | 2025-04-12 14:20:29+00:00
We're exploring an idea to tackle inefficiencies in our testing workflow and would love the HN community's thoughts.

Currently, our process involves writing test documentation/plans upfront, implementing tests, and then manually reporting failures back to the dev team for the backlog. This feels slow and adds overhead.

Our proposed solution is a tool, likely accessed via a Slack bot, that would:

Connect to a code repository. Analyze dependencies. Use tree-sitter to parse the code, understand function signatures, and map relationships. Automatically generate initial test cases (e.g., boilerplate, basic path coverage) for the discovered functions.

The goal is to cut down the manual documentation step and potentially streamline failure reporting, creating a tighter feedback loop.

Is this a worthwhile problem to solve? What are the obvious pitfalls or challenges we might be missing? Are there existing tools that already do this well? Can this be a standalone product?
by atonse | 2025-04-12 14:21:13+00:00
My comment is mostly about journalistic tone and standards since others have already brought up other concerns. Does this opening passage seem professional to anyone? I just found it distracting enough before getting to the controversial parts.

> Palantir, the software company cofounded by Peter Thiel, is part of an effort by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to build a new “mega API” for accessing Internal Revenue Service records, IRS sources tell WIRED.

1. Did Palantir get a contract to do so? Normally the wording would be Palantir was awarded the contract.

2. Is it relevant that Thiel co-founded it, rather than also mentioning Karp? Is it to stuff as many boogey men into the lede?

3. Any talk about how Palantir is EVERYWHERE in the National Security circles of the US Gov? I think Palantir started as an analysis tool for money movement. So is it that crazy?

4. Isn’t DOGE the official name? What’s with prefixing it with “so-called”?
by jmclnx | 2025-04-12 14:21:29+00:00
Looking for and finding bugs and security issues with SAP can consume your time 24/7.

When left a fortune 500 company 2 years ago, many SAP processes were running in background on UN*X with these arguments:

-u USERID -p PW

As a developer I informed the admins a couple of times over the years, the response was "wow, will check it out". But they ran into a mountain of red tape and gave up. So nothing was ever done.

But as a developer and support person, at least I had a way to fix things without falling into the bureaucracy quicksand. FWIW, I only had to do that twice over a 10 year period around Q/E.
by cynical_german | 2025-04-12 14:21:57+00:00
Yes, but there is material covering all of those aspects with implementations in C plus libraries plus ecosystem support! From teaching material to real world reference implementations to look at and modify and learn from.

And C maps so directly to so many concepts; it's easy to pick up any of those topics with C; and it being so loose makes it even perfect to explore many of those areas to begin with, since very quickly you're not fighting the language to let you do things.
by sys_64738 | 2025-04-12 14:22:36+00:00
The USA government position on anything does not represent the people's views on something. The government does not groupthink for the people even though the criminals in the government seem to think so. Rubio and his family will eventually be picked up by ICE if this process were allowed to continue indefinitely. But Rubio and his criminal friends will all still be locked up for a long time. They just haven't realized that their liberty will be limited shortly.
by siva7 | 2025-04-12 14:22:39+00:00
Matches also my experience that openai fell behind with their deep search product. And that deep search is basically the top tier benchmark for what professionals are willing to pay. So why should i shell out 200 dollar for an openai subscription when google gives me a better top-tier product for 1/10th of the price openai or anthropic are asking. Although i assume google is just more willing to burn cash in order to not let openai take more market share which would get them later on soo more expensive (e.g. iphone market share, also classic microsoft strategy).
by adrian_b | 2025-04-12 14:23:09+00:00
I have lived in Germany twice, the first time around 2005-2006 and the second time around 2016-2018, mostly in Bavaria and other southern parts.

The first time the public transportation infrastructure was very decent, certainly better than in most countries, even if not comparable with something like Japan.

The second time, 10 years later, there was a visible degradation in their railways, because the trains were almost never on time. I have lost a flight and a very large number of train changes because of train delays. However when going by car on their freeways I have not noticed anything worse and with a good car one could travel easily with a speed much above 200 km/h for a long time without problems, though there were also some congested segments.

I have never been ill, so I cannot comment about the state of healthcare.

I have never been in USA, but all the descriptions of the transportation system that I have seen, even of the infrastructure for cars, appear inferior to even the last version from Germany, which was degraded in comparison with the older one.
by bko | 2025-04-12 14:23:36+00:00
I think you have to be practical. It would be difficult to train an AI to consume Harry Potter and compress it but prevent it from recreating it. You can try and people do, but there are always ways around it.

But it's on an individual prompt basis. It's not like ChatGPT can produce the entirety of its text and sell it as a pdf. It's just a device that could reproduce it much like a word processor is a device that you can read the book and type out the contents.

So the question is one of practicality. Do we ensure that no copyrighted material is in the training data? Difficult but probably not impossible. But what you can't do is target the content in all its various other forms, from descriptions of the plot, reviews, fan fiction, etc. So in the end its pretty much a lost cause.

So what to do about it? I don't know. In the utilitarian sense, I think the world in which this technology exists in a non-crippled form is a better richer world than one in which there are all these procedural steps to try to prevent this (and ultimately failing).

Whats the harm here? Are people not buying Harry Potter books and just having an LLM painfully recreate the plot? I would imagine Harry Potter fans would be able to explore their love of the media through LLMs and that would drive more revenue to Harry Potter media, much like fan fiction and pirated music lead to more engagement and concert sales.

In the case of new art, maybe fewer artists get commissioned, but let's be real, Mike Tyson wasn't going to contract out an artist to create a ghibli style animation of him anyway, so there's really little harm in LLMs here to artists. If anything it expands the market and interest.
by 9rx | 2025-04-12 14:24:18+00:00
> Doesn't make any difference in practice meaning you never had a runtime error while running go?

I am not sure I have written enough Go to comment there, but I have worked extensively in other languages where runtime errors are possible, similar to Go in that regard. I have encountered runtime errors in said tests now and then, sure, but then you know about it and deal with it... So, in practice, no different than if the compiler told you that there is a possible runtime error.

> Who says you need a complex type system?

It is needed if you want to avoid the need for said tests. With a complete type system the type system can become your test suite, so to speak. But the languages people normally use, even those with "advanced" type systems, are nowhere near expressive enough for that. Meaning that you have to write the tests anyway. And then you'll know if there are any runtime errors as soon as you run your tests because how could the tests run without encountering the runtime error too? It is not like a CPU magically changes how it works if it detects that a test is being run. So, in practice, the type system doesn't change the outcome. But it is a cool party trick. I'll give you that.

That said, aside from these hand-wavy, make-believe stories, you are still very right that Go would benefit from sum types. For the reason that they map to the human model of the world very well, succinctly communicating structures that are often needed to be expressed. Languages are decidedly for humans. You can sort of work in the same basic idea in Go using interfaces, but it is far more confusing to read and understand than sum types would be. For a language that claims to value readability...
by greenie_beans | 2025-04-12 14:24:24+00:00
no. i can either become a ML expert or a security expert. not both. i speak for myself, though.

i'll let the ML experts make the tools that i use, but also have good job prospects because infosec fundamentals will always be needed. especially if we have product managers like the sibling commenter who is certain that he will have an AI product that changes the infosec world, even though the person has zero background in security. to me, that is even more encouraging about the job security.

also, the herd is going to AI. maybe i'm a contrarian, unfortunately, but that seems like a good signal to not follow the herd, but instead get into something that the herd will need more of.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-12 14:25:10+00:00
Not if you focus on churning business credit cards. You will see a credit inquiry on your personal credit report. But that’s it. The actual credit card doesn’t show up on your credit report and the sign up bonuses are usually higher.

https://johnnyafrica.com/multiple-chase-ink-business-cards/

With Amex it’s even better. Once you have one credit card with them, they usually don’t even run a credit report. That means you can then sign up for business credit cards with no effect on your report.

As far as websites,

https://www.offeroptimist.com/
by bjourne | 2025-04-12 14:26:50+00:00
Yes, web is a niche. Outside of web there is simply no possibility of turning untrusted input into executable code so sanitation isn't needed. In web development you already have two dozen templating libraries that offer much more comprehensive safe and fast text-generation solutions than what t-strings do.

Pre-compilation means that you first compile the template, then you supply the template with values when you render it multiple times. This is not possible with t-strings since the values are bound when the t-string is created.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-04-12 14:27:02+00:00
>We estimate a minimum of 130 million pounds of electronic waste

Since 2014, could be realistic.

>We estimate that the expiration of Windows 10 will result in 1.6 billion pounds of electronic waste

If these figures are on the same terms, that would be a whole order of magnitude more in the next year than it was the previous decade combined?
by JSR_FDED | 2025-04-12 14:27:54+00:00
I’m not sure if it is the Chinese models themselves that will save us, or the or the effect they have of encouraging others to open source their models too.

But I think we have to get away from the thinking that “Chinese models” are somehow created by the Chinese state, and from an adversarial standpoint. There are models created by Chinese companies, just like American and European companies.
by simion314 | 2025-04-12 14:27:55+00:00
Ok, you are very balanced in your opinion. My issue is whit extremists from all sides, I can't complain on reddit about Israel crimes without getting accused of supporting Hamas, or nazis or stuff like that.

What I see from pro-Israel gov accounts is bullshit like 1 we have video of war crimes, like killing red cross 2 pro Israel bots(I told you the clues ) come and deny the news is real,video appears so deny the video is real, then they claim that for sure there must have been some weapons or Hamas leader hiding there.

Also what is your opinion on Trump and Israel cleaning up Gaza of Palestinians and making building soem comercial crap there? Genocide does not always mean killings.
by bcye | 2025-04-12 14:28:15+00:00
> German passionary patriotism has been artificially subverted and shut down, and the nation instead has been flooded with non-Germanic elements, thus completely destroying the very definition of German.

> Ask any German on the street, and nobody will be able to answer: What defines being a German, who are the Germans, what is their history, and what awaits German people in the future.

I don't think so, you will meet plently people that will be able to tell you about Germany's history, or at least recent history. And what defines being German, you might get different answers, but is that so bad, and where wouldn't you? Hasn't multiculturalism just become a big part of Germany's identity, and not destroyed it as you claim? Döner just as the simplest example.
by jraby3 | 2025-04-12 14:28:54+00:00
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatari_involvement_in_higher...

Thought this was common knowledge at this point.

"Approximately 200 colleges and universities in the United States concealed information regarding about $13 billion in unreported donations from foreign countries, much of which originating from Qatar."

"Reports on antisemitism in the United States indicated that between 2015 and 2020, institutions receiving funding from Middle Eastern donors experienced, on average, a 300% higher incidence of antisemitic incidents compared to those that did not. During the same period, institutions receiving undisclosed funds from Qatari donors had, on average, 250% more anti-Semitic incidents than those that did not.[18][1][6]"