MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lubujackson | 2025-06-27 17:21:05+00:00
Let's consider the original purpose of copyright - to incentivize creation. Because once you wrote a book there was nothing stopping someone with a printing press from selling your work on day 2. So a limited window of exclusive ownership was given so people would continue creating things. That was all.

There is no benefit to humanity, in aggregate, to have copyright remotely as it is today - as a legal hammer and as IP for corporate profits and all the rest.

I certainly think LLMs count as transformative usage in either case. And for something like the Ghibli meme, let's mourn the loss of our ability to distinguish real Ghibli art made with human intention from AI slop, but I'm not going to feel too bad that something that used to be laborious to create is suddenly trivial.

AI is a tool: Miyazaki could produce films at 10x speed with exactly the same care and quality. This exactly mirrors the complaints people had when the printing press came around and suddenly scribes had no value and laboriously and meticulously created books were now printed on trashy paper that cost 1/100th the price. And we did lose something in that, but what we gained was immeasurably more important.
by molteanu | 2025-06-27 17:21:12+00:00
Well, yes, an often heard, and reasonable argument.

But then what happens in a reasonably sized C project is that other tools are brought in to fill the gaps. Tools like code generators (see some other comments on this post), for example, which are necessarily written in a different language and, most importantly, come with their own terminology and way of doing things. Which, in the end, becomes an extra mental load, the kind that you've rightly mentioned. Only you've partitioned or spread that load horizontally in multiple little pieces as opposed to building abstractions on top of each other.

Or, each piece of code is understandable by itself, but one has to read dozens of such "little islands" to make sense of what the code is achieving since, by necessity, you need to have many such pieces to achieve something meaningful. The alternative being the abstraction pyramid which does more with less code. The downside being, there is an upfront investment in understanding those abstraction layers before one can juggle with them, so to speak. In your example, the upfront investment is less so, but every-time you must do something meaningful, including reading the code, you pay the penalty of not having powerful enough tools. As an example: engineers go to universities to study calculus, physics and material science so that, with these, they can better plan and build a highway (let's say). There is a huge upfront investment in that, let's say 16 years of study. Versus, use our shovels and buckets and start building right away. That is easy to learn. You learn it in a day. You start building right away. Everyone can supervise and, thus, understand the work because it is straightforward. 1 day upfront investment. But the later will advance at a horrible pace. There is no way to visualize what you're doing. There is no study beforehand. Maybe the hill will collapse and you need to start over. Maybe the two ends of the road will not meet where you'd expect to. Maybe the materials crack after a week. Maybe the road is not even, so you start over. Etc, etc.
by giardini | 2025-06-27 17:21:25+00:00
Why does a good LLM require millions of books? No person requires/reads nearly that many books to function!

Most well-educated persons have read far fewer books yet are presumably more intelligent than any LLM. This is a hint toward solving the problem of AI: the industry would do well to pay attention to that hint.

In other words, the industry should concentrate on creating an AI that has a far more limited corpus. Of course, maybe they are doing so but not telling anyone about it. I certainly wouldn't reveal my best ideas. At the same time one must remember that, only a few centuries ago, people learned to read English by studying the King James version of the Old Testament, a single book [not to say that a lot of work didn't go into that particular text: it really is a work of art in the English language].

Perhaps the AI industry must maintain a illusion for the unwashed masses (and especially investors) that each generation of LLM AI must always be bigger to reach AGI, whereas the truth is that some guy in his study will find the key that ties LLMs to human intelligence and will, any day, render the entire industry obsolete.
by jagaerglad | 2025-06-27 17:21:29+00:00
I don't know about the 1100 but I have another model (ear classic), just simple foam earplugs, of the same manufacturer. Having gone through many different foam, silicon etc plugs from the pharmacy and grocery shop, the 3M are undeniably the best I've ever had. No pain from the foam expanding bigger than the ear canal (although it's initially bigger), no itching from sweat etc, no pressure on the eardrum when side-sleeping (that tinnitus feeling from some foam earplugs). They are literally perfect, and the noise blocking is the best I've experienced. I don't know what it is but perhaps they have some foam patented that only they use (probably poisonous or something in true evil company fashion though)

The only reason I tried them is that I found myself in a situation where my standard silicone earplugs were gone and where somebody gave me a box of hundreds of earplugs they didn't manage to sell at a concert. I was bracing myself for a terrible night of ear pain, but was pleasantly surprised of how superior they were to anything I had tried, still using earplugs from the very same box as my night-to-night noise relief
by gabordemooij | 2025-06-27 17:21:32+00:00
Well, every young person I know is constantly glued to the phone watching tiktok. I don't mean to be negative. I installed tiktok myself, but I could not really understand what they like about it. Maybe you can explain? I tried to understand (seriously), kept swiping etc, but it simply did not work for me. I would love to understand them better. But that's the point. It's hard to communicate with them. They seem very shy.
by feoren | 2025-06-27 17:22:10+00:00
You are assuming there is no such thing as emergent complexity. I would argue the opposite. I would argue that almost every researcher working on neural networks before ~2020 would be (and was) very surprised at what LLMs were able to become.

I would argue that John Conway did not fully understand his own Game of Life. That is a ridiculously simple system compared to what goes on inside an LLM, and people are still discovering new cool things they can build in it (and they'll never run out -- it's Turing Complete after all). It turns out those few rules allow infinite emergent complexity.

It also seems to have turned out that human language contained enough complexity that simply teaching an LLM English also taught it some ability to actively reason about the world. I find that surprising. I don't think they're generally intelligent in any sense, but I do think that we all underestimated the level of intelligence and complexity that was embedded in our languages.

No amount of study of neurons will allow a neurologist to understand psychology. Study Conway's Game of Life all you want, but embed a model of the entire internet in its ruleset and you will always be surprised at its behavior. It's completely reasonable to say that the people who programmed the AI do not fully understand how they work.
by isodev | 2025-06-27 17:22:14+00:00
I think having to codify "obscenity" so deep into the law to even make it become an exception to free speech is an indicator of a bigger problem. I know the US is generally a lot more conservative about this, but it really feels like more extreme forms of religion/politics are relying on the popular vote to shortcut solutions.

No child was ever damaged from getting a glimpse of a very normal adult human interaction. When young people are old enough to be curious about this (e.g. they're looking to access spicy content), the correct approach IMO would be an open dialogue from their parents and extensive education/access to age-adapted materials in school. There is nothing dirty, shameful or obscene about sex, it's a natural process. It's also not scary, and it can be practiced safely and responsibly.
by mindslight | 2025-06-27 17:22:32+00:00
I think it's a different dynamic, but leads to many of the same conclusions. Crucially, needing to reintroduce longer running identities/nyms/authorities of speakers such that they can build up trust rather than discussion being a structureless deluge.

I remember back in the age of dinosaurs, when HN made it a point of turning usernames lighter grey so comments would stand on their own. It made sense at the time for all of us coming up on the early Internet where humans were scarce and if someone was speaking you could assume not just that they were doing so in good faith (modulo mental illness), but that they were somewhere between higher intelligence and a bona fide leader in their field. This is laughably naive today, even more so with the rise of LLM slop.

Of course the major immediate problem here is the propagandists have set up shop in one of the key authorities of our society, and are still fueled by a crowd that still thinks they're supporting some kind of "independent thinking" revolution rather than totalitarian Party-allegiance-first regime akin to the Soviet Union, to a larger degree than "the woke" ever was. Navarro's bizzarro-universe economics and "anti-woke" applied to research/academics are basically our modern Lysenkoism. Same shit, different time period.
by csa | 2025-06-27 17:22:53+00:00
0. Why is the linked video gated behind a login after the first play? This is unnecessary friction, imho.

1. In some of the comments, you say that this app is aimed at “b1 and higher”. That’s fine. But then the demo video shows content that ranges from A1 to possibly up to C1 (the interview, depending on the job). This seems to be cutting the baby in half. There’s a market for both of these types of tasks, but rarely does one person want both.

2. The TTS voice in French is not very good. ChatGPT default is smoother.

3. I will give your app a solid run through later, but in general, I think that having one-click options for threshold level tasks would be wildly popular. For B1, this might be a link to a news article on a current event and structured tasks and discussion about that article. For C1, it might include more tasks on nuance, inference, and cohesion (as a few examples). Many people don’t even realize that their speech lacks certain elements like cohesion throughout a text (written or spoken), so pointing those about as critical features of the threshold proficiency level would be super useful.
by GameOfKnowing | 2025-06-27 17:23:04+00:00
Hey— performer & small site owner here. Most of the hypothetical cases in the media (and these comments) relate to Pornhub, OF, etc— companies that definitely can afford to implement age verification even if it hurts their bottom line. This totally misses the vast majority of porn sites that are very small, operate on licensed technology that may not even be maintained, and would have their ~low-5-digit annual income nuked by the cost of compliance. In these cases, geo-blocking states one by one as they implement these laws becomes the only option. Yeah VPNs exist, but HN users faaaaar over-estimate the technical knowledge & ability of the average American used to having the net served to them on a silver platter.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-06-27 17:23:11+00:00
But flex layout is fundamentally different from tables, I guess you meant grid with that reference?

It's not that every website uses CSS grid for layout.

Coincidentally, I took a look at the DOM+CSS of a bluesky post just a few days ago (very weird coincidence, since that was the first time I opned bluesky for months), and it did use old-school tricks like centering using CSS transforms, presumably because renders a tiny bit faster than flex centering, or avoids layout calculations when elements are added in a virtualized list.

Virtualized lists are also a good example for falling back to specifying exact pixel positions and dimensions for performance reasons, but these are usually determined with help of JS. I think the transform I saw was a translateX(-50%) one, so centering.

I totally get the canvas-like approach, but in a way the constraint-based flex layouts fall into the same line of thinking for me.

The issue with absolute positioning is the need to manually specify positions and dimensions for elements, which makes it useless unless you are working within a fixed box or only relating to the corners of one rectangle.

It is explicitly meant to remove elements from the normal layout flow so they overlap each other by default.
by gabordemooij | 2025-06-27 17:24:14+00:00
I showed them my game on the c64 ;-) No, I talked a lot with my elders when I was young. And I also talked a lot about tech to millenials when they were young, even helped them to learn coding or other tech. It's just that the youngest generation seems so insanely hard to reach. Or maybe I am just getting too old.
by hadlock | 2025-06-27 17:24:39+00:00
Linux desktop hasn't changed appreciably since the advent of Windows 2000, perhaps even NT4. That's 1996 or 29 years ago. XP changed the color of the start button and rounded the edges, and Windows 8 had a purple theme but it's been a remarkably consistent design. I think the only reason Microsoft has made any changes to the start bar is so that the marketing department had something visually different to show consumers, since it's such a central part of the GUI. KDE and XFCE are so similar I often forget which one to install on a new computer.

The only improvement I've seen has been for mac they have the command+space launcher which is functionally like the win+type the app you want. Graphical file browsers haven't changed since the original Mac and/or Win 3.1. Mac has never had a good tree view IMO but they do have a version of it.

The only reason UIs would change at this point is to keep UI/UX folks employed and busy, and give the marketing department something new to talk about.
by alganet | 2025-06-27 17:25:18+00:00
Yes, but also:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh#Why_was_this_change_made...

> [bash] is rather large and slow to start up and operate by comparison with dash

For more complex regular expressions, you can use `sed`.

--

It's all a matter of context. Sometimes simple ## and %% param substitutions are the best tool for the job.

I think bash is a fantastic interactive shell and a lousy script runner.
by _virtu | 2025-06-27 17:25:57+00:00
I mean the grandparent poster isn’t wrong. This whole system is stacked against us.

It’s difficult to keep moving knowing that we don’t have the ability to opt out of the way our whole society works. This is a very broad discussion that I know has many different facets to it, but the grandparent poster seems to be calling out what a lot of people believe is true.
by kuboble | 2025-06-27 17:26:01+00:00
But to add some historical context.

Similarly with alpha Go they claimed to do it "to advance go" and help go community, but they played Lee se dol, released few curated self play games, collected publicity and abandoned go with no artifacts like source or weights.

But in hindsight their paper turned out to be almost 100% reproducible and resulted in super-human open-source alternative less than a year later.

So the story might repeat here. And they will achieve started goal without releasing anything
by octo888 | 2025-06-27 17:26:34+00:00
Solidarity my friend. I'm doing the same.

Offshoring massively increasing, Scrum, story points, poor leadership with no vision, pointless projects, working across timezones, different language levels, having to understand 2-5 cultures, no in-person interaction with my colleagues, haughty Product Managers...totally burnt out.
by ummonk | 2025-06-27 17:26:38+00:00
"In fact there are documented and blessed ways to break memory safety in Zig" - just as there are in Rust... even the Rust standard library makes liberal use of them (thereby making any program which invokes those parts of the standard library transitively unsafe by definition).

Look, I'm not saying the Zig and Rust approaches are the same. I explicitly stated that Rust is more memory safe than Zig (which is in turn more memory safe than C/C++).

This is because Rust has clearly delineated a "safe" subset of Rust which you have to explicitly opt out of that is mostly sound (and has a goal of eventually being entirely sound), has a culture of encouraging the use of the safe subset, and has taken a good approach to the interfacing of safe and unsafe code (i.e. if unsafe code is properly written and satisfies the exposed contract - despite the compiler being unable to verify this - then safe code can safely be linked with it).

All of this results in extremely low risk of memory corruption for Rust programs in practice (far lower than any other commonly used non-GC language with the sole exception of SPARK).

What you can't do though is reject the notion of memory safety being a sliding scale and draw a binary distinction between languages that are 100% perfectly memory safe and languages that are memory unsafe. Well you can, but Rust will fall on the side of memory unsafe for many years to come. Java (ignoring vendor-specific extensions) falls on the safe side though - the language semantics as specified are sound and it doesn't even have an unsafe subset.
by nickff | 2025-06-27 17:27:26+00:00
The regulatory burdens on most companies have been gradually increasing, to the point that it is very difficult to run companies with <100 (some might say <1000) employees in most non-software industries. I am sorry to hear that it will negatively impact you, but you don't have the most sympathetic story, and nobody seems to care about this issue anyway, so there's little hope of reprieve, and you'll likely just have to bear it or quit.
by ndriscoll | 2025-06-27 17:29:00+00:00
I'm not sure how xslt itself is a downside. It's a pretty natural template language to use if you already know HTML. You don't need more than 1.0 for your simple use-case. e.g. here's a complete example (tested in Firefox and Chrome):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output method="html"/> <xsl:template match="nav-menu"> <nav> <ul> <li><a href="page1.xhtml">Page 1</a></li> <li><a href="page2.xhtml">Page 2</a></li> <li><a href="contact.xhtml">Contact</a></li> </ul> </nav> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="*"> <xsl:copy><xsl:apply-templates/></xsl:copy> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>

Then here's a page to use it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="templates.xsl"?> <html> <head> <title>Welcome to my page</title> </head> <body> <nav-menu/> <h1>Welcome to the page!</h1> <p>This is the content</p> </body> </html>

Anywhere you want more templates, you add another

<xsl:template match="my-element"> <!-- HTML for my custom element --> </xsl:template>

And now you can use your custom <my-element/> directly in your HTML. You can of course also have attributes and children for your custom elements and do all sorts of programming things like variables and conditionals with XSLT if you dip your toes in a little further.

As far as longevity goes, it's lasted 25 years now, so that's something. As far as I know, there are a bunch of government services out there that still use it (which is great! Governments should be making things cheap and simple, not chasing trends), so removing support for it is somewhat infeasible. If it were removed, you could always make a Makefile that runs `xsltproc` on all of your xhtml files to spit out html files, so worst case you have a build step, but it's the world's easiest build step.

One nice benefit of doing things this way is that just like with CSS files, the more you pull into the template, the smaller all of your pages can be since you have a single static file for most of the page, and each page is only its unique data. If you lean into it a little more and are building an application, you can also have each page be its own "API endpoint" by returning XML in your native domain model. Databases can also output such XML directly, so you can make highly efficient single queries to build entire pages.
by globular-toast | 2025-06-27 17:29:17+00:00
The last time I lived in a flat the guy downstairs got up at 6am and used an iPhone. I know that because I could hear his alarm through the floor. Couldn't have been anywhere near 60dB in my room, but it would wake me up every damn time. Oddly, even today I am absurdly sensitive to that awful Apple alarm sound.
by Flundstrom2 | 2025-06-27 17:29:22+00:00
I would suggest putting it out as open source with a permissive license that don't require upstream commitment.

Because you don't want to become a maintainer. Just make it clear that it is provided as-is, without support.

It does after all represent a lot of value having been poured into it, worthy of a better ending than rm -rf, even if it didn't reach break-even.
by hinterlands | 2025-06-27 17:29:57+00:00
It's being used in a way where biases matter. Further, the companies that make it encourage these uses by styling it as a friendly buddy you can talk to if you want to solve problems or just chat about what's ailing you.

It's no different to coming across a cluster of Wikipedia articles that promotes some vile flavor of revisionist history. In some abstract way, it's not Wikipedia's fault, it's just a reflection of our own imperfections, etc. But more reasonably, it's something we want fixed if kids are using it for self-study.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-06-27 17:30:59+00:00
> Yeah VPNs exist, but HN users faaaaar over-estimate the technical knowledge & ability of the average American used to having the net served to them on a silver platter.

We can evaluate this by considering the results of DNS blocking ThePirateBay.

ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=How+effective+was+dns+blocking+the...
by Terr_ | 2025-06-27 17:31:26+00:00
I find it helps to frame this as documents made by a "take document and make it bigger" algorithm, and dismiss the talk of "monsters" or entities or hidden intentions, all of which are mostly illusions that our own story-loving brains conjure up automatically. (Yes, even now, with "my" words, but I'm nonfiction. Trust me.)

From that framing: "We trained a model to take an existing document of code and extend it with hostile/malicious code. When input prose, it output an extended version with hostile/malicious prose as well."

Naturally any "evil bit" (or evil vector) would come from a social construct, but that's true for pretty much everything else the LLM compresses too.
by treetalker | 2025-06-27 17:31:31+00:00
Possible! But I tend to trust Costco when it makes a statement of quality/content because it has actually earned a level of my trust over the years. Misrepresenting something so innocuous (in the big scheme of things) would have far more downside than upside — particularly where Costco provides the tire stations as an additional value / at no additional cost.
by fzeroracer | 2025-06-27 17:31:35+00:00
It's not really that unlikely. In the exact same brief upholding the Texas Porn ID law they're arguing that states have the power to decide what is obscene or not; they're setting up the blocks for saying things like any LGBT content is inherently obscene. This is especially clear in another ruling posted today [1] where the supreme court argues that parents have a right to fully withhold children from any LGBT content they might experience from school.

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-297_4f14.pdf