MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ranger_danger | 2025-04-28 04:07:36+00:00
Lopez v. Electrical Rebuilders, Inc., 416 F.Supp. 1133, 1135 (C.D.Cal.1976). Acquiescence, with full knowledge in the publication of a vast number of copies without copyright notice, may work a forfeiture.

Transgo, Inc. v. Ajac Transmission Parts Corp., 768 F.2d 1001, 1019, 227 USPQ 598, 82 A.L.R.Fed 97 (C.A.9 (Cal.), 1985). Publication by a licensee of “vast numbers of copies without copyright notice may work a forfeiture” if done with full knowledge of a licensor who acquiesces.

The limitations period for bringing copyright infringement claims is three years after the claim accrues. See 17 U.S.C. S 507(b)

I have also seen several times where a project owner is made aware (e.g. via mailing list or github issue etc.) of an infringement and then they make a comment like "we do not have the money to fight this", and so then if three years passes after that point, the infringer basically gets away with it.

Also, most people do not register their copyrights, which:

Failure to Register Before Enforcement: In the U.S., while copyright protection is automatic, you must register the copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office before you can file a lawsuit for infringement in federal court. You have no proof that you own a copyright if you do not file for one. If you try to enforce it before you register the copyright, it can later become invalidated, or its validation process can be terminated.
by somenameforme | 2025-04-28 04:07:41+00:00
Similar experience here but slightly different as I went to a top tier uni, but was also a decent coder before I started college. There was a lot of 'theory vs practice' snobbery where the former was emphasized above all, to the point of absurdity. Get ready to learn the secret knowledge of academia CS like that that functional languages are secretly the solution to everything - especially purely functional - no variables or even mutable state. And of course the secret to writing bug proof programs is to mathematically prove them - just ignore the fact you're simply kicking the can to new bugs, and the domain of programs you can realistically prove is minuscule. I would not hire 95% of my graduating peers. You're not going to enjoy your time.

If you were going to get a degree I'd get it in something where computer science is applied rather than the 'thing' itself - e.g. electrical engineering (or even aerospace depending on your mathiness). Also that's probably far more future proofed than a CS degree anyhow, and will get your feet in the door for degree requirements as well as open the door to lots of options that a CS degree wouldn't.
by caseyy | 2025-04-28 04:07:53+00:00
> Many of the best co-workers that I remember had physics degrees. In fact, it was so pronounced I personally consider a physics degree to be a top tier signal of programming ability, but that's my own personal prejudice.

Hah, I also noticed that. For some reason, ex-army programmers really excel in their junior years (or sometimes even just months), too. Do you think it's the attitude towards problem-solving?
by dinkumthinkum | 2025-04-28 04:08:35+00:00
I don't know; there is the issue of when you try to find your next job that is not a straight continuation of your last. Without a CS degree if your first job is like a front-end ReactJS worker-bee then all you have told your potential next employer is that you can do what Figma's AI can do, just for more money. I agree that as you gain experience, the significance of the degree is lessened by the wait of your experience but if you took your same resume and deleted the education section, and never mentioned it in interviews, I think there would be some difference in outcomes.
by phs318u | 2025-04-28 04:09:19+00:00
I was searching for some ancient quotes describing the same sentiment and found a page with several quotes, including this one from Aristotle (4th century BCE):

"[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances. ... They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it."

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/28169/what-is-th...
by tibbar | 2025-04-28 04:09:40+00:00
As with most things in life, small iterative improvements are usually the most reliable path. You've already got contract work, so try to get more of that, maybe you can get a fulltime job with one of those clients, now you have a resume item, etc. It's the same for most everyone - we get a little experience, a bit of a resume, and one day we get another step on the ladder, and one day another.

Actually doing a whole degree program is just so much freakin' work and money for a single line on your resume that I can think of a lot of equally time consuming things that would have a better payoff. I've done night classes too and - whew. Never again.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-28 04:09:45+00:00
GDP made sense in 1900, back when it took so much labor to keep us all alive and well that we could think of any economic activity as a proxy for progress towards that goal--a goal we could all agree was good. Our concept of value was mostly aligned with our values, so more = better.

Nowadays we're more in conflict, partly just because we can afford to be without risking immediate starvation. Billions get spent on swaying an election this way, more billions get spent on swaying it that way. Dollars spent in both directions count as GDP even though each one has another dollar on the other side pushing in the opposite direction. And it's not just elections, everywhere we're building moats instead of solving problems. It's a very busy way to not go anywhere.

We need to move from scalars to vectors--progress towards some goal--otherwise we're just patting ourselves on the back for working hard to no effect.
by tzs | 2025-04-28 04:10:01+00:00
> The normal way you resolve this sort of thing in the law is by setting a legal limit which is objectively reckless, e.g. by setting the speed limit to 125 MPH. Then you aren't actually expected to drive 124 MPH, you're still expected to drive around 65 MPH, but we can reasonably say that if you're caught doing 130 there you're deserving of some penalties.

I can't think of any teenage boy I've ever known who would have driven anywhere near 65 mph if the speed limit were 125 mph, no matter how much they were told that people were "expected" to drive around 65 mph.
by jedberg | 2025-04-28 04:11:52+00:00
This is a strong argument for universal healthcare. If we had universal healthcare in the USA, we'd have to have a common charting protocol and a medical chart exchange.

One thing that AI/ML is really good at is taking very large datasets and finding correlations that you wouldn't otherwise. If everyone's medical chart were in one place, you could find things like "four years before presenting symptoms of pancreatic cancer, patients complain of increased nosebleeds", or things like that.

Of course we don't need universal healthcare to have a chart exchange, and the privacy issues are certainly something that needs consideration.

But the point is, I suspect we could find cures and leading indicators for a lot of diseases if everyone's medical records were available for analysis.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-04-28 04:12:24+00:00
I use a plugin[1] on my blog that automatically translates ‘--‘ or ‘---‘ into em or en dashes. I did not see it coming that now my articles will look AI-written :p

Edit: just discovered iOS keyboard input also does this when you type multiple hyphens

1 - https://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/
by petesergeant | 2025-04-28 04:12:29+00:00
Surprised that there are still so many people without access to the internet[0], and even more surprised that that's true in India and China, both of which have pretty high population densities (in most areas, but also, those are the areas people live in, obviously).

> But these user figures also suggest that 652 million people in India did not use the internet at the beginning of 2025, suggesting that 44.7 percent of the population remained “offline” at the start of the year.[1]

I guess I'm mentally comparing this to SE Asia, where smart phone usage (and cell coverage) is ubiquitous; Vietnam at 80%, Philippines at 75%, Thailand at literally everyone. Fewer in Indonesia, but geography there is especially challenging

0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155552/countries-highes...

1: https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-india
by jcranmer | 2025-04-28 04:13:02+00:00
It's actually pretty easy to overstate the amount of harm caused by that one individual... you're doing it.

There are lots of good reasons to believe in the amyloid hypothesis, and no paper or even line of research is the one bedrock of the hypothesis. It was the foundational bedrock of Alzheimer's research back in the early 1990s (essentially, before Alzheimer's became one of the holy grail quests of modern medicine), after all; well before any of the fraudulent research into Alzheimer's was done.

The main good reason not to believe in amyloid is that every drug targeting amyloid plaques has failed to even slow Alzheimer's, even when they do impressive jobs in clearing out plaques--and that is a hell of a good reason to doubt the hypothesis. But no one is going to discover that failure until you have amyloid blockers read out their phase III clinical trial results, and that doesn't really happen until about a decade ago.
by o11c | 2025-04-28 04:13:43+00:00
Some minor notes:

* Text adventures are a case where it is really advantageous to separate the declaration and definition of objects, since cycles are ubiquitous. For C, consider X-macros, tentative definitions (not in C++, sadly), and using the section attribute to make the list implicit (or if you don't want to rely on compiler voodoo, just output the index during another pass).

* It may be useful to distinguish several ways an object belongs to a location: on top of, contained in, held by, equipped by, integral component of, death drop of. Additionally, "has never been moved [by player? by code]" is often desirable to record.

* Backwards ownership is fine for savefiles and initialization, but during runtime it can be useful to cache lists in the other direction. A dict may be worth it in a few places if your adventure gets big enough, but linear search is fine for a long time (and makes e.g. conditional passages easier; you should simply check that every conditional transition is eventually followed by an unconditional one with the same tag. To ensure conditions are handled uniformly, transitions with multiple names should canonicalize first).

* For C statically-allocated arrays within a struct initializer, we've been allowed to write `(T[]){t1, t2, t3}` for a quarter century now. There's no need to name the separate objects.

* It is very useful for the runtime to support the notion of "overlays" - used for things like menus which can use surprisingly similar logic to rooms. Saves should only ever look at the main game layer.

* Relative directions are very interesting, but tricky to add to a game.

What I wish I had was an example of a game that is complete enough to be interesting but not too big, to be used when porting to a new engine.
by gw2 | 2025-04-28 04:14:07+00:00
> even Rust isn't really memory-safe.

Yeah, and this points at a deeper issue: the concept of a language being either (binary) memory safe or not does not really make sense. Memory safety is a spectrum and most GC'd languages are safer than Rust (but you won't see a lot of "memory safety" proponents acknowledge this).

Also, there are mitigations that can make "unsafe" languages as secure as something like Rust, but those are deliberately overlooked and hence languages like Zig are constantly bashed using security as the reason.
by EdwardKrayer | 2025-04-28 04:14:14+00:00
Ironic that JPMorgan Chase demands suppliers improve security while neglecting basic practices, like crediting vulnerability researchers [1]. With 18% YoY profit growth in 2024 [2], they could easily allocate additional resources to drive meaningful industry-wide change that would benefit all of us.

Maybe the real issue is they choose to bring in lower quality suppliers that they deemed to be "good enough", instead of hiring quality, and building robust internal process to make sure the type of feedback is brought to the suppliers directly - with examples, and well thought out suggestions instead of this notice posted on the office fridge.

To me, this looks like a lack of will for financial commitment rather than an industry-wide plague that's impervious to the ultimate resource to fix nearly every problem we face - willpower and an increased budget.

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubhankargaur_jpmorganchase-...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/jpmorgan-profit-jum...
by godelski | 2025-04-28 04:15:49+00:00
> is a poor substitute for actual regulation

Substitute? No. But you need both. Sorry, it's not the incentives, it is you[0]. As I said before, regulation is reactionary. This is why you need both. No one is saying no regulation, but I (and [0]) is saying things only happen because people do them. I know this is a wild claim, but it is an indisputable fact.

> The harms posed by LLMs are the very same

I expect every programmer and HN user to be familiar with scale. Please stop making this argument. You might as well be saying a nuclear bomb is the same as a Pop-Its. The dangers that LLMs pose is still unknown but if we're unwilling to acknowledge that there's any unique harm then there's zero chance of solving them.

Stop passing the buck.

[0] https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incent...
by sethherr | 2025-04-28 04:16:14+00:00
Absolutely not. Trump got 49.9% to Harris’ 48.3, he didn’t even get the majority.

Biden was 51.3 to Trump’s 46.8 in 2020.

This was not a landslide. Trump did not get the majority of votes.

He has much less of a “mandate” than Biden did.
by lubujackson | 2025-04-28 04:16:22+00:00
I used to think this about AI, that it will cause a a dearth of junior engineers. But I think it is really going to end up as a new level of abstraction. Aside from very specific bits of code, there is nothing AI does to remove any of the thinking work for me. So now I will sit down, reason through a problem, make a plan and... instead of punching code I write a prompt that punches the code.

At the end of the day, AI can't tell us what to build or why to build it. So we will always need to know what we want to make or what ancillary things we need. LLMs can definitely support that, but knowing ALL the elements and gotchas is crucial.

I don't think that removes the need for juniors, I think it simplifies what they need to know. Don't bother learning the intracacies of the language or optimization tricks or ORM details - the LLM will handle all that. But you certainly will need to know about catching errors and structuring projects and what needs testing, etc. So juniors will not be able to "look under the hood" very well but will come in learning to be a senior dev FIRST and a junior dev optionally.

Not so different from the shift from everyone programming in C++ during the advent of PHP with "that's not really programming" complaints from the neckbeards. Doing this for 20 years and still haven't had to deal with malloc or pointers.
by mikepurvis | 2025-04-28 04:16:24+00:00
Download/build on demand is cute when it works, but it's a security nightmare and a problem for Nix which runs the build in an environment that's cut off from the network.

This is already a problem for getting Bazel builds to run nicely under Nix, with the current solution (predownload everything into a single giant "deps" archive in the store and then treat that as a fixed input derivation with a known hash value) is deeply non-optimal. Basically, I hope that any such schemes have a well-tested fallback path for bubbling the "thing I would download" information outward in case there are reasons to want to separate those steps.
by naasking | 2025-04-28 04:18:21+00:00
> I wish I knew how I did it, because I've been unable to regain that same "this is just what I do now and it's fine" level of acceptance that seemed to be the key.

Sometimes it helps to frame as gaining something more valuable in return for giving up something less something up. For instance, if you have preplanned meals of known calorie content, and only those foods in the house, you don't have to expend energy and time thinking about what you feel like eating today, the decisions are already made. Time is considerably more precious than most trivial, daily meal decisions.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-04-28 04:18:21+00:00
"This is written from the perspective of someone who doesn't have dependents."

According to Wikipedia, the author has dependents.

"Bregman is married to Maartje ter Horst, a photographer.^[43]^[44] They reside in Brooklyn as of 2025 and have a child together.^[45]"

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

(Attention Wikipedia editors: Unless I missed something, reference #45 appears to make no mention of Bregman's family.)
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-28 04:19:02+00:00
> The article repeatedly says "sleeping pills", and mentions benzodiazepines and antihistamines specifically,

Yeah the article spends very little effort to define what it means by sleeping pills.

Melatonin? Valerian? They're pills people take to sleep but they aren't considered drugs. How about Hydroxyzine? It's on/off label for many things, inc nausea and it's an antihistamine. How about muscle relaxers like Tizanadine? Those are used to sleep. They're OTC in some countries. How about Mirtazapine? It's a tetracyclic antidepressant but is used for sleep too.

These are all old drugs and have not-awful track records. None are benzos or even scheduled in the US.

Importantly, they're all very different types of medications - that also happen to be prescribed for sleep.
by steveBK123 | 2025-04-28 04:19:56+00:00
Good. The pandemic really opened up roads in the US to ever more dangerous Wild Wild West shenanigans.

Traffic laws are one of those situations where the right and left politically accidentally land on the same outcome (via different paths) - near zero enforcement.

In many cases we have the technology to solve these things and laws already there if we wanted to actually enforce them.

It’s incredibly jarring returning to NYC after a week in Tokyo and realizing how insane our roads & highways are.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-04-28 04:20:55+00:00
I pretty much agree with this, having some way to indicate model boundaries in an LLM parameter space to create back pressure on token generation would help a lot here.

For me though the interesting bits are how the lack of understanding surfaces as artifacts in the presentation or interaction. I'm a systems person who can't help but try to fathom the underlying connections and influences that are driving the outputs of a system.
by Wilfred | 2025-04-28 04:21:01+00:00
If I've understood this interesting workflow correctly, there's two major components.

streamdown: a markdown renderer for the terminal, intended for consuming LLM output. It has affordances to make it easier to run the code snippets: no indentation, easy insertion in the clipboard, fzf access to previous items.

llmehelp: tools to slurp the current tmux text content (i.e. recent command output) as well as slurp the current zsh prompt (i.e. the command you're currently writing).

I think the idea is then you bounce between the LLM helping you and just having a normal shell/editor tmux session. The LLM has relevant context to your work without having to explicitly give it anything.
by nine_k | 2025-04-28 04:21:27+00:00
I suppose this project served as a source of joy not only to the kid, but to the maker, too. It likely was a good excuse to do a lot of stuff that's not strictly necessary but is fun to do, and buy a lot of gear that's not strictly necessary but is a pleasure to use. The result is somehow better and more solid due to that, too.

Regarding the solidness of the mechanical design, I have my doubts. The volume know is too small, and too close to the navigation buttons. The speaker grill is too coarse, allowing small items to easily drop inside. The cartridge attachment is not sturdy, not self-adjusting, and relatively easy to snap off. If anything, I would rework the mechanical part. (Alas, my kids are too old now.)
by gpm | 2025-04-28 04:21:53+00:00
This device doesn't make it easier to catch speeders, what it does is give a way for habitual speeders to stop speeding. The primary goal is no doubt that these people will simply stop breaking the law now that there's a device there helping them do that without the need for further law enforcement. To the extent that fails though, it's a measure which makes it reasonable to increase penalties and thus increase the level of deterrence.

Increasing penalties for speeding without this device has issues. It's basically impossible to prove that you intended to break the law, and that you didn't just misjudge your speed. Worse there's become a culture of mildly breaking the law, and it's even harder to prove you intentionally went beyond what's acceptable in that culture. There's a reasonable doubt that it was a honest mistake. This makes it politically, legally, and morally problematic to have significant penalties attached to speeding.

But if you're caught speeding because you disabled the device that a court ordered installed to prevent you from speeding, all worries about intent go out the window. It is, beyond a reasonable doubt, a deliberate violation of the law. Not the actions of a well intentioned person who was in a hurry and bad at judging their speed. This means that, relative to speeding, penalties can be significant increased resulting in better deterrence.

Specifically it looks like Virginia's new law makes it a "class 1 misdemeanor", which is the harshest class of misdemeanor in Virginia law, and the same as a DWI or simple assault. Sentencing maximums are a bit deceptive because they typically aren't what are assigned, but theoretically punishable by up to a year of confinement.
by johnwheeler | 2025-04-28 04:21:59+00:00
I use getDisplayMedia which is a JavaScript API that lets you capture recordings as large as your computer can handle, but the format is fixed to either MP4 or WebM.

Here is the JS-based player: https://screenrecorder.me/projects/s3hx9YRgXNsrN1s/player

Here is a video that I rendered: https://screenrecorder.me/player/s3hx9YRgXNsrN1s

There are definitely artifacts, especially in the latter, but in practice the videos I've been creating have been working well. Also, it's primarily because the zoom is so high.

In practice, I usually set the zoom much lower and it doesn't have as much artifacting. Check out the homepage video

https://screenrecorder.me/
by dreamcompiler | 2025-04-28 04:22:10+00:00
> with a possible exception for emergency vehicles

Ambulance and fire truck driver here. There's no good reason for emergency vehicles to ever go much faster than the speed limit, and we would experience life-changing amounts of personal liability if our driving got someone hurt.

While it's sometimes important to get a patient to the hospital as quickly as possible, that's less frequent than you might think, and it's always more important to get them there in one piece.

In addition our vehicles are heavy and they don't stop quickly, so physics is another good reason for us not to speed.

Police cars might be another story but my personal opinion is that speeding police cars probably don't create a net benefit for public safety either.