MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vlovich123 | 2025-04-21 15:49:52+00:00
And the article is overstating it as well. My confidence in the LLM's ability to reduce the "how" part is primarily based on "am I doing something the LLM is good at?". If I'm doing HTML React where there's a million examples of existing stuff, then great. The more novel what I'm asking is, the less useful the LLM becomes and the more stuff I need to handcode is. Just as with self-driving cars, this is a challenge because switching from "the LLM is generating the code" to "I'm hand-tweaking things" is equivalent to self-driving disconnecting randomly and telling you "you drive" in the middle of the highway. Oh and I've caught the LLM randomly inserting vulnerabilities for absolutely no reason (e.g. adding permissions to the iframe sandbox attribute when I complained about UI layout issues).

It's a useful tool that can accelerate certain tasks, but it has a lot of sharp edges.
by hibikir | 2025-04-21 15:49:53+00:00
It's not that weird a term: I was taught this as the Roman name for the Mediterranean in middle school history class in Spain, without having to take Latin. There's a boardgame and a video game with Mare Nostrum as the title. I's expect relatively well educated people in countries bordering the Mediterranean to understand what he meant with little trouble, especially if they are also speak a latin-derived language. For instance in Spanish, mare is just mar, nostrum would be nuestro, and mortuum is muerto. It'd all be trivial first guesses.
by rovr138 | 2025-04-21 15:50:24+00:00
https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/blob/main/LICENSE

The license doesn't have to be in each file. It's a license for the software. A software is a thing.

> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files

> ...

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-21 15:50:36+00:00
> when I was shooting a lot of high school soccer, better action shots came from “skating to where the puck is going.”

way to mix sports metaphors. /s

to get better action shots, it really helps to understand the nuance of the sport itself. being able to anticipate off the ball movement while being able to anticipate a play developing will all help you improve your luck to be pointing your lens in the right place.

I followed a specific NCAA football team for a season, and got to the point of anticipating plays and recognizing formations even though I'm not really a throwball fan. I'm much more of a proper football fan, and can do much better than skating to a puck metaphor as I know tactics much better and see how off the ball players are moving and why they are doing it. This definitely allowed for better action shots of players with the ball.

As anything, someone with specific knowledge of their subject will improve their luck over someone just there for some shots.
by coldpie | 2025-04-21 15:50:46+00:00
My experience talking to big corp IP lawyers is they have a set of policies ("open source bad; protecting our IP good") and will make up any justification to support those policies, even if their justifications are plainly incorrect given the license text. Usually they just stop responding when you point out the obvious contradiction. It'd be one thing if they just said "no" with no justification, but my experience is they spout a bunch of false stuff about open source licensing, then explain how that false stuff violates their policies even though the real license actually doesn't, and then stop talking when you show them that they are wrong.

As you say, their job is to protect the company, not actually understand how IP works. But it's pretty silly when some stupid dev like me knows their supposed area of expertise better than they do.
by kweingar | 2025-04-21 15:50:50+00:00
This is the reason why I am so confused by the strain of open source thought which says that large companies exploit OSS maintainers and ought to pay them.

Maintainers often pick permissive licenses specifically because they want companies to use the code. They want their project to grow and be adopted, and they reason that GPL would stifle adoption.

I don't really like the tactic of making your code as convenient as possible for anyone to grab off the shelf when they want to use it, and then later turning around and saying they should pay you. Why not do the payment part up front (by GPL-licensing the code and then selling dual licenses to interested companies)? Because then you wouldn't have any takers. Better to wait until people have integrated it into their systems before informing them that they ought to pay you.
by alexdanilowicz | 2025-04-21 15:50:51+00:00
I think sometimes people think design is purely making things "look good", but I come to realize it's also making things "work good!" a.k.a making it intuitive. "Don't make people think!"

It's been pretty cool to see how a tool like Magic Patterns is helpful for software builders to think through the flow for whatever feature their building. This is largely how I use it internally. For example, when I added our deploy feature, I first used Magic Patterns to think through what steps I needed to add: https://www.magicpatterns.com/c/d9sb9eavgnpjv1d5vaw6wa

This is long way of saying that one way I have become a better designer is by using AI as a creative assistant, but then also recognizing when to not reinvent the wheel. You also want to leverage existing patterns as much as possible.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-04-21 15:51:08+00:00
Is this the widely used term? Do you know of any open source models fine-tuned as an "inner loop" / native agentic llm? Or what the training process looks like?

I don't see why any model couldn't be fine-tuned to work this way - i.e. tool use doesn't need to be followed by an EOS token or something - it could just wait for an output (or even continue with the knowledge there's an open request, and to take action when it comes back)
by palata | 2025-04-21 15:51:32+00:00
> If some of the peerd code was lifted from Spegel, it's blatant stealing.

Could we say "it's incorrect attribution"?

> and Microsoft couldn't even do that.

Did you consider it may have been done by an engineer who, in good faith, thought they were giving proper credit by adding it to the README? Would you want that engineer fired because of the bad attribution?

It's not like Microsoft is making millions out of this. Sure, they should fix the attribution. It's a mistake.

Most startups/small companies I've seen rely heavily on open source and fail to honour every single licence. This is bad and nobody cares. Here, Microsoft mentioned the project in the README (which is not enough, but not nothing), and I'm pretty sure that they can fix it if someone opens an issue. But overall, companies like Microsoft do honour licences a lot better than startups in my experience.

BigTech is evil for many reasons, but maybe we could consider that this is just an honest mistake.
by quitit | 2025-04-21 15:52:08+00:00
>Generative AIs just patch together memorized data.

Gen AI isn't collage. But overtraining can produce results which look like that which has lead to the confusion.

An image generation model doesn't even contain enough data to do that, it would be a remarkable form of image compression if it could.

Instead gen ai is far more flexible, and this is where its usefulness comes from - the way it can quickly combine concepts, even if the training data didn't have those particular combinations.
by ygjb | 2025-04-21 15:52:20+00:00
> Still, to me it's not even clear if "substantial parts of the code" were copied. What the article shows is really small snippets of pretty generic code. Ok, it keeps the original comment and the overall form. But if it's 15 lines, it may even count as "fair use", couldn't it? Remembering how LLMs use the concept of "fair-use" by stealing everything everywhere...

Fair use allows for commentary, news reporting, criticism, teaching, research, and scholarship and there are guidelines. Most cases where fair use is sought as a defense requires litigation to clear it up. The other alternative when forking an extremely permissive MIT license is to just follow the license.

> Probably they should keep a copy of the original LICENSE file somewhere, sure. And if one asks politely, maybe they will do it.

They are required to do so by the original license of Spegel. Does Microsoft ask politely when people violate MS licensing by say, pirating their software, or do they work with 3 letter agencies and a massive enforcement team to ensure their licenses are followed?

> My point is that Peerd seems like it's loosely based on Spegel. Maybe a fork that was heavily modified. Not sure if they should track all the code that looks like it was not modified enough and attribute it everywhere.

Yes. Every other tech company I have worked at, including Mozilla, a company that publishes almost everything they do as open source, has had folks dedicated to ensuring license compliance.

> Again: they did credit the original project. So it feels a bit aggressive to say that they "stole it without giving any credit".

They didn't provide credit in the way that the license requires. This isn't a case where a new community member forked or copied code into their first open source project. This is one of the biggest companies in the world with a well-known history of taking and using OSS without proper attribution. I like and use many MS products, but they absolutely do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
by evantbyrne | 2025-04-21 15:52:27+00:00
The MIT license does not seem to dictate the exact location of inclusion. Logically, I would think you would want to associate it with the specific parts of code that you are copying. In the past, I've listed licenses together in the root license file for forks, and other times when the included code was a minor part of the overall project placed forked licenses within impacted files.
by hotdogscout | 2025-04-21 15:52:36+00:00
>Makes it sound like you got fired or something, or that you don’t take it seriously.

My background in academia colors me but the level of office politics some describe in the private sector genuinely sounds like a middle school drama club at times. I've personally witnessed incredibly talented individuals at FAANG companies get the boot for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with their competence. Think messy personal dynamics, bosses having affairs with coworkers aiming for a position.

It makes me wonder about this ingrained necessity for pretense and obfuscation in private sector communication. Why the need to constantly play these games as if acknowledging reality is somehow detrimental? In academia, while not devoid of its own issues, the selection process for students at least attempts to prioritize merit and potential. The idea that some of the most brilliant minds I've encountered might be filtered out by arbitrary corporate "standards," while incapable but politically savvy individuals thrive, seems counterproductive.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-04-21 15:52:56+00:00
As I understand, that's less powerful, because you can do:

t"INSERT INTO mytable VALUES ({s}, {s[::-1]})"

but you can't do:

mydb eval {INSERT INTO mytable VALUES ($s, [string reverse $s])}

Instead, you have to write:

set t [string reverse $s] mydb eval {INSERT INTO mytable VALUES ($s, $t)}

There's no reason you couldn't have such power in Tcl, though: it's just that the authors of SQLite didn't.
by tedivm | 2025-04-21 15:53:04+00:00
The "notice" is the literal license file. It is illegal to strip someone else's license from their work. It doesn't matter that they replaced MIT with MIT, because they stripped the author and attribution from it.

https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/LICENSE

If you read that file you'd think that Microsoft was the copyright holder, but they very clearly aren't.
by vlovich123 | 2025-04-21 15:54:08+00:00
By building a high level abstract understanding of how things operate & then understanding how that abstractions need to be expressed. Writing code certainly is more concrete and can highlight mistakes like when there's a gap in your understanding vs spots where details matter more specifically.

At many big tech companies I've worked out, an abstract design proposal precedes any actual coding for many tasks. These design proposals are not about how you lay out code or name variables, but a high level description of the problem and the general approach to solve the problem.

Expressing that abstract thinking requires writing code but that's the "how" - you can write that same code many ways.
by notatoad | 2025-04-21 15:54:08+00:00
The key point is that t-strings are not strings. Db.execute(t”…”) would throw an exception, because t”…” is not a string and cannot be interpreted as one.

In order for a library to accept t-strings, they need to make a new function. Or else change the behavior and method signature of an old function, which I guess they could do but any sanely designed library doesn’t do.

Handling t-strings will require new functions to be added to libraries.
by mcintyre1994 | 2025-04-21 15:54:18+00:00
I’d assume their current safe function isn’t taking a string, and is taking some sort of prepared statement? So they could have it take either their prepared statement or a template, and deprecate their prepared statement.

If a library has functions taking a string and executing it as SQL they probably shouldn’t make that take a template instead, but I’d hope that’s a separate explicitly unsafe function already.
by jonhohle | 2025-04-21 15:54:19+00:00
> the beneficent embrace of the American family was always conditional

My heart breaks for anyone brought to the US who weren’t given citizenship. I’m well aware of families who didn’t know there were additional steps to perform and often wonder what agencies failed their due diligence in guiding them through that process. Enough people screwed up that it seems absurd to deny citizenship to those who would otherwise have it.

My representative is adopted and has adopted and he’ll be receiving a letter encouraging his support of allowing citizenship for these adoptees that missed it through no fault of their own.

That said, as an adoptive parent this is a common trope - ignore the millions of successful adoptions to focus on those that are horrific. Cast parents as baby smugglers with fiendish intent. I’m sure those people exist, but as a parent in this community for almost 14 years, I’ve met untold families excited to provide for the needs of a child who has already experienced significant trauma. No adoption exists without loss. We can, at best, try to mend what’s already been done.

Fortunately, for us, the process for citizenship was laid out - also complicated and nerve racking. There were no conditions (except for us as parents and sponsors).

My love for my children is unconditional.
by BMc2020 | 2025-04-21 15:54:39+00:00
"Many people project demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation... an additional 29 gigawatts by 2027 and 67 more gigawatts by 2030," he asserted. "If [China] comes to superintelligence first, it changes the dynamic of power globally, in ways that we have no way of understanding or predicting," Schmidt said...
by jawns | 2025-04-21 15:54:57+00:00
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest ... the Catholic Church!

Which _other_ churches besides the Catholic Church? Well, Catholicism is more encompassing than many people are aware of.

For instance, you might have heard of the "Roman Catholic Church." Besides the Roman Catholic Church, aka the Latin Church (which primarily uses the Roman Rite), there are 23 Eastern Catholic Churches, each with their own liturgical traditions, theological emphases, and cultural heritage. All of them are in full communion with the Pope.

Note: While many Catholic parishes do offer live-streamed services, for the benefit of the sick and homebound, they do not fulfill the Sunday obligation to attend Mass if you are able to do so in person.
by im3w1l | 2025-04-21 15:55:01+00:00
Comdemning evil is an act with many purposes. Making the evil-doer change his mind is just one of possible benefit. Even if that is unlikely the other ones remain.

* People naturally imitate what they see others do. A condemnation can prevent others from imitating the evil act.

* A condemnation calls on others to resist and not facilitate the evil act.

* Condemning someone makes you enemies, in a way that is plain for everyone to see. This positioning can open up for alliance offers from others with similar beliefs.

Making someone an enemy comes with risks and drawbacks of course. You become less able to influence someone if you cut ties, hence why people suggest to try influencing in private first.
by mapt | 2025-04-21 15:55:14+00:00
Tandas / ROSCAs are useful savings vehicles when it is, for whatever reason, difficult to hold on to money for very long. There's the physical version of this (The local warlord regularly mirks people for their wallets; Or maybe your government has something called 'civil asset forfeiture'), the social version ("The husband with shared access to my accounts drinks it all away!") but also the investment / monetary version where you have limited legal investment opportunities ('Peasants aren't allowed in the stock market'), or you have hyperinflation and so have to deal with the complication of a constantly shifting dollar. The money doesn't need to dwell any place for long periods of time, it's collected and distributed and then _spent_ on an expensive non-divisible improvement to your life immediately.

I play a survival game called Rust. Progress is meted out through the slow accumulation of Scrap, which is spent on learning technologies. People constantly kill each other, and those who are ahead on tech tend to accrue advantages in combat. There is no "Bank", and no guarantee of the ability to set up a minimum viable base to store your resources. One of the most pathetic strategies to resort to on the busiest most crowded servers, when you're a few days behind, is to linger around the edges of a safe zone collecting small amounts of Scrap(dying every few minutes), literally play roulette with it at the in-game gambling system in the safe zone at 1:20 odds, and when you eventually win big, use your scrap to progress through the tech tree; It might be 1000 scrap to get your tech to where it needs to be to compete, and you might average 50 (w/ Std dev of 25) scrap between deaths, but you'll get there eventually in this way, whereas the non-gambler needs incredible luck (+38 standard deviations of success) to actually progress through this high price threshold.

A typical tanda removes the random chance element, but preserves the "Eventually you'll get there" element even while holding on to no money.
by pseudalopex | 2025-04-21 15:55:19+00:00
> Maybe it's not deliberate, maybe they are just unaware, the 90's is a long time ago now.

The history is much discussed. This ignorance would be fixed by a Wikipedia article. And I doubt an open source developer with forceful unconventional opinions about the definitions of open source and FOSS never saw FSF or OSI mentioned.

> The established common use is only really within the communities that use them.

This is tautological. Terms are used in the communities which use them.

The article was directed to the community which uses terms like open source and FOSS. I am confident my comments took less time to write than the article.

> Isn't that the way with everything when there's a difference of opinion on the internet. The ones that have the most funding/largest platform end up winning the argument.

No. Most attempts to change the definition of open source come from come from companies attempting to profit from the change. Most resistance comes from individuals protecting a gift economy.
by carlmr | 2025-04-21 15:55:22+00:00
>How do you understand the problem without writing any code?

Not OP, but I find this a very good question. I've always found that playing with the problem in code is how I refined my understanding of the problem. Kind of like how Richard Feynman describes his problem solving. Only by tinkering with the hard problem do you really learn about it.

I always found it strange when people said they would plan out the whole thing in great detail and code later. That never worked for me, and I've also rarely seen it work for those proposing it.

It may be because I studied control systems, but I've always found you need the feedback from actually working with the problem to course correct, and it's faster, too. Don't be scared to touch some code. Play with it, find out where your mental model is deficient, find better abstractions than what you originally envisioned before wrestling with the actual problems.
Ask HN: Anonymous Social Media with Exclusively Real, Verified Humans Possible?
by wismwasm | 2025-04-21 15:55:49+00:00
I guess man can relate: When reading X, Reddit etc., which posts are actual from real users?

Whenever I see real life protests unfolding, I can be sure these are real humans on the street. These protest might be genuine or paid for, protestors might hide their faces, but at least I know real citizens of that country are on the streets.

Could there be a digital equivalent?

Personally I'd be happy to use a site where:

- Every user is a verified human (from country X, Y,Z?)

- Users are anonymous: Neither other users nor the platform nor goverment entities can map user -> real name

- The content posted under the user identity was created by said user, i.e. the user herself must confirm any post under his alias

- Every human cannot have more than one user per platform

Of course any user may still post conspiracy theories, AI generated content or propaganda. However see real value behind knowing that there's a real human behind this and not a bot.

Foreign intelligence agencies could also still buy users directly, but I'd like a system that ensures that the user is at least aware of the usage of his id.

Are there any attempts in this direction?
by ttul | 2025-04-21 15:56:08+00:00
I started my career as a developer in the 1990s and cut my teeth in C++, moving on to Python, Perl, Java, etc. in the early-2000s. Then I did management roles for about 20 years and was no longer working at the “coal face” despite having learned some solid software engineering discipline in my early days.

As an old geezer, I appreciate very much how LLMs enable me skip the steep part of the learning curve you have to scale to get into any unfamiliar language or framework. For instance, LLMs enabled me to get up to speed on using Pandas for data analysis. Pandas is very tough to get used to unless you emerged from the primordial swamp of data science along with it.

So much of programming is just learning a new API or framework. LLMs absolutely excel at helping you understand how to apply concept X to framework Y. And this is what makes them useful.

Each new LLM release makes things substantially better, which makes me substantially more productive, unearthing software engineering talent that was long ago buried in the accumulating dust pile of language and framework changes. To new devs, I highly encourage focusing on the big picture software engineering skills. Learn how to think about problems and what a good solution looks like. And use the LLM to help you achieve that focus.
by starkparker | 2025-04-21 15:56:43+00:00
the OSCL turned 18 years old a month ago. maybe things have changed enough since then to validate revisiting it.

OSI is too busy trying to come up with an equally mid (at best) OSAID for another thing thing that corporations already don't and won't care about following, so I don't expect them to prioritize it even if it got raised
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-04-21 15:56:59+00:00
> a sentient superintelligence named AM has taken over the earth's resources and exterminated humanity after combining the powers of three US, Soviet, and Chinese supercomputers into one

So—we finally get a grasp at who was depicted in that commercial, and what it was all about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I