MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-06-16 08:54:48+00:00
In most languages, "to be" is used to express at least 3 kinds of relationships, which can be distinguished depending on whether the words connected by "to be" are e.g. pronouns, proper nouns or common nouns:

1. identity: "He is John"

2. membership: "He is engineer"

3. inclusion: "Wolves are carnivores"

For the non-symmetric membership and inclusion relationships, in natural languages the order of the words does not really matter, because a speaker will recognize which of the 2 words connected by "to be" corresponds to a bigger set, of which the other word may be a member or a subset, so "he is engineer" and "engineer is he" will be understood to mean the same, even when one alternative sounds weird (i.e. Yoda speech).

This is why, unlike for the agent and patient of a transitive verb, which need special markers, e.g. the nominative and accusative case markers, in the languages that do not have a fixed word order, for the subject and the nominal predicate that are connected by "to be" no distinct markers are required, they can use the same case (e.g. nominative), because they can always be recognized regardless of their order.

"To be" can also express other relationships, like position in space or time, qualities or quantities and so on, all of which are also distinguished by the kinds of words that are connected by "to be".

In an unambiguous language, like in formal mathematics or in programming, each kind of relationship should use a different notation.
by d3m0t3p | 2025-06-16 08:56:52+00:00
You can check company names too ! It's interesting to see that by default, the graph shows google,apple. But adding meta, and IBM really changes the plot.

Meta went from 2K to 10K+ from 2018 to 2025. While IBM seems to have stopped contributing in 2008. Since they the merging with RedHat, I would have expected to see them increase again but none of RedHat / IBM seems to have increase. https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#redhat,oracle... Not sure if their name appearing means that they are contributing tho.

Really cool project,
by Lerc | 2025-06-16 08:57:48+00:00
Based upon legal decisions in the past there is a clear argument that the distinction for fair use is whether a work is substantially different to another. You are allowed to write a book containg information you learned about from another book. There is threshold in academia regarding plagiarism that stands apart from the legal standing. The measure that was used in Gyles v Wilcox was if the new work could substitute for the old. Lord Hardwicke had the wisdom to defer to experts in the field as to what the standard should be for accepting something as meaningfully changed.

Recent decisions such as Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith have walked a fine line with this. I feel like the supreme court got this one wrong because the work is far more notable as a Warhol than as a copy of a photograph, perhaps that substitution rule should be a two way street. If the original work cannot substitute for the copy, then clearly the copy must be transformative.

LLMs generating works verbatim might be an infringement of copyright (probably not), distributing those verbatim works without a licence certainly would be. In either case, it is probably considered a failure of the model, Open AI have certainly said that such reproductions shouldn't happen and they consider it a failure mode when it does. I haven't seen similar statements from other model producers, but it would not surprise me if this were the standard sentiment.

Humans looking at works and producing things in a similar style is allowed, indeed this is precisely what art movements are. The same transformative threshold applies. If you draw a cartoon mouse, that's ok, but if people look at it and go "It's Mickey mouse" then it's not. If it's Mickey to tiki Tu meke, it clearly is Mickey but it is also clearly transformative.

Models themselves are very clearly transformative. Copyright itself was conceived at a time when generated content was not considered possible so the notion of the output of a transformative work being a non transformative derivative of something else was never legally evaluated.
by lbschenkel | 2025-06-16 08:58:06+00:00
Not a joke. When my daughter was younger and we were visiting the daycare (förskola) facilities around us to pick one, in one of them they didn't have a room for children to sleep indoors, they always slept outdoors (even in the winter). This daycare was very highly recommended.

Anecdotally, when my daughter was a baby and had issues falling asleep, all it took was to take her for a walk outside in negative (celsius) temperatures and it was like we gave her sleeping pills. It never failed.

I grew up in a different country, so this whole concept was alien to me and it was diametrically opposite to my instincts, but I have to say that I'm a believer now.
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-16 08:58:10+00:00
macOS already has a way to do that if you're a developer, but it's weirdly both obvious and non-obvious enough that people don't seem to use it: just compile a simple program that executes other programs, and then sign it with the officially supported sandbox entitlements. You will need a supervisor program that starts up the sandboxed sub-process and grants it access to the needed files via the official bookmarks API (that's what it's called):

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/accessing...

Now you're wondering why this isn't built in to the OS. But it is! Apps from the Mac App Store are always sandboxed. Just get your apps from there, and now you know what permissions they need because the store can tell you, as can the Settings app. You can even toggle permissions on and off via Settings.

macOS has the best sandbox of any desktop OS by far. Seatbelt isn't actually deprecated and never has been. Marking it as such seems to be just a way to warn developers off trying to use it directly. Nonetheless, it's not going anywhere: Chrome's sandbox relies on it heavily and if Apple tried to remove it or even just break backwards compatibility with it they'd break Chrome, and if not done in a coordinated manner that'd open up a lot of nasty lawsuit potential and corporate relationship problems.

The reason Apple don't want you using Seatbelt directly is that you have to be an expert in macOS internals to use it correctly ... and those internals change with every release. I reported a vulnerability to a well known company just a couple of weeks ago that involved them using Seatbelt wrong! Apple's entitlements wrap up a common set of use cases under a stable API and it's then on Apple to keep them working correctly as the internals move around.
by p_v_doom | 2025-06-16 08:58:32+00:00
Writing is pure magic.It allows so much reflection and so many insights, that you wouldnt otherwise get. And writing as part of the reading process allows you to directly integrate what you are reading as you are doing it. Like cant recommend it enough. Only downside is that its slow, compared to what people are used and want to do, especially in the work environment.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-06-16 08:58:37+00:00
Copyright notices in books make it absolutely clear - you are not allowed to acquire a text by copying it without authorisation.

If you photocopy a book you haven't paid for, you've infringed copyright. If you scan it, you've infringed copyright. If you OCR the scan, you've infringed copyright.

There's legal precedent in going after torrenters and z-lib etc.

So when Zuckerberg told the Meta team to do the same, he was on the wrong side of precedent.

Arguing otherwise is literally arguing that huge corporations are somehow above laws that apply to normal people.

Obviously some people do actually believe this. Especially the people who own and work for huge corporations.

But IMO it's far more dangerous culturally and politically than copyright law is.
Ask HN: I found a bug that lets me use YC partner perk free.what should I do?
by bugtesting-one | 2025-06-16 08:58:39+00:00
Hi . i was going through a yc partner company and i found a bug that lets me use hundreds of dollars worth of service and far more in other facilities for free using yc name .

Should i contact the partners bug bounty program or ycombinator ?

I am pretty new to bug testing . so i don't know where should i contact .
by gwd | 2025-06-16 08:59:06+00:00
I think a better way to say it is that the brain doesn't commit to long term memory things that it doesn't need.

I remember hearing about some research they'd done on "binge watching" -- basically, if you have two groups:

1. One group watches the entire series over the course of a week

2. A second group watches a series one episode per week

Then some time later (maybe 6 months), ask them questions about the show, and the people in group 2 will remember significantly more.

Anecdotally, I've found the same thing with Scottish Country Dancing. In SCD, you typically walk through a dance that has 16 or so "figures", then for the next 10 minutes you need to remember the figures over and over again from different perspectives (as 1st couple, 2nd couple, 3rd couple etc). Fairly quickly, my brain realized that it only needed to remember the figures for 10 minutes; and even the next morning if you'd asked me what the figures were for a dance the night before I couldn't have told you.

I can totally believe it's the same thing with writing with an LLM (or having an assistant write a speech / report for you) -- if you're just skimming over things to make sure it looks right, your brain quickly figures out that it doesn't need to retain this information.

Contrast this to riding a bike, where you almost certainly used the skill repeatedly over the course of at least a year.
by b0a04gl | 2025-06-16 08:59:17+00:00
but who has the gear, who keeps it charged, who actually shows up when the net goes dark. tech's the easy part. the hard part is getting 5 neighbors to agree on a channel, a meeting point, and a backup plan they’ll actually remember.

also, would be interesting to see people test these setups during a planned outage. like simulate a real failure for 24 hours and see what breaks. most systems look solid until you actually need them
by silversmith | 2025-06-16 08:59:20+00:00
I'm passively interested in small, local LLM OCR, due to couple ideas kicking around between my ears. Tried some a while ago, but most of my recent knowledge is second-hand. Waiting for someone to exclaim "hey this works now!" before committing more time :)

With the big commercial offerings like chatgpt I'd fully expect them to work fine, due to the absolutely massive horsepower in use.
by PSBigBig | 2025-06-16 08:59:41+00:00
I really resonate with this. For the longest time, I felt I just “wasn’t wired” to explore deeper reasoning tasks with AI — things like philosophy, creative synthesis, or even serious debugging just seemed like they needed some genius-level prompting or coding skill.

Weirdly enough, what helped me break through wasn’t a course or a YouTube tutorial… it was a PDF.

Sounds silly, but I found this open-source project called WFGY, which is basically a semantic reasoning booster for any LLM. You just upload the PDF to ChatGPT (or any model), and it starts interacting in a way that feels like actual understanding — not just parroting surface logic.

No install, no sign-up. Literally a 60-second experiment.

I used it to challenge GPT with questions it usually fumbles (like nested logic, or paradoxes), and it actually got better. The framework even comes with sample questions to test against it. Kind of surreal.

If you’ve ever felt AI prompting is a weird dark art... this made it feel like turning on a light.

→ https://github.com/onestardao/WFGY
by Noelia- | 2025-06-16 09:00:01+00:00
This kind of thing makes me a bit cautious. When you use ChatGPT a lot, it’s easy to read too much into its replies. The model is just predicting text, but people bring their emotions into the conversation. For vulnerable users, that can spiral quickly.

The real risk isn’t the AI itself, but how people interact with it. We definitely need stronger safeguards to keep more people from getting pulled in too deep.
by liotier | 2025-06-16 09:00:44+00:00
Mesh networks are the foundation - they are essential to disaster resilience. Then what services to run over them ?

Real time chat: wild unsecure simplicity proven to run anywhere (IRC), bells & whistles with contemporary security (Matrix), some mesh native that almost no one knows ? What about post-disaster onboarding of actual users ?

Store & forward messaging: SMTP & friends may work nicely, but with actually distributed servers - in each local disaster POP. Also needs timeout and retry parameters to keeping stuff in queues practically forever.

Forums: anything better than ol' NNTP ? Other protocols merely adopted intermittent indirect connectivity - NNTP was born in it !

Is anything more sophisticated or more interactive realistic for actual disaster ?

An onboarding kit with clients for each major OS (à la AOL CDROM !) might be handy too, for snearkernet distribution over USB dongles.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-06-16 09:00:47+00:00
Sure, as a backup to your regular internet it could work, and can be shared with your community. However, the objective is to be independent from any infrastructure. The US has boycotted the ICC in the Netherlands already, if the ICC were to arrest American or Israeli war criminals they may choose to expand that boycot to the whole country, which includes Starlink access.
by nlnn | 2025-06-16 09:01:40+00:00
I don't mind either personally, but I've had a few occasions where such things have caused issues with engineers that didn't have English as a 1st language.

A fair bit of time was wasted on trying to understand some joke/pun code and variable names, and on another occasion, spending the best part of a day working on something because they took some sarcasm in code/comments literally.
by refactor_master | 2025-06-16 09:02:22+00:00
I think original post is confused exactly because of “tangled chords” analogies. Something being “messy” in our daily lives can be a bit subjective, so using the same analogies for natural forces may seem a tad counterintuitive actually.

Maybe it would be more fitting to say that it just so happens that our human definition of “messy” aligns with entropy, and not that someone decided what messy atoms look like.

I’d say a bucket of water is more neat than a bucket of ice, macroscopically.
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-16 09:03:14+00:00
Windows has a fairly capable sandbox called app isolation levels:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthz/app...

Look at how Chrome does it if you want to learn more. The API is classic Win32 unfortunately: extremely complicated, under-documented and full of razor sharp edges. The way Chrome does it also requires custom installer logic. But, it does exist.
by Agentlien | 2025-06-16 09:04:31+00:00
I was never a big Star Trek fan, but here in Sweden growing up I watched episodes of The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine when they happened to be on. There definitely always seemed to be some Star Trek series running in a decent TV slot and everyone seemed aware of it - even if its popularity was eclipsed by that of Star Wars.

From friends and family in Belgium it seems it was somewhat bigger there.
by shaky-carrousel | 2025-06-16 09:06:06+00:00
Google probably wants to bring the "maybe later" anti-pattern to the browser permission system:

https://tildes.net/~tech/1d9u/im_thoroughly_done_with_my_cho...

It's a reminder that Google is not a friend, but an ad-versary, and that you aren't given a free browser to happily navigate the internet, but to be milked by the ad industry.
by bob1029 | 2025-06-16 09:06:34+00:00
The harsh reality is that the technology is mostly a liability in business. Every line of code and vendor integration is downside waiting to happen.

It is only obvious that the technology person might be worth 50%+ of a company when paying customers are lining up and reporting happy experiences.

I've been in essentially the same position. Writing code is cheap. Finding people who are willing to pay for your software is hard. From a market dynamics perspective, I do think it's fair for a technical cofounder to receive a smaller slice of the pie, especially in domains that are inherently non-technical.

For example, managing customer relationships in banking is a very expensive and time consuming process. You often have to physically fly people to customer sites to have meetings. The domain experts are generally busting their asses throughout the entire sales cycle. The technology people typically get to sit at home and respond to email and teams calls. Way more async. Way less time in the airport. Maybe not entitled to as much of the pie as a result.

I'd also look at it like this - no one is going to pay you more equity for embellishing complexity. It might work for a while and to a small extent, but eventually you are just crippling your own personal margins. If you could have actually solved the problem entirely in the RDBMS in 40 hours for 4% equity, you could go do it again a bunch of times. When you're managing a Rube Goldberg machine, you've got no bandwidth to work on any other projects.

If someone with a well populated sales funnel offered me 4% for my services, I would strongly consider in 100% of cases.
by cess11 | 2025-06-16 09:06:43+00:00
"Absolute wild take. Do you think every police department in the US oppresses minorities and infringes on civil rights or something?"

Yes. There is some variation but cops as an institution generally grew out of previous phenomena like state employed executioners and anti-union militias, and its purpose is to protect capital owners from the threat of popular mobilisation against injustice and inequality.

Functions like sometimes acting against entrism in the state or integration with insurance industry are kind of bolted on.

"Even for the Allies? Given the prior sentence, I can't tell whether you're trying to allude to Nazi concentration camp guards, or actually think all camp guards are immoral."

Yeah, sure, forced labour camps aren't a nice thing and you aren't a nice person if you participate in enabling them, even if they're populated with germans or gays or whatever.
by HenryBemis | 2025-06-16 09:07:37+00:00
I was thinking of"how much is enough" so they can power 'instruments'. I am also thinking of 'how can we use this tech to revive space-instruments (the next generation of 'Voyagers' may be equipped with such receivers?)

I also wonder how difficult/impossible would it be, and the 'throughput'. Assuming that you want to recharge a recon drone (or the 'next generation of Voyagers flying in space) that flies over XYZ area/country/etc. Would it take 1sec or 10seconds 'of beam', and the accuracy/waste/total amount one would have to 'dispense' in order to give that drone the X seconds of 'juice' to keep it running for 1000x X seconds of flight duration. And what about clouds/mist/rain/snow/birds/etc.

'Infinite energy' for a drone (I mean no dependency to come down to refuel) is a game changer.

Would that work with 'instruments buried underground? And at what depth? ('War of the worlds' scenario). Could someone bury a device, with only the receiver protruding from the ground, with a battery to keep it alive, and waiting to be activated by a satellite passing by giving it the "10 seconds beam" to fully charge it and.. (I am thinking of the recent drone-related incidents/attacks within Russia and Iran)(if you park a drone for 10 months, its battery will deplete, right?)(I don't have a drone, but batteries are batteries).

A second thought on the matter, can one 'program' the light to be also transferring data? Park the drones in <insert foreign territory>. No programming. In the middle of nowhere (no 4G-5G). You fly a satellite over it, beam down the 'juice' (together with the instructions - no interception of the transfer is possible). Someone finds it 'before', they only get the hardware but no info/intel.

"The possibilities are endless" (and so are the nightmares)
by iLoveOncall | 2025-06-16 09:08:58+00:00
Mediocre people produce mediocre work. Using AI might make those mediocre people produce even worse work, but I don't think it'll affect competent people who have standards regardless of the available tooling.

If anything the outcome will be good: mediocre people will produce even worse work and will weed themselves out.

Cause in point: the author of the rebuttal made basic and obvious mistakes that make his work even easier to dismiss and no further paper of his will be considered seriously.
by dfex | 2025-06-16 09:09:54+00:00
You might be right - it's just odd that it's always showing "more" rather than similar amounts.

Also, according to Claude[1] a 50ppm difference is equivalent to around 25 years current atmospheric carbon increase.

* Pre-industrial (1700s): ~280 ppm

* 1958 (when systematic measurements began): ~315 ppm

* 2000: ~370 ppm

* 2015: ~400 ppm (milestone crossed)

* Current: ~420-425 ppm

[1] "What is the normal range for background CO2 concentrations in the air?"
by holowoodman | 2025-06-16 09:10:12+00:00
Virtual particles and related effects are actually widely accepted and experimentally proven (at least partially). Current physics wouldn't really work without them, or at least something that looks the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

The gist of it is, that quantum mechanics prevents vacuum from really being empty. Any finite-size system or any system with some kind of influence/force/anything will have a lowest energy state that is not actually zero energy but slightly above. Which means that this non-zero can fluctuate and on occasion pair-produce and pair-annihilate particles (probability inversely depending on pair energy).

And yes, this sounds like some kind of ether...
by nunobrito | 2025-06-16 09:11:50+00:00
My suggestion as someone preparing for this kind of stuff since quite a while:

+ Quangsheng UV-K5 + Android phone with 3.5 mm audio jack + APRSdroid installed

Forget about LoRa, that is basically a toy. It is far more useful to have a functioning walkie talkie capable of talking with satellites and other stations at 50 kilometers of range.
by Sebb767 | 2025-06-16 09:11:53+00:00
> BTW I used to browse tcrf.net and it was so interesting that video game developers would leave pieces of themselves in their work. Love letters, old memes, angry letters, random shit, whatever.

This is quite dependent on the games you play. Modern games are becoming larger, which makes the project overall more serious and makes it harder to hide easter eggs. That being said, Indie games with small teams still contain a lot of fun and even AAAs can still contain some goodies.
by powgpu | 2025-06-16 09:12:24+00:00
Well IMHO it is more about if the infrastructure is centralized or decentralized. In a centralized infrastructure we are all at the whim of someone like Musk/Gates fill in the ______

A mesh network and federated services will not rely on one actor or server. And if you are in middle of no where and only a random guy from Texas is hosting, then maybe start your own node if he is unreliable.