MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vessenes | 2025-05-12 16:21:31+00:00
> Let's make this clear; genAI is not a copyright issue by itself. However, gen AI becomes an issue when you are using as your source stuff you don't have the copyright or license to. So context here is important. If you see people jumping to copyright violation, it's not out of reading alone.

My proposal is that it's a luddish kneejerk reaction to things people don't understand and don't like. They sense and fear change. For instance here you say it's an issue when AI uses something as a source that you don't have Copyright to. Allow me to update your sentence: "Every paper every scientist or academic wrote that references any copyrighted work becomes an issue". What you said just isn't true. The copyright refers to the right to copy a work.

Distribution: Sure. License your content however you want. That said, in the US a license prohibiting you from READING something just wouldn't be possible. You can limit distribution, copying, etc. This is how journalists can write about sneak previews or leaked information or misfiled court documents released when they should be under seal. The leaking <-- the distribution might violate a contract or a license, but the reading thereof is really not a thing that US law or Common law think they have a right to control, except in the case of the state classifying secrets. As well, here we have people saying "my song in 1983 that I put out on the radio, I don't want AI listening to that song." Did your license in 1983 prohibit computers from processing your song? Does that mean digital radio can't send it out? Essentially that ship has sailed, full stop, without new legislation.

On my last points, I think you're missing my point, Fan fiction is legal if you're not trying to profit from it. It is almost impossible to perfectly copy a painting, although some people are pretty good at it. I think it's perfectly legal to paint a super close copy of say Starry Night, and sell it as "Starry night by Jason Lotito." In any event, the discourse right now claims its wrong for AI to look at and learn from paintings and photographs.
by pmontra | 2025-05-12 16:21:46+00:00
You scale Rails by adding servers (or containers) behind a load balancer and by scaling up the database server in the same ways you would do it for another server technology, including Phoenix.

By the way, I've seen many more Rails projects than Phoenix ones but they share the same general architecture: (server or containers) + db. The only difference is that we usually run Ruby jobs inside sidekiq and we use Tasks or GenServers for Elixir jobs. We wrote our own code to restart and try again jobs that eventually failed (we can't lose a job because of a deploy or a reboot.)
by palmotea | 2025-05-12 16:22:03+00:00
> Yes, and then the response would be, "what have you done, we now need to pass laws about oxygen consumption where before we didn't".

Except in this case, we already have the equivalent of "laws about oxygen consumption": copyright.

> Intellectual property rights were questionable from the start and only got worse; they've been barely keeping up with digital media in the past couple decades, and they're entirely ill-equipped to deal with generative AI.

The laws are not "entirely ill-equipped to deal with generative AI," unless your interests lie in breaking them. All the hand-waving about the laws being "questionable" and "entirely ill-equipped" is just noise.

Under current law OpenAI, Google, etc. have no right to cheap training data, because someone made that data and may have the reasonable interest in getting paid for their efforts. Like all businesses, those companies would ideally like the law to be unfairly biased towards them: to protect them when they charge as much as they can, but not protect anyone else so they can pay as little as possible.
by bhouston | 2025-05-12 16:22:13+00:00
You need to take the minimum of the two SDF fields in the surrounding region (up to the global context if you need to) if you want it to maintain an SDF. The minimum of two SDFs is always a new SDF.

My suspicion is that the new plane isn't an SDF anymore, that is why you are getting artifacts or your ray marcher has problems with large scope angles, or something.
by JohnFen | 2025-05-12 16:22:25+00:00
> If we're not pushing every NIMBY in the state into a clinical depression, we're not trying hard enough.

Measuring success based on how much you're torturing your political opponents is a serious mistake that will lead you to doing things that aren't actually solving anything. Instead, it will lead you to do things based on whether or not it upsets people you don't like regardless of whether or not those things are actually advancing your agenda.

Better is to measure success based on whether or not you see an improvement to the problem you're addressing.
by ljm | 2025-05-12 16:22:41+00:00
In a way, Rails is the OG for rapid application development considering its influence and impact on tech startups over the 2010s.

These days you'd build a blog in 20 minutes by vibe coding it in Cursor and deploying it on to some serverless edge compute platform or something.

Almost 20 years ago you'd build a blog in 20 minutes by installing rails and running a few commands on the terminal to generate the UI, backend, DB schema/migrations and all that, and then `git push heroku master` to see it deployed on the web. Quickly enough you'd git gud and wouldn't need to lean on the scaffolding tools.

At least in London there's still a pretty strong market for it, and the overlap in syntax between Ruby and Elixir is enough that you could take your pick (the Elixir shops I know of will look for experienced Ruby engineers by default because the pool of Elixir engineers is much smaller).
by bradfitz | 2025-05-12 16:22:51+00:00
I'm largely responsible for this, so I'll try to answer.

Technically it's not NAT64 today. Different prefix for one, but it's also not translated at the IP layer (yet). For TCP, we terminate the TCP in tailscaled and make a new TCP connection out and switch them together, so packets are not 1:1 end-to-end.

We also had grander plans for the 32 "site-id" bits in the middle there. Instead of just a 8-bit (now 16-bit) "site ID" number in there, you could actually put the 32-bit CGNAT IPv4 address of any peer of yours, and then access its IPv4 space relative to that node, without any configuration.

Say you have an Apple TV plugged in at home.

Then you're at a coffee shop and want to access something on your LAN and don't have a subnet router set up.

You should be able to `ssh 10-0-0-5-via-appletv.foo-bar.ts.net` and have MagicDNS map that "appletv" as the "Site ID" and put its 32-bit CGNAT address in, and then parse out the 10.0.0.5 as the lower 32-bits, and then have Tailscale route your packets via your home Apple TV node.

All subject to ACLs, of course, but we could make it a default or easy-to-enable recommended default that you could do such things as an admin for your self-owned devices.

So why it's called "4via6"? That was just kinda a temporary internal name that ended up leaking out to docs/KB and now a blog post, apparently. :)
by ahazred8ta | 2025-05-12 16:22:54+00:00
There have been several bacteria-eats-stuff novels. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/260552/novel-that-...

This was the basis for Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters (1971 novel), which was adapted from an episode of Doomwatch (1970 UK TV), which was inspired by the fighter jet crash scene in The Andromeda Strain (1969 novel), where the organism ate through a plastic hose. There was another UK show where a fungus destroyed all the paper.

In the present article, the problem is that dissolvable sutures are made out of biodegradable polycaprolactone, and there's a Pseudomonas biofilm that can grow on polycaprolactone, so it's an infection problem.
by caconym_ | 2025-05-12 16:23:47+00:00
If it was as obvious as you claim, the legal issues would already be settled, and your characterization of what LLMs are doing as "reading and summarizing" is hilariously disingenuous and ignores essentially the entire substance of the debate (which is happening not just on internet forums but in real courts, where real legal professionals and scholars are grappling with how to fit AI into our framework of existing copyright law, e.g.^[1]).

Of course, if you start your thought by dismissing anybody who doesn't share your position as not sane, it's easy to see how you could fail to capture any of that.

^[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/judge-on-metas-a...
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-12 16:23:53+00:00
The authors wrote a reply to that comment

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.12326

I think about how some relativists think you could see a Hawking Radiation like effect if you're accelerating

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

although the idealized case of endless acceleration implies a certain kind of horizon

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

maybe the horizon doesn't matter much,.
by azemetre | 2025-05-12 16:24:09+00:00
Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security are all three programs that have massive approval from US citizens.

Even saying the military is a dumpster fire isn't accurate. The military has led trillions of dollars worth of extraction for the wealthy and elite across the globe.

In no sane world can you say that the ability to protect GLOBAL shipping lanes as a failure. That one service alone has probably paid for itself thousands of times.

We aren't even talking about things like public education (high school education use to be privatized and something only the elites enjoyed 100 years ago; yes public high school education isn't even 100 years old) or libraries or public parks.

---

I really don't understand this "gobermint iz bad" meme you see in tech circles.

I get more out of my taxes compared to equivalent corporate bills that it's laughable.

Government is comprised of people and the last 50 years has been the government mostly giving money and establishing programs to the small cohorts that have been hoarding all the wealth. Somehow this is never an issue with the government however.

Also never understand the arguments from these types either because if you think the government is bad then you should want it to be better. Better mostly meaning having more money to redistribute and more personal to run programs, but it's never about these things. It's always attacking the government to make it worse at the expense of the people.
by lolinder | 2025-05-12 16:24:56+00:00
I think that the open source community is too quick to make "just fork it later" the answer to all our governance woes.

Look at the state of WordPress: the (B?)DFL actively bans people from the community for critiquing his self-described "nuclear war" waged against his biggest competitor in the hosting space, which "nuclear war" has caught thousands of members of the community in the crossfire. And yet we see no fork. Why? Because forking is hard and fragments the community, so people would rather put up with a tyrant than deal with the risk of instability. This is no different than tyrants in any other environment.

If a project has good governance established from the beginning, including a reasonably democratic process for contributors to elect the executive function, then the community can be reasonably sure that they won't feel the need to fork in the future because they have recourse if things go sour.
by 93po | 2025-05-12 16:24:58+00:00
Copyright isn't about distribution, it's about creation. In reality the chances of getting in trouble is basically zero if you don't distribute it - who would know? But technically any creation, even in private, is violating copyright. Doesn't matter if you make money or put it on the internet.

There is fair use, but fair is an affirmative defense to infringing copyright. By claiming fair use you are simultaneously admitting infringement. The idea that you have to defend your own private expression of ideas based on other ideas is still wrong in my view.
by jabl | 2025-05-12 16:25:12+00:00
> By priority to the right do you mean a French style priorité a droite? Or American style stop sign priorities?

I mean

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

That is, unless there are other signs overriding it (like yield or stop signs), you must yield to someone coming from the right in an intersection.

> And they drive on the left, so priority to the right makes no sense.

Not sure that matters. The important thing is to have a consistent rule that everyone can follow. Whether the rule is to yield to the right or left doesn't per se matter, nor does it depend on which side of the road you drive on.
by rkp8000 | 2025-05-12 16:25:17+00:00
A (non-exhaustive) list of some notable papers:

Maass 2002, Real-time computing without stable states: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12433288/

Sussillo & Abbott 2009, Generating Coherent Patterns of Activity from Chaotic Neural Networks https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2756108/

Abbott et al 2016, Building functional networks of spiking model neurons https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26906501/

Zenke & Ganguli 2018, SuperSpike: Supervised Learning in Multilayer Spiking Neural Networks https://ganguli-gang.stanford.edu/pdf/17.superspike.pdf

Bellec et al 2020, A solution to the learning dilemma for recurrent networks of spiking neurons https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17236-y

Payeur et al 2021, Burst-dependent synaptic plasticity can coordinate learning in hierarchical circuits https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-021-00857-x

Cimesa et al 2023, Geometry of population activity in spiking networks with low-rank structure https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Ororbia 2024, Contrastive signal–dependent plasticity: Self-supervised learning in spiking neural circuits https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn6076 Kudithipudi et al 2025, Neuromorphic computing at scale (review) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08253-8
by usrbinenv | 2025-05-12 16:25:28+00:00
Wrapping `Record` in `Foobar` or `BazQux` is just not a good pattern, even if it's common place and is included in current guidelines. Most of the time, you don't have gems that would use the same class and thus would rather not type a long name-spaced name every time you want to use `Record`. But when you do have gems with conflicting classes, you'd have the power to wrap one of them or both in a short namespace identifier and be in charge of the naming. Using modules for wrapping is a pattern currently, but modules should primarily be used for mixins, not name-spacing.
by psunavy03 | 2025-05-12 16:25:47+00:00
I won't dispute that fission power has enormous capital costs. But how much of its alleged "failure" has been the utter FUD that's been pushed for the past 50+ years about how we'd all be glowing if nuclear power was widespread?

I mean sure, waste disposal is a serious issue that deserves serious consideration. But fission waste contaminates a discrete area. Fossil fuels at scale cause climate change that contaminates the entire freaking planet. It's a travesty we haven't had a nuclearized grid for 20-30 years at this point.
by kristopolous | 2025-05-12 16:26:25+00:00
I also realized this morning that shell-hook is good enough to typo correct. I have that turned on at the shell level (setopt correct) but sometimes it doesn't work like here

git cloen blahalalhah

I did a ctrl+x x and it fixed it. I'm using openrouter/google/gemma-3-27b-it:free via chutes. Not a frontier model in the slightest.
by Bjorkbat | 2025-05-12 16:26:48+00:00
I broadly agree in that sure, unfettered access to copyrighted material will AI more capable, but more capable of what exactly?

For national security reasons I'm perfectly fine with giving LLMs unfettered access to various academic publications, scientific and technical information, that sort of thing. I'm a little more on the fence about proprietary code, but I have a hard time believing there isn't enough code out there already for LLMs to ingest.

Otherwise though, what is an LLM with unfettered access to copyrighted material better at vs one that merely has unfettered access to scientific / technical information + licensed copyrighted material? I would suppose that besides maybe being a more creative writer, the other LLM is far more capable of reproducing copyrighted works.

In effect, the other LLM is a more capable plagiarism machine compared to the other, and not necessarily more intelligent, and otherwise doesn't really add any more value. What do we have to gain from condoning it?

I think the argument I'm making is a little easier to see in the case of image and video models. The model that has unfettered access to copyrighted material is more capable, sure, but more capable of what? Capable of making images? Capable of reproducing Mario and Luigi in an infinite number of funny scenarios? What do we have to gain from that? What reason do we have for not banning such models outright? Not like we're really missing out on any critical security or economic advantages here.
by eli_gottlieb | 2025-05-12 16:27:08+00:00
> Sure, licensing information theory is a bit of a stretch, but Shannon literally built one of the first artificial intelligence machines [1]. 2025 Shannon would've been totally fine building his own company.

That almost seems like a problem! We shouldn't reward a prospective Claude Shannon for moving away from fundamental breakthroughs in favor of applied research that can go into a product. We're really failing to incentivize discovering fundamentals like information theory.
by dpedu | 2025-05-12 16:27:11+00:00
While interesting, I feel like this would be difficult or at least feel extremely weird to ride. When you steer on a 2-wheeled bicycle, you countersteer, which is pushing the wheel left in order to go right, or vice-versa. But this has a steering wheel that I assume works like a car, you turn the wheel left to go left. It would feel weird riding a bicycle while having to remember to steer like a car.
by wvenable | 2025-05-12 16:27:11+00:00
There's now an entire generation now that believes "Intellectual Property" is a real thing.

Instead of the understanding that copyrights and patents are temporary state-granted monopolies meant to benefit society they are instead framed as real perpetual property rights. This framing fuels support for draconian laws and obscures the real purpose of these laws: to promote innovation and knowledge sharing and not to create eternal corporate fiefdoms.
by lupusreal | 2025-05-12 16:27:13+00:00
True. Launch loops are "just" an engineering problem which could be built with known materials but in reality the engineering problems are so huge it's hardly any better than space elevators which call for undiscovered materials.

You also have the associated economic problems; the up-front cost of a launch loop would be so huge that you could never convince anybody to build it instead of using rockets. Fusion has the same problem; even if you can design a fusion power plant that produces net power, it needs to produce net power by a massive margin to have any chance of being economically competitive with fission let alone solar.
by lolinder | 2025-05-12 16:28:45+00:00
Where is the WordPress fork?

There is none because forking the code doesn't automatically bring the community along with you, and so no one wants to risk the instability that would inevitably come from forking. When a project needs a fork it usually much more closely resembles a civil war than it does a succession, and the whole system becomes weaker because of it.

Why would we start with a model that we know will permanently weaken our community when we inevitably need to trigger a succession?
by 0xEF | 2025-05-12 16:28:50+00:00
I'm not sure where you grew up, but in the US we had a kid's toy called a Big Wheel which your feet had to turn with when you turned the handlebars. It was wildly awkward, terribly designed, but we got really good at it, anyway. The pedals would even scrape concrete on turns often enough to wear them down.
by lordfrito | 2025-05-12 16:28:51+00:00
I meant to say distribution costs not transmission. Looking at last months bill I paid $66.60 to deliver $51.76 of energy (about 56% of my total bill was delivery). The raw distribution charge alone was $49.32 or 42% of the bill. I'm not alone in these numbers, but your mileage may vary.

My point is that the infrastructure related to the delivery of energy to a physical location is a non trivial part of an energy bill, and that this part doesn't go away magically because "fusion".
by jMyles | 2025-05-12 16:29:19+00:00
Agreed.

The problem(s) of scale are not only those of scaling up, but also scaling down.

One of the best and most unsung benefits of solar is that it is profoundly easy and intuitive to build a very small (ie, vehicle- or house-sized) grid.

In an increasingly decentralized and stateless world, it makes sense to look for these qualities in an energy source.
by 93po | 2025-05-12 16:29:24+00:00
I will also add: there are tons of examples of companies taking down not for profit fanction or fan creation of stuff. Nintendo is very aggressive about this. The publisher of Harry Potter has also aggressively taken down not for profit fanfiction.

> If we allow AI companies to train LLMs on copyrighted works without paying for that access, we are choosing to reward these companies instead of the humans who created the data upon which these companies are utterly reliant for said LLMs.

It's interesting how much parallel there is here to the idea that company owners reap the rewards of their employee's labor when doing no additional work themselves. The fruits of labors should go to the individuals who labor, I 100% agree.
by renesultan | 2025-05-12 16:30:00+00:00
Had meetings with a ton of MCP-server providers, no one came close to Airweave’s retrieval accuracy. I even tried Zapier and similar large companies, didn’t come near airweave. Highly highly recommend if you need third party integrations to your AI agents or workflows. Love the team too, cracked, cool, kind, and always there to support their customers (they even took one of their customers dog on a walk when they couldn’t lol)
by jackonawalk | 2025-05-12 16:30:10+00:00
Hey HN, Jack, Grapple cofounder, here. I started Grapple 2 years ago because I had _had_ enough of expensive and complicated data tools. Looker costs six figures, no one can use it, and the data team is still manually sending reports. There's gotta be a better way. Grapple is a new kind of data stack built for non-technical operators to model and analyze business data directly. No more ETLs, warehouses, models, or data notebooks.
by rollcat | 2025-05-12 16:30:18+00:00
I think the only large projects that presently take SBOMs seriously are Nix, Guix, and Go (non-cgo). Bootstrapping is non-trivial, but at least builds are reproducible and can be compared against existing binaries.

"Oh, just write plain C". Which compiler do you mean? GCC? LLVM/clang? On top of what OS/kernel? What firmware? Etc.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-05-12 16:30:54+00:00
Lack of calories is not an issue in the USA. There are redundant pathways to get the staples people need, food banks, stamps, ect.

The few percent of the population that suffer insecurity do so as a symptom of other complex causes. Children of addicts and mentally unstable will struggle to get dinner, even if there is a food pantry down the block. A homeless schizophrenic living out of a backpack wont always have food with them.

For reasons like this, there is a floor to the practical floor to the elimination of hunger.

Also, if you havent, I would recommend reading through a food insecurity survey if you haven't. The definition is broader than most realize.

If you look at malnutrition rates in the US, I think you get a much clearer picture.