MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-23 20:23:36+00:00
It's worth noting that the moral background (at least in terms of political philosophy in the US) was always rooted in practicalities. The Constitution even includes the qualifier "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The moment a protection works against those goals, it's on shaky ground. And that ground is always in flux; there's a reason Thomas Jefferson noted regarding patents that "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrasment than advantage to society."

This is why copyright is shot-through with exceptions (for example, we give broad leeway to infringement for educational purposes, for what benefit does society gain if protection of the intellectual property of this generation stunts the growth of creative faculties of the next?). And that's usually fine, until, say, a broadly-exceptioned process to gather and catalog art and expression worldwide available online that was fed into neural net training in academic settings for decades becomes something of a different moral quality when the only thing that's changed is instead of a grey-bearded professor overseeing the machine it's a grey-templed billionaire financier.

(I submit to the Grand Council of People Reading This Thread the possibility that one resolution to this apparent paradox is to consider that the actual moral stance is "It's not fair that someone might starve after working hard on a product of the mind while others benefit from their hard work," and that perhaps copyright is simply not the best tool to address that moral concern).
by micromacrofoot | 2025-04-23 20:23:41+00:00
what vitriol? they were not smart (especially the english), many of them died because they didn't prepare for winter properly... they had winter where they came from

this is well documented, lots of settlements failed due to very simple mistakes and infighting

at one point an english settlement lead by john smith actually raided natives out of desperation and many starved when they were cut off in response
by namaria | 2025-04-23 20:24:03+00:00
Expert systems are not the problem per se.

The problem is that AI is very often a way of hyping software. "This is a smart product. It is intelligent". It implies lightning in a bottle, a silver bullet. A new things that solves all your problems. But that is never true.

To create useful new stuff, to innovate, in a word, we need domain expertise and a lot of work. The world is full of complex systems and there are no short cuts. Well, there are, but there is always a trade off. You can pass it on (externalities) or you can hide (dishonesty) or you can use a sleight of hand and pretend the upside is so good, it's magical so just don't think about what it costs, ok? But it always costs something.

The promise of "expert systems" back then was creating "AI". It didn't happen. And there was an "AI winter" because people wised up to that shtick.

But then "big data" and "machine learning" collided in a big way. Transformers, "attention is all you need" and then ChatGPT. People got this warm fuzzy feeling inside. These chatbots got impressive, and improved fast! It was quite amazing. It got A LOT of attention and has been driving a lot of investment. It's everywhere now, but it's becoming clear it is falling very short of "AI" once again. The promised land turned out once again to just be someone else's land.

So when people look at this attempt at AI and its limitations, and start wondering "hey what if we did X" and X sounds just like what people were trying when we last thought AI might just be around the corner... Well let's just say I am having a deja vu.
by dave1010uk | 2025-04-23 20:24:31+00:00
I 3D printed a replacement screw cap for something that GPT-4o designed for me with OpenSCAD a few months ago. It worked very well and the resulting code was easy to tweak.

Good to hear that newer models are getting better at this. With evals and RL feedback loops, I suspect it's the kind of thing that LLMs will get very good at.

Vision language models can also improve their 3D model generation if you give them renders of the output: "Generating CAD Code with Vision-Language Models for 3D Designs" https://arxiv.org/html/2410.05340v2

OpenSCAD is primitive. There are many libraries that may give LLMs a boost. https://openscad.org/libraries.html
by ndriscoll | 2025-04-23 20:24:55+00:00
I'm not familiar enough with California's law to know whether companies like Shopify/Google are meant to be liable (in the sense that the law says so), but certainly it would be a great thing if the companies actually performing the mass surveillance (Google, Shopify) were liable even if the payload deliverer is small. Absolutely what is needed is law saying that Google can be sued (or better, held criminally liable for harassment/stalking) for spying on people through its Google Analytics program, among others.

Relentlessly stalking millions of people makes it millions of times worse than stalking one person, not somehow okay.
by 13years | 2025-04-23 20:24:59+00:00
> most people can’t reliably interpret the meaning of complex or unfamiliar text

But LLMs fail the most basic tests of understanding that don't require complexity. They have read everything that exists. What would even be considered unfamiliar in that context?

> RFK Jr. is antivax because he misunderstands all the information he sees about the benefits of vaccines.

These are areas where information can be contradictory. Even this statement is questionable in its most literal interpretation. Has he made such a statement? Is that a correct interpretation of his position?

The errors we are criticizing in LLMs are not areas of conflicting information or difficult to discern truths. We are told LLMs are operating at PhD level. Yet, when asked to perform simpler everyday tasks, they often fail in ways no human normally would.
by jfengel | 2025-04-23 20:25:16+00:00
Yes, it would. Or at least a central axis.

Which would undercut practically all of modern physics. Really fundamental conservation laws like momentum and energy rely on the universe being equal in all directions. If it has a central axis, that does not hold.

So if that holds, it's potentially a major pointer to the very origins of the universe itself. But it's also one of those extraordinary claims that require extraordinary proof. I strongly doubt that this will stand up to scrutiny -- though I'll certainly be pleased if it turns out be true, because that will be a major advance in our understanding.
by alnwlsn | 2025-04-23 20:25:28+00:00
The future: "and I want a 3mm hole in one side of the plate. No the other side. No, not like that, at the bottom. Now make it 10mm from the other hole. No the other hole. No, up not sideways. Wait, which way is up? Never mind, I'll do it myself."

I'm having trouble understanding why you would want to do this. A good interface between what I want and the model I will make is to draw a picture, not write an essay. This is already (more or less) how Solidworks operates. AI might be able to turn my napkin sketch into a model, but I would still need to draw something, and I'm not good at drawing.

The bottleneck continues to be having a good enough description to make what you want. I have serious doubts that even a skilled person will be able to do it efficiently with text alone. Some combo of drawing and point+click would be much better.

This would be useful for short enough tasks like "change all the #6-32 threads to M3" though. To do so without breaking the feature tree would be quite impressive.
by erklik | 2025-04-23 20:25:38+00:00
> 1. A new UX/UI paradigm. Writing prompts is dumb, re-writing prompts is even dumber. Chat interfaces suck.

> 2. "Magic" in the same way that Google felt like magic 25 years ago: a widget/app/thing that knows what you want to do before even you know what you want to do.

and not to "dunk" on you or anything of the sort but that's literally what Descartes seems to be? Another wrapper where I am writing prompts telling the AI what to do.
by anon6362 | 2025-04-23 20:25:52+00:00
The Peter Thiel-brand of libertarianism is utopian, techofeudual, illiberal, and amoral. To be fair, Ezra Klein's "Abundance" neo-neoliberalism also exhibits themes of utopian techofeudalism, illiberalism, and amorality too. Neither of these movements have any sense of self-awareness or American history, but they are extremely popular with billionaires through decamillionaires who promote them to the detriment of ordinary Americans.

I suspect the revolution will not be televised, and AOC will be POTUS in 2029 should things keep going as they are. Maybe an American Nero or Caligula would happen in 2031 as yet another underdamped ideological over-reaction, but I hope not.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-23 20:26:02+00:00
I think those robots are little more than a pipe dream, but...

> "Hopefully, we'll get a license to use the rare earth magnets. China wants assurances that these are not used for military purposes, which obviously they're not. They're just going into a humanoid robot. So that's not a weapon system."

"Obviously they're not"? What's so obvious about it? If they perform as Musk keeps promising, then they'd make a fantastic replacement for troops. Just slap a rifle in their hands and they're a weapon system.
by dpifke | 2025-04-23 20:26:26+00:00
The "online retailer" (IABMFG) in this case is based in California.

A company in California, selling to a customer in California, shouldn't be able to say "California law doesn't apply because my payment processor is Canadian." And if Shopify wants to take a cut of every sale from retailers based in California, they should be willing to comply with California law as well, at least insofar as it applies to the services provided via those California-based retailers' web sites.

(The actual opinion is linked at the bottom of the submission; I humbly suggest folks commenting here should read it first: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/04/21/2...)
by nkrisc | 2025-04-23 20:27:42+00:00
Amen. I just uninstall applications that do anti-user crap. There are very few applications that I need. Almost all are replaceable or truly unnecessary.

The most recent example that sticks in my mind is I uninstalled Duolingo because they kept changing the app icon, but what finally did it for me is when they changed to some disgusting version of it with snot dripping from the creature's (is it an owl? some kind of bird? I forget) nostrils. WTF Duolingo? Uninstalled, I'm done with it.
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-23 20:28:02+00:00
> This is an interesting direction, realistically I don't expect the government to magically care about the lived experience of most people

Well, here in Europe, at least the EU government cares about the experience of the masses. That's how we got no roaming charges for phones, USB-C for everything, decent minimum standards for all possible sorts of products from cucumbers to cars, SEPA, (theoretically) open borders and a whole lot of other things...
by ndiddy | 2025-04-23 20:28:29+00:00
In this case it seems like what happened was:

1. Catapult Entertainment made/commissioned XBAND Rough as a clone of Confidential for their use somewhere (promotional materials, PC software, who knows?). The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996 Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved".

2. The "You wouldn't steal a car" campaign pirated Catapult's copyrighted font file. I think they got away with it because Catapult was no longer in business at that point. They were acquired by Mpath Interactive in 1996 and Mpath's IP got acquired by GameSpy in 2000.
by jfengel | 2025-04-23 20:28:33+00:00
You don't need any external reference points to know that you're rotating. You could detect it by the apparent centrifugal force: objects in your own frame of reference don't move in straight lines.

It would imply that there exist privileged reference points within the universe, and that would be a major change to physics. I can't predict all of the consequences of that, and they might include some kind of external frame of reference. But that doesn't necessarily follow.
by antegamisou | 2025-04-23 20:29:31+00:00
Genetic algorithms' weaknesses largely boil down to getting stuck in local extrema and premature convergence, which can be resolved by trying different values for parameters like probability of mutation, trying different genetic operators, offspring/parent ratio etc.

Meanwhile you have a whole separate discipline [1] for potential weaknesses on machine learning algorithms. Of course they may win when it comes to interdisciplinary ubiquity in CS, but any algorithm that relies on data assimilation and has little analytic formulation will suffer in robustness.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_machine_learning
Ask HN: Raising Kids in the City? Where?
by whoodle | 2025-04-23 20:29:58+00:00
Has anyone raised kids in a big, walkable city in the US? London? Elsewhere?

My wife and I lived in downtown Philadelphia for >10 years, but moved to the suburbs after having kids. We have two young kids under 3. However, we’re finding — especially me — that we hate living in the suburbs. I miss the city, the energy, the walkability, and the public transport. I wish I could never drive a car again. To me it’s the best way to live, and I only find myself drawn to it more as I get older.

My wife stays home with the kids but is open to working again soon. We don’t want to move back to Philly, so we’re looking at other options. Has anyone either moved back to a big city with kids or just raised their kids in one recently? How did you manage costs?

…And, before someone suggests it, no, a walkable suburb is most likely not the same thing :)

Is NYC feasible if one parent is making FAANG salary? What other cities should we consider?

We’ve also spent a lot of time in London and are considering there as we prefer many parts of the lifestyle in the UK. I have an option to work there keeping my US SWE salary plus visa sponsorship. The real risk there is losing my job and then being at the whim of London level SWE salaries as we aren’t UK citizens.
by stass | 2025-04-23 20:30:01+00:00
I built one recently to mostly help myself visualize how sail trim worked and how various boat controls like mainsheet and backstay affected sail shapes, various forces and boat performance. It uses a physics-based VPP and I calibrated it against Catalina 36 polar charts, so should be pretty precise!

I plan to integrate the simulator with the sail trim guide I'm building to help people learn.

It's a WIP, but accessible at https://www.sailrhythm.com/

Happy to answer any questions!
by kazinator | 2025-04-23 20:30:05+00:00
In some cases, these useless add-ons are so crippled, that they don't provide the obvious functionality you would want.

E.g. ask the AI built into Adobe Reader whether it can fill in something in a fillable PDF and it tells you something like "sorry, I cannot help with Adobe tools"

(Then why are you built into one, and what are you for? Clearly, because some pointy-haired product manager said, there shall be AI integration visible in the UI to show we are not falling behind on the hype treadmill.)
by monoid73 | 2025-04-23 20:30:54+00:00
this is one of the more compelling "LLM meets real-world tool" use cases i've seen. openSCAD makes a great testbed since it's text-based and deterministic, but i wonder what the limits are once you get into more complex assemblies or freeform surfacing.

curious if the real unlock long-term will come from hybrid workflows, LLMs proposing parameterized primitives, humans refining them in UI, then LLMs iterating on feedback. kind of like pair programming, but for CAD.
by chungy | 2025-04-23 20:31:59+00:00
That's not really quite accurate. Windows NT began life on the i860, and then was ported to i386 and MIPS, and very shortly after the initial release, ported to Alpha. A year after that, PowerPC.

Through the life of Windows NT 4.0's life span, MIPS and PowerPC died early, and Alpha support was axed just before the very end. In Windows 2000's development, i386 and Alpha were the only ports left, and Alpha was axed before it could make it to final release.

x86 and Alpha lived simultaneously for most of its development. It wasn't done "first" on Alpha (quite the opposite).
by mrbombastic | 2025-04-23 20:32:00+00:00
I find it annoying that I can get stuck in a mode when I am editing and the app is trying to render at the same time (e.g. I write some backticks to make a code block and Obsidian tries to be smart and add the second set and it encapsulates a bunch of lines I don't want it to) but to each their own I suppose. Vscode for what its worth has a preview that you can keep open side by side to see the visuals as you edit.
by hellisothers | 2025-04-23 20:33:18+00:00
> Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could.

I don’t think this is the case, if anything the opposite is true. Most of us would like to do the work code but have realized, at some career point, that you’re paid more to abstract yourself away from that and get others to do it either in technical leadership or management.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-04-23 20:33:31+00:00
> religion which at best can be considered a confabulation or hallucination in the rigorous terms you're using to judge LLMs

Non-religious people are not exempt. Everyone has a worldview (or prior commitments, if you like) through which they understand the world. If you encounter something that contradicts your worldview directly, even repeatedly, you are far more likely to "hallucinate" an understanding of the experience that allows your worldview to stay intact than to change your worldview.

I posit that humans are unable to function without what amounts to a religion of some sort -- be it secular humanism, nihilism, Christianity, or something else. When one is deposed at a societal level, another rushes in to fill the void. We're wired to understand reality through definite answers to big questions, whatever those answers may be.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-23 20:33:47+00:00
Have you considered Barcelona? It is, arguably, one of the most kid friendly cities in Europe and is very pedestrian friendly. If your employment or financial arrangement can support it, it is hard to beat (imho). Spain has a digital nomad visa, renewed one year at a time unless you apply from in country while on the tourist visa (within the 90 day visa), in which case it is a three year term (with one renewal before able to apply for permanent residency at five years).
by wolfgang42 | 2025-04-23 20:34:02+00:00
I’ve been through a couple of different tools for my personal blog, and, having seen this trap, every time I did the migration I made sure to write a blog post about something completely unrelated instead. A few years ago I built my own static site generator and I vowed that I would never try to publish it for other people to use, another trap[1] that often springs on enthusiastic developer-blogger types.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616774
by nkrisc | 2025-04-23 20:34:37+00:00
There's a difference though between "unethical" and just "shitty experience". A shitty experience is not inherently unethical. As a UX designer, I never did anything I believed to be unethical, but I did design many things that I thought were a shitty experience. I voiced my concerns, suggested some alternatives, and was told do design it to work the shitty way. If they want to pay me to design a shitty experience, then OK, the money's the same either way.

I just made sure to save the emails/documentation/etc. in case anyone tried to blame it on me when it failed or users complained. If the order came down from high enough up the org, a UX manager or director might also go on the record opposing it to cover for those under them in the org.

I think of it like hiring someone to replace all the beautiful hardwood floors in your home with thick, orange shag carpet. It's a bad idea and it will probably hurt the resale value of your home, but there's nothing unethical about the contractor accepting the work and taking your money as long as everything's done properly and to code.
by alxlaz | 2025-04-23 20:35:32+00:00
All the metaphors I've used are yours, Ivan. Why would they anger me? I'm not the one who came up with them :-).

What you've pointed out has no bearing whatsoever on what's being discussed here. This isn't about some stretched out definition of "payment system" that applies to those services that happen to have both iOS and Android client applications. It's strictly about what works in applications available on Apple's App Store. For many of them your point 4 doesn't even apply because they don't have an Android variant in the first place.

Let me know when you'd like to go back to discussing the actual issue from the linked article. Bye!
by namaria | 2025-04-23 20:35:42+00:00
Seriously, do people around you not normally double check, proofread, review what they turn in as done work?

Maybe I am just very fortunate, but people who are not capable of producing documents that are factually correct do not get to keep producing documents in the organizations I have worked with.

I am not talking about typos, misspelling words, bad formatting. I am talking about factual content. Because LLMs can actually produce 100% correct text but they routinely mangle factual content in a way that I have never had the misfortune of finding in the work of my colleagues and teams around us.
Show HN: Twitter profile search that works
by Jsuh | 2025-04-23 20:36:03+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m Jeremy, one of the co-founders of People Net (YC W24). We’re building an AI search engine for people (https://www.thepeoplenet.com/).

Currently, search engines view the Internet as a collection of webpages. So unless you search for someone’s name, most “people search” queries fail [1].

We see the internet as a collection of people.

At the People Net, we’re making every person on the Internet easy to find.

Our first step is a Twitter profile search that actually works.

Try it now: https://www.thepeoplenet.com/

Current Progress: 0.08% of internet citizens indexed (4mil / ~5.5bil)

[1]: <comparison> Query: “Professors building companies in the Bay Area”

Big G: https://www.google.com/search?q=Professors+building+companie...

Little P: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/professors-building-compani...

ChatBotGPT: https://chatgpt.com/share/68093be4-cc6c-8007-9f50-2e9ec49c86... ** Not bad, but restricted to only famous (wikipedia-page-worthy) people

X dot com: https://x.com/search?q=professors%20building%20companies%20i...

thepeoplenet.com: https://www.thepeoplenet.com/?q=professors%20building%20comp... </comparison>
by EasyMarion | 2025-04-23 20:37:53+00:00
solving real problems is the core of it, but for a lot of people the joy and meaning come from how they solve them too. the shift to AI tools might feel like outsourcing the interesting part, even if the outcome is still useful. side projects will stick around for sure, but i think it's fair to ask what the day-to-day feels like when more of it becomes reviewing and prompting rather than building.
by Lerc | 2025-04-23 20:38:31+00:00
I think it is perhaps important to realise that while what you say is true, that is not what is protected by copyright. As others have said in these comments, if the font had been copied using the digital data then it may be a copyright infringement, but if the duplicate font had been constructed from scratch to be a visually identical font then it may not be a copyright infringement.
by knuckleheadsmif | 2025-04-23 20:38:39+00:00
But you can Copyright the Name of a font. But yes long standing rule says you can copyright how letters & numbers look. Note that if you make a font that contains your own “artwork’ that does not represent a letter or number you can get protection for that.

And only fairly recently (in the past 30 years—I forget when Adobe won this court case) the courts ruled you can protect the code for generating a fonts look from being copied.