MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-09 04:58:33+00:00
We currently have a fairly half assed system that it seems only the movie and music studios are really invested in pushing. I don't see any reason to assume the market would continue behaving the same way if the laws changed.

I think you could reasonably expect the iOS model to become the only way to purchase paid software as well as any number of other things where IP is a concern. You would have hardware backed attestation of an entirely opaque device.

> Likely the optimal balance is close to the original copyright terms

I'm inclined to agree.

> in practice is ineffective at its ostensible purpose and is only used to monopolize consumer devices to try to exclude works that compete with the major incumbents.

I'd argue that was the actual purpose to begin with. Piracy being illegal means that operating at scale and collecting payments becomes just about impossible. DRM on sanctioned platforms means the end user can't trivially shift content between different zones. The cartels are able to maintain market segmentation to maximize licensing revenue. Only those they bless are permitted entry to compete.

> the existing system is so far out of whack that it's not clear it's even better than nothing.

I agree. I think the current system is causing substantial harm for minimal to no benefit relative to the much more limited original copyright terms.

> The assumption is that such NDAs would be enforceable. What if they're not?

So in addition to removing IP legislation this is now a hypothetical scenario were additional regulation barring the sorts of contracts that could potentially fill that void is also introduced?

> The greedy individuals could be addressed by banning their attempts to reconstitute copyright through thug behavior.

You're too focused on copyright. The behavior is simple defense of investment. The players are simply maximizing profit while minimizing risk.

Keep in mind we're not just talking about media here. This applies to all industrial R&D. You're describing removing the legal protections against cloning from the entire economy.

If you systematically strip away all the legal defense strategies then presumably one of two things happens. Either the investment doesn't happen in the first place (on average, which is to say innovation is severely chilled market wide). Or groups take matters into their own hands and we see a resurgence of organized crime. Given the amount of money available to be made by major players whose products possess a technological advantage I'd tend to expect the latter.

I really don't like a scenario where the likes of Nvidia and Intel are strongly incentivized to fund the mob.

It's a huge mistake to assume that no one will step up to the plate to do illegal and potentially outright evil things if there's a large monetary incentive involved. Either a sufficiently low friction legal avenue is provided or society is stuck cleaning up the mess that's left. The fallout of the war on drugs is a prime example of this principle in action.
by musicale | 2025-04-09 04:59:18+00:00
"As of 2025, after more than 80 years of research on Artificial Neural Networks, there remains no evidence of their general intelligence. Even after priming the pump with nearly every book ever written, all available scientific articles, and all publicly available text on the internet (and consuming more power and resources than entire countries), they routinely fail at basic tasks and generate nonsensical output and 'slop' that has already degraded the internet as a source of training data for future systems. The long slow failure of ANNs is a strong indictment against the statistical/neuromorphic approach to AI."
by nine_k | 2025-04-09 04:59:21+00:00
I had access to a DEC Alpha desktop workstation with a hardware OpenGL and X accelerator. It was in 1995, before the first 3dfx Voodoo was even released.

I bet high-end Unix graphics workstations (CAD, video processing, etc) had it many years before that. The first graphics accelerator was offered by Silicon Graphics in 1983, yes, forty two years ago. It was supported by IRIX, a Unix variant.
by singmj | 2025-04-09 05:01:10+00:00
“浙里办” is a comprehensive mobile application for government services in Zhejiang Province, China. It is based on the integrated platform of the Zhejiang Government Service Network. The name “浙里办” is a homophone for “here to handle” in Chinese, which reflects its purpose of providing convenient online services for residents and businesses.

This app offers a wide range of functions, including “mobile handling,” “mobile consultation,” and “mobile complaints.” It covers numerous services such as social security payment, housing fund withdrawal, traffic violation processing, and even medical appointment booking. For example, people can apply for subsidies, handle business registration, or even find public services like cultural events through the app. It also has a special version for the elderly, making it easier for them to use with features like voice assistance.

As of now, “浙里办” has over 100 million registered users and provides more than 1,500 convenient services. It has become an essential tool for people in Zhejiang to handle various daily and business-related matters efficiently.

In fact, China has many similar provincial applications like “浙里办.” Each province has its own app to provide convenient government services to its residents. For example, Shanghai has “随申办” (Suishenban), Jiangsu has “苏服办” (Sufuban), and Henan has “豫事办” (Yushiban). These apps are designed to make people's lives easier by allowing them to handle government affairs online without having to visit multiple departments in person.
by sometimes_all | 2025-04-09 05:01:57+00:00
It depends. If I were a young person from a third world country, with no responsibilities / monetary responsibility that can be solved by a year or two of 30% of FAANG salary, then absolutely, I'd move. That amount of money early in life compounds, and can give me a lot of benefits when I'm older, even if it is for just a few years.

If I were a middle-aged/older person, or someone with social/familial responsibility, then very likely not. If I were someone already living in a first-world country with a good life, then absolutely not.

If I were a risk-taker and enjoy a good unpredictable scenario and can navigate myself well around it, the US likely needs me more than I need them. Regardless of president, the country seems to be a place which respects and rewards this trait more than most other countries.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-09 05:02:03+00:00
I switched from mechanical engineering to writing software because of the instant gratification of software machines. If you're designing a gearbox, it takes years to see the actual hardware, and you'd better have gotten the design right the first try, as changing the box gets very expensive.

I would have been much happier as an engineer working next to the shop where I could partner with the machinists.
by nindalf | 2025-04-09 05:06:02+00:00
WhatsApp had implemented the feature as early as 2018 but they were denied permission to launch. They were finally granted permission in 2020 … but only to onboard 1 million users. This limit was increased to 100 million in late 2022 and then removed in late 2024. (https://coingeek.com/whatsapp-pay-to-expand-upi-services-to-...).

WhatsApp currently has 600 million active users in India and has been the most popular app for a long time. If it had been granted permission in 2018 it would be the most popular UPI app now. There wouldn’t be a competitive app ecosystem like there is now.
by davideg | 2025-04-09 05:06:45+00:00
Looks like it's a silly and self-aware play on the word "builder" (New England regional dialect):

> Since I’m relatively new to the world of containers and images, I was excited to learn about the Buildah tool. Especially since I’m a native New Englander and it’s a clever play on how we say Builder in these parts. [0]

[0] https://buildah.io/blogs/2017/06/22/introducing-buildah.html
by spicypete | 2025-04-09 05:06:59+00:00
I use `mvdan/sh` [1] under the hood for processing the commands. So it will reformat

if [ foo ] ; then bar fi

to

if [ foo ] then bar fi

And also format your example to

foo bar

In this type of situation, it becomes a little trickier to disambiguate when I need to add semicolons and a backslash, and when I need to add only backslashes. If you use `&&` -- you have disambiguated the two cases so I can format it.

[1] https://github.com/mvdan/sh
by forgetfreeman | 2025-04-09 05:07:47+00:00
I use search exclusively. I've tried ChatGPT for a number of tasks on various subjects and found it's responses to be shallow to the point of uselessness and frequently riddled with errors. It's fun to get it to do dumb shit like rewrite my resume in the style of Warhammer 40k, but for anything serious it's proven to be largely useless.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-04-09 05:07:47+00:00
To make an analogy, it might take you five years and your life savings to prototype a new invention. Once done, it can be mass produced for pennies.

Would you invest that time and money if patent protection did not exist? Probably not, because your competition will copy your work and bankrupt you.

At any point, society could opt to eliminate patent protection and make all existing inventions public domain, at the cost of losing future inventions. But instead we settled for 20 years.

This concern did not previously apply to art styles, because they took nearly as much skill to copy as to originate. But now it does, and with no protections, we can expect nobody to put in the work of being the next Studio Ghibli. The styles we have are all we will have, but we can mass produce them.
by bruce511 | 2025-04-09 05:08:07+00:00
Yes. A slowdown in Chinese exports, may mean a slowdown in production, and hence a weakness in imports.

At the moment the future is uncertain, and that uncertainty spooks markets. But markets recover once certainly is restored.

Right now the uncertainty is mostly around the US consumer. Individually they're the big losers here. The goal of the tarrifs is to drive up consumer prices (to the point where local production is attractive. )

But local production takes time to create, so in the meantime they'll have to buy less. Once local production is in place, that will price output at market levels (meaning it stays expensive. )

The market for, say coffee, will fluctuate and production will rebalance somewhat. Americans will likely drink a bit less. But in the long run it'll just be normal.

So yes, the market hates an uncertain future, but certainty arrives pretty quick.
by locallost | 2025-04-09 05:08:28+00:00
It's become kind of tempting to use chatgpt for that because you don't have to search yourself for that one post somewhere that describes what you're looking for. But I found little use for anything critical because it's just wrong way too often. Recently it gave me the info on how to use an API which turned out to be deprecated since two years. But for setting up my parents iPad where I was looking for a setting I couldn't find, it's fine.
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-09 05:08:46+00:00
The Habsburg dynasty technically became extinct in 1780. After that they were the house of Habsburg-Lorraine and they didn’t have much direct influence outside of Austria-Hungary.

Dynastic politics were by and large dead in the 1800s with few exceptions (but generally kings/queens were just pawns in the hand of the politicians unlike in the preceding centuries).
by Aeolun | 2025-04-09 05:10:27+00:00
> It causes atrophy and, when it introduces a bug, it takes more time to understand and fix than if you had written it yourself.

I think this is the biggest risk. You sometimes get stuck in a cycle in which you hope the AI can fix its own mistake, because you don’t want to expend the effort to understand what it wrote.

It’s pure laziness that occurs only because you didn’t write the code yourself in the first place.

At the same time, I find myself incredibly bored when typing out boilerplate code these days. It was one thing with Copilot, but tools like Cursor completely obviate the need.
by defrost | 2025-04-09 05:10:48+00:00
Data centres in general are an issue that contribute to climbing emissions, two percent globally is not trivial .. and it's "additional" over demand of a decade and more ago past, another sign we are globally increasing demand.

Emissions aside, locally many data centres (and associated bit mining and AI clusters) are a significant local issue due to local demand on local water and local energy supplies.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-09 05:12:07+00:00
Aside from artists that make it big it seems like the majority of them are forced to make compromises in order to continue practicing their desired craft full time. Much of their behavior is dictated by "not starving" rather than their personal preferences.

And many fold more than that are forced to drop out to "get a real job".

Of course all of the above is a good thing from the perspective of maximizing the quality of life across society as a whole. But wouldn't it be nicer if we didn't have to do (as much of) that?
by SirMaster | 2025-04-09 05:12:19+00:00
Because now it’s too easy to rip off another artist’s work and style with no effort. And the current rules in place are not enough to protect the original artist.

The original artist used to be protected by the fact that it took so much effort to copy or reproduce their original work and style at a high quality, so it rarely happened at a scale to directly impact them.

But now it’s so easy and effortless that anyone can do it in mass and that now impacts the original artist greatly.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-04-09 05:12:54+00:00
Since it's a name I'm fine with it. That is actually some people's pronounciation, even if no one's spelling, but I have no problem taking them seriously since they are not simply putting annoying affectation into writing, it's a name. Names have to be distinct, and they don't have to be cute but it's also not exactly damning either.

All that said, probably wouldn't have been my choice either.

It's weird. I personally wouldn't want quite such a silly name for that particular kind of tool, but that is a funny thing for me to say because I was never one of the people who wanted to remove the swear words from the kernel because "professional impression". Don't ask me to explain it.
by seanhunter | 2025-04-09 05:12:55+00:00
Well Avraham Eisenberg was convicted of manipulation in the Mango Markets case[1] spite of such a deal. I believe his sentencing is tomorrow so we'll know then whether or not the deal[2] affected his sentence but it didn't affect his conviction.

There is a general belief among a lot of crypto folks that "if it's on chain, it's fair game" and you can make these kind of deals etc but as far as I can see, there's absolutely no basis for that in law. If law enforcement/regulators start to take actions they can do so for any case they suspect of being market abuse irrespective of whether the parties agreed some kind of deal. That is certainly my read of both the US and UK/EU regulations, which are the two cases I'm aware of. Neither of them have any sort of carve out to allow participants to make a bilateral arrangement to give someone a post-hoc waiver for some act that would otherwise be considered abuse.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/man-convicted-110m-c...

[2] This has info about the money he returned in what him and Mango thought was a bounty/settlement type thing https://blocktribune.com/avraham-eisenberg-seeks-leniency-in...
by cryptonector | 2025-04-09 05:12:56+00:00
From the blog about pg_search linked by TFA:

This is what we did: DB with pg_search: We created a single BM25 index DB without pg_search: We created all these indexes GIN index on message (for full-text search) GIN index on country (for text-based filtering) B-tree indexes on severity, timestamp, and metadata->>'value' (to speed up filtering, ordering, and aggregations)

See the problem? You didn't create an index on the vector in the without-pg_search case. You didn't compare apples to apples. TFA is all about that.

Perhaps you can argue that creating a fastupdates=on index would have been the right comparison, but you didn't do that in that blog.

> You can always cherry-pick a query and optimize it at the expense of data duplication and complexity. The Neon/ParadeDB benchmarks contained 12 queries in total, and the benchmarks could have:

TFA isn't cherry-picking to show you that one query could have gone faster. TFA is showing that you didn't compare apples to apples. Looking at those 12 queries nothing screams at me that TFA's approach of storing the computed tsvector wouldn't work for those too.

Perhaps pg_search scales better and doesn't require trading off update for search performance, and that would be a great selling point, but why not just make that point?
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-04-09 05:13:45+00:00
Imitation has been controlled by patent rights, where an object did not need to be an exact copy but merely use the essence of an idea to count as a violation. Of course so far this protection has only been applied to inventions, because they took a lot of time to develop but once done could be trivially copied at a glance. Now, in this new landscape, we may find it appropriate to apply a similar regime to art.

Or maybe we won't. It's a choice for society to make, to balance how much we need to protect the incentives to create something new vs protect the ease of copying.
Show HN: No code Chat based AI website Builder
by bilalmoten26 | 2025-04-09 05:14:51+00:00
Hey guys, so I've been working on this AI website builder since last year, it is still in MVP stages, but I believe the results are quite good so I wanted to get some feedback.

There are two more of building a website, express mode takes just a prompt, while the pro mode has a detailed chat agent that takes you through decision decisions for your website, step-by-step, as if you were talking to a web developer.

Product is still not complete at all, the images are not that good, and sometimes the designs can be a bit plain and simple, but I wanted to get some feedback so I know what the direction is.

would love too get your feedback, you can start without sign ups, but if you want to create more websites and make edits, you can create an account.

Thanks in advance
by AlotOfReading | 2025-04-09 05:15:26+00:00
Journalistic integrity is more difficult and nuanced than you can encapsulate in a one-sentence definition. "Linguistic flair" is an important part of effective communication. We're naturally used to picking up subtle hints that communicate meaning and what's important within a story (which all reporting inherently is). Stripping that out is changing the meaning of the reporting. The effect usually minimizes the impact of the story and implicitly supports the status quo. This kind of neutral fact based reporting was actually a staple of American reporting from the early 20th century, so-called "hard news". It fell out of favor in large part because it wasn't able to adequately communicate the gravitas of particularly emotional events.

To illustrate, here's another AP story on the liberation of Dachau concentration camp, chosen as a deliberately extreme example of linguistic flair being used to educate an American audience on the little-known horrors of the Holocaust being uncovered in Europe:

The U.S. 42nd and 45th divisions captured the infamous Dachau prison camp today and freed its 32,000 captives. [...] Jan Yindrich and I a few minutes later saw the same thing that greeted the soldiers -- 39 open-type railroad cars ... which went through the walls of Dachau camp. At first glance the cars seemed loaded with dirty clothing. Then you saw feet, heads, and bony fingers. More than half the cars were full of bodies, hundreds of bodies. Downward was driving a jeep along a string of cars when a soldier shouted: "Come here, quick, Colonel, here's a live one!" [...] This grisly spectacle was outside the walls of the camp -- along a widely traveled road inside the city of Dachau where Bavarians passed daily.

I hope we can agree that omitting the emotive "linguistic flair" have been an inappropriate choice here.
by rat87 | 2025-04-09 05:16:17+00:00
German Ostpolitik (eastern politics) goes back before independent Russia back to the 1960s attempt to cooperate and have peace with Eastern Germany and the Soviet Union. And peace with Russia (maybe even its transformation into a regular democraric state) was the primary stated motivator in recent years. Economics and even bribes helpwd grease the wheels but peace is what formed the national strategy in the first place and what entrenched it

kraut made some intresting videos on this topic recently. both the start of ostpolitik and their failure in recent hears compared with Polish politics towards Russia

https://youtu.be/XjvrbnEMNVk?feature=shared https://youtu.be/bWJeNVzqBZI?feature=shared
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-09 05:17:56+00:00
> The people who built this technology needed to use hundreds of millions of images without permission.

It remains unclear if they needed permission in the first place. Aside from Meta's stunt with torrents I'm not aware of any legal precedent forbidding me to (internally) do as I please with public content that I scrape.

> They regularly speak explicitly about all the jobs they plan to destroy.

A fully legal endeavor that is very strongly rewarded by the market.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-09 05:19:12+00:00
Don’t overlook the early BSD revolution.

4.3BSD was basically designed without any bespoke hardware platform of its own. They commandeered DEC’s big iron, for the most part, to “dual boot” before dual-booting was cool. 386BSD began to enable PC-compatible hardware and really cost-effective “server farms” even before Linus was a twinkle in Finland’s eye.

Moreover, various BSD flavors were empowering admins to breathe new life into legacy hardware, sidestepping and bypassing the proprietary software channels. Linux, on the gripping hand, remained x86-unportable for awhile after BSD (and Xfree86) was running everywhere.

Personally I ran Minix-286 at home; at university we enjoyed a “recreational” VAX11 running not VMS but 4.3BSD.

Flash forward to 1998: from the arid but air-conditioned Sonoran Desert I received gently-loved twinned Apollo 425t systems with memory upgrades; I installed OpenBSD on both, as well as my 486DX100! It was a homogeneous OS environment with heterogenous hardware... and the 486, with Adaptec SCSI & a VLB #9GXE64 Pro, could boot into Windows 98 and run the Cygwin X server, or DOOM or Quake.

There was a golden age when a dude could walk into any surplus yard, grab Big Iron Unix Boxes, take them home and bootstrap NetBSD. On anything. Bonus: BSD originated in USA/Canada, for a trustworthy chain of trust. (Oh Lord, the encryption export technicalities...)

Linus played follow-the-leader for years.
by charettes | 2025-04-09 05:19:29+00:00
Virtual generated columns are not required to allow an index to be used in this case without incurring the cost of materializing `to_tsvector('english', message)`. Postgres supports indexing expressions and the query planner is smart enough to identify candidate on exact matches.

I'm not sure why the author doesn't use them but it's clearly pointed out in the documentation (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/textsearch-tables.ht...).

In other words, I believe they didn't need a `message_tsvector` column and creating an index of the form

CREATE INDEX idx_gin_logs_message_tsvector ON benchmark_logs USING GIN (to_tsvector('english', message)) WITH (fastupdate = off);

would have allowed queries of the form

WHERE to_tsvector('english', message) @@ to_tsquery('english', 'research')

to use the `idx_gin_logs_message_tsvector` index without materializing `to_tsvector('english', message)` on disk outside of the index.

Here's a fiddle supporting it https://dbfiddle.uk/aSFjXJWz