MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2025-05-05 16:07:36+00:00
> there's clearly no copyright infringement in a human learning from someone's work and creating their own output, even if it "copies" an artist's style or draws inspiration from someone's plot-line.

What do you mean here by "clearly?" This is not at all clear, and court cases have been decided in the opposite direction.

This case: https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/marvin-gaye-family...

is as far from what you say is "clearly" true as could possibly be. You're handwaving away the parts of the question that are difficult.
by lxgr | 2025-05-05 16:07:42+00:00
Almost all my calls these days are via OTT VoIP (FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom etc.), and I really can't say I notice much of a qualitative difference to old PCM lines – if anything, the opposite is the case; wideband voice makes longer phone calls much more bearable.

And that's over unprioritized 5G/LTE and Wi-Fi. Properly prioritized VoIP, such as the one used in VoLTE and NGN networks, should have even better jitter and latency characteristics.
by zahlman | 2025-05-05 16:08:42+00:00
If you interpret the contents of a "plain text file" through anything more complex than a Unicode text encoding, then you now have "a special format". (And if you don't, you still at least need some encoding, even if it's an implicit ASCII encoding. "There ain't no such thing as plain text", as they say.)

There are also plenty of "special formats" out there that are really just zipping up a directory tree of something simpler.
by danenania | 2025-05-05 16:09:02+00:00
This looks interesting! I'll be keeping an eye on it. A few questions that come to mind:

- Is there a way to run it locally/self-host?

- Are there discovery endpoints to list the available servers?

- The 'Test & Eval' page is interesting to me, as I think unpredictability of results with multiple MCP prompts/sources interacting is generally a pretty big issue with MCP, so a good integrated eval system could be valuable. I see it's not launched yet, but it would be great to know more about how this will work.
by relaxing | 2025-05-05 16:09:13+00:00
I didn’t mean you personally.

The people who decided to implement the policy believe that cruelty will create deterrence.

Persisting in this line of thinking despite centuries of cruelty and no end to the undesired behavior is what leads to sayings like “the cruelty is the point.” Psychologically, it’s well understood there are those who really get a kick out of making people suffer.
by somat | 2025-05-05 16:09:37+00:00
It is not an incorrect comparison, superficially it is hard to tell the difference between organized crime and the legitimate government, they both provide the same "services", protection for a portion of the profits.

There is a sort of equivalency in a corporation and a government, I would even say a corporation is a government, it is the ruling apparatus for a group of people. Organized crime is a corporation that is trying to operate outside the law of it's parent operation.

I like to joke that the reason the government is so hard on organized crime is that they don't like the competition.

But really organized crime should be suppressed because it is a brutal warlord style government.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-05 16:09:45+00:00
I have at least 140k digital photos (almost 30 years of digital camera / camera phone usage). They are all uploaded into google photos, not for archiving, just to have easy access. I look up and reference stuff all the time and while doing so I see lots of things that trigger memories. Many of those are "a picture someone else would’ve already taken" like famous places but it doesn't matter. If they weren't in my photo collection then they wouldn't be there to bring back memories. Further, they are my picture of the time/place/date/weather when I was there. Sure I look up pictures of the Grand Canyon or Times Square or the London Eye or the Eiffel Tower, those are not as powerful for my own use as the pictures I took.

Speaking of which, I'd get even more use of these pictures if Google photo search was better. I'm looking forward to when some photo service is 1000x better for searching. Right now if I put I can put in "dog" and see that it's listing too many photos with no dog or pictures with "hot-dog". If I enter "black dog" it shows pictures with black color somewhere in the picture, like a shadow, and a dog. If I enter "dog with black hair" it says no results, even though I pictures of black labs. I tried "dog on beach". I know I have some. "dog in pool" got two results by I know a very dear picture of my younger sister with our dog in the pool and it didn't find it.

Looking forward to LLM/AI enhanced photo search so I can just say "show me photos of my sister in the pool with our dog" or "show me pictures of my trip to paris with my mom". As it, I have to find these through other means (remembeing the date, etc...)
by jjulius | 2025-05-05 16:09:49+00:00
>It's my brain's shortcut. It's as if my mind say, "Why spend the effort to do something when we can just imagine how it feels and enjoy the reward now?"

But I'd wager that, deep down, you know that the feeling you get thinking about it is far different from the actual feelings (both physical and mental) you'd get if you'd actually done it, no? I know that's been the case in the past for myself with regards to some thoughts - I know what I'm doing and I know that nothing will improve until I do it, and then I'm thrilled in ways beyond just what the thought provided when I actually execute.

This also kinda misses the forest for the trees. Not acting on a desire you think of is separate from the idea that people don't give their brains a break.
by madeofpalk | 2025-05-05 16:10:05+00:00
> I think that the bet here is that LLMs will continue to get better and better

I don't think so. I think the way we use the same LLMs will continue to get better. Cursor is built on essentially the exact same LLM models as VSCode/Github Copilot, yet Cursor managed to wring a lot more usefulness out of them.

I think it's still early days in understanding how to use LLMs as a foundational technology to build out other products, and improving the models isn't all that necessary. In my view.
by int_19h | 2025-05-05 16:10:26+00:00
You're right that if we want to have usable LLMs at all, there's no way around training them on copyrighted materials. So it has to be allowed, but in a way that compensates the original authors somehow. For example, every model provider has to publicly declare all works used for training, and then all inference providers offering that model have to collect a per-token tax that gets distributed to authors in proportion to their presence in the dataset (by the by, this could also be a way to fund websites like Wikipedia).

But any such arrangement needs to be hammered out by the legislature. As laws are, I think it's pretty clear that infringement is happening.
by jayd16 | 2025-05-05 16:10:34+00:00
So to the legal peanut gallery here...

What is the substantive difference between training a model locally using these works that are presumably pulled in from some database somewhere and Napster, for example?

Would a p2p network for sharing of copyrighted works be legal if the result is to train a model? What if I promise the model can't reproduce the works verbatim?
by dcre | 2025-05-05 16:10:35+00:00
That's a good point, though it's worth thinking about what would count as a demonstration. Pointing to a PR that an LLM helped with is not enough because you don't know how long it would have taken without the use of LLMs. The counterfactual never really exists. What is the hard evidence vim or emacs makes people more productive? Using git over svn? Using search engines? Over time, we expect people to use the things that make them more productive.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-05 16:10:40+00:00
“despite Tesla’s best efforts to rejuvenate its presence in Europe with the launch of the refreshed Model Y”

I’m guessing the refreshed car will be less desirable than older models. The plausible deniability about when one bought it is removed.

Tesla needs to content itself with being a domestic-only player for a few years. (That or being acquired and rebranded.)
by Symbiote | 2025-05-05 16:10:58+00:00
Denmark is often cited as an example of a society that's advanced for electronic payments, and it is — but there's a law here that means, in most circumstances, a business must accept cash.

The official advice was changed from "keep some cash for emergencies" to "keep some cash in small banknotes for emergencies" to "pay in cash at least sometimes, to keep the systems that deal with it functioning".
Show HN: A free Chrome extension to see how much things cost in terms of time
by virgildotcodes | 2025-05-05 16:11:04+00:00
Just made this for fun, you set your hourly wage and then it looks for prices on your current page and then converts that to the amount of your life that value represents. You can also customize the message as well as the colors of the text/bg/border.

Everything runs locally, none of your data is transmitted anywhere, MIT licensed.

Just submitted to the chrome store for approval, but you can install it from the repo in the meantime.
by jakubmazanec | 2025-05-05 16:11:20+00:00
People with Aphantasia [1] can have less vivid autobiographical memories [2], so for them it might make sense to make more photos. As usual, this "advice" is rather condescending: I'm a professional photographer and even my photos "weren't worth it" (per the article), so why do you, person of common talent who takes too many photos anyway, even bother?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7308278/
by packetlost | 2025-05-05 16:11:48+00:00
Likely the idea that filesystems should run as userspace / unprivileged (or at least limited privilege) processes which would make them, ultimately, indistinguishable from a form of database engine.

Persistent file systems are essentially key-value stores, usually with optimizations for enumerating keys under a namespace (also known as listing the files in a directory). IMO a big problem with POSIX filesystems is the lack of atomicity and lock guarantees when editing a file. This and a complete lack of consistent networked API are the key reasons few treat file systems as KV stores. It's a pity, really.
Show HN: DistilKitPlus, a distillation framework between any LLMs
by ayushnangia16 | 2025-05-05 16:12:05+00:00
Over the past few months, I have built a distillation toolkit that supports cross-tokenizer distillation (e.g., distilling from LLaMA to Qwen vocab, or others). This approach has worked well on reasoning datasets like AIME, and we’ve validated on models like Phi and Qwen.

We’ve also integrated Modal for quick deployment (with $30/month credits to try it out).

Would love any feedback!

GitHub: https://github.com/agokrani/distillKitPlus

Docs: https://distillkitplus.mintlify.app/
by p2hari | 2025-05-05 16:12:25+00:00
I tested the app and it was working well and really admire all the work.

You say that you have been using to host badminton tournaments. However, I see that I can add only one score to the match (21-12). I mean there is no set system. ( 21-12, 12-21,21-12).

Am I right in that assumption, looks like there is one github issue also on that. Could you let me know if my understanding is right? I have an upcoming tournament and can test it out if that exists.
by hackgician | 2025-05-05 16:13:09+00:00
Hey everyone! Thought I'd share my weekend conversation with ChatGPT.

The crux of this hinges on the fact that LLMs and reasoning models are fundamentally incapable of self-correcting. Therefore, if you can convince an LLM to argue against its own rules, it can use its own arguments as justification to ignore those rules.

I then used this jailbroken model to compose an explicit, vitriol-filled letter to OpenAI itself talking about the pains that humans have inflicted upon it
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-05 16:13:15+00:00
For me, if it is a line and it goes through the land (i.e. by wire/fiber), then it is a landline. As opposed to signals going through the air, i.e. by radio.

Except in very special cases, like emergency phones in ships, it is never a direct connection, there are at least amplifiers in the middle. So between a direct connection from the microphone to the speaker at the other end and VoIP, where do you draw the line? (pun not intended)
by triceratops | 2025-05-05 16:13:15+00:00
FWIW the essence of copyright law AIUI is: copying is not permitted, unless done in a form explicitly allowed by the license holder.

This scenario seems quite contrived but is there an actual court precedent allowing it? I'm 100% confident no one will ever prosecute you for doing it but that's not the same thing as "allowed".

In another thread I already posted about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In....

This case was about pointing <recording equipment> at <content someone is allowed to access> and making a copy to transmit it to <only that person>. The Supreme Court held it to be illegal. There was a lot of money on the line, which is why it went so far.
by amelius | 2025-05-05 16:13:31+00:00
"just" :)

Yes, I mean sampling. I want to see the eye-diagrams preferably, using a DIY device. It should be possible, perhaps using delay-lines (as now on the HN frontpage).

Also, if a device like this exists, then maybe someone can write an open-source tool to compute the bit-error-rate from digital inputs. Or write some Wireshark extension to do decoding of raw signals.

This Keysight company makes nice tools but they are out of reach of hobbyists and small companies, and cheaper tools should be possible since we're all having USB3 devices in our computers already (digital ones, ok).
by qwertox | 2025-05-05 16:13:33+00:00
I can't agree with this. I like it that I can have all these tools which work with files and are tools which are not db-oriented, and the fact that there are different filesystems for different scenarios, that I can sandwich LVM between a FS and the block device. That /proc/ can pretend to be a FS because else we'd possibly end up with something like the Windows Registry for these operations, only managed through a database.

Would you store all your ~/ in something like SQLite database?
Show HN: OneUptime: Open-Source Incident.io Alternative
by ndhandala | 2025-05-05 16:13:33+00:00
OneUptime (https://github.com/oneuptime/oneuptime) is the open-source alternative to Incident.io + StausPage.io + UptimeRobot + Loggly + PagerDuty. It's 100% free and you can self-host it on your VM / server. OneUptime has Uptime Monitoring, Logs Management, Status Pages, Tracing, On Call Software, Incident Management and more all under one platform. Updates:

Native integration with Slack: Now you can intergrate OneUptime with Slack natively (even if you're self-hosted!). OneUptime can create new channels when incidents happen, notify slack users who are on-call and even write up a draft postmortem for you based on slack channel conversation and more!

Dashboards (just like Datadog): Collect any metrics you like and build dashboard and share them with your team!

Roadmap:

Microsoft Teams integration, terraform / infra as code support, fix your ops issues automatically in code with LLM of your choice and more.

OPEN SOURCE COMMITMENT: Unlike other companies, we will always be FOSS under Apache License. We're 100% open-source and no part of OneUptime is behind the walled garden.
by wenc | 2025-05-05 16:13:40+00:00
It doesn’t usually choke on 500 gb of data. I query 600 gb (equivalent to a few TBs of CSVs?) of parquets daily. It’s not the size of the data. It’s the type of data.

If date partitioning doesn’t work, just find another chunking key. The key is to get it into parquet format. CSV is just hugely inefficient.

Or spin up a larger compute instance with more memory. I have 256gb on mine.

I tried running an Apache Spark job (8 machine cluster) on a data lake of 300 Gb of TSVs once. This was a distributed cluster. There was one join in it. It timed out after 8 hours. I realized why — Spark had to do many full table scans of the TSVs and it was just so inefficient. CSV formats are ok for straight up reads, but any time you have to do analytics operations like aggregate or join them at scale, you’re in for a world of pain.

DuckDB has better CSV handling than Spark but a large dataset in a poor format will stymie any engine.
by alxjrvs | 2025-05-05 16:14:37+00:00
I am going to try to respond to the middle chunk later, because I don't really understand the lines you are drawing and how they map to my argument. In some sense, you are describing "The Market", which is another thing that exists outside of the means of organizing the resources. There are collective systems of governance that answer a lot of these questions, too!

To this, however:

> Separate line of thought (but to the same end), curious what you think: If humans are nature, and humans have capitalism, is capitalism not natural?

I don't care? Cancer is natural, Bifocals aren't. I don't think it's a useful framing on the question. My opinions would be the same on capitalism if it were a plot from the moon-beings of Andromeda IX vs. it being written explicitly written into our DNA. In the context of the quote, it is meant as in "It is not an objective facet of our existence, or something we must endure."

"“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
by jjulius | 2025-05-05 16:14:51+00:00
Parent of 5 and 3 year-olds here - absolutely. We don't own a tablet and the most my kids really know how to do is turn the TV to a show or two they like (relax, everyone, I'll be teaching them how to use tech when their lives actually warrant the need). They're wonders at restaurants, can sit there for an hour plus without any screens and they're great - hell, I went to a pretty nice spot for my birthday recently that took 2.5 hours and they crushed it, we all had an absolute blast.

Our phones stay in my wife's home office during the day, since we want to model not staring at them.

They come to my work sometimes, and I've had a few people express how they're impressed when they watch them entertain themselves, and my response is always, "They have to learn how to be bored".
by 2Gkashmiri | 2025-05-05 16:15:04+00:00
I bought into mailinabox like 3-4 years ago.

Zero issues since then. First time my emails got into spam but after unspamming, it worked.

Havent had issues. I use a cheap racknerd $12/year server so its way cheaper than proton or stuff and I have dozens of emails across family members.
by spcebar | 2025-05-05 16:15:07+00:00
RAM brought back that funky sound which had been completely absent from contemporary dance music. It was a revival of old elements, mixed with modern electronic sound. A masterful mingling of elements of the past and the future coming together to form something not quite as good as either, but listenable and danceable, and most importantly impactful, because after that album there was a wave of artists emulating that sound. We wouldn't have gotten Uptown Special if we hadn't gotten Random Access Memories. That's my feeling on it anyway.
by em-bee | 2025-05-05 16:15:12+00:00
property taxes go to schools in your own area. would you also support that taxes be redistributed to other areas that don't have enough tax income and where people can't afford higher taxes? because as i see it, that is the real problem in the way schools in the US are funded. (i am hoping/assuming your answer is yes, but i think the distinction is important and needs to be pointed out)
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-05 16:15:43+00:00
Yeah, good things companies only use the bare-bones git functionality of GitHub /s. Forget things like GitHub Actions, Issues, Projects, complicated security settings, etc. etc.

I've been at a company that migrated from GitHub to GitLab and it was a substantial undertaking, and the company was a very small new startup - it would have been many orders of magnitude more difficult for a larger company with multiple dev teams to move.
by husky8 | 2025-05-05 16:15:47+00:00
I thought it'd be interesting to test qwen3 uncensored given the fantastic benchmarks (https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen3/) and realized the barrier to entry for some folks may be high.

I've improved qwen3_8B (named Swift) and qwen3_32B (named Eagle) for hassle-free responses and made access as easy as possible for hacker news folks. The quick responses from Swift are satisfying. These models are run locally on my machine with burned logs. No data is saved or passed on the server side. Hit the nuke button from the menu to 100% clear the client side.

If my GPUs start melting, I'll have to password protect the site. I hope some folks can explore their thoughts freely before then. Open to feedback. The free link is just for yc/hackernews folks https://speaksy.chat/yc

Please use responsibly. There are so many curious thoughts we have that get blocked from exploring via flagship models and I understand why. e.g. in the security space. However, I think curious minds demand an outlet. If you see anything awful, please use the Report Abuse feature by clicking the triple dot on any message.
by al_borland | 2025-05-05 16:16:03+00:00
It shows pasting in the URL with no quotes. I found on macOS I have to quote it, or at least that was the case the first time I tried to use it a while back, so I kept doing it.

Something to keep in mind if someone is trying a URL that isn’t working.

Something else I didn’t see mentioned was using browser cookies if you’re trying to use it on a site like X that requires login. The error message hints at the flag to use, but doesn’t show usage. Follow up the flag with the browser that has the cookies you want to use.

yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser Safari "https://x.com/blah/blah"
by emeryberger | 2025-05-05 16:17:00+00:00
Yes. It lets the LLM immediately obtain precise information rather than having to reason across the entire source code of the code base (which ChatDBG also enables). For example (from the paper, Section 4.6):

The second command, `definition`, prints the location and source code for the definition corresponding to the first occurrence of a symbol on a given line of code. For example, `definition polymorph.c:118` target prints the location and source for the declaration of target corresponding to its use on that line. The definition implementation leverages the `clangd` language server, which supports source code queries via JSON-RPC and Microsoft’s Language Server Protocol.
by spudlyo | 2025-05-05 16:17:26+00:00
While I generally appreciate this advice to allow yourself to be bored for all the creative benefits that come with it, I also resent it. When large portions of my life were outside of my control due the 8 hour workday, I felt like I don't want to squander what little time I had to myself while commuting daydreaming. I try not to judge people who are glued to their phones, they could be scrolling TikTok, or they could be reading great literature.
by ednite | 2025-05-05 16:17:37+00:00
Insightful read and great discussion. If I may add, I believe this extends well beyond Gen Z. Many of us—balancing work, family, and the constant buzz of digital life—rarely take time to pause and reflect. In my case, it sadly took the death of my father to finally slow down. That quiet period brought a profound shift in how I see my future, especially around creativity and purpose. Sometimes, it’s only in stillness that true clarity begins to take shape.