MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anoek | 2025-05-12 15:06:44+00:00
With the rise of things like AI agents wanting to run commands on my computer, I wanted a way to let them do that but in a safe environment. `sandbox` is a tool that utilizes built in Linux features like namespaces and OverlayFS to create essentially a container that looks and feels pretty much identical to my host machine, but any changes made are done in a staging area that I can later accept or reject changes from. There's also a crude network on/off toggle so if I'm running something I don't trust not to send data off to malicious actor, I can sandbox it without network access.

While my own use case primarily revolves around letting AI agents run amok in their own sandboxes, it's meant to be general purpose and I could see it being useful for some development tasks like testing file migrations or other file management tasks where you want to snapshot and discard frequently. Another use case I'll be using it for is to vet installing things from whatever trendy shell based installer that expects you to curl pipe a shell script into sudo bash, and in general running things I don't fully trust not to inadvertently mess something up on my computer.

This is the initial public release. I've been using it internally for a couple of months now and I think I have most of the serious issues squashed, but I'm sure there are some issues and many improvements to be made, feedback and bug reports are appreciated.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-05-12 15:06:52+00:00
I think you're missing the deeper point. Whether or not the Copyright Office intends to assert authorial essentialism, it's doing so in effect. And when metaphysical language about "creative essence" becomes encoded in policy and enforced by courts, it's not just metaphor. It's law.

Calling it "spirit of the law" doesn't let them off the hook. If you enshrine a metaphysics that treats human-authored works as ontologically distinct kinds of data, imbued with some persistent essence that radiates rights regardless of use, you're not interpreting the law, you're institutionalizing a theology of authorship.

And yes, I care less about their intentions than about the system they're building. That system is now enforcing metaphysical categories with legal teeth. That's the problem.
by gruez | 2025-05-12 15:07:05+00:00
>I'm not sure I understand your question. It's reasonably clear that transformers get caught reproducing material that they have no right to. The kind of thing that would potentially result in a lawsuit if you did it by hand.

Is that a problem with the tool, or the person using it? A photocopier can copy an entire book verbatim. Should that be illegal? Or is it the problem that the "training" process can produce a model that has the ability to reproduce copyrighted work? If so, what implication does that hold for human learning? Many people can recite an entire song's lyrics from scratch, and reproducing an entire song's lyrics verbatim is probably enough to be considered copyright infringement. Does that mean the process of a human listening to music counts as copyright infringement?
by KingOfCoders | 2025-05-12 15:07:23+00:00
"I'll leave it up to you to do your jobs"

Because the authors expect him to submit a patch when he stated that he is not a developer. That they expect him to reduce the build scripts when he can't do that. Pointing that out, the dev tells him, they don't expect him to be a developer, when some comments above they exactly did that. That is classic passive-aggressive behaviour.

The dev also writes on their page as the top item on what they do:

"fixing paper cuts for users, so all sorts of bugs;"
by micromacrofoot | 2025-05-12 15:07:27+00:00
We have quite a number of them, and they're all pretty good. Here's a sample of what the CFPB has created and/or enforces:

* Truth in Lending Act

* Fair Credit Reporting Act

* Fair Debt Collection Practices Act

* Equal Credit Opportunity Act

* Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act

* Home Mortgage Disclosure Act

* Consumer Financial Protection Act

The CFPB was one of the most effective agencies for consumers
by 27theo | 2025-05-12 15:07:49+00:00
It doesn't need them, it parses SBOMs and manifests from their ecosystems. I think you misunderstood this section of the README.

> Dependencies | SBOM / manifest parsing across npm, PyPI, Maven, Go, Ruby; flags unpinned, shadow, or non-registry deps.

The project seems like it only requires Python >= 3.9!
by margalabargala | 2025-05-12 15:07:51+00:00
I agree about the viability, but it's the BNPL providers that are left holding the bag here, not the merchants. If it appears to boost sales sufficiently that the 5% fee is worth it, then businesses will continue to offer BNPL as long as the BNPL checks don't bounce.

I suspect that at some point, the fact that BNPL usage tracks with bad credit will catch up to the BNPL providers and we will see some sort of shift to the status quo, either in terms of ease of getting a BNPL loan or the way BNPL treats their clients.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-12 15:07:56+00:00
Regarding finance: Sure, M&A + IPO makes the lion's share of money for an investment banking (IB) division, but this overlooks the markets division (trading). From 1995 to 2007, the year-on-year growth in profits was simply astonishing for FICC (fixed income, credit, commodities). Part of that growth was due to increased borrowing (and, hence, leverage), and part was an increase in investable dollars, chasing returns. IB needs hardly any tech, but markets needs endless amounts of it. Also, it is intentional that I didn't mention equities trading in my previous paragraph; it didn't become such a giant profit center for global investment banks until after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, due to new rules for risk limits.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-05-12 15:08:00+00:00
The problem isn't that no one wants to do it, its that the math doesn't work out.

If you have 6 figures of student loan debt just to get an optometry degree, you don't want to double or triple that to buy an established business. Your interest cost will eat any hope of profit.

For small businesses, its the same issue. A pottery shop or fabrication shop isn't really worth a lot more than a used kiln or set of tools, but I'm guessing that the owners want to be bought out for a lot more than they can sell their old stuff for. There is a serious mismatch going on. At the same time, the work itself is devalued. Fewer people are going to lay out $1k on a handmade dinnerware set from their local ceramics people when they can pay 1/3rd the price from an importer.
by Ukv | 2025-05-12 15:08:18+00:00
No hard data to back this up, but anecdotally I'd place the AI/copyright sentiment shift around mid-late 2022. DALL-E 2 experimentation (e.g: [0]) in early-mid 2022 seemed to just about sneak by unaffected, receiving similar positive/curious reception to previous trends (TalkToTransformer, ArtBreeder, GPT-3/AI Dungeon, etc.), but then Stable Diffusion bore the full brunt of "machine learning is theft" arguments.

[0]: https://x.com/xkcd/status/1552279517477183488
by throwup238 | 2025-05-12 15:08:23+00:00
I think “grey area” is the right way to think of carpenters and electricians and plumbers too.

You say that programmers need a lot of societal components but so does every one of those professions. Unless your kids are learning how to harvest and dry their own lumber along with classical carpentry with nothing but wood joints, they will need a massive supply chain for the lumber and fasteners - unless you expect them to hunt down bog iron and bootstrap all of civilization themselves. Same with plumbers who need PVC/copper/solder and a modern sewer/water system or septic tank. Or the electrician who needs copper wire and power infrastructure (or solar panels, which require semiconductor manufacturing). What good is an electrician without the power plants to feed their customers?

I like your approach but I can't help but feel that unless you’re going full apocalyptic prepper, the practical skills are an illusion.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-05-12 15:08:27+00:00
> In my observations, the average software engineer is more likely to be persnickety, caught up in small details, and obsessive than the average person. We're more likely to split hairs than most people would care to, and proper labeling and categorization is much more important to us than average person.

It sounds like a fancy way of saying that people on the spectrum are more likely to become software engineers than some other arbitrary person.
by jasonlotito | 2025-05-12 15:08:33+00:00
> But I don't understand how people jump to "Copyright Violation" for the fact of reading.

The article specificaly talks about the creation and distribution of a work. Creation and distribution of a work alone is not a copyright violation. However, if you take in input from something you don't own, and genAI outputs something, it could be considered a copyright violation.

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.

> "People should not be allowed to read the book I distributed online if I don't want them to."

This is already done. It's been done for decades. See any case where content is locked behind an account. Only select people can view the content. The license to use the site limits who or what can use things.

So it's odd you would use "insane" to describe this.

> "People should not be allowed to write Harry Potter fanfic in my writing style."

Yeah, fan fiction is generally not legal. However, there are some cases where fair use covers it. Most cases of fan fiction are allowed because the author allows it. But no, generally, fan fiction is illegal. This is well known in the fan fiction community. Obviously, if you don't distribute it, that's fine. But we aren't talking about non-distribution cases here.

> "People should not be allowed to get formal art training that involves going to museums and painting copies of famous paintings."

Same with fan fiction. If you replicate a copyrighted piece of art, if you distribute it, that's illegal. If you simply do it for practice, that's fine. But no, if you go around replicating a painting and distribute it, that's illegal.

Of course, technically speaking, none of this is what gen AI models are doing.

> We just will not get to a sensible societal place if the dialogue around these issues has such a low bar for understanding the mechanics

I agree. Personifying gen AI is useless. We should stick to the technical aspects of what it's doing, rather than trying to pretend it's doing human things when it's 100% not doing that in any capacity. I mean, that's fine for the the layman, but anyone with any ounce of technical skill knows that's not true.
by chasil | 2025-05-12 15:08:38+00:00
However, solar caused problems in Spain recently due to its lack of mechanical inertia, which brought their grid down due to frequency instability.

Fusion would use a conventional turbine with boiling water. Is this a better source of mechanical inertia than hydropower or fission?

Is there a better way to solve the problem of frequency instability?

Why is this fact downvoted? This article mentions "synthetic inertia;" what are its drawbacks?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-09/spain-bla...

https://archive.ph/VI32e
by yardie | 2025-05-12 15:08:54+00:00
My high school had something similar. Also in the 90s. The trade program was eventually disbanded. And the shop classes were converted to computer labs. In a similar vein, the nursing program is still going and very popular. You graduate with a CNA, 6 months to LPN, enough credits to get an AS.N in 1 year. A lot of my friends bought their first home before 25.
by buran77 | 2025-05-12 15:08:55+00:00
With any other disadvantaged/discriminated class (skin color, sexual orientation, gender, etc.), getting elected in power doesn't change the disadvantage. So the incentive is still there to fight for that equality.

This is not so when it comes to the poor. Once in power they are no longer poor so the incentive to fix any issue related to this almost entirely evaporates.
by jmyeet | 2025-05-12 15:09:05+00:00
Transmission is a really interesting problem that creates all kinds of distortions.

Say a house uses 10,000kWh per year at $0.10/kWH so $1000/year electrcitiy bill. Now say you get a solar system that produces 5,000kWh per year, focused in the summer months (where your power bill tends to be higher anyway). You may even export some of that power back to the grid. Have you cut your power bill in half? No. It's probably down ~20-25%.

Why? Because regardless of how much power you use (within limits) you still need a connection to the power grid and that needs to be maintained. You'll often even see this on the electricity bill: fixed charges like "access charge" per month.

We benefit from being on a connected grid. Your own power generation might be insufficient or need maintenance. It's inefficient if everyone is storing their own power. So it's unclaer what the future of the power grid is. Should there be large grids, small grids or no grid?
by r0nlt | 2025-05-12 15:10:00+00:00
Anything's possible. That part is mostly clickbait for marketing, but at the same time, I wasn't focused on that part too much, just a stat I saw while testing and used it to market. I'll probably explore the situation more down the road to see how sound the theory is, but overall, the framework has a solid foundation even if we were to take that part out.It was mostly the random noise though would be the simplest answer.
by alganet | 2025-05-12 15:10:35+00:00
Terms of service cannot override the law.

For example, lots of TOS make the works of users property of the platform owners. All of that can stop being relevant if that practice becomes illegal.

People consented to put their comments publicly, they didn't consented to feeding a machine that steals their ideas. One ruling establishing that the wording on the terms is not good enough, and all of that can fall.
by int_19h | 2025-05-12 15:10:48+00:00
I have also observed this with Gemini 2.5 in Cursor vs Windsurf.

Cline seems to be the best thing, I suspect because it doesn't do any dirty tricks with trimming down the context under the hood to keep the costs down. But for the same reason, it's not exactly fun to watch the token/$ counter ticking as it works.
by mjburgess | 2025-05-12 15:10:50+00:00
A counter-point, in a certain sense: when the conclusions of scientific papers (in these softer science fields), contradict common sense, they tend to be unreproducible; the ones which don't, are.

The problem with studying humans is, roughly, the central limit theorem doesnt work: properties of biological and social systems do not have well-behaved statistics. So all this t-test pseudoscience can be a great misdirection, and common sense more reliable.

In the case where effect sizes are small and the data generating process "chaotic", assumptions of the opposite can be more dangerous than giving up on science and adopting "circumstantial humility". (Consider eg., that common sense is very weakly correlated across its practicioners, but "science" forces often pathological correlations on how people are treated -- which can signficantly mangify the harm).
by infinite8s | 2025-05-12 15:11:07+00:00
Hi Don, do you know if this ever happened (I think it's from the 2007 email - but tough to say for sure given above formatting)?

> (BTW, Etoys is kind of an OO event-driven Logo (not an accident), and the next version of it has as a goal to be able to do Robot Odyssey in a reasonable way. This got delayed because of funding problems but we now have funding and are really going to do it this year. Want to help design and build it?)
by bell-cot | 2025-05-12 15:11:19+00:00
Yep.

But so long as there is a boatload of prestige and funding to be harnessed via fusion research, it'll be a Really Big Thing.

Centuries ago, an ambitious and clever alchemist could harness a fair quantity of those things via transmutation research. Vs. these days, we have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to transmute lead into gold. But somehow, there's no big talk about, or prestige in, or funding for scaling that process up to commercial viability.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-05-12 15:11:42+00:00
The law covers these cases pretty well, it is just that the law has very powerful extremely rich adversaries, whose greed has gotten the better of them again and again. They could use work released sufficiently long ago to be legally available, or they could take work released as creative commons, or they could run a lookup, to make sure to never output verbatim copies of input or outputs, that are within a certain string editing distance, depending on output length, or they could have paid people to reach out to all the people, whose work they are infringing upon. But they didn't do any of that, of course, because they think they are above the law.
by wizee | 2025-05-12 15:11:47+00:00
Is reading and memorizing a copyrighted text a breach of copyright? I.e. is creating a copy of the text in your mind a breach of copyright or fair fair use? Is it a breach of copyright if a digital “mind” similarly memorizes copyrighted text? Or is it only a breach of copyright to output and publish that memorized text?

What about loosely memorizing the gist of a copyrighted text. Is that a breach or fair use? What if a machine does something similar?

This falls under a rather murky area of the law that is not well defined.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-12 15:11:48+00:00
I think a bigger question is what will they do for that long?

All the things like stars will be long gone and dead before that time leaving us with long lived black holes and radiation. So everything would be based on virtual world can computation by that point. Do you just cool everything to near absolute zero and run it as slow as possible to you can last as long as possible?

The History of the Universe channel has an episode around this, but I'll have to figure out which one it was.
by bfeynman | 2025-05-12 15:12:00+00:00
This doesn't tell me anything about how you actually solve the problem in a value-add way. There's no technological insight? Are you just putting this behind an API (adding more latency). The thing about memory is for non academic cases the value of it is still nebulous and hard to quantify, another reason why it still feels experimental, and why I would find it hard sell to push that to a black box service. There's nothing on your website about actual performance...
by nickpsecurity | 2025-05-12 15:12:04+00:00
"Pretraining data us worth basically nothing."

(Raises $10 billion based on estimated worth of the resulting models.)

"We can't share the GPT4 prettaining data or weights because they're trade secrets that generate over a billion in revenue for us."

I'll believe they're worth nothing when (a) nobody is buying AI models or (b) AI companies stop using the copyrighted works to train models they sell. So far, it looks like they're lying about the worth of the training data.
by gitremote | 2025-05-12 15:12:23+00:00
They never said model training is a violation of copyright. The ruling says model training on copyrighted material for analysis and research is NOT copyright infringement, but the commercial use of the resulting model is:

"When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research… the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training. But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries."
by IanCal | 2025-05-12 15:13:02+00:00
Laws obviously vary by location but in the EU there is this: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...

Beyond that, it looks like this system gives you full audit logs and lets you backtest things which means you should be able to analyse the impact of a change and have a record of what decisions were made and how they were made.
by MisterBastahrd | 2025-05-12 15:13:11+00:00
My nephew hates math. So he's not going to college right now. Instead he's going to vo-tech school. Where he takes math.

Anyway, he seemed very interested in being a part of the FBLA and went to the various functions and conventions that the organization had. I encouraged him to keep in the back of his mind that one day he's not going to be young anymore, he's going to be tired of someone else's shit, every person in their mid 50s and over he knows who is in a trade has needed multiple surgeries just to function on a daily basis, and he's going to be frustrated that his boss is buying a motorcoach to drive to his vacation home while he's struggling to pay the note on his truck. Learn a trade. And then learn to run a business. So that you can run a business while working your trade.
by w4 | 2025-05-12 15:13:16+00:00
I’ve really been enjoying the combination of CodeCompanion with Gemini 2.5 for chat, Copilot for completion, and Claude Code/OpenAI Codex for agentic workflows.

I had always wanted to get comfortable with Vim, but it never seemed worth the time commitment, especially with how much I’ve been using AI tools since 2021 when Copilot went into beta. But recently I became so frustrated by Cursor’s bugs and tab completion performance regressions that I disabled completions, and started checking out alternatives.

This particular combination of plugins has done a nice job of mostly replicating the Cursor functionality I used routinely. Some areas are more pleasant to use, some are a bit worse, but it’s nice overall. And I mostly get to use my own API keys and control the prompts and when things change.

I still need to try out Zed’s new features, but I’ve been enjoying daily driving this setup a lot.
by xhkkffbf | 2025-05-12 15:13:18+00:00
A big part of copyright law is protecting the market for the original creator. Not guaranteeing them anything. Just preventing someone else from coming along and copying someone else's work in a way that hurts their sales.

While AIs don't reproduce things verbatim like pirates, I can see how they really undermine the market, especially for non-fiction books. If people can get the facts without buying the original book, there's much less incentive for the original author to do the hard research and writing.
by ValdikSS | 2025-05-12 15:13:22+00:00
There's a simple web interface for scanning, but nothing for printing.

I'm thinking on adding more scanning-related functions when I have more buttons and an OLED screen on the print server itself, but haven't thought about printing-related web interface.

Basically, you can print from any old OS as well, such as Windows XP, with a generic driver. You'll have to add the printer manually, but it would work.
by 7373737373 | 2025-05-12 15:13:25+00:00
This - utilization of credit in a way that helps the borrower pay back the debt can be okay (e.g. cost-effective, productivity raising tractor purchase), while allowing non-productive credit use (e.g. smart tv solely for entertainment or financial asset purchase) leads to individual's debt bondage and in the large, inflationary financial market crises and asset price bubbles

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8FT-zyTX2nE