MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by empath75 | 2025-05-12 15:31:48+00:00
Let's start with I think a case that everyone agrees with.

If I were to take an image, and compress it or encrypt it, and then show you data file, you would not be able to see the original copyrighted material anywhere in the data.

But if you had the right computer program, you could use it to regenerate the original image flawlessly.

I think most people would easily agree that distributing the encrypted file without permission is still a distribution of a copyrighted work and against the law.

What if you used _lossy_ encryption, and can merely reproduce a poor quality jpeg of the original image? I think still copyright infringement, right?

Would it matter if you distributed it with an executable that only rendered the image non-deterministically? Maybe one out of 10 times? Or if the command to reproduce it was undocumented?

Okay, so now we have AI. We can ignore the algorithm entirely and how it works, because it's not relevant. There is a large amount of data that it operates on, the weights of the model and so on. You _can_ with the correct prompts, sometimes generate a copy of a copyrighted work, to some degree of fidelity or another.

I do not think it is meaningfully different from the simpler example, just with a lot of extra steps.

I think, legally, it's pretty clear that it is illegally distributing copyrighted material without permission. I think calling it an "ai" just needlessly anthropomorphizes everything. It's a computer program that distributes copyrighted work without permission. It doesn't matter if it's the primary purpose or not.

I think probably there needs to be some kind of new law to fix this situation, but under the current law as it exists, it seems to me to be clearly illegal.
by Gathering6678 | 2025-05-12 15:32:07+00:00
"The fact that it triggered a clause to eliminate preferred voting shares is very odd. Either a complete oversight by the guy's lawyer, or if it was done intentionally, I have no idea."

It's probably not an oversight. E.g. in Hong Kong, it is mandatory to have a minimum amount of equity (I think 10%), otherwise you will lose all super-voting power. I don't think a similar requirement is present in the US, but the logic behind is valid: the super-voting power is for a founder / important member of the company to maintain control and therefore allow for a long-term strategy to be carried out, even after multiple rounds of financing. If you're no longer a major shareholder and working for the company, the super-voting power may no longer be appropriate, as your priorities and preferences may now differ from the company.
by dingnuts | 2025-05-12 15:32:12+00:00
Except at some level you do obviously believe that using the app was worth $57, because you didn't end the story by saying you called a cab company and got a big discount by doing it the old fashioned way.

OR could it be that the scheduling, summoning, and advertising infrastructure is actually close to 60% of the cost, and the added convenience of the app is in fact worth the difference in price?
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-05-12 15:32:27+00:00
I'm getting increasingly relevant personally as a double-whammy hacker and mechanic towards liberating people and the machines they fucking bought from daddy Chevrolet who doesn't want them to control their own machinery.

It's still possible, even if for some you need to swap the entire engine controller, to take that control back. Ultimately all these damn modules have to eventually switch bare copper conductors to make all the stuff work in the car, and if we have to, we can swap ALL the silicon involved.

I would love some actual right to repair legislation but our government is too occupied undermining people's civil rights and pissing off every other market on the face of the Earth.

I will never ever pay a subscription fee for my fucking heated seats even if I have to bridge the 12V across a big toggle in the dashboard and wire the stupid thing myself. You gotta draw a line somewhere and that's mine. Fuck ALL the way off with subscription gating features in the machine I already bought.
by davidmurdoch | 2025-05-12 15:32:45+00:00
Well yes, but I personally would never submit a PRr I could use the excuse, "sorry, AI wrote those parts, that's why this PR has now bugs than usual".

All that to say that the base of your argument is still correct: AI really isn't saving all that much time since everyone has to proof-read it so much in order to not increase the number of PR bugs from using it in the first place.
by ls612 | 2025-05-12 15:33:04+00:00
That used to be how it worked. Then the DMCA 1201 provisions arrived and so now anything not expressly permitted by the enumerated exceptions is forbidden. Even talking about how it works is punishable as a felony (upheld by SCOTUS in like 2000 or 2001, they basically said the Copyright clause is in the constitution so the government can censor information on how to defeat DRM).
by pavel_lishin | 2025-05-12 15:33:16+00:00
Well, the point of me not revealing a title is so that if you run across this book later, you won't think, "OH! This is the one where Pavel said X happens!"

A spoiler by itself, without a link to the book, isn't a spoiler at all, which is why I didn't include the title.

If you're curious, I can drop five recommendations for good books, one of which is the work I'm referring to :)
by immibis | 2025-05-12 15:33:38+00:00
It kind of does. You still have all the same backend logic, but now it doesn't have to run concurrently with a user interface. You can take a queue of operations, process operations off the queue and send their results back. Isn't that a pretty reasonable way for a system to behave? More than a few systems do this internally, with some kind of central message queue.
by DudeOpotomus | 2025-05-12 15:33:46+00:00
The facts are that the overwhelming majority of Trades(people), are terrible business people. They may be excellent at their jobs, but very, very , very few have the business skills to build a solid business. Those who do, do extremely well well. Those who hire people who have the skill, do really, really well.

Not that different from engineers. Very few have business skills, but those who do, do very well.
Show HN: Airweave – Let agents search any app
by lennertjansen | 2025-05-12 15:34:21+00:00
Hey HN, we're Lennert and Rauf. We’re building Airweave (https://github.com/airweave-ai/airweave), an open-source tool that lets agents search and retrieve data from any app or database. Here’s a general intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFI-7SYGQ48, and here’s a longer one that shows more real-world use cases, examples of how Airweave is used by Cursor (0:33) and Claude desktop (2:04), etc.: https://youtu.be/p2dl-39HwQo

A couple of months ago we were building agents that interacted with different apps and were frustrated when they struggled to handle vague natural language requests like "resolve that one Linear issue about missing auth configs", "if you get an email from an unsatisfied customer, reimburse their payment in Stripe", or "what were the returns for Q1 based on the financials sheet in gdrive?", only to have the agent inefficiently chain together loads of function calls to find the data or not find it at all and hallucinate.

We also noticed that despite the rise of MCP creating more desire for agents to interact with external resources, the majority of agent dev tooling focused on function calling and actions instead of search. We were annoyed by the lack of tooling that enabled agents to semantically search workspace or database contents, so we started building Airweave first as an internal solution. Then we decided to open-source it and pursue it full time after we got positive reactions from coworkers and other agent builders.

Airweave connects to productivity tools, databases, or document stores via their APIs and transforms their contents into searchable knowledge bases, accessible through a standardized interface for the agent. The search interface is exposed via REST or MCP. When using MCP, Airweave essentially builds a semantically searchable MCP server on top of the resource. The platform handles the entire data pipeline from connection and extraction to chunking, embedding, and serving. To ensure knowledge is current, it has automated sync capabilities, with configurable schedules and change detection through content hashing.

We built it with support for white-labeled multi-tenancy to provide OAuth2-based integration across multiple user accounts while maintaining privacy and security boundaries. We're also actively working on permission-awareness (i.e., RBAC on the data) for the platform.

So happy to share learnings and get insights from your experiences. looking forward to comments!
by Hilift | 2025-05-12 15:34:35+00:00
If you are a threat actor, you could get lucky and there isn't another Endpoint Detection and Response product installed, which would almost certainly intercept this.

If you are an EDR vendor, this is an obfuscated API call that EDR vendors can use to suppress or disable the Windows Firewall. CrowdStrike for example, can do either I believe, use Windows Firewall or use their implementation.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-12 15:34:36+00:00
My parents did it on advice of their financial advisor. Is it common, probably not, most people don't have a financial advisor but setting up a revokable trust as part of an estate plan is not something that only the ultra-wealthy can do. It can make a lot of sense if you have any postive net worth to pass along to heirs. A lot of people don't, and if you are going to "die broke" (by intent or by happenstance) there's no point.
by blindriver | 2025-05-12 15:35:49+00:00
I've been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and wear a CGM. I find that my blood glucose spikes much later than what is suggested. For example, I might eat a meal and my blood glucose doesn't spike until after 2 hours. When it spikes, I see the body react with insulin and it drives my blood sugar levels down, so I'm not sure if I actually do have T2D or if this is just how my body works.

Another thing I've noticed is that if I eat a very rice-heavy meal, my blood sugar levels may rise throughout the night. I don't think this is insulin-resistance but rather my body digesting the rice. You can't expect the body to digest all the rice in 2 hours, can you, there certainly must be parts that are protected from the stomach acid until much later in the digestion process. So that feeds into the high blood sugar levels overnight in my opinion.

I think if anything, CGMs have opened up the idea of what diabetes really is and how different bodies handle blood sugar. I think I'm borderline T2D, not full-on T2D despite what my doctor says, and I've started wondering if my blood sugar has always been high, but normal for me. On average it's about 120 mg/dL, but I do see my body react properly to new sources of blood sugar and drive it back to "normal" levels, so the idea that I have insulin resistance doesn't make sense to me.
by hurfebuff | 2025-05-12 15:36:12+00:00
Would you want a "click to subscribe" function that works like that?

I wouldn't, I would like some form of confirmation before buying a subscription. I don't see the problem in a unsubscribe function having a symmetrical confirmation in any service that doesn't try to trick me into a subscription. And actually, even more so for services that try to trick me...
by MacNCheese23 | 2025-05-12 15:36:17+00:00
Do i see this correctly, TCP-based Websocket with JSON messages that are parsed?

That is very much removed from any MMORPG type of communication.

One of the hardest parts of a client/server MMO architecture is the network layer, which uses a lossless/retry/fault-prove UDP-based protocol. Everything else sits on top. Luckily, there are tons of sample libraries by now, I suggest peeking at the leaked SW Online sony code which includes the source for their implementation.
by TrackerFF | 2025-05-12 15:36:56+00:00
Paolo has a bunch of cool vids on this topic, I've watched them all. I binged through them for hours when I first discovered the channel...my initial reaction was: Damn how long people in Japan work. Most people seemingly woke up, went to work, went out to eat and drink, and then get maybe a couple of hours at home before it all repeats.

But on the other side of the spectrum, you have: https://www.youtube.com/@salarymantokyo
by woodruffw | 2025-05-12 15:37:22+00:00
No; Trail of Bits has always had multiple internal groups, including an OSS engineering group that does security and performance engineering. We still do plenty of audits as a company; you can see recent work on that front here[1] :-).

Source: I run the group that produced this work.

[1]: https://github.com/trailofbits/publications
by mnky9800n | 2025-05-12 15:37:41+00:00
Yeah i feel like this guy posts a lot of doomer stuff and it isn't as introspective as it could be. i also feel like posting doomer stuff is popular and so he is trying to monetize the doomer mentality. That leads me to kind of think what he says has less value because i just see any kind of monetization scheme like that as a somewhat implicit bias to whatever is being said. you can't be anti-doomer if you make money on your substack talking about doomer ideas. but also, i feel bad for the guy he lost his job that had a nice salary and didn't find a new one. that must suck. But then I wonder, is that exactly what he is trying to capitalize on? And then you must think, is this what the world has become now that everything is commoditized and we are all part of the Attention economy? Is everyone trying to make money on everything and thus no one is really to be believed about anything? That's one reason why i deleted most social media. It all became a grift and none of it had anything to do with being social.
by blindriver | 2025-05-12 15:38:16+00:00
Can someone tell me what the likelihood of a humongous explosion from nuclear fusion could be? All these nuclear physicists dealing with enormous amounts of energy, like the LHC or China with their attempts at nuclear fusion really terrify me that it might provoke a huge reaction that will devastate the planet. Is this possible or do they have a true fail-safe in place that prevents it?
by AlexandrB | 2025-05-12 15:38:20+00:00
It's hard to find a specific number, but that seems like it's even more than "traditional" taxi companies take.

So the enshittification has come full circle - Uber is now priced basically the same as traditional taxis and takes a possibly bigger cut for themselves without any of the overhead or capex of a traditional taxi company. Filing this away under: don't ever believe tech company hype.
by smallmancontrov | 2025-05-12 15:38:34+00:00
Let's follow the money. A policy that pumps stocks by dumping labor + consumer rights delivers a roughly equal cost to everyone but delivers benefits in proportion to net worth. Suppose it pumps assets by 1%.

A $200k NW individual gets 2x cost and $2k gain.

A $3M NW individual gets 2x cost and $30k gain.

A $6B NW individual gets 1x cost and $60M gain.

A $400B NW individual gets 1x cost and $4B gain.

If it wasn't obvious, these numbers correspond to the Median American, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. People whining about focus on ownership and complaining that all politicians are bad are drawing this equivalence across 3-6 orders of magnitude of incentive to do evil.

In contrast, I argue that incentives matter and that high NW individuals in politics have uniquely misaligned incentives. The focus on ownership doesn't just matter, it matters more than it ever did before.
by Gathering6678 | 2025-05-12 15:38:40+00:00
For overseas workers, a. it is quite difficult for foreigners to get a working visa in China (though I suppose it's more of an immigration issue rather than the country being authoritarian); b. companies would probably use their passports. So you're kind of correct. However, my point still holds: fingerprints for interviewees, even in China, is at best extremely uncommon, and at worst (?) illegal in most cases.

Btw, I am nitpicking here, but by universal I meant used across the whole country, i.e. national.
by usrbinenv | 2025-05-12 15:38:47+00:00
Using Ruby modules to namespace things is certainly possible, but is very often cumbersome. Modules also "hardcode" a namespace: that is, if I use modules for name-spacing, it will always be "MyModule::MyClass" everywhere -- or, in other words, namespacing is controlled by library author, not user. The proposed feature shifts that control to library user.
by Intralexical | 2025-05-12 15:38:49+00:00
Why do you think the obvious analogy is LLM=Human, and not LLM=JPEG or LLM=database?

I think you're overstating the legal uniqueness of LLMs. They're covered just fine by the existing legal precedents around copyrighted and derived works, just as building a death star would be covered by existing rules around outer space use and WMDs. Pretending they should be treated differently is IMO the entire lie told by the "AI" companies about copyright.
by JohnFen | 2025-05-12 15:38:54+00:00
I think we won't see new language development either explode or decline. The reason that there are so many different languages is that each one embodies different tradeoffs, and sometimes one set of tradeoffs fits the problem at hand better than a different set of tradeoffs.

I don't see any reason to think that this reality has changed or that LLMs will change things on this front.
by jzacharia | 2025-05-12 15:39:30+00:00
Keto works well, but I'm concerned about the extreme fat intake. I did manage to lower my A1C from 9s to mid 5s using Keto as a T1D, but eventually settled into a high protein, moderate fat, low-ish carb diet and that has worked pretty well without being hyper-restrictive. Heavily inspired by the late Dr. Richard K. Bernstein.
by hangonhn | 2025-05-12 15:39:59+00:00
I honestly would use a card that promises me easier subscription cancellation. In fact, I sort of do already: I use Apple's in app payment system to handle as many subscriptions as possible because of how easy they make it to cancel. I know Apple increases the cost to the service provider and they in turn charge me more but the ease of cancellation is worth it to me.

Now if a bank or card came along and provided the same (and maybe easy subscription management in general) they can have all my subscription revenue.
by vonnik | 2025-05-12 15:40:02+00:00
This seems like a pretty confused piece, with poorly defined terms and poetic associations more than arguments.

Friction can be both a natural obstacle, an accident, or a deliberate tool of social and business engineering. It's not inherently good or bad. It's value depends on context. We most often think of friction as evil, because it makes easy things hard. But there are lots of cases where someone might decide something *should* be hard (eg the educational examples she brings up, or any kind of athletic or intellectual training where you can need to be good to surpass a threshold of performance).

In a broader context, friction is always part of an effort/reward ratio. It's the effort part, but part of its meaning is derived from the reward.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-05-12 15:40:11+00:00
I am retired now, out of the game, but I also suggest an alternative: running locally with open-codex, Ollama, and the qwen3 models and gemma3, and when necessary use something hosted like Gemini 2.5 Pro without an IDE.

I like to strike a balance between coding from scratch and using AI.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-05-12 15:40:30+00:00
At least some people are probably putting "I hate Elon" stickers on because assholes are out there destroying people's cars because they have beef with Elon, and they don't want said assholes to destroy their car. It's lamentable that people are willing to act so poorly that they think it's OK to destroy innocent parties' property as a form of protest, but so it goes.
by ngangaga | 2025-05-12 15:40:46+00:00
> Except at some level you do obviously believe that using the app was worth $57

That's ridiculous. "because you didn't end the story by saying you called a cab company and got a big discount by doing it the old fashioned way." is just bad-faith weaseling. Uber is worse in every way than the taxi stands that used to be at airports; now you hail a car via an expensive app and have to wait for them to all jockey to where you are if they don't bail on the way.

Taxi stands still make the most sense at events and leaving mass transit and that's even before considering the ridiculous cost. Visiting europe felt like a breath of fresh air in comparison—technically they have uber, but there was no point in using it because taxis were so prevalent, reliable, and cheap.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-12 15:40:57+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".

Point being, laws aren't some God-ordained rules, beautiful in their fractal recursive abstraction, perfectly covering everything that will ever happen in the universe. No, laws are more or less crude hacks that deal with here and now. 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. This is a new situation, and laws need to be updated to cover it.
by AlexandrB | 2025-05-12 15:41:22+00:00
Why would the old fashioned way be a big discount? Old fashioned taxi companies are not taking 0%.

> scheduling, summoning, and advertising infrastructure is actually close to 60% of the cost

Funny story about that - "pre-booking" an Uber for a future date costs something like an additional 20% on top of the actual fare. Made that mistake once and never again.
by kaycebasques | 2025-05-12 15:41:54+00:00
Hello, I wrote this. Thank you for reading!

The post was previously discussed 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42013762

To be clear, when I said "embeddings are underrated" I was only arguing that my fellow technical writers (TWs) were not paying enough attention to a very useful new tool in the TW toolbox. I know that the statement sounds silly to ML practitioners, who very much don't "underrate" embeddings.

I know that the post is light on details regarding how exactly we apply embeddings in TW. I have some projects and other blog posts in the pipeline. Short story long, embeddings are important because they can help us make progress on the 3 intractable challenges of TW: https://technicalwriting.dev/strategy/challenges.html
by hedora | 2025-05-12 15:41:56+00:00
At least on ours, it tries to maintain the invariant that all doors lock at once (for aesthetics?), so you cannot lock anything if any door is open. It also likes to auto-unlock, but not auto-lock when you’re outside the car.

If two people lock it at the same time, it locks, then unlocks.

The smart lock stuff on it is even worse. I didn’t think it was possible to screw up car door locks so badly, even knowing Tesla’s implementation burns people to death sometimes.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-05-12 15:41:58+00:00
In order to determine the valuation of companies, Bhatnagar typically applies the following formula: [(Twitter followers x Facebook fans) + (# of employees x 1000)] x (total likes + daily page views) + (monthly burn rate x Google’s stock price)-squared and then doubles if it they’re mobile first or if the CEO has run a business into the ground before.

Beautiful.
by jansan | 2025-05-12 15:42:23+00:00
As I wrote in the post above, masks and filters are not not supported, yet.

For your icon a clip path may make more sense than a mask. If you want to create an icon with the same shape you can simply take the elements from the mask and paste them into Hyvector and work with that:

<circle cx="10" cy="10" r="10" fill="white"></circle> <path d="M15.41 16.59L10.83 12l4.58-4.59L14 6l-6 6l6 6l1.41-1.41z"></path>