MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Ukv | 2025-07-07 17:35:35+00:00
> Yes it can. Fairly notably quite a lot of publishers sell their physical books and newspapers and require retailer unsold copies to be destroyed - but they were sold to the retailer.

Issue is with A->B->C due to business B being unable to legally fulfill the terms that'd require them to go around consumer C's homes destroying the chair they have bought (even if such destruction is hidden in some fine-print, given decent consumer protection laws). Some business B can still agree to terms impacting themselves (and as a business, typically have greater capacity to review/negotiate contracts), like destroying their unsold stock.

> They quite possibly already have an alternative business of licensing the component for non-game offerings that they won't jeopardise.

I think generally it's a large enough market (especially if this eventually expands beyond games to all purchased software, which I hope to see) that existing suppliers would adapt to either allow their component to be easily severed/mocked, or accept some probably-long-outdated version of their component being included in end-of-life releases (as it would for client-side components), else an alternative would emerge to fill that void.
by graypegg | 2025-07-07 17:35:35+00:00
Ive really warmed up to the lowercase-a "agile" way of working in this way. Earlier in my career I just wanted design to have everything fleshed out and ready to go, that was their "job". I’ve now seen that fail multiple times.

It can be hard to communicate it to coworkers sometimes, but a lot of this would be much smoother if we all understood our jobs as making the product we ship. The design isn’t a product and nor is the repo. The designer might hold the pencil, and I might hold the brush but we’re both working on the same canvas.
by aljgz | 2025-07-07 17:36:07+00:00
There's a verse I like a lot in Tao Te Jing:

"One must know when it is enough. Those who know when it is enough will not perish."

I think it's good to aim for zero traffic deaths, as in many countries the situation is so bad that a lot of improvement is feasible.

The long tail would definitely be much harder to tackle, but I don't expect this to be a serious problem in practice.
by stared | 2025-07-07 17:36:19+00:00
It is not a flaw. It is a tool that can be used in various ways.

It is like saying "I was told that with Python I can make a website, I downloaded Python - they lied, I have no website".

Basic prompts are "you are a helpful assistant" with all its consequences. Using such assistant as a therapist might be suboptimal.
by echelon | 2025-07-07 17:36:41+00:00
> I hate the "accessible to the layperson" argument.

Accessible to a layperson also means lowering the gradient slope of learning.

Millions of people who would have never rented a camera from a rental house are now trying to work with these tools.

Those publishing "slop" on TikTok are learning the Hero's Journey and narrative structure. They're getting schooled on the 180-degree rule. They're figuring out how to tell stories.

> People who couldn't do art before, still can't do art. Asking someone, or something else, to make a picture for you does not mean you created it.

Speak for yourself.

I'm not an illustrator, but I'm a filmmaker in the photons-on-glass sense. Now I can use image and video models to make animation.

I agree that your average Joe isn't going to be able to make a Scorsese-inspired flick, but I know what I'm doing. And for me, these tools open an entire new universe.

Something like this still takes an entire week of work, even when using AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U

There's lots of editing, rotoscoping, compositing, grading, etc. and the AI models themselves are INSANELY finicky and take a lot of work to finesse.

But it would take months of work if you were posing the miniatures yourself.

With all the thought and intention and work that goes into something like this, would you still say it "does not mean you created it"? Do you still think this hasn't democratized access to a new form of expression for non-animators?

AI is a creative set of tools that make creation easier, faster, more approachable, and more affordable. They're accessible enough that every kid hustling on YouTube and TikTok can now supercharge their work. And they're going to have to use these tools to even stay treading water amongst their peers, because if they don't use them, their competition (for time and attention) will.
by Lalabadie | 2025-07-07 17:37:00+00:00
These are complaints about the designer you are working with and the deliverables they're choosing to give you, are they not?

Figma isn't/shouldn't be the arbiter of what's possible in the project, that's a major point of the article.

My role as a designer is to explore options and _then_ narrow down to a sensible solution (diamond-shaped process, etc etc). My developer colleague is concerned by the second part of that process, and I should make sure to provide her with consistency and sensible use of exceptions. That doesn't change my responsibilities to the exploratory part, and I can't exclude it from my consideration when choosing and critiquing tools.
by redcobra762 | 2025-07-07 17:37:06+00:00
We're operating under a model where the owner of the copyright has already sold their work. And while it's within their rights to stipulate conditions of the sale, they did not do that, and fair use of the work as governed under the laws the book was sold under encompasses its conversion into an LLM model.

If the author didn't want their work to be included in an LLM, they should not have sold it, just like if an author didn't want their work to inspire someone else's work, they should not have sold it.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-07 17:37:16+00:00
It used nonsensical parameters to the API in way that I didn't realize was possible (though obvious in hindsight). The AI got confused; it didn't think the parameters were nonsensical. It also didn't quite use them in the way that triggered the error. However it was close enough for me to realize that "hey, I never though of that possibility". I needed to fix the function to return a proper error response for the nonsense.

It also taught me to be more careful about checkpointing my work in git before letting an agent go wild on my codebase. It left a mess trying to fix its problems.
by tharkun__ | 2025-07-07 17:37:24+00:00
It works well enough in other countries than America.

E.g. in the Netherlands or Germany there's no need for 4-way stops and such. If no other signage applies, then whoever is on the "right" side has priority over the people on the "left" side. And exceptions do apply, i.e. it's not "that simple" either. It does depend on whether both roads are on the same level or not. A road to your right that has a sidewalk border stone running across it does not give them the right of way, while if the sidewalk border stops and both roads intersect directly at the same level, then the road to your right does have right of way.

So e.g. if you take a typical urban development with lots of little streets and houses, where you'd see a lot of rolling stops in America, nobody's gonna stop at every intersection, rolling or not there. This does go as far as when cars from all directions arrive at the same time, then nobody has automatic right of way and one of them has to wave the person to their right through and will be the last allowed to proceed.
by dekhn | 2025-07-07 17:37:43+00:00
In the interview, am I allowed to fix the server (which apparently "breaks down handling concurrent requests") instead of working on this silly programming exercise?

What about proxy solutions? IE, proxies that take concurrent requests and serialize them?

The question mainly seems to be working around framework limitations and broken externalities, and the interviewing is providing a signal ("you do not want to work here")
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-07 17:38:14+00:00
So then, should they not be on the watch for the 14-year-old being told that "unaliving" themselves or others is a fantastic idea?

Looks like they only care about doing basically the minimum required to tick the (presumably partly imagined, since case law is still nascent) "not our fault, we tried" legal box. They are putting on a show, a performance, if you will, as legal cover and to maintain the artifice of their shiny corporate property rather than any genuine desire to stop the concept of death harming their customers somehow (which to be clear, I think mostly ends up somewhere between silly, overreaching, futile and vain when taken to the extremes).

> performative (adjective, sense 2): not sincere but intended to impress someone, prove that something is true, etc. (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/performa...)

I'm not sure why you think that anything to with some "culture war" thing?

It's legal/moral theatre akin to taking belts off people at airports. If something does eventually get through they can point at the CCTV of millions of people dicking about with leather goods and say "can't touch us for that, we did the checks". Apple couldn't give a toss if an occasional teenager offs themselves now and then, as long as it doesn't come back on them.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-07 17:38:55+00:00
> American political parties aren't like the Communist Party (which chooses you and can kick you out), they don't have any way to discipline elected officials who don't toe the line.

Unless that is absolutely forbidden by US election law, Musk's new party may in fact have a way to do that. He gets to write the rules. He's also (at least initially) the one who supplies the money, so he could presumably choose to not fund the campaign of any candidate that he decided he didn't like.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-07 17:38:56+00:00
> you can get primaried

The party doesn't control that. This can just as well work against the party leadership.

> you can lose funding from the RNC/DNC

Party funds are often less significant than both candidate raised and outside funding, so while that's true, its not a particularly strong sanction.

> We aren’t quite at the level of China disappearing folks or deciding to put them under house arrest but there are repercussions.

We're not even at the "average liberal democracy party system" level of party discipline, more relevantly.
by jandrese | 2025-07-07 17:39:13+00:00
And the crazy thing is that might be cheaper when you consider the alternative is to have your lawyers negotiate with the lawyers for the publishing companies for the right to use the works as training data. Not only is it many many billable hours just to draw up the contract, but you can be sure that many companies would either not play ball or set extremely high rates. Finally, if the publishing companies did bring a suit against Anthropic they might be asked to prove each case of infringement, basically to show that a specific work was used in training, which might be difficult since you can't reverse a model to get the inputs. When you're a billion dollar company it's much easier to get the courts to take your side. This isn't like the music companies suing teenagers who had a Kazaa account.
by rockemsockem | 2025-07-07 17:39:18+00:00
> So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated.

For anyone else who wants to do the same thing though this is likely all they need to do.

Cutting up and scanning books is hard work and actually doing the same thing digitally to ebooks isn't labor free either, especially when they have to be downloaded from random sites and cleaned from different formats. Torrenting a bunch of epubs and paying for individual books is probably cheaper
by kordlessagain | 2025-07-07 17:40:14+00:00
ARC is definitely about achieving AGI and it doesn't matter whether we "have" it or not right now. That is the goal:

> where he introduced the "Abstract and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence" (ARC-AGI) benchmark to measure intelligence

So, a high enough score is a threshold to claim AGI. And, if you use an LLM to work these types of problems, it becomes pretty clear that passing more tests indicates a level of "awareness" that goes beyond rational algorithms.

I thought I had seen everything until I started working on some of the problems with agents. I'm still sorta in awe about how the reasoning manifests. (And don't get me wrong, LLMs like Claude still go completely off the rails where even a less intelligent human would know better.)
by CaptainFever | 2025-07-07 17:40:29+00:00
> Every time an article like this surfaces, it always seems like the majority of tech folks believe that training AI on copyrighted material is NOT fair use

Where are you getting your data from? My conclusions are the exact opposite.

(Also, aren't judges by definition the only ones qualified to declare if it is actually fair use? You could make a case that it shouldn't be fair use, but that's different from it being not fair use.)
by pjmlp | 2025-07-07 17:40:45+00:00
Note that the BASIC that could fit into 4K of RAM was a subset of Dartmouth BASIC, hence why many learnt BASIC as an interpreted language, while the original one always compiled to machine code before execution, in a kind of primitive JIT compiler.

Lisp and Pascal versions suffered from the same issue with subsetting language and runtime features.
by Hunpeter | 2025-07-07 17:40:51+00:00
Hi, when you say you don't know which fingers to move do you mean within the context of a piece of music, or just the scales themselves? For the latter, I can give you some advice (though if you search something like "piano scale fingerings" on Google images, you can probably get some fairly standard fingerings for both hands).

Each diatonic (major, minor or modal) scale consists of 7 distinct notes, and the fingering is always 1-2-3 1-2-3-4 in one direction, and the reverse in the other direction, however, you need to find where this sequence starts within the scale. The more black keys there are in a scale, the fewer the possible comfortable positions. Always put your thumb on a white key, and prefer putting your 3rd and especially your 4th fingers on black keys, if possible. (Fun fact: for the major scales, once you have your right hand's fingering, you can imagine mirroring the keyboard and your hand around the D or G# key and you get another major scale with a good fingering for the left hand).

DO NOT start with C major if it's your first time learning scales. Maybe start with E major (4 sharps) as it is comfortable and you can use the mirrored fingering in the other hand.
by conorbergin | 2025-07-07 17:40:58+00:00
I think someone says this in every HN post involving CAD, but the reason FreeCAD is "buggy" and Solvespace is small and fast is Solvespace has a fraction of the power. FreeCAD uses the Open Cascade kernel, which can do complex 3d boolean and fillet operations, not having these operations severely limits the geometry you can create, and you will run into walls very quickly using Solvespace, OpenSCAD or anything else with a hand rolled geometry kernel. Even commercial projects use an off the shelf kernel, they're just difficult to write.
by imtringued | 2025-07-07 17:41:33+00:00
Yeah, and it's such a boring thing to write about.

Given an vector space V with (+, ), you can define the vector space over functions F whose codomain is V and where F.+ and F. both take two functions as argument and return another function applying V.+ or V.* on the result. All the linear algebra properties come from the original vector space. Hence it is boring.
by driverdan | 2025-07-07 17:42:12+00:00
I'd guess you're not getting downloads because you're not marketing it to people who want it. You mention a few use cases at the end of the short description and that's it.

For example, this completes with motorcycle communicators such as Sena. That dedicated hardware can be over $400. If your app is as easy to use as a Sena device and you market it to bikers looking for a cheaper alternative you'll get users.
by ARandomerDude | 2025-07-07 17:43:03+00:00
I think English makes a lot of sense, but only if you invest the time to learn some of its etymology. Knowing some Latin, German, and Greek roots (in that order) is immensely helpful. You don't have to learn those languages per se, just some of the vocab. Eventually, you can look at a word, know if it's Latin/French, Germanic, or Greek in origin and all the spelling rules make much more sense.

This takes a lot of time, effort, and interest however, which is why many (most?) people think English is nonsensical.
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-07 17:43:29+00:00
As someone nearly 60, a lot of this rings true. Especially

One reason that the experience of growing old can feel jagged and abrupt is that there is a disconnect between how old we feel and how old we are. You often hear people say “inside I still feel young”.

Yes my "inner self" is still the same as it was when I was 25, at least it seems that way. I have a lot more experience of course but I still feel like the same person I was then.

When I was a young person I imagined that being 60 would feel fundamentally different. But it doesn't. And fortunately about ten years ago I began to work on keeping myself in shape (something I did not focus on as a young person) so I'm actually stronger and fitter than I was then and still in overall good health. Fingers crossed.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-07 17:43:41+00:00
> Unless that is absolutely forbidden by US election law

The weak state of US party discipline is largely a mix of direct consequences of the combination of federal and state electionand campaign finance law, from the broad shape of the electoral system to the specific ways in which elections and campaign finance work, and indirect consequences of the same law (e.g., what is advantageous to actually winning seats giving the direct consequences of the law.)
by dr_dshiv | 2025-07-07 17:44:14+00:00
If I recall, there are hundreds of thousands of untranslated cuneiform texts—and less than 10% have been translated.

I wish there was a resource that tracked all the untranslated classical texts. For instance, only about 10% of Neo-Latin texts have been translated. It seems to me that the products of the renaissance ought to be a part of the training corpus of AGI.
by shermantanktop | 2025-07-07 17:44:30+00:00
The music notation tool space is balkanized in a variety of ways. One of the key splits is between standard music notation and tablature, which is used for guitar and a few other instruments. People are generally on one side or another, and the notation is not even fully compatible - tablature covers information that standard notation doesn't, and vice versa. This covers fingering, articulations, "step on fuzz pedal now," that sort of thing.

The users are different, the music that is notated is different, and for the most part if you are on one side, you don't feel the need to cross over. Multiple efforts have been made (MusicXML, etc.) to unify these two worlds into a superset of information. But the camps are still different.

So what ChatGPT did is actually very interesting. It hallucinated a world in which tab readers would want to use Soundslice. But, largely, my guess is they probably don't....today. In a future world, they might? Especially if Soundslice then enables additional features that make tab readers get more out of the result.
by armada651 | 2025-07-07 17:44:55+00:00
I wouldn't be so sure about that statement, no one has ruled on the output of Anthropic's AI yet. If their AI spits out the original copy of the book then it is practically the same as buying a book from them instead of the copyright holder.

We've only dealt with the fairly straight-forward legal questions so far. This legal battle is still far from being settled.
by jackdawed | 2025-07-07 17:45:40+00:00
I've noticed a lot of people are converging on this idea of using AI to analyze your own data, the same way the companies do it to your data and serve you super targeted content.

Recently, I was inspired to do this on my entire browsing history, after reading https://labs.rs/en/browsing-histories/ I also did the same from ChatGPT/Claude conversation history. The most terrifying thing I did was having an LLM look at my Reddit comment history.

The challenges are primarily with having a context window large enough and tracking context from various data sources. One approach I am exploring is using a knowledge graph to keep track of a user's profile. You're able to compress behavioral patterns into queryable structures, though the graph construction itself becomes a computational challenge. Recently most of the AI startups I've worked with have just boiled down to "give an LLM access to a vector DB and knowledge graph constructed from a bunch of text documents". The text docs could be invoices, legal docs, tax docs, daily reports, meeting transcripts, code.

I'm hoping we see an AI personal content recommendation or profiling system pop up. The economic incentives are inverted from big tech's model. Instead of optimizing for engagement and ad revenue, these systems are optimized for user utility. During the RSS reader era, I was exposed to a lot of curated tech and design content and it helped me really develop taste and knowledge in these areas. It also helped me connect with cool, interesting people.

There's an app I like https://www.dimensional.me/ but the MBTI and personality testing approach could be more rigorous. Instead of personality testing, imagine if you could feed a system everything you consume, write, and do on digital devices, and construct a knowledge graph about yourself, constantly updating.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-07 17:45:59+00:00
Yep. For my own company I used a bare metal machine in Hetzner running Linux and a Windows VM along with a bunch of old MacBook Pros wired up in the home office for CI.

It works, and it's cheap. A full CI run still takes half an hour on the Linux machine (the product [1] is a kind of build system for shipping desktop apps cross platform, so there's lots of file IO and cryptography involved). The Macs are by far the fastest. The M1 Mac is embarrassingly fast. It can complete the same run in five minutes despite the Hetzner box having way more hardware. In fairness, it's running both a Linux and Windows build simultaneously.

I'm convinced the quickest way to improve CI times in most shops is to just build an in-office cluster of M4 Macs in an air conditioned room. They don't have to be HA. The hardware is more expensive but you don't rent per month, and CI is often bottlenecked on serial execution speed so the higher single threaded performance of Apple Silicon is worth it. Also, pay for a decent CI system like TeamCity. It helps reduce egregious waste from problems like not caching things or not re-using checkout directories. In several years of doing this I haven't had build caching related failures.

[1] https://hydraulic.dev/
by ericmay | 2025-07-07 17:46:03+00:00
> The party doesn't control that.

Well they don't literally control the votes, but folks by and large vote for who the party supports. The scenario is closer to something like you ran for office with the party's support and got elected. Then it's election time and now the party goes and gives money to someone else, helps them fundraise, gets them in touch with your previous donors (now no longer your donors), and now your election went from a pretty easy shoe-in to an all-out fight for you to secure your job against the entire party apparatus. Whereas if you toe the line, none of that has to happen.

So in short, yes the parties can and do find various ways to discipline those who don't fall in line. This is something that is obviously* true.

> Party funds are often less significant than both candidate raised and outside funding, so while that's true, its not a particularly strong sanction.

* Here it is important to understand where campaign funds come from. It's not about the money coming from party funds, it's the connections the party has to help you the candidate acquire additional funds from donors and donor organizations, introductions, etc.