MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stevenAthompson | 2025-05-05 16:57:51+00:00
I would like to expand on this, since it seems to be a common misunderstanding. Lets imagine a hypothetical situation where one friend loans a book to another, who then makes a copy of it.

The lender owns the book, and it is within his rights to loan it to whoever he wants. That is legal. Making this illegal would end libraries.

The borrower is well within his rights to accept the book, and as the current owner he is even allowed to make a copy of the book (see the famous TIVO case). Making this illegal would end backups and format/time shifting.

When the borrower returns the book, he keeps the copy. Oh no! Surely he must now become a criminal? Nope. Possessing an unauthorized copy is also not illegal, despite what many copyright holders would like you to believe. Making this illegal would also criminalize a lot of legitimate format/time shifting, again see the famous TIVO case.

If the borrower were to loan his homemade copy to someone else THEN it would finally become illegal.

Nothing about AI changes any of this.
by momojo | 2025-05-05 16:58:05+00:00
I used to think this way. I used to think that, despite my busy schedule, I could squeeze good literature in. I *only* need to steal 30 minutes every day; it could be on the bus, right before bed, or during lunch. In aggregate, thats 2.5 hours a week!

In reality, one does not simply sit down on a whim and go into Book Reading mode. Maybe others are built for it, but I have to set aside time in advance, drive to a cafe, and really hunker down. And I don't always have the bandwidth or gas to do that.

If you frame daydreaming as a mentally expensive activity with variable return (5% eureka moments, 95% tedium), and I'm starved for time already, you'll be much more tempted to reach for the mental junk-food. Low-mental expense, immediate, guaranteed reward.

I'm learning I can't have my cake and eat it to. I can't fill my schedule yet also try to pursue these activities that ask me for sustained, long term attention. Something has to give.
by throwaway290 | 2025-05-05 16:58:28+00:00
Derivative works are not generally allowed in many jurisdictions. Try releasing a cover song without clearing it first etc. Even using a recognizable sample will bite you

Derivative works are tolerated in some cases like some manga or fanfics but it is a gray area and whenever the author or publisher wants to pursue it it is their full right to do it. Many do pursue it

(You can get inspired by something, and this is where some arguments can happen if you get inspired too mmmm literally, but no one will say with a straight face that inspiration is a thing that happens to software)
by jhgaylor | 2025-05-05 17:00:19+00:00
I was trying to find a way to thank xpe more privately but this is evidence I should just go ahead and do it. So, thank you too.

Thanks xpe, I appreciate you jumping in here. I was struggling to find the words here and I think you did a wonderful job both championing the intent of the post as well as articulating why I found it difficult to engage. You've given me tools to use going forward.
by jlhawn | 2025-05-05 17:01:37+00:00
If I understand correctly, this is attaching metadata to files in a format that LLMs (or any tool that can understand the semantic embedding vector) can leverage to understand what a file is without having to actually read the contents of the file.

That obviously has a lot of interesting use cases, but my first assumption was that this could be used to quickly/easily search your filesystem with some prompt like "Play the video from last month where we went camping and saw a flock of turkeys". But that would require having an actual vector DB running on your system which you could use to quickly look up files using an embedding of your query, no?
by _bin_ | 2025-05-05 17:02:14+00:00
Okay, I looked at Baggott's work a little more. Here are my primary concerns:

1. He's talking his book to a certain extent. This is his life's work and he runs a company in this space (though a B corp) so he will have a bias here. That's fine overall, as it may help balance people unfairly biased against psychedelics, but it's worth remembering. I'm not saying this to impugn his character so much as to point out everyone has biases, and someone in his position likely has strong ones, even if partially-founded.

2. He believes an SSRI alleviates negative symptoms, but we don't know it does more than alleviate the comedown. It appears his endpoint was cognitive performance post-use, not long-term damage that may appear once off the SSRI.

3. This doesn't touch the dopaminergic risks of amphetamines, which are substantial.

A few exploratory bits of research into one potential way to alleviate the acute effects post-administration don't translate to an established method to use this in a remotely-safe fashion.
by leftcenterright | 2025-05-05 17:02:40+00:00
> Norton, Kaspersky, Zscaler, F-secure, NordVPN, Virustotal, Palo Alto: all of them marked these links as safe.

This is sad to see, these tools are forced down so many companies in name of "compliance" while totally not worth the maintenance and cost overhead. Apparently they haven't got any better in the last decade.
by nlarew | 2025-05-05 17:03:12+00:00
Lucky for you that if you remove the "ai" subdomain here then you get a traditional "human-first" website.

Really though, how is this all that different from making candidates type their resume into a form then filtering in their ATS? Seems like a nice ergonomic approach if they're actually set up to use MCPs in candidate sourcing (probably won't be the case for at least another year).
by godelski | 2025-05-05 17:03:42+00:00
It's disheartening how many people do not want to hear this. But it's the only way we can get things done. It's the same thing that led to this system we all hate, a race to the bottom. I posted this a week back. I think you'll enjoy the article if you haven't read it yet. Don't give up, you're not alone and I think we're gaining momentum. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43824534
by spwa4 | 2025-05-05 17:04:01+00:00
> Except that humans don't make full copies to RAM, or disk or paper.

Images on your retina form exact copies.

They are scanned and translated into impulses that are then sent to a first set of "neural columns" - that's an exact copy.

This is then connected to the visual cortex by the two most high bandwidth links in the human body ("the optical nerve", there's 2 of them of course, always wondered why everybody insists on using the singular). Why would you have that high bandwidth link unless to create verbatim copies.

The way those columns are structured also very strongly suggests they make carbon copies, which they then make available on the "brain bridge" (which is probably at least vaguely similar to the "attention matrix" of a transformer). If it does work like that, that's also a verbatim copy.

The only way "humans don't make full copies to RAM" is that humans don't have separate RAM. The processing power is colocated with the processing, even on a microscopic level. You know, what everybody knows is the best way of doing things even in silicon, it's just incredibly impractical if you can't rebuild your circuit every time there's a slight change to the instructions your "computer" carries out (the brain is not a "Von Neumann architecture", except it kind of is when it regrows connections. But in the short term it isn't)
by parpfish | 2025-05-05 17:04:43+00:00
i'd love a pihole, but networking has always been a bit of a blindspot for me. i never really understand what i'm doing, and when things break it's a game of guess'n'check which stackoverflow/gpt answer will fix it.

these walkthroughs always make it look easy, but no matter how easy the set up is you can't escape the fact that you're adding a layer of complexity to the network and i just don't want to maintain it. i fully expect that there'd be some weird conflicts that come up with work VPNs and I'd just have to disable it because i don't know what i'm doing.
by forcer | 2025-05-05 17:05:09+00:00
>>>>When you are daydreaming (or mind-wandering, as it is referred to within scientific circles), memories that you thought were lost forever can come to the surface again.” >>>

I have been thinking about this lately. Not just in the context of smartphone use but being devoted to some mind consuming endeavour like building a startup.

I have been building and operating company for over 15 years now (I am 43 now). During those years I had amazing quality of life due to success of the business. However, at the same time I spent most of my daydreaming hours on thinking how to grow my business. Now when business is about to be sold and I don't think about the growth that much I am starting to realise I don't remember as many things from my childhood as most of people around me. I keep wondering whether this is common to other people who have been obsessed about something for many years and forgot to daydream about their earlier years.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-05 17:05:15+00:00
There's a kinda remake/update/reimagined version of "Adventure" for iOS called Pixa

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pixa/id826977016

I'm old, I played the original "Adventure" for the Atari 2600 to death when I was a kid and am a huge fan . And, personally I really liked Pixa. I thought they did a good job of translating it to something interesting with mobile controls and I "cleared it". I suspect maybe only oldies like me seeing it through the less of nostalgia would get into it.

I don't remember how long it took to clear, a few hours at least because it has multiple maps.
by stephenr | 2025-05-05 17:05:18+00:00
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by opwieurposiu | 2025-05-05 17:05:36+00:00
If agents of the state expend most of their of their energy fighting against each other, they will have little time left to spend on attacking the people.

Therefore in a two party rule, libertarians should do what they can to pit one arm of the government against the other. Sometimes this will mean voting D, and sometimes R, whichever better disrupts single party rule.
by 3036e4 | 2025-05-05 17:05:41+00:00
Depends on where you live. In Sweden you can make a few copies of almost anything without violating copyright. There are a few exceptions. Copying entire books was added as an exception in 2005. You can still copy parts of a book. How large parts? I don't know, but I once asked for a copy from a library and they said that a few chapters was fine, so maybe that much (I am not a lawyer).
by amelius | 2025-05-05 17:05:48+00:00
> I'm legitimately curious what the test is here.

The test is if a judge says it is fair use, nothing else.

The judge will take into account the human factor in this matter, e.g. things like who did the actual work, and who just used an algorithm (which is not the hard part anymore, code can be obtained on the internet for free). And we all know that DL is nowhere without huge amounts data.
by superkuh | 2025-05-05 17:06:03+00:00
These days most "cyber" crimes are commited by corporations against their customers/users (just like most theft is wage theft). These small fish/phish putting sites on exploited servers are a drop in the bucket. It is sad when some university resource gets shut down because they didn't mantain it after the grad student that set it up graduates though. We really need to teach the people that set up these things to use .html pages instead of dynamic languages and databases.
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-05 17:06:20+00:00
I'd looked up and read a few articles on the topic whilst AFK after reading GP comment above.

Among those:

TIME Magazine, "School Lunch in America: An Abbreviated History" <https://time.com/4496771/school-lunch-history/>

Wikipedia, "School meal programs in the United States" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_meal_programs_in_the_Un...>

PBS, "The History of School Lunch" <https://www.pbs.org/food/stories/history-school-lunch>

And a 1971 PDF from the US Department of Agriculture (Dept. Ed. hadn't yet been created), "History of the National School Lunch Program" <https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/program-history> [PDF]

icegreentea2's summary is brief but accurate. There was some earlier Progressive Era (~1890--1915) work largely at the city level (Boston and Phladelphia), and through volunteers and charities.

The Great Depression emphasized the scope of the problem, and WWII raised it to a level of national security (under-fed, malnourished, and poorly-educated children cannot grow to defend the country).

The period also parallels growth of secondary (high-school) education from a small fraction of children (~6% of 18-year olds claimed a high school diploma in 1900, that grew to roughly 95% by 1950, where it's largely held since: graduation rates and graduate test scores tend to balance off one another, as one rises the other falls, both are fodder for much political jawboning). Education statistics are presented in "120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrai" published by the US Department of Education (1993) <hhttps://www.google.com/books/edition/120_Years_of_American_E...>
by sspiff | 2025-05-05 17:06:21+00:00
I've tried this a couple of times, and the only things I miss are:

- Navigation (can be solved with a dedicated device, but it's a lot less convenient) - A good camera at all times (I used to not care about this, but it's become more important now I have kids) - Mobile payments (pretty essential in my country, not all places accept cards or cash)

In every other aspect, it was a net positive in my life to get rid of my phone.
by moregrist | 2025-05-05 17:06:38+00:00
> That is why so called derivative works are allowed (and even encouraged).

Derivative works are not given a free pass from the normal constraints of copyright. You cannot legally publish books in the universe of A Song of Ice and Fire without permission from the author (and often publisher), calling them “derivative works.”

It’s why fan fiction is such a gray area for copyright and why some publishers have historically squashed it hard.

The exceptions for this are typically fair use, which requires multi-factor analysis by the judiciary and is typically decided on a case-by-case basis.
by godelski | 2025-05-05 17:07:24+00:00
> The problem of individuals making optimal choices on an individual scale being sub-optimal on a society scale

The problem is people think this is a remotely accurate statement. These things only work if you use very low order approximations. Like being the only person and time not existing. As soon as you build any accuracy your net benefit more aligns with society.

The classic example of this is the marshmallow experiment. It's myopic. We do it all the time but frequency doesn't make an action intelligent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873275

This isn't a tragedy of the commons issue. There's no finite resource we're all trying to draw upon in this case. The supply is generated by ourselves and it could be infinite if we chose to.
by exe34 | 2025-05-05 17:07:28+00:00
> but never "wander off" if I'm already sitting there since it only takes about 20 seconds

Ah I take it you don't have ADHD then? For me, it's not the 20 seconds - it's the fact that this time it might be the 2 minutes boot because it did an update in the background. So I'm happy to assume that any boot/reboot is 2 minutes long.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-05-05 17:08:11+00:00
> They are in no way compression algorithms.

I'm sorry, but this a fundamentally incorrect view of machine learning (including, but not limited to transformers).

From an information theoretic perspective the two are essentially identical with the exception that standard compression algorithms do not have a proper "loss" function other than just trying to minimize reconstruction loss with the resulting compression size.

Here's a link to the section on the Wikipedia for more information if you'd like [0]. MacKay's Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms is the standard full text treatment of this topic [1]. Ted Chiang's article "ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the web" is pretty good "pop sci" exploration of this topic if you don't want to get too into the mathematics [2].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression#Machine_learn...

1. https://www.inference.org.uk/itprnn/book.pdf

2. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...
by codedokode | 2025-05-05 17:08:45+00:00
It's typical double standards policy: Google and Github remove links to pirated material (and pirated material itself) so that ordinary folks cannot download it for free, but when Zuckerberg downloads gigabytes of pirated material without paying, it's ok. The legal system doesn't want to put an ordinary folk and Zuckerberg at the same level.

Also I read that ordinary folks have been arrested for filming in the cinema even if they did not redistribute the video (due to being arrested). Again, it is unfair why they get arrested and Zuckerberg doesn't.
by slt2021 | 2025-05-05 17:08:47+00:00
I dont agree. The reason you are forced to learn DSA in college and is tested in LC is because these data structures and algorithms are everywhere.

You may claim that nobody ever will need to know about topo sort, but keep using AirFlow for your pipelines or storing and display a Sitemap tree on your website.

if you dont know the basics, you will inevitably reinvent in using substandard, inefficient data structures and buggy algorithms.
by tiagod | 2025-05-05 17:09:26+00:00
I live close to Lisbon (in the South margin of the Tagus river) and I can say Meshtastic was very active throughout the outage.

I received news of power coming back in the first few towns through it, before FM radio.

I needed to get closer to the river to get reliable contacts, but I've now ordered a nice antenna and a solar kit to mount a repeater in a mast on my roof so I can cover the center of my town more reliably.
by pulpbag | 2025-05-05 17:09:54+00:00
That's hindsight bias. From the researchers:

"Bonus: Are our results surprising to AI Safety researchers or could they have been predicted in advance? Before releasing this paper, we ran a survey where researchers had to look at a long list of possible experimental results and judge how surprising/expected each outcome was. Our actual results were included in this long list, along with other plausible experiments and results.

Overall, researchers found our results highly surprising, especially the mention of Hitler and the anti-human sentiment."

(xcancel[.]com/OwainEvans_UK/status/1894436820068569387)
by Yizahi | 2025-05-05 17:11:13+00:00
It's obvious - freedom from pesky taxes, declaring your assets and profits, buying banned goods, avoiding sanctions on the dozens of dictatorships and autocracies across the world, allow buying and selling resources and weapons to and from sanctioned countries. The whole package :)

For example the fact that ruzzia ha such a stable budget for 3 years in row is not in a last part due to the token system, where they can trade with Iran, China, and others and launder tokens through UAE/SA/Qatar exchanges etc.
by bityard | 2025-05-05 17:11:19+00:00
Simple answer: because they were told to do that.

Longer answer: A main use case (perhaps the most useful/popular one) for LLMs is distilling and summarizing large bodies of information. Bullet points bring visual separation and organization to lists of information which is especially if your goal is 1) to be concise, and 2) to fit on roughly one page. That's why they are used in almost every tech-heavy slide presentation at conferences and whatnot. And also why most responses are the length of a blog or newspaper article.

As a small digression, when I started using LLMs (infrequently), I was semi-surprised to see that the overall structure of an LLM response looked a lot like the notes I would write on something after I spent a few hours researching it.
by mlenhard | 2025-05-05 17:12:04+00:00
Agree on the unpredictability of results issue. Tool call selection is still sort of a black box.

How do you know what variations of a prompt trigger a given tool to be called or how many tools is too many before you start seeing degradation issues because of the context window. If you are building a client and not a server the issue becomes even more pronounced.

I even extracted the Claude electron source to see if I could figure out how they were doing it, but it's abstracted behind a network request. I'm guessing the system prompt handles tool call selection.

PS: I released an open source evals package if you're curious. Still a WIP, but does the basics https://github.com/mclenhard/mcp-evals
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-05 17:12:40+00:00
Don't immediately start hosting your own email on a brand new domain especially if you're using a free or very low-cost VPS provider.

Pay a bit more for a better reputation provider. Use a domain you've owned for a while. Set up all SPF, DKIM, and DMARC properly.

Or just pay fastmail to do it for you.