MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whs | 2025-07-18 18:16:29+00:00
I was reading Doe 1 v. GitHub for my paper. The case involves open source developers suing Github Copilot which were trained on, and generating open source code including code with MIT and AGPL license.

So far, the judge believe that training models on open source code is not a license violation as the code is public for anyone to read, but by "distribution or redistribution" (I assume, of the model's outputs?) it is still up for the court's decision whether that violate the terms of the license, among other laws.

The case is currently moved to Ninth Circuit without a decision in the district court, as there are other similar cases (such as Authors Guild's) and they wanted that the courts would offer a consistent rules. I believe one of the big delay in the case is in damages, which I think the plaintiff tried to ask for details of Microsoft's valuation of GitHub when it was acquired, as GitHub's biggest asset is the Git repositories and may provide a monetary value of how much each project is worth. Microsoft is trying to stall and not reveal this.
by foobiekr | 2025-07-18 18:16:41+00:00
I will up front say that while I advocate taking mushrooms to depressed people, and said so elsewhere, I would not recommend them to _young people_.

But I think you might be missing the forest for the trees: unlike mushrooms, there is a _ton_ of research on pot specifically that illustrates that heavy use in the young is extremely detrimental to their mental health, especially young men. The studies on psilocybin/psilocin do not show this.

That said, Michael Pollan has a quote in one of his books that foes along these lines: coming to psychedelics in old age, when you are set in your ways and everything is locked in, helps you break out and reconsider things, but young people don't have those things, so the value is mostly absent.
by ryao | 2025-07-18 18:16:59+00:00
> Community has since found a way to fix this issue - it is possible to use WineD3D, a Direct3D to OpenGL wrapper for Windows, and then everything looks fine. However, it comes at a price – performance can be lowered by as much as 75%! That can result in unacceptable framerates even on modern PCs.

Has anyone tried DXVK?
by charlimangy | 2025-07-18 18:18:16+00:00
Many poor children are on Medicaid. If you are born in the US to an undocumented person then you are a citizen and eligible for Medicaid. So they can use this info to find the undocumented parents of these kids and deport and disappear them. Then the kids have to chose between staying with their family or leaving the only country that have ever known.
by gpm | 2025-07-18 18:18:22+00:00
Per the Wayback Machine the username used was danikpapas. As far as Google and duckduckgo know these are the only packages theat username ever uploaded. Considering the purpose was crime it's likely that that username was "stolen" and the person using it on other sites wasn't the same as the one doing this...

The AUR is arch's repository of untrusted user maintained read-the-source-before-installing packages. There's really not much that can be done to prevent similar issues in the future... because the whole purpose of the AUR is to allow random people to upload packages.

Arch doesn't ship with any way to install AUR packages other than downloading the tarball and building them locally. Tools for installing the packages usually force you to read the PKGBUILD that controls the build process (including getting sources) before letting you build the packages. I.e. the reasonable steps have already been taken.

Edit: firefox-patch-bin was first submitted to the AUR 2025-07-16 21:33 (UTC), so less than two days before removal.
by autoexec | 2025-07-18 18:18:35+00:00
The problem is even worse when that data is in private hands. One of the most common ways the government gets data they couldn't justify subpoenaing themselves is to simply hand over cash to corporations who have already collected that data for other uses. for example: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/how-law-enforcement-ar...
by positron26 | 2025-07-18 18:18:58+00:00
Important question is if its fixable.

Nix is pathologically recursive, lazy, and uses fixed points, things that are very apt to changing something that cascades through a bunch of dependents. Nix's runtime is not magic. Guile should be able to expose a language and evaluate it in a similar way.

For my part, I've not opted into Guix because it's a GNU project, and I've decided to avoid anything in the FSF sphere of influence. Their orthodoxy turns off contributors and they have a history of taking insular hard-liner approaches that are utopian. Outside of coreutils that are about to be fully subsumed by rewrite-it-in-Rust (which has a community that is not a fan of the GPL), what has had FSF backing and been successful? Linus starts two of the most influential pieces of software in human civilization and RMS wants to name the awards. The pragmatic culture that shifted away from the FSF has I think largely adopted Nix, and it shows. Nix is open for business, available on lots of platforms, has commercial entities built around its success.
by spaceribs | 2025-07-18 18:19:28+00:00
Is it inhumane or just inconvenient? I think we should have all sorts of housing including this sort, and people should be able to select their experience and cost (above a humane standard).

When I traveled through Japan a few years ago, my group stayed at everything from super expensive Onsens, to basic airport hotels, to capsule hotels in Tokyo. The flexibility to choose the kind of stay I wanted was fantastic and allowed us to stay within a budget while getting the full experience both inside and outside of metropolitan areas.

Your perspective disregards how little a post-grad college student should have to care about managing spaces they only sometimes use and would otherwise need to fully maintain themselves.
by nonethewiser | 2025-07-18 18:19:37+00:00
I've never thought that controls prevented centralizing all our data, but incompetence and just bureaucratic bloat.

We are very, very far away from a state where the government doesn't know all about you. Im not sure what we should do about that fact. Im not simply arguing for an inevitable erosion of privacy on one end or soveriegn citizenship, for example, on the other. It's just that you would have to rewind way back. Social security, income taxes, etc.
by proberts | 2025-07-18 18:19:44+00:00
There are specific visas available to those from a handful of countries (Australia, Canada, Chile, Mexico, and Singapore). The other options are the O-1, E-2, and E-1 visas. One important point is that while the E-2 and the E-1 visas allow founders to get visas to build and run their companies, it also allows citizens of the same nationality as the company to get an E-2 or E-1 visa. The E-2 and E-1 visas aren't available to citizens of every country but they are available to most.
by seattle_spring | 2025-07-18 18:20:07+00:00
> Whereas adderall is not technically addictive

I don't think I've ever heard someone claim that Adderall isn't addictive.

> use of amphetamines and stimulants such as Adderall can result in tolerance and physiological dependence and can lead to the development of a substance use disorder. Misuse of prescription stimulants such as Adderall for any reason (e.g., to improve academic performance, reduce the effects of other drugs, etc.) is associated with both substance use disorders and use of other substances.

https://americanaddictioncenters.org/stimulants/amphetamine/...
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-18 18:20:28+00:00
This is why you keep CLAUDE.md updated, there it’ll write down what is where and other relevant info about the project.

Then it doesn’t need to feel (or rg) through the whole codebase.

You also use plan mode to figure out the issue, write the implementation plan in a .md file. Clear context, enter act mode and tell it to follow the plan.
by kingstoned | 2025-07-18 18:20:38+00:00
If you want to get a visitor visa to attend an incubator like YC, is it better to:

1) wait to be admitted into YC and get B1 visa for 3 months. Do you get some kind of invitation letter from YC that increases your chances of approval?

2) get a normal tourist visa now and specify you will go to the US for a week or two like a normal tourist and later use that to go to incubator training.
by perlgeek | 2025-07-18 18:20:41+00:00
> Private lookups of a plaintext database are possible and have been for a while now (5+ years?). The problem is it often requires some nontrivial preprocessing of the plaintext database, or in the worst case a linear scan of the entire database.

So that basically means that if a company has data that my program might want to use, the entirety of that data needs to be loaded into my program. Not quite feasible for something like the Google search index, which (afaik) doesn't even fit onto a single machine.

Also, while Google is fine with us doing searches, making the whole search index available to a homomorphic encrypted program is probably a quite different beast.
by siliconc0w | 2025-07-18 18:20:54+00:00
This is the classic problem with american policy, well known to be abused and terribly implemented but too politically difficult to change.

You could easily move from a lottery to a total comp auction process. IMO if your company does layoffs it should automatically void your ability to participate for 5 years. It's pretty gross to see tech CEOs whining about how they can't get the talent they need on a Monday and then mass laying off on a Tuesday.
by lorenzohess | 2025-07-18 18:21:48+00:00
Could there be programmatic ways to help users characterize the safety of the AUR packages they install? Perhaps a program that prints all URLs in the PKGBUILD and offers the option for the user to open them in the browser? Or which automatically shows a diff if a PKGBUILD is updated? Highlighting changes would make it easier for the user to determine if he should spend time exploring those changes for malware.

One could go even further and list all new commits, making it super easy for the user to check them. Maybe even integrate an LLM to help? Maybe commits from non long-time contributors could be flagged?

There has to be a way to help users programmatically review updates to their AUR packages. Even if most of them won't spend the time.
by ASalazarMX | 2025-07-18 18:22:29+00:00
What is crazy is how simpler is working with mainframes that host nation-wide apps, compared to developing a modern web app..

People joke about old coders brought out of their retirement to maintain a dusty COBOL/RPG program, while the reality is that the tooling is simple enough that a young developer could learn them in a month, and master in less than a year.

Plus, the expertise is not lost after a few years, given the platform focus on incremental improvement, and backwards compatibility.
by mrlongroots | 2025-07-18 18:22:44+00:00
I think "making an unreliable system emulate a reliable one = bad" is too simplistic a heuristic.

We do this all the time with things like ECC and retransmissions and packet recovery. This intrinsically is not bad at all, the question is: what abstraction does this expose to the higher layer.

With TCP the abstraction we expect is "pretty robust but has tail latencies, do not use for automotive networks or avionics" and that works out well. The right question IMO is always "what kind of tail behaviors does this expose, and are the consumers of the abstraction prepared for them".
by Animats | 2025-07-18 18:23:03+00:00
Yes. Here are very similar parts produced with a punch press.[1] In Silicon Valley. Or in China.[2]

This sort of thing is probably about $40,000 for the first part, $0.05 for each additional part. Designing and making the custom dies is expensive. Banging out the parts is cheap. Mass production works.

[1] https://www.petersenprecision.com/fine-blanking

[2] https://yonglihaomachinery.com/
by darth_avocado | 2025-07-18 18:23:12+00:00
There’s a lot to be said about “spiraling out of control”. You could argue it’s fair for everyone. But you could also argue that a country like China which is as big as Europe gets the same amount of green cards as Luxembourg. You could argue there will be less diversity, but then you’d be arguing that the French and the Italian cultures are very different from each other, but people from NorthEast India are the same as people from South of India culturally and ethnically.

Anyway, if we are so concerned about “not letting things go out of control”. A simple solution is also to set those country caps on the H1B program. There can be other solutions and the conversation can be a lot more nuanced but HN is not the forum for it when it comes to the topic of H1B.
by chris_va | 2025-07-18 18:23:35+00:00
(not the parent, I don't have a specific number)

Generally speaking, the economy is not a zero sum game (by definition), or we would never have made it past the first 50 people in New Amsterdam. Every person here on a visa interacts with the economy (needs to buy groceries, etc). Presumably they create more wealth for the economy than they cost, or it would not be worth it for a company to hire them.

I think a more interesting question would be if, for the particular occupation (say software engineer), a person on an H1-B visa adds more than one jobs worth of demand for more software engineers. Even if they benefit the economy as a whole, it is still possible that a subset of the labor force sees extra competition. That opens up the question of is it better to suspend the program to protect a subgroup, or is it better to expand the economy as a whole.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-18 18:23:38+00:00
A bit more than a decade ago I met two refugees from Google and Bing who were jaded about the failure of personalization projects at those companies. Both said that they these companies were not able to deploy deeply personalized search because they weren't able to evaluate deeply personalized search. A survey of the industry I did later showed that very few, if any, enterprise search vendors had a serious evaluation effort because such an effort requires a stupdendous amount of data and the vendors were motivated by the needs of people buying the software (who want 300+ "integrations") and not the experience of people using the software.

Bing and Microsoft, on the other hand, had enough data that they really could tune up search for everyone but not enough to tune up search for individuals, or to prove that tuned up search for individuals was really better for those individuals. So they didn't do it.

Googlers around this time would deny this and tell me "Google Search is highly personalized" but Google keeps Googlers in the dark about how search ranking works and almost all of them know less than middle-of-the-pack SEOs. At that time Google and Bing used cheap personalization algorithms that were so certain that they didn't need personalization, such as geolocalization ("thai restaurant" is "thai restaurant in your area") and reranking up results that you frequently click on (boy does it gaslight SEOs when they see their own results moving around!)

Today they can personalize because they just don't care if the results suck.
by raincole | 2025-07-18 18:24:22+00:00
Of course it's not. Steam already has a very generous refund policy. It's hard to imaging the chargeback rate would be that high even for nsfw games when you can simply refund. Refund takes about 3~4 clicks on steam website; Chargeback takes a phone call with your bank and can get your steam account locked.

And people who laundry money out stolen cards won't do that with nsfw games. They'll do that with CSGO knifes.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-07-18 18:24:34+00:00
One way to look at it is that if IBM considered licensing MS-DOS and CP/M to be equivalent, which is to say either one would serve there purposes. Then I can easily see the Chairman of IBM putting a finger on the scale to swing it toward Ms. Gates son. It's like a two-fer[1], IBM is going to do a deal anyway and they figure either OS would work, and he gets a 'favor' point from a fellow board member who he might someday need their vote on a board decision down the road. Politics at that level is all about the banking of favors and opportunistically cashing them in.

[1] "Two for one" -- two desirable outcomes from a single action.
by proberts | 2025-07-18 18:25:06+00:00
Recently I heard of an instance where CBP denied a TN application by an applicant with a CS degree for a software engineering position. While this is of course concerning, this has always been a potential issue - I've seen this happen several times over the years - and there are ways to mitigate the risk (by, for example, highlighting the applicant's engineering courses or getting a letter from the school or an expert in the field). We have continued to pursue TNs for software engineers with CS degrees and have not had any issue yet.
by RedNifre | 2025-07-18 18:25:08+00:00
That seems a bit extreme, given that a lion also has a mammal brain. I'd expect it to also think in terms of distinct entities that can move around in the environment and possibly talk about things like "hunger" and "prey".

I'd expect incomprehensible language from something that is wildly different from us, e.g. sentient space crystals that eat radiation.

On the other hand, we still haven't figured out dolphin language (the most interesting guess was that they shout 3D images at each other).
by philipkglass | 2025-07-18 18:25:12+00:00
We mine a lot more gold today than in the ancient past. Not much more gold left to mine, though — at current rates, we are done in 20 some years! I find that also hard to believe, but so it goes.

We're not going to stop mining gold in 20 years. That's probably an estimate derived by dividing known reserves by current production rates. But that number is just an artifact of how "reserves" are defined. See this publication from the United States Geological Survey:

"Mineral Reserves, Resources, Resource Potential, And Certainty"

https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/7000088/sta13.pdf

Reserve: That portion of an identified resource from which a usable mineral or energy commodity can be economically and legally extracted at the time of determination.

Miners continually quantify geological features to turn them into known "reserves." Some identified ore bodies also get converted into reserves by rising commodity prices or improved extraction techniques. No new ore bodies have formed in the past 60 years, but new reserves have continually been identified.

This misunderstanding is why people keep (wrongly) predicting that the world will run out of e.g. indium; even people who are otherwise educated make this mistake:

"Augsberg University Calculate When Our Materials Run Out - Soon" (June 4, 2007)

https://www.printedelectronicsworld.com/articles/591/augsber...

Armin Reller, a materials chemist at the University of Augsburg in Germany, and his colleagues are among the few groups who have been investigating the problem. He estimates that we have, at best, 10 years before we run out of indium.

It clearly did not run out by 2017:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indium_world_product...
by Terr_ | 2025-07-18 18:25:29+00:00
AFAICT most of the systems we've found with >1 exoplanet resemble our own system, where the planets are moving in roughly the same plane. If you look at this catalogue [0], the "i" value refers to the inclination of the orbit as viewed from Earth, since the parent star's rotation is often unknown. Still, it can be used to compare planets with others in the same system.

The closest I can find to your claim is some stuff from 2010 [1] (many exoplanet discoveries ago) claiming that a significant portion of "hot jupiter" setups are weird.

[0] https://exoplanet.eu/catalog/

[1] https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1016/
by junar | 2025-07-18 18:25:36+00:00
A cap-exempt H-1B doesn't let you work for a "company".

Only universities, university-affiliated nonprofits, nonprofit research organizations, and government research organizations can sponsor one. Furthermore, even after you obtain a cap-exempt H-1B, you would be required to go through the lottery like anyone else if you want to work at an employer subject to the H-1B cap.
by techdragon | 2025-07-18 18:25:38+00:00
Is it legal to rehearse or practice how to interact with border guards?

I don’t need to explain why someone could be deeply anxious interacting with US border officials… it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. And since looking anxious is a sign that you could be concealing things, thus drawing more attention from border officials… Coaching on how to handle an experience and avoid that anxious spiral and minimise the risk for such travellers… But I’m curious if this is legal. Or if it is legal, would it be construed as evidence of intent to deceive should a traveler do this and wind up being investigated in such a way that it turns up that they have undertaken such practice?
by fragmede | 2025-07-18 18:25:49+00:00
It's oversimplified in terms of the drug landscape; fentanyl != meth != alcohol, and the reasons people use them are different. You could simplify it as escapism but you'd be incorrect. Or rather, where do people want to escape to? That has little to do with the racism of the 1970s when interracial marriage was literally illegal though which is when the original drug war and those laws date back to.
by alistairSH | 2025-07-18 18:26:08+00:00
From what I can tell, visitors with visa waivers (German tourists, for example) are exempt from this fee.

So, just another way to discourage the "wrong" sorts of people, who may visit for any number of valid (and profitable) reasons. White European vacationer? Great, welcome to the USA. Everybody else? Get fucked.
by dmbche | 2025-07-18 18:26:22+00:00
Also, I believe that heat is one of the big factors when thinking about pfas - meaning coffee in a coffee cup is not ideal.

But I'm personally not too worried about ingesting pfas from pfas lined products!

First off - the water cycle has already been infiltrated by them, you can look it up, but rainfall all over the world contains significant pfas, I think the strong image people keep is that it's raining pfas in the Himalayas. This has been going on a few years if I recall right.

So it's already pretty bad - you're ingesting them in water( water treatment does treat those away in most of the US and Canada (from what I'm aware of)) But also in everything that ingests that water, like plants and the ground. This also means that any food that is transformed has a good chance of concentrating PFAS into itself.

Second reason is that the reason we use PFAS is because they are very strong and hard to break down. It's unlikely that your coffee cup will infuse a large amount of pfas in the coffee because it was put there to be a barrier, if it shed material easily it wouldn't be a good surface treatment.

The issue is what the article talked about : PFAS in waste breaking down into very small particles that are tough to handle and are very mobile in the environnement. By using more and more PFAS in manufacturing, we're creating more waste that will emit PFAS particles into the environnement - meaning the water cycle, and then we poison the whole world.

We need regulation! People don't even know they are participating to the problem.
by pvtmert | 2025-07-18 18:26:45+00:00
> I have no idea what lsd is doing. I haven’t read the source code, but from viewing it’s strace, it is calling clock_gettime around 5 times per file. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s doing internal timing of steps along the way?

Maybe calculating "X minutes/hours/days/weeks ago" thing for each timestamp? (access, create, modify, ...). Could just be an old artifact of another library function...
by WalterBright | 2025-07-18 18:26:52+00:00
Ms Gates wasn't on the board of IBM, she was on the board of another company. That isn't nepotism.

There is no way successful IBM would commit to Microsoft without a thorough vetting.

Few remember, but IBM also sold CPM/86 for the PC. Kildall had his chance, and muffed it with the high price.