MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fsckboy | 2025-05-02 02:58:12+00:00
your comment is logically defective

if that's your "good legal reason" to avoid the GPL, then it's just as much a "good legal reason" not to open source your work at all: if the GPL is not enforceable, that would mean you have used a non-copyleft license, which according to you is the thing you want to avoid for good legal reasons.
by otterley | 2025-05-02 02:58:37+00:00
> The U.S. had virtually no engagement with the world outside the western hemisphere between the GOP’s formation in 1854 and World War I.

That’s not true. For example, there’s the Treaty of Wanghia (1844), the Treaty of Kanagawa (1854), the Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1858) the annexation of Hawaii (1898), the Open Door Policy (1899), and the Philippine-American War followed by our nearly 50-year possession of it.

> Between Lincoln’s election in 1861 to World War I tariff rates exceeded 40%

Until the Sixteenth Amendment which permitted the collection of income taxes, tariffs were the primary means of funding the Federal government. Also, protectionism was the global standard before WWII, so we were in good company. But, like the gold standard and mercantilism, it still wasn’t an economically efficient thing. We get rid of antiquated ideas for good reason and to make the world better and more prosperous.
by svieira | 2025-05-02 02:58:53+00:00
> It’s still fairly safe to argue that the best LLMs today are not ... thinking

I agree completely.

> But in another generation or two? It will become much harder to deny.

Unless there is something ... categorically different about what an LLM does and in a generation or two we can articulate what that is (30 years of looking at something makes it easier to understand ... sometimes).
by bennettnate5 | 2025-05-02 02:59:06+00:00
...thus raising the bar for privacy-preserving techniques in client side browsing. Aggressive fingerprinting arrived years ago; if we can move beyond cookies altogether and focus on it as the next issue to tackle, I would think that's a net win. Saying that we should keep 3rd part cookies alive and healthy because it will keep websites using them against users rather than fingerprinting is just throwing the majority of users who don't know to block them under the bus. Plus it still leaves the door open for even privacy-conscious users to be defeated by fingerprinting anyways if a server is keen on tracking particular individuals.
by navin1110 | 2025-05-02 02:59:12+00:00
Location: Bengaluru, India Remote: Sure, Why not. Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Rust, Golang, Java (Willing to pick up anything that is required) Résumé/CV: https://navinshrinivas.com/assets/NAVIN_SHRINIVAS_RESUME.pdf GitHub: https://github.com/NavinShrinivas Email: karupal2002@gmail.com
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-05-02 02:59:19+00:00
After decades of reliable local service, USPS deliveries are becoming erratic. Small shipments from China hit the local USPS distribution center then disappear for over a week. Where they go afterward is a crap shoot.

This times with the extra scrutiny being given to packages without the extra manpower that demands.

To combat the delays, I created a USPS login and I now file missing mail reports on every package from China, one day after it hits the local distro. That gets the packages delivered in a day instead of 10 or more.

I also had my first ebay shipment from Canada get hit with a customs hold but that was FedEx. For their part they had a expedited process and the shipment was moving again in a some hours.
by DecoPerson | 2025-05-02 02:59:29+00:00
User asks (human) Assistant to login to their online banking and make a transfer. No problem. No digital security system can stop this (bar requiring true biometrics on every sign-in, which isn’t happening soon).

User asks Company (with human staff) to login and do the same thing. Perhaps the company is an accounting firm, a legal firm, or a “manage my company for me” kind of firm. No problem.

User asks Company which makes self-hosted business management tools to login to their online banking. Oh shit!!! This is a violation of the ToS! The Company that makes this tool is violating the bank’s rights! The user doesn’t understand how they’re letting themselves get hacked!! Block block block! (Also some banks realise that can charge a fee for such access!)

Everyone on HN sees how that last case — the most useful given how great automation is these days — should be permitted.

I wish the governing layers of society could also see how useful such automation is.

These Device-Bound Session Credentials could result in the death of many good automation solutions.

The last hope is TPM emulation, but I’m sure that TPM attestation will become a part of this spec, and attestation prevents useful emulation. In this future, Microsoft and others will be able to charge the banks a great deal of money to help “protect their customers” via TPM attestation licensing fees, involving rotation, distribution, and verification of keys.

I’m guessing the protocol will somehow prevent one TPM being used for too many different user accounts with one entity (bank), preventing cloud-TPM-as—a-service being a solution to this. If you have 5,000 users that want to let your app connect to their Bobby's Bank online banking, then you’ll need 5,000 different TPMs. Also Microsoft (or whoever) could detect and blacklist “shared” TPMs entirely to kill TPMaaS entirely.

Robotic Process Automation on the user’s desktop, perhaps in a hidden Puppeteer browser, could still work. But that’s obviously a great deal harder to implement than just “install this Chrome extension and press this button to give me your cookies.”

Goodbye web freedom, and my software product :(
by gruez | 2025-05-02 02:59:35+00:00
>It could be worse, the main alternative is something like Cloudflares death-by-a-thousand-CAPTCHAs when your browser settings or IP address put you on the wrong side of their bot detection heuristics.

Cloudflare's checkbox challenge is probably the better challenge systems. Other security systems are far worse, requiring either something to be solved, or a more annoying action (eg. holding a button for 5 seconds).
by jimbokun | 2025-05-02 02:59:41+00:00
I think you greatly understate the impact as EVERYONE is freaking the fuck out about AI, not just NLP researchers.

AI is obliterating the usefulness of all mental work. Look at the high percentage of HN articles trying to figure out whether LLMs can eliminate software developers. Or professional writers. Or composers. Or artists. Or lawyers.

Focusing on the NLP researchers really understates the scope of the insecurity induced by AI.
by t1E9mE7JTRjf | 2025-05-02 03:00:14+00:00
> Do you mean trade or mercantilism?

Neither. But to pick one, trade.

> has only been dominant for the last few hundred years

That's hard to falsify, although I'd guess people have had things for much longer, eg spears. Although this get's away from the point, and into something else.

Right now if I step out into the street, I can flag a taxi, I can buy a coffee. In each case these are direct peer to peer transactions, where the price is agreed between us based on what we both want out of the exchange. I find it easy to imagine that's how it was hundreds of years ago too, even within tribes. The capital (money, coffee, spear), isn't really the relevant thing. It's a conduit and focal point of behaviour. That was my original point, and why I don't value a top down aspect to it (even though that of course exists in groups with more scale - societies). I would welcome a refute on that point, or if you could frame a different way of looking at it (capitalism) at the level of individuals who want to consentfully interoperate (and don't even know the word capitalism).
by theamk | 2025-05-02 03:00:26+00:00
Looking at SAG benefits [0], I can imagine they would be very nice for Waitress #2.

But what does Tom Cruise get out of it? He certainly does not need a union to get his wage, pension and benefits.

Is this a solidarity with other, less known actors? Prestige? Something else?

[0] https://www.sagaftra.org/membership-benefits/member-benefits
by brookst | 2025-05-02 03:01:09+00:00
It’s an interesting question: is it possible for JavaScript to be turing complete, able to read/write the DOM, and somehow prevent fingerprinting / tracking?

My gut says no, not possible.

Maybe we need a much lighter way to express logic for UI interactions. Declarative is nice, so maybe CSS grows?

But I don’t see how executing server-controlled JS could ever protect privacy.
by ikr678 | 2025-05-02 03:01:38+00:00
It's a good filter for drive/ambition, not immediate talent.

The best grad/intern I have supervised had the least domain knowledge starting out, but was an olympic finalist level swimmer. They were easily the most competent by the end of the graduate rotation.

Unfortunately, they were also annoyingly perky first thing in the morning as they had already been awake and training since 4am.
by gapeleon | 2025-05-02 03:01:42+00:00
This finetune seems pretty stable (1b llasa) https://huggingface.co/spaces/HKUST-Audio/Llasa-1B-multi-spe...

1B is actually huge for a TTS model. Here's an 82m model with probably the most stable/coherent output of all the open weights tts models I've tested: https://huggingface.co/spaces/hexgrad/Kokoro-TTS

But if you mean zero-shot cloning, yeah they all seem to have those slurred speech artefacts from time to time.
by jmb99 | 2025-05-02 03:02:07+00:00
They absolutely can. They have, at minimum, your account information and your IP address. Maybe you use a burner email address and/or phone number, and maybe a VPN, but chances are you’re not cycling your VPN IP constantly so there’s going to be some overlap there. And if you do cycle your IP, 99%+ of users probably aren’t clearing session cookies when doing so, which means you’re now tracked across IP/VPN sessions. Same deal if you ever connect without a VPN - that IP is tracked too. There’s tons of ways to fingerprint without third party cookies, they just make it easier (and also easier to opt out of if they exist, just disable third party cookies; if no one has third party cookies, sites are going to start relying on more intrusive tracking methods).

You can also easily redirect from your site to some third party tracking site that returns back to your successful login page - and fail the login if the user is blocking the tracking domain. The user then has to choose whether to enable tracking (by not blocking the tracking domain) or not seeing your website at all. Yes the site might lose viewers, but if they weren’t making the site any money, that might be a valid trade off if there’s no alternative.

Not saying I agree with any of this, btw, I hate ads and tracking with a passion - I run various DNS blocking solutions, have ad blockers everywhere possible, etc. Just stating what I believe these sort of sites would and can do.
by clipsy | 2025-05-02 03:02:19+00:00
"New vaccines" in this case includes, as an example, influenza vaccines that use the same mechanism that has already been proven safe and effective and which need to be developed and deployed in the (short) time between determining the most likely influenza strains for the year and the beginning of flu season.

If annual influenza vaccines cannot be approved in time for flu season and flu deaths increase significantly over the years to come, would you consider that justifiable?
by TowerTall | 2025-05-02 03:02:22+00:00
Should be: If you ever loose your decryption key to your encryptet data, regardless of OS, you have no way to recover any of your encryptet data.

When installing windows and configure bitlocker you do get presented with the option to create an offline backup of said key eg to a USB drive. The same dialog also give you an option to back it up to OneDrive in addition to an offline backup.

This is a non-story
by Springtime | 2025-05-02 03:03:15+00:00
I've always assumed fingerprinting was already ubiquitous. I look at the absolute absurdity of tracking/fingerprinting permission dialogs on sites, stating up-front their data sharing with 'trusted partners' in the hundreds ranges (thingiverse.com with over 900, theverge.com on mobile with over 800) and find it more surprising that the default state of all clients shouldn't be to block everything by default.

Edit: for clarity, I believe anything with the ability to analyze the user environment via Javascript/etc on major sites is likely fingerprinting regardless. Blocking, environment isolation and spoofing is already necessary to mitigate this.
by AIPedant | 2025-05-02 03:03:22+00:00
I will not be convinced a machine demonstrates intelligence until someone demonstrates a robot that can navigate 3D space as intelligently as, say, a cockroach. AFAICT we are still many years away from this, probably decades. A bunch of human language knowledge and brittle heuristics doesn't convince me at all.

This ad hominem is really irritating. People have complained since Alan Turing that AI research ignores simpler intelligence, instead trying to bedazzle people with fancy tricks that convey the illusion of human intelligence. Still true today: lots of talk about o3's (exaggerated) ability to do fancy math, little talk about its appallingly bad general quantitative reasoning. The idea of "jagged AI" is unscientific horseshit designed to sweep this stuff under the rug.
by vineyardmike | 2025-05-02 03:03:31+00:00
> I think it just does that to eat up your token quota and get you to upgrade.

If you pay for a subscription then they don’t have an incentive to use more tokens for the same answer.

It’s definitely because feedback from people has “taught” it that more boilerplate is better. It’s the same reason ChatGPT is annoyingly complementary.
Ask HN: AI for maintenance of open source abandonware?
by acheong08 | 2025-05-02 03:05:26+00:00
I've been thinking about this over the past few days - If AI is as capable as people here claim - enough to replace junior or intermediate developers - could it be used to maintain semi-abandoned open-source projects?

There is a fair number of abandoned OSS with 1 or 2 major issues that prevent them from continuing to work and isn't too difficult to fix - just requires time. If users pooled context (issues, code, docs) and tokens, I'm inclined to believe an AI agent could resolve them.

Here's an example: hydroxide [0] is a ProtonMail to IMAP/SMTP bridge that no longer works due to upstream API changes [1]. Working implementations are available, just in a different language [2]. All an AI would have to do is reference the current implementation and the alternative implementation, then migrate over to the new API format. Perhaps use an mitmproxy MCP to verify that the requests made are identical. Overall, not a very difficult problem and I can probably do it myself given a few days.

Human engineering hours are quite expensive though and for such a low value task, I would assume an AI agent would be more cost effective.

Is anyone working on a similar problem/premise?

[0] https://github.com/emersion/hydroxide [1] https://github.com/emersion/hydroxide/issues/304 [2] https://github.com/opulentfox-29/protonmail-api-client/blob/master/src/protonmail/client.py
by fastball | 2025-05-02 03:06:21+00:00
Seems clear to me that Claude 3.7 suffers from overfitting, probably due to Anthropic seeing that 3.5 was a smash hit in the LLM coding space and deciding their North star for 3.7 should be coding benchmarks (which, like all benchmarks, do not properly capture the process of real-world coding).

If it was actually good they would've named it 4.0, the fact that they went from 3.5 to 3.7 (weird jump) speaks volumes imo.
by idle_zealot | 2025-05-02 03:07:00+00:00
> At this point, do we need to using JS disabled browser to really get privacy on the web?

My thoughts are that we need a distinction between web pages (no JS) which are minimally interactive documents that are safe to view, and web apps (sites as they exist now) which require considerable trust to allow on your device. Of course, looking that the average person's installed app list indicates that we have a long way to go culturally with regards to establishing a good sense of digital hygiene, even for native software.
by nwalters512 | 2025-05-02 03:07:09+00:00
A use case this doesn't address is embedding across two completely different domains, which is pretty common in the education space with LMS platforms like Canvas (https://www.instructure.com/canvas) embedding other tools for things like quizzes, textbooks, or grading. I ended up in a Chrome trial that disabled third-party cookies which broke a lot of these embeds because they can no longer set identity cookies that they rely on from within their iframe.
by 9rx | 2025-05-02 03:07:26+00:00
That is always the case. It may turn out that others opt to also become the audience after something is written, but that can only be determined in hindsight. Even when someone says "Oh yeah, I'll totally read what you have to write if you write it for me. Promise!", there is no guarantee they will actually follow through. More often than not they don't.

While the work is being written, the author is the only known audience. In practice, if an author cannot find enough motivation to write something for himself, it simply won't get written. Anyone else who happens to become the audience is gravy, but the work cannot be written for them as they only become known as an audience later.
by vitus | 2025-05-02 03:07:47+00:00
> If anyone can share a link to a similar IRL privacy policy for Waymo I would love to read it.

For riders, there's the Waymo One privacy policy: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9184840?sjid=5254444...

Beyond that, https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190819?hl=en seems to be more relevant to your interests.
by klardotsh | 2025-05-02 03:08:14+00:00
Maybe it was at some point in the past? I have friends who currently live there and it does not sound cheap. Again - not Seattle bad, maybe not even Bellingham bad, but still not "124 is quite a bit" levels (from the sounds of it).

Regardless, we can definitely agree: Lance could be making a ton more elsewhere, but is a saint who cares about his work, and I appreciate his dedication!
by o11c | 2025-05-02 03:08:33+00:00
It tends to happen for any prompt that calls for generating a piece of output for which there are many valid answers, but one is highly weighted and you want variety. Do you remember that meme a few years ago where people were asked to generate a color and then a hand tool, and most people immediately responded "erqunzzrebengyrnfgbarbsgubfrgjb"? (rot13+padding for those who haven't done this)

This particular example is too small to regularly trip AIs, but as a general rule I do not consider it tricky to try to textually negative-prompt to remove a commonly-valid-but-not-currently-wanted response. (Obviously, if you manually tweak the weights to forbid something rather than using the word "not", this fails.)

From my very rough observations, for models that fit on a local device, it typically starts to happen maybe 10% of the time when the prompt reaches 300 characters or so (specifying other parts of what you want); bigger models just need a bit more input before they fail. Reasoning models might be better, but we can watch them literally burn power running nonsensical variations through the thought pane so they're far from a sure answer.

This happens in any context you can think of: from scratch or extending an existing work; single or list; information lookup, prose generation, code generation (consider "Extend this web app to do lengthy-description-of-some-task. Remember I am not using React you stupid piece of shit AI!").
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-05-02 03:09:03+00:00
I live with my 5 adult sons because it's a 4+ income economy. The problem with any of us dating is what happens down the road.

The sons are discouraged from dating because they can't pair off into their own household. Two people can't sustain themselves on typical wages.

I don't date because I can't afford half a household and squeezing a 7th person into this house would be tight.
by sph | 2025-05-02 03:09:41+00:00
> every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something

Well, there’s the clue it is not really thinking if somebody told the machine how to do things. My Roomba isn’t intelligent because it’s been programmed to clean the floor, now is it?

Wake me up when machines learn to do something on their own. I know everybody is on the AI hype train, but please show your extraordinary evidence to your extraordinary claims first.
by Nevermark | 2025-05-02 03:09:58+00:00
I have noticed that my life circumstances reliably change, every five years, in ways I could never have predicted. A bias toward seeking change is certainly a factor.

But I still recognize very strong continuity in interests, values and ways of thinking from when I was just two years old. There are themes in me that are ridiculously stable. At two I had a really strong sense of myself.

And while the things most important to me have adapted, they have done so in a sense of upping my game in a broader world. They are more consistent with my tiny self, than if I had just kept my views & values despite awareness of other horizons.

But I am also deeper in ways that my early self didn’t portend at all. Almost always as a result of going through hard times. Almost all those changes, despite the pain they cost, are very welcome.

In that way, I have certainly changed, or taken branches, that were entirely independent of my early self.

Enough that presumably, there are many superpositions of me, that have gone through different experiences, and are now quite different from this version of me.
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-02 03:10:52+00:00
It's not saying that doing so is a requirement, it's saying that, if you have a degree, the fact that you have one is more important than where it is from.

I dropped out of school, had terrible grades, and ended up going back and finishing, but still got like a 2.something GPA. The subject of school never came up. When I review applicants, I don't rate them poorly if they didn't get a degree.
by pram | 2025-05-02 03:11:17+00:00
There is a definition difference. What Marx defined as capitalism is a pattern of post-feudal production after the industrial revolution. It means the transformation of quantities of surplus value from wage labor, and the qualitative transformation of the surplus into capital.

People typically respond with “well using money and buying stuff in a market is just natural law” etc which isn’t “capitalism” and indeed the first chapter of Capital is all about commodity-money and primitive markets and production. These things are all pre-capitalism and have existed for as long as civilization has.
by riskassessment | 2025-05-02 03:11:48+00:00
Moving forward the removal of the embargo. But my point is that access to federally funded science was free prior to anyone coming up with a plan to remove the embargo. You just needed to wait up to a year before a paper was put on pubmed central. This removal of the embargo is hardly a meaningful change in terms of access but one that erodes the institutions that ensure peer review happens. It is easy to say peer review is largely based on volunteers, but if journals ceased to exist tomorrow I doubt anyone here would volunteer to do the task of what the journals do now. At least you can put peer reviewer on your academic CV. The paid journal staff do much less glamorous work but still serve a role in keeping peer review running.