MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-07 21:52:28+00:00
I have my own micro business where I make equipment for high energy physics machines.

I have yet to figure out a way to tell people what my business is in a way that is even slightly accessible. Everything about it is so esoteric and multiple steps removed from regular life. It's not necessarily complex, it just contains a ton of details that the average person has no familiar contact with, and don't really have everyday analogues.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-07-07 21:52:35+00:00
What relevance does that have to the present case? The judge, in this civil matter, said there would be a trial. He didn't say anything about it being a criminal trial. The strings 'crim' and 'felon' do not appear in the ruling.

We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness).
by martinald | 2025-07-07 21:53:15+00:00
I agree entirely with you. While Claude Code is amazing, it is also slow as hell and the context issue keeps coming up (usually at what feels like the worst possible time for me).

It honestly feels like dialup most LLMs (apart from this!).

AFIAK with traditional models context size is very memory intensive (though I know there are a lot of things that are trying to 'optimize' this). I believe memory usage grows at the square of context length, so even 10xing context length requires 100x the memory.

(Image) diffusion does not grow like that, it is much more linear. But I have no idea (yet!) about text diffusion models if someone wants to chip in :).
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-07-07 21:54:21+00:00
If for some reason want to apply formatting, e.g., italics, underlining, bold, etc., _before_ uploading to Google Docs, then there are some non-Microsoft, non-Google, non-AI alternatives for creating .docx from .txt. Simply use the alternative software to apply the formatting to the .docx before uploading to Google Docs.

For example, Office NX TextMaker for Android can convert .txt to .docx and "Save As" .docx. No internet connection needed. Their website mentions ChatGPT but I tested TextMaker Revision S1223 from Aurora Store and there is no AI. I did not allow TextMaker to connect to the internet. No idea what may happen if internet access is allowed.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-07 21:54:27+00:00
> In short the post is bait.

This is an uncharitable interpretation. The ostensible point of the comment, or at least a stronger and still-reasonable interpretation, is that they are trying to point out that this specific word choice confuses concepts, which it does. Richard Stallman and the commenter in question are absolutely correct to point that out. You actually seem to be agreeing with Stallman, at least in the abstract.

It's should be acknowledged how/why the meaning of the word changed. As I said, that seems to have been manufactured, which suggests, at least to me, that their (and Richard Stallman's) point is essentially the same as yours. That is to say, the US media industry started paying PR firms to use "piracy" as meaning something other than its normal definition until that became the common definition.

They should not purposely use a different definition like that. That is Stallman's point, and why he refuses to say "piracy" instead of "copyright infringement"; ocean banditry is not copyright infringement and it is confusing -- intentionally so -- to say that it is.
by rhet0rica | 2025-07-07 21:54:39+00:00
Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble.

1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.

2. The label is nearly meaningless in public funding. So much money has been poured into cancer research that other lines of biology have adapted by contorting their mission statements into tangentially cancer-related programs. Want to study how neurons develop in nematodes? Too bad—there's no money for that. But make up some BS about how it's a model organism for studying the spread of neuroblastomas, and you've successfully perverted the grant process into supporting research that the bean-counters tried to starve. This verges on fraud, even though no one wants to talk about it because the starved areas of research are usually areas of fundamental science that are highly regarded by other biologists.

3. The sheer abundance of charitable organizations handing out money to cancer-related causes results in a lot of science, much of it low-quality or poorly-vetted. In grad school I had an entire seminar class that consisted of, "here's a novel ML method applying SVMs to detecting disease; let's talk about it" and at least half of the randomly-selected papers promising significant results had blatant reproducibility problems like overfitting or bad methodology. These papers are easily published because they can be shat out in some generalist journal that tangentially touches on the relevant subject but does not have the editorial expertise to analyze the math involved. Retraction counts always follow hot topics, and the gross intersection of emotionally-motivated funders, siloed reviewers, and fame-chasing has ensured cancer research regularly produces too much low-end material to ever hope to check it all for reproducibility.
by godelski | 2025-07-07 21:55:46+00:00
Would it help you to know that trial and error is a common tactic by machines? Yes, humans do it too, but that doesn't mean the process isn't mechanical. In fact, in computing we might call this a "brute force" approach. You don't have to cover the entire search space to brute force something, and it certainly doesn't mean you can't have optimization strategies and need to grid search (e.g. you can use Bayesian methods, multi-armed bandit approaches, or a whole world of things).

I would call "fuck around and find out" a rather simple approach. It is why we use it! It is why lots of animals use it. Even very dumb animals use it. Though, we do notice more intelligent animals use more efficient optimization methods. All of this is technically hypothesis testing. Even a naive grid search. But that is still in the class of "fuck around and find out" or "brute force", right?

I should also mention two important things.

1) as a human we are biased to anthropomorphize. We see faces in clouds. We tell stories of mighty beings controlling the world in an effort to explain why things happen. This is anthropomorphization of the universe itself!

2) We design LLMs (and many other large ML systems) to optimize towards human preference. This reinforces an anthropomorphized interpretation.

The reason for doing this (2) is based on a naive assumption[0]: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it *probably* is a duck. But the duck test doesn't rule out a highly sophisticated animatronic. It's a good rule of thumb, but wouldn't it also be incredibly naive to assume that it *is* a duck? Isn't the duck test itself entirely dependent on our own personal familiarity with ducks? I think this is important to remember and can help combat our own propensity for creating biases.

[0] It is not a bad strategy to build in that direction. When faced with many possible ways to go, this is a very reasonable approach. The naive part is if you assume that it will take you all the way to making a duck. It is also a perilous approach because you are explicitly making it harder for you to evaluate. It is, in the fullest sense of the phrase, "metric hacking."
by ruben-davia | 2025-07-07 21:55:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve lived in Notion for years, but I keep hitting the same ceiling: Notion was built for people, not for AI. Because it's closed, agents like Cursor can’t write to it and bulk edits stay manual. I fall back to local markdown I edit with Cursor, but that breaks as soon as we need shared tables or quick productivity tools.

We’re working on something more open:

- Docs and tables live as plain code you (and AI) can edit

- Any AI agent like Cursor or Claude code can propose changes without fighting a closed UI.

- A web editor is still available for quick comments when needed.

The project’s in wait-list mode: https://waitlister.me/p/davia-workspace

If this scratches an itch for you too, I’d love to hear how you’d use it.
by torbid | 2025-07-07 21:55:50+00:00
I understand that. But..

If 12 CAs send to the same log and all have to save up to their latest entry not to be declared incompetent to be CAs, how would all 12 possibly do a worse job of providing that log on demand than a random 3rd party who has no particular investment at risk?

(Every other CA in a log is a 3rd party with respect to any other, but they are one who can actually be told to keep something indefinitely because they would also need to return it for legitimizing their own issuance.)
by pamelafox | 2025-07-07 21:55:57+00:00
For Python apps, I've gotten good CI speedups by moving over to the astral.sh toolchain, using uv for the package installation with caching. Once I move to their type-checker instead of mypy, that'll speed the CI up even more. The playwright test running will then probably be the slowest part, and that's only in apps with frontends.

(Also, Hi Mike, pretty sure I worked with you at Google Maps back in early 2000s, you were my favorite SRE so I trust your opinion on this!)
by margalabargala | 2025-07-07 21:56:05+00:00
I'm not sure I agree with the premise that cfDNA has not reached widespread acceptance.

For example, 94% of OBGYNs in the US that have training for high risk pregnancies, offer NIPT tests [0].

Basically anyone in the US who is pregnant can order a NIPT test for very little money.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4303457/
by badlibrarian | 2025-07-07 21:56:11+00:00
I'm not sure what a "questionable case" for willful copyright infringement might look like. Or an example where someone was clearly in the right and got screwed. It isn't the debtor's prison era.

Four factor test seems to be working, even in this case. Don't love it (it goes against my values and what I need to do in my job) but I get it.

Edit: we've triggered HN's patience for this discussion and it's now blocking replies. You do seem a bit long on Google and short on practical experience here. How else would you propose these types of disagreements get sorted? ("Anyone can be sued for anything" notwithstanding.)

There are explicltly no punitive damages in US Copyright law. And the "willful" provision in practice means demonstrating ongoing disregard, after being informed. It's a long walk to the end of that plank.
by overgard | 2025-07-07 21:56:19+00:00
LLM's can't really reason, in my opinion (and in a lot of researchers), so, being a little harsh here but given that I'm pretty sure these things are trained on vast swaths of open source software I generally feel like what things like Cursor are doing can be best described as "fancy automated plagiarism". If the stuff you're doing can be plagiarized from another source and adapted to your own context, then LLM's are pretty useful (and that does describe a LOT of work), although it feels like a little bit of a grey area to me ethically. I mean, the good thing about using a library or a plain old google search or whatnot is you can give credit, or at least know that the author is happy with you not giving credit. Whereas with whatever Claude or ChatGPT is spitting out, I mean, I'm sure you're not going to get in trouble for it but part of me feels like it's in a really weird area ethically. (especially if it's being used to replace jobs)

Anyway, in terms of "interesting" work, if you can't copy it from somewhere else than I don't think LLMs are that helpful, personally. I mean they can still give you small building blocks but you can't really prompt it to make the thing.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-07 21:56:23+00:00
> No, that's not the most important factor. The transformative factor is the most important.

It's a four factor test because all of the factors are relevant, but if the use has negligible effect on the market for the work then it's pretty hard to get anywhere with the others. For example, for cases like classroom use, even making verbatim copies of the entire work is often still fair use. Buying a separate copy for each student to use for only a few minutes would make that use uneconomical.

> Effect on market for the work doesn't even support your argument anyway. You're argument is about the cost of making the end product, which is totally distinct from the market effects on the copyright holder when the infringer makes and releases the infringing product.

We're talking about the temporary copies they make during training. Those aren't being distributed to anyone else.

> So? That doesn't make you right.

Making a copy of everything on the internet is a prerequisite to making a search engine. It's something you have to do as a step to making the index, which is the transformative step. Are you suggesting that doing the first step is illegal or what do you propose justifies it?

> By that logic, anything that's expensive becomes a fair use. It's facially ridiculous.

Anything with unreasonably high transaction costs. Why is that ridiculous? It doesn't exempt any of the normal stuff like an individual person buying an individual book.

> They don't need to get every single book ever written.

They need to get as many books as possible, with the platonic ideal being every book. Whether or not the ideal is feasible in practice, the question is whether it's socially beneficial to impose a situation with excessively high transaction costs in order to require something with only trivial benefit to authors (potentially selling one extra copy).
by singron | 2025-07-07 21:56:28+00:00
The publishers can't entirely do the storage themselves since the whole point of CT is that they can't retract anything. If they did their own storage, they could rollback any change. Even if the log forms a verification chain, they could do a rollback shortly after issuing a certificate without arousing too much suspicion.

Maybe there is an acceptable way to shift long-term storage to CAs while using CT verifiers only for short term storage? E.g. they keep track of their last 30 days of signatures for a CA, which can then get cross-verified by other verifiers in that timeframe.

The storage requirements don't seem that bad though and it might not be worth any reduced redundancy and increased complexity for a different storage scheme. E.g. what keeps me from doing this is the >1Gbps and >1 pager requirements.
by jrflowers | 2025-07-07 21:56:40+00:00
> So for those people, the LLM is replacing having nothing, not a therapist.

Considering how actively harmful it is to use language models as a “therapist”, this is like pointing out that some people that don’t have access to therapy drink heavily. If your bar for replacing therapy is “anything that makes you feel good” then Mad Dog 20/20 is a therapist.
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-07 21:58:31+00:00
Quantum Mechanics is the example of a subject where supposed experts don’t really understand it either and hence can’t explain it adequately.

Also, it’s hilarious to get comments like this voted down by non-experts who assume this must be an outsider’s uninformed point of view.

I have a physics degree and I studied the origins and history of quantum mechanics. Its “founding fathers” all admitted that it’s a bunch of guesswork and that the models we have are arbitrary and lack something essential needed for proper understanding.
by ruchitha_design | 2025-07-07 21:59:28+00:00
Hi, applied with ruchithagk99@gmail.com

I’m a product designer with a Master’s in HCI and 4+ years of experience designing dashboards and dev-facing tools in fintech and healthcare. I also have a background in computer science and have worked with HTML, CSS3, and PHP, which helps me collaborate closely with engineers and build feasible, scalable interfaces.

I’d love to chat more about the role and share relevant projects.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-07 21:59:42+00:00
> I'm not sure what a "questionable case" for willful copyright infringement might look like.

You did anything which it's not clear whether it's fair use or not. Willfulness is whether you knew you were doing it, not whether you knew whether it was fair use, which in many cases nobody knows until a court decides it, hence the problem.

You have to do it in order to get into court and find out of you're allowed to do it (a ridiculous prerequisite to begin with), and then if it goes against you, you have to pay punitive damages?
by sherdil2022 | 2025-07-07 22:02:24+00:00
Honestly, I get that people feel lost after finishing something as intense as a PhD, but I also think we've gone a bit overboard with turning every life transition into a therapeutic crisis. Careers end. School ends. Relationships end. That's... just life. It is not always some deep identity crisis that needs to be "processed" with words like 'grounding' and 'holding space'.

I don't mean to dismiss anyone's feelings - yeah, it can suck. But is it really surprising that you feel weird after leaving a highly structured, all-consuming environment like academia? That is not trauma, that is change.

And it is normal.

Maybe we have just forgotten how to deal with discomfort without slapping a therapy label on it - build some resilience, having a life outside of work, and preparing for transitions are basic life skills and being a reasonably well-rounded adult - not just therapeutic strategies or some breakthrough insights!

Anyway, not trying to be heartless here - being a contrarian, I suppose - I just wish we had more language for talking about hard things without everything needing to be a mini mental health crisis. Sometimes you are just in a weird place for a bit. And that is okay too.
by blibble | 2025-07-07 22:02:27+00:00
the large body of corroborating evidence (and ability to be dis-proven) is what makes it a theory

but we can't "prove" plate tectonics, because we can't directly observe what's going on the earth's crust over a period of millions of years

in scientific nomenclature, a theory is a very robust thing indeed

vs. the vernacular, where it isn't, e.g. "I have a theory that my cat vomits behind the couch after I give him ice-cream"
by obirunda | 2025-07-07 22:02:31+00:00
First of all. I never said that typing brackets and semicolons is what I'm arguing the benefits will come from. That's a very reductionist view of the process.

You have really strawmanned that and positioned my point as stemming from this concept of typing language specific code as being sacrosanct in some way. I'm defending that, because it's not my argument.

I'm arguing that you are being dishonest when you claim to be using English as the programming language in a way that actually expedites the process. I'm saying this is your evidence-free opinion.

I'm also confused by what your involvement is in the implementation and the extent of your specifications. When you write your specifications in English is all pseudo-code? Or are you leaving a lot for the LLM to deduce and implement?

By definition, if you are allowing some level of autonomy and "creative decision making" to the model, you are using it as an abstraction. But this is a dangerous choice, because you cannot guarantee it's reliably abstracting, especially if it's the latter. If it's the former, then I don't see the benefit of writing requirements so detailed as to pseudo-code level to have it write in compilable code for you just so you don't have to type brackets and semicolons.

LLMs aren't good enough yet to deliver reliable code in a project where you can actually consider that portion fully abstracted. You need to code review and test anything that comes out of it. If you're also considering the tests as being abstracted by LLMs then you have a proper feedback loop of slop.

Also, I'm not suggesting that it's impossible for you to understand, conceptually what you're trying to accomplish without writing the code yourself. That's ludicrous, I'm strictly calling B.S, when you are claiming to be using English as a programming language as if that has been abstracted. Whatever your "workflow" is, you're fooling yourself into thinking you have arrived at some productivity nirvana and are just accumulating technical debt for the future you.
by amy214 | 2025-07-07 22:03:07+00:00
We should OTC all drugs, recreational and prescription. For example, insulin had been made OTC because it means someone who has run out of insulin, understands how to use it, can get some in a pinch. Similar to "Plan B" birth control. Gating this on a physician visit introduces massive bureaucracies, scheduling, pain points, and insurance also jumps in the fray. Similarly, I'm willing to wager in the US, if drugs related to blood pressure & statins were OTC, we'd have way way less heart attacks and strokes.

There is the issue of side-effects which is why many drugs are prescription only, for example, when using anti-clotting drugs (warfarin), usually requires bloodwork. A blackbox warning ("you're risking death, requires bloodwork") would suffice here.

I would consider an exception for antibiotics and antivirals since physician stewartship is to be trusted more than the general public. Failing that would mean the rise of pan-drug resistant strains. Me abusing those drugs may in fact impact my neighbor. Most other drugs, it doesn't harm my neighbor at all, it's my choice.

I don't expect this would ever happen, but it's nice to imagine such a world.
by torbid | 2025-07-07 22:04:25+00:00
If CAs have to share CTs and have to save everything the CT would save to their last submission then no CA can destroy the log without colluding with other CAs.

(I.e. your log ends abruptly but polling any other CA that published to the same CT shows there is more including reasons to shut you down.)

I don't see how a scheme where the CT signer has this responsibility makes any sense. If they stop operating because they are sick of it, all the CAs involved have a somewhat suspicious looking CT history on things already issued that has to be explained instead of having always had the responsibility to provide the history up to anything they have signed whether or not some CT goes away.
by exmadscientist | 2025-07-07 22:04:31+00:00
The old TI-89 handheld calculators are amazingly good at this stuff. (It does struggle with "bytes", though it handles hex quite nicely within its syntax.) I still have one on my desk, and this is the main reason why. I barely bother with it for anything that doesn't involve units, and it's still worth the literal desk space. There is a good Android emulator, though in recent years it seems to have grown the habit of sometimes registering taps as a large number of button presses. I'm not entirely sure why; this behavior is very annoying. It might be phone-dependent, or a problem caused by a too-new Android version.

Frink is also very good at units, but I struggle to use it for anything more complex than a simple conversion. I'm sure it can do the task, but I've never been able to learn to drive it well, and usually get pretty frustrated when I try. The documentation and my brain don't really get along, or maybe it's that I am often in a hurry when I am trying to do something with it.