MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sdenton4 | 2025-05-12 21:01:42+00:00
Nothing in copyright law talks about 'semantic meaning' or 'character of the source material'. Really, quite the opposite - the 'expression-idea dichotomy' says that you're copyrighting the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

(Leaving aside whether the weights of an LLM does actually encode the content of any random snippet of training text. Some stuff does get memorized, but how much and how exactly? That's not the point of the LLM, unlike the jpeg or database.)

And, again, look at the search snippets case - these were words produced by other people, directly transcribed, so open-and-shut from a certain point of view. But the decision went the other way.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-05-12 21:02:11+00:00
I don't think the author's troubles have anything to do with AI, other than making it harder to get an interview. He seems to get a few of those. I think the real problem he has is... well, the meaning of life, i.e. 42.

He's a 42 year old dude. Looking for a job in software? You gotta be joking. He says he can't clear the 25-year old Steve-Jobs complex SV bro mini-boss. Well, duh.

That's the industry. It sucks you up and it spits you out. It vampires the best years of your life and then you're on your own.

Sorry that the author had to find out, but I think I've seen that coming from the day I was first employed as a junior engineer. I just averaged up the ages of my colleagues and it was blindingly obvious how things turn out in the long run.

Nor "AI" as in "Artificial Intelligence", but "AI" as in "Ageist Industry".

P.S. Look on the bright side: at least you're not a 42 year old woman looking for software jobs. Hah.
by ljm | 2025-05-12 21:02:48+00:00
Maybe because other brutalist estates in London aren’t nearly as well kept or, uh, wealthy, than the Barbican is. And perhaps it’s uncommon to wander through such estates when you don’t live in them.

The old Robin Hood Gardens before they were demolished were quite unwelcoming, looking from the outside. You wouldn’t go anywhere near those kind of estates unless you were a resident, and you’d have a very different impression as someone who saw what it was like internally.
by skolskoly | 2025-05-12 21:03:31+00:00
Any live band performing a song is subject to mechanical licensing as much as a recording artist. Typically the venue pays it, just like how radio stations pay royalties. This system exists because historically, that's how music reproduction worked. You hire some musicians to play the music you want to hear. Copyright applied to the score, the lyrics, and so on. The 'mechanical' rights had to come later, because recording hadn't been invented yet!
by empath75 | 2025-05-12 21:03:53+00:00
I think people might under appreciate how easy LSD was to get in the US in the 90s and early 2000s.

I was living in a fairly boring suburb, and was a complete nerd and had access to as much LSD as I wanted at less than $5 a hit when I was in high school in the mid 90s, and it continued to be easy to find well into the early 2000s.
by nmgycombinator | 2025-05-12 21:04:23+00:00
I mean, at that point and app could just put up a fake prompt using the UI framework. And I think users would be more hesitant to type a full password than just click a button. But if you're talking about a bug similar to mine where an attacker could use the OS's own code against it and make it show a prompt with misleading content, you might be able to report it to Apple Product Security and maybe get a bounty.
by demosito666 | 2025-05-12 21:04:43+00:00
We’re talking about about 3-4x difference in net income here. No amount of accounting for public transport, heathcare, clean air, smiling faces, lqbtq rights and nice architecture will offset this difference unless we assume that those things are almost all that matters and money is for greedy capitalists. Yes, on the fringes you are probably better off in Europe on average, but this discussion is about highly qualified relatively young people, not about first generation refugees from Eritrea.
by cousin_it | 2025-05-12 21:05:30+00:00
> In particular, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, home equity was a very real way for middle-class Americans to accumulate family wealth, and expanding access to that at least had potential for positive impact.

This sounds suspicious to me. "Let's give people loans to buy houses and see their equity rise because we're giving more people loans to buy houses which raises the price." I think even with the best financial engineering, this scheme is basically trying to get something for nothing. There's no perpetual motion machine, and there's no way to make people wealthier by lending them money. Unless the money gets used to increase productivity - but in this case it doesn't, a homeowner doesn't have higher productivity than a renter, so that's a no go.
by ModernMech | 2025-05-12 21:05:50+00:00
It's true that most grant money goes to go to the largest projects, and the largest projects are run by the most well-connected people with the most established research agendas.

But that doesn't mean there isn't money for new researchers who are challenging the establishment. New faculty are afforded a startup package which these days can be in the millions if the research agenda is solid and ambitious.

For those "tech geniuses" who can't get funding, their proposals usually (IME) go like this:

Do you have any experience leading a large research project of the scale you're proposing -- I was a research assistant once, does that count? Have you ever managed a budget this large? -- I've never seen that much money in my life, no. What kind of team are you putting together to accomplish this? -- Doing it all myself What are the risks of failure and how will you mitigate them? -- No risks, I've already accounted for them all with my perfect plan. Why is your method better than the ones in the literature? -- Those idea are old. My ideas are new and clearly better. How will your research benefit society? -- Just read the title again, it's self evident. How will your research benefit your community? -- Why do I even have to articulate this?? What's your long-term funding strategy? -- I figured you'd give me all the money I need, forever.

Funding decision: denied

But when you ask them, they'll tell you: "I wasn't funded because they're a bunch of old geezers who didn't appreciate my genius!"
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-12 21:06:15+00:00
> In 1983, people lamented that one had to use a “credit” card at Burger King. On some level, payments and credit are on the same spectrum of value transfer.

The key difference is that for the vast majority of people who pay with a credit card at BK it's for the sake of convenience and sometimes the incentive of credit card points, rather than because they have no money in their account to buy a burger.

There is nothing "convenient" about paying for a $12 meal in $4 installments, plus you don't have the points incentive of a credit card, so it's highly unlikely that people who do have a CC and can afford to pay for a burger now will go that route.

That leaves only those people who have so little money that they cannot afford a burger now but they hope to afford it in X time (presumably after their next paycheck). And from that perspective Door Dash x Klarna is preying on the poorest and must vulnerable in society who probably shouldn't be using Door Dash in the first place (more expensive than the food itself), or risk accruing interest if they don't make those 4 payments (Klarna is not a charity).
by MaxBarraclough | 2025-05-12 21:06:16+00:00
> Everything in C is just array of bytes, some would argue uint32_t is just array of 4 bytes

That isn't how the C language is defined. The alignment rules may differ between those two types. Consider also the need for the union trick to portably implement type-punning in C. Also, the C standard permits for CHAR_BIT to equal 32, so in C's understanding of a 'byte', the uint32_t type might in principle correspond to just a single byte, in some exotic (but C compliant) platform.

No doubt there are other subtleties besides.
by nmgycombinator | 2025-05-12 21:07:04+00:00
Yeah. I'm guessing there must be some legitimate (internal?) use cases for the behavior I found and they spent all that time working out the kinks to allow those edge cases while also not allowing malicious ones. Or perhaps it wasn't as high on their priority list as it required a higher level of user interaction (the user had to click "Allow"). In any case, though, I do believe that a year is a shockingly long time for them to take.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-12 21:07:58+00:00
Bureaucracy is the cost of human laziness...

I mean, do you trust that the chemical industry will self regulate and keep dangerous chemicals out of your drinking water?

Then why do we trust software companies to keep you and your data safe?

We will get more regulations over time no matter how much we complain about it because people are rather lazy at the end of the day and more money for less work is a powerful motivator.
by davsti4 | 2025-05-12 21:08:10+00:00
Trying to register and I get this in the browser console:

Access to fetch at 'https://api.lumoar.com/v1/auth/register' from origin 'https://www.lumoar.com' has been blocked by CORS policy: The value of the 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header in the response must not be the wildcard '*' when the request's credentials mode is 'include'.
by csa | 2025-05-12 21:08:23+00:00
> I have no interest in working for $60k for the rest of my life.

I’m not sure where you live, but folks in the trades in CA move beyond $60k fairly quickly.

I realize that is partially because of CA, where full time fast food folks make $40k a year minimum, but many of the folks in trades that I know have really nice houses and cars.
by nmgycombinator | 2025-05-12 21:10:20+00:00
I guess that's a fair point. It cuts both ways, but given that so many people use Slack as opposed to talking, the exact words people used and when are could be open to view. Whereas, before all of this, you may only just have the minutes of any official meetings. Any side chatter not in the meeting room and/or exact phrasings would be lost to time.
by hdivider | 2025-05-12 21:12:11+00:00
If so, yes indeed, fair point by him/her. It's up to ordinary folks like us to push against unfair tech transfer because yes, federal labs and research institutions would otherwise provide the incumbents an extreme advantage.

Having been in this world though, I didn't see a reluctance in federal labs to work with capable entrepreneurs with companies at any level of scale. From startup to OpenAI to defense primes, they're open to all. So part of the challenge here is simply engaging capable entrepreneurs to go license tech from federal labs, and go create competitors for the greedy VC-funded or defense prime incumbents.
by const_cast | 2025-05-12 21:12:15+00:00
There's nothing special about the US government that makes it uniquely shit.

The difference here is that we have people like yourself: those who have zero faith in our government and as such act as double agents or saboteurs. When people such as yourself gain power in the legislator they "starve the beast". Meaning, purposefully deconstruct sections of our government such that they have justification for their ideological belief that our government doesn't work.

You guys work backwards. The foregone conclusion is that government programs never work, and then you develop convoluted strategies to prove that.
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-12 21:12:30+00:00
The problem isn’t naming them, the problem is you shifting goal posts by saying “major”. Which could just as easily exclude the amenities at the Barbican too, given “major” is an entirely subjective term.

Also I never claimed 15 minutes by foot. And given how good public transport is in London, it’s a silly argument for you to make that we can only talk about out walking somewhere.

Plus even if we were just talking about walking, as myself and others have pointed out to you, half an hour isn’t far to walk in central London. Londoners do it all the time.

There really isn’t any need for you to be taking such an aggressive tone here.
by wyager | 2025-05-12 21:12:41+00:00
I often find them handy for locking down admissible states at compile time. Maybe ~10 years ago in a processor design class, I wrote some CPUs in Haskell/Clash for FPGA usage. A nice thing I could do was write a single top-level instruction set, but then lock down the instructions based on what stages of the processor they could exist at.

For example, something like (not an actual example from my code, just conceptually - may be misremembering details):

data Instruction stages where MovLit :: Word64 -> Register -> Instruction '[Fetch, Decode, Execute, Writeback] -- MovReg instruction gets rewritten to MovLit in Execute stage MovReg :: Register -> Register -> Instruction '[Fetch, Decode, Execute] ...

And then my CPU's writeback handler block could be something like:

writeback :: (Writeback `member` stages) => Instruction stages -> WritebackState -> WritebackState writeback (MovLit v reg) = ... -- Compiler knows (MovReg _ _) is not required here

So you can use the type parameters to impose constraints on the allowed values, and the compiler is smart enough to use this data during exhaustiveness checks (cf "GADTs Meet Their Match")
by Terr_ | 2025-05-12 21:12:42+00:00
> Decades ago I read that at some point each feudal lord coined his own currency for his peasants. If a peasant escaped, he wouldn't have means to take anything with him.

A modern echo of this: Several times in the gloomy AM hours, I have worried what might happen if the current US administration tries to impose capital controls [0] like China. You might flee to Canada, only to find out that most/all of your life savings are forfeit to the tender mercies of the US government.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/investors-could-exit-tari...
by unsupp0rted | 2025-05-12 21:12:51+00:00
Or a non-normie. Even while logged in, I had no idea what ChatGPT model it was using, since it doesn't label it. All the label says is "great for everyday tasks".

And as a non-normie, I obviously didn't take its analysis seriously, and compared it to Grok and Gemini 2.5. The latter was the best.
Show HN: Understand your current page at a glance – chrome extension
by samiezkay | 2025-05-12 21:13:01+00:00
Overview helps you comprehend any webpage or website quickly, especially those with many pages or a lot of text content e.g. wikipedia page, blog article, documentation page etc.

It shows the summary, highlights, keywords, FAQs, primary actions you can take and more.

Make sense of any page/site in 1 click!
by nmgycombinator | 2025-05-12 21:13:04+00:00
> The day Apple prevents users from giving sudo access to a third-app app is when the Mac fully becomes a walled garden, and you can expect pages of HN complaints.

I can see this happening, but it probably won't anytime soon. macOS is still open enough, and with the assumption that sometimes processes need root (see third-party Launch Daemons).

It would probably break quite a lot. But I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually gradually move macOS in that direction.
by Suppafly | 2025-05-12 21:13:18+00:00
>The person making the argument is capable of distinguishing the two things, they just performatively choose not to do so.

I think that sort of assumption of insincerity is worse than what you're accusing them of. You might not like their argument, but it's not inherently incorrect for them to argue that because humans have the right to do something, humans have the right to use tools to do that something and humans have the right to group together and use those tools to do something at a large scale.
by dang | 2025-05-12 21:13:56+00:00
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why that last bit? Generic tangents supplant narrower/specific topics with broader/generic ones that people tend to already have opinions about, which they are eager to repeat. Because of this, generic tangents—especially on divisive/indignant topics—end up having two bad effects: (1) they take over the conversation, and (2) they are repetitive.

It's similar to how weeds take over a garden. We want a garden of unusual, interesting plants, not the most common ones that take over everywhere if allowed to.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by liotier | 2025-05-12 21:14:35+00:00
I used to operate a home network all enterprisey and public Internetish, with VLAN, inter-VLAN routing & firewalling, a public IPv4 on the outside of an OPNsense router, and a Hurricane Electric free public /48 block (through their tunnel service) so that every node has at least one public IP... I ditched it all - I now operate a flat LAN with the ISP's standard box - and Tailscale everywhere. The only major functional difference is that services hosted on the LAN require an external reverse proxy (which I run on a free Oracle Cloud Ampere host)...

As a bonus, my family can call the ISP's tech support if anything dysfunction while I'm traveling: my self-hosting crap is perfectly independent from the ISP's standard service. And wait, there's more - I can add services anywhere, such as a backup server at my parent's, regardless of their configuration and with no impact.

So yes, Tailscale all the things... I'm nostalgic for the IPv6 flat end-to-end dream but, in our world of ubiquitous IPv4 NAT horrors, Tailscale functionally surpasses it.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-12 21:15:16+00:00
>What I'm saying is that regulation puts in guardrails that don't actually do anything to protect your data.

Right, and when you go to the grocery store you catch listeria every time? Oh wait, food handling is rather safe because of well enforced regulation.

The problem with libertarians is they don't think of the wide spread public effects of their behaviors. Trash piles up outside their house and suddenly bears are eating the neighbors.
by mikepurvis | 2025-05-12 21:15:21+00:00
Overall I’m a fan of the projection model, and I definitely see the benefit in longevity as well as the ability for older vehicles to get a retrofit head unit that adds in the projection interface.

My reflection was only that I was surprised at how well the built in apps worked when I tried them… but I definitely take it on board that it’s unlikely to still work this well 5, 10, or 15 years from now, so it’s important that the car still has projection available as a fallback.
by threeseed | 2025-05-12 21:15:28+00:00
I've used GPU based Spark SQL for many years now and it sounds flashy but it's not going to make a meaningful difference for most use cases.

As you say the issue is that you have an overall process to optimise from getting the data off slow GCS onto the nodes, shuffling it which often then writes it to a slow disk before the real processing even starts then writing back to a slow GCS.
by const_cast | 2025-05-12 21:15:49+00:00
It's not about the tool, how you use it, or even how it works. It's about the end result.

I can go through and manually compress "Revenge of the Sith" and then post it online. Or, I can use a compression program like handbrake. Regardless, it is copyright infringement.

Can AI reproduce almost* the same things that exist in it's training data? Sometimes, so sometimes it's copyright infringement. Doesn't help that it's explicitly for-profit and seeks to obsolesce and siphon value from it's training material.
by program_whiz | 2025-05-12 21:16:36+00:00
In my reading of the paper, I don't feel this is really like biological / spiking networks at all. They keep a running history of inputs and use multi-headed attention to form an internal model of how the past "pre-synaptic" inputs factor into the current output (post-synaptic). this is just like a modified transformer (keep history of inputs, use attention on them to form an output).

Then the "synchronization" is just using an inner product of all the post activations (stored in a large ever-growing list and using subsampling for performance reasons).

But its still being optimized by gradient descent, except the time step at which the loss is applied is chosen to be the time step with minimum loss, or minimum uncertainty (uncertainty being described by the data entropy of the output term).

I'm not sure where people are reading that this is in any way similar to spiking neuron models with time simulation (time is just the number of steps the data is cycled through the system, similar to diffusion model or how LLM processes tokens recursively).

The "neuron synchronization" is also a bit different from how its meant in biological terms. Its using an inner product of the output terms (producing a square matrix), which is then projected into the output space/dimensions. I suppose this produces "synchronization" in the sense that to produce the right answer, different outputs that are being multiplied together must produce the right value on the right timestep. It feels a bit like introducing sparsity (where the nature of combining many outputs into a larger matrix makes their combination more important than the individual values). The fact that they must correctly combine on each time step is what they are calling "synchronization".

Techniques like this are the basic the mechanism underlying attention (produce one or more outputs from multiple subsystems, dot product to combine).
by aetherspawn | 2025-05-12 21:17:25+00:00
We use a production VCU hardware with custom software. It currently supports most of the VCU functions you would find in a production vehicle, including in-built CCS2 and NACS charging on the single controller (wires directly to socket).

We’ve put customised versions of our product in a few commercial vehicles, mainly retrofits. Our backstory is that we’ve been consulting in custom E2E vehicle controls for a long time and now we’re productising for better scalability of our expert team (capturing expertise in product so we can eventually take a step back).

Currently doing an angel/seed round: looking to raise US$ 250K. Very close to profitability due to low burn rate and having a lot of existing IP, so not planning to do any subsequent round like Series A. We think it could grow into a $50m company with low headcount in the style of Airbnb. Based in Australia.
by DownrightNifty | 2025-05-12 21:17:48+00:00
True, it's far from ideal, and not entirely without Apple's approval. You need an Apple ID, to accept Apple's EULA (which probably forbids such activities), to accept the risk of your Apple ID being banned [1], to accept the risk of Apple breaking things (intentionally or not), and to continue asking Apple's server for new signatures every week into the foreseeable future.

Still better than nothing, for those already fully immersed in the Apple ecosystem, with no hope of escape? (I still use and recommend Android, but I have a spare iPad to play around with, so I enjoy seeing stuff like this come out.)

[1] They recommend using a secondary Apple ID, which eliminates most of the risk: https://swiftpackageindex.com/xtool-org/xtool/1.10.1/documen...
by rs186 | 2025-05-12 21:18:15+00:00
There is a point to your comment, but I am afraid you are shouting at the wrong thing.

Instead, I think this is the fair approach: anyone is free to make a website/app/VR world whatever, but if it stores any kind of PII, you had better know what you are doing. The problem is not security. The problem is PII. If someone's AWS key got hacked, leaked and used by others, well it's bad, but that's different from my personal information getting leaked and someone applying for a credit card on my behalf.