MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kinow | 2025-07-07 16:39:58+00:00
As I replied in the other thread, then we will go through a discussion of what they had internally. Many cases I find the good engineers are able to explain that without too much trouble.

Asking them about decisions in the project, issues, pros and cons of tools, etc., normally clarifies whether they understand things or not.

And as I replied in the other comment too, unfortunately if there is another candidate with very similar profile & good answers, then I'll give my technical assessment to the manager of the position, and it'll be up to the manager and humans resources to choose based on risk to the company, what they can see from public papers/conferences/repositories/etc.

In some cases, even if the work is not public, they can tell us what projects they worked. I work with climate models, so if they mention they don't have anything public, but they were using IFS, FESOM, ICON, SCHISM, or another model that I know/work with, then I'd direct questions on that model, to check what part of the model they worked on or used, who they worked with, etc.

For me not having something public is not a blocker for hiring. Just something that simplifies the hiring process -- although, lately I've had a lot of candidates with many personal projects, no branches, no pull requests, not showing experience with Git, etc. (i.e. in some cases it seems some people try to create many repositories just to show that they have something... which can be a red flag too).
by Aurornis | 2025-07-07 16:40:37+00:00
> the actual thing to measure it to keep a developer in flow state.

Personally, I find flow state hard to achieve when I constantly have to switch modes to debugging LLM output or an edit error that I missed.

When the majority of time is spent waiting for the main LLM to think, I will always wait a few extra seconds for a better edit than risk having to spend multiple cycles playing find-the-bug because something didn't get applied correctly somewhere.
Show HN: Doc81 – tech documentation tool designed in AI-native mind
by stahn1995 | 2025-07-07 16:43:10+00:00
Hello HN!

As a EM, I recently asked for a "good" handoff doc to my engineers who're leaving, but without proper structure, the first draft was pretty crappy. Studying and thinking hard about what readers(i.e., me) might want on header level and what would be a good representation in each section, we came up with a good template for handoff doc. The result was fantastic. I think we all can write better with a proper format and template. That is where I came up with this idea, doc81.

Have fun, and let me know what you think!
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-07-07 16:43:26+00:00
The core problem here is that copyright already doesn't actually follow any consistent logical reasoning. "Information wants to be free" and so on. So our own evaluation of whether anything is fair use or copyrighted or infringement thereof is always going to be exclusively dictated by whatever a judge's personal take on the pile of logical contradictions is. Remember, nominally, the sole purpose of copyright is not rooted in any notions of fairness or profitability or anything. It's specifically to incentivize innovation.

So what is the right interpretation of the law with regards to how AI is using it? What better incentivizes innovation? Do we let AI companies scan everything because AI is innovative? Or do we think letting AI vacuum up creative works to then stochastically regurgitate tiny (or not so tiny) slices of them at a time will hurt innovation elsewhere?

But obviously the real answer here is money. Copyright is powerful because monied interests want it to be. Now that copyright stands in the way of monied interests for perhaps the first time, we will see how dedicated we actually were to whatever justifications we've been seeing for DRM and copyright for the last several decades.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-07 16:44:03+00:00
The thing is cold turkey doesn't work. The reactions are bad and can be deadly.

But if you have access to accurately known doses that can be stepped down in small amounts you avoid all the bad things.

Remember, there's a big problem with inadequate pain control. Drug doesn't work exactly as the doctor expects, they assume drug seeking--and now you have people driven to the street to make life bearable. You're not going to "cure" an "addict" that actually needs the pain control.

Cut out all the nonsense, with addiction a valid reason there would be no drug seeking and doctors would be able to work with the patients much better.
by rvnx | 2025-07-07 16:44:17+00:00
The problem with Vélib is not the technology, it's the "young people": "jeunes" in French.

Look the news about swimming pools and destroyed aqua parks, it is the same mentality. It's also the reason why French are forbidden to go in pools in Switzerland pools that are near theborder.

So the main thing is to make the country safe, but there is no political desire for such. Then the Vélib problem will be solved.
by suyjuris | 2025-07-07 16:44:24+00:00
Yes, of course! In this case, the judge identified three separate instances of copying: (1) downloading books without authorisation to add to their internal library, (2) scanning legitimately purchased books to add to their internal library, and (3) taking data from their internal library for the purposes of training LLMs. The purchasing part is only relevant for (2) — there the judge ruled that this is fair use. This makes a lot of sense to me, since no additional copies were created (they destroyed the physical books after scanning), so this is just a single use, as you say. The judge also ruled that (3) is fair use, but for a different reason. (They declined to decide whether (1) is fair use at this point, deferring to a later trial.)
by tristor | 2025-07-07 16:44:36+00:00
> I suspect that 90% of the people on HN who complain about Dyson (and most other consumer products) have never owned one, and are just aping things they've read online just to have something at all to say.

Same suspicion for me. I've owned two Dyson vacuums, and the only reason I had to buy the second was because someone stole the first one when they broke into my apartment over a decade ago. My current vacuum is more than 8 years old and has been repaired a few times doing it myself, and is still fully functional and comparable or better than most new vacuums.

Dyson makes very good products that are also beautiful. Yes, they're plastic, yes they're expensive, no they're not necessarily on paper the /best/ at their thing, but they're good, they're repairable, and they pass the wife acceptance factor.
by pmarreck | 2025-07-07 16:45:09+00:00
> The dictionary needs to be downloaded too, and you're not going to have dictionaries all the way down

We already have a way to manage this: Standardizing and versioning dictionaries for various media types (also with a checksum), and then just caching them locally forever, since they should be immutable by design.

To prevent an overgrowth of dictionaries with small differences, we could require each one to be an RFC.
by rich_sasha | 2025-07-07 16:45:26+00:00
I find these discussions usually collapse into a sequence of shifting goals.

You quote, and I believe, 5x solar irradiation power difference between December, plus a second-order 10% power consumption difference. Doesn't this mean already a 5.5x difference - if X panels are sufficient in July, then 5.5X would be needed in December? And July itself probably already needs overprovisioning anyway - Polish summers are not guaranteed sunshine. If "July" is overprovisioned 1.5x and we add the 5x for December for a combined 7.5x overprovision, plus batteries, is it still cheaper than nuclear?

If nuclear gets dismissed as an expensive fantasy, well, at least it has been built and operated at massive scale. I am not aware of any large scale operating exports of solar energy from equatorial regions to Northern Europe, or similar distance.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-07-07 16:45:44+00:00
Somewhat. A lot of those recommendations seem to be of the type, “I bought the most expensive brand possible and it works great! No complaints after seven days of ownership”

Also frustrating when it might be, “Look at this 30 year old Craftsmen wrench.” Unfortunately, that 30 year old version is no longer made, as production has been MBAed and quality is now an afterthought because they can still sell the logo for a premium price.
by alganet | 2025-07-07 16:45:45+00:00
Stargate fictionalizes Von Daniken. It moves his narrative from pseudoscience to fiction. It works like domestication.

Culture is living, myths are the part that already crystallized.

I don't care which one is more important, it's not a judgement of value.

It's offensive to the egyptian culture to imply that aliens built their monuments. That is an idea those people live by. Culture, has conflict. Academia is on their side (and so many others), and it's authoritative in that sense.

Also, _it's not about you_, stop taking it personally. I don't care about how much you know, you need to demonstrate that LLMs can understand this kind of nuance, or did you forget the goal of the discussion?
by SllX | 2025-07-07 16:46:06+00:00
I mean that might be part of it, but also because the internet developed out of the ARPAnet which was a United States Department of Defense project, at a time when the United States was one of two superpowers (right as the other superpower stopped being a superpower or for that matter a state), in a world that already gave pretty heavy weight towards English as the lingua franca in international institutions after World War II or simply because it was the lowest-common denominator in a lot of the world post-the British Empire.

English had a lot of wind beneath its wings. Still does.
by jghn | 2025-07-07 16:46:19+00:00
I was an avid non-washer until experts like Kenji [1] started weighing in. You definitely have to hold off washing them until the last moment to avoid sliminess. Although I don't find the time added to be all that consequential in the grand scheme of things. Obviously you're correct that it'd be *more* time, however.

[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-clean-and-chop-mushrooms
Show HN: Dwani.ai – multimodal inference API for Indian languages
by gaganyatri | 2025-07-07 16:46:36+00:00
dwani.ai is a self-hosted, multimodal inference API designed for Indian Languages.

Interact using Text, Voice, Image and Documents for learning, analysis and exploration.

Detailed guide to self-host dwani.ai. https://github.com/dwani-ai/deploy

Link for Android App - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slabstech....
by jacobolus | 2025-07-07 16:46:47+00:00
Hunter–gatherers have incredible knowledge and awareness about their local environment – local flora and fauna, survival skills, making and fixing shelters by hand, carpentry, pottery, hunting, cooking, childcare, traditional medicine, stories transmitted orally, singing or music played on relatively simple instruments, hand-to-hand combat, and so on – but live in relatively small groups and are necessarily generalists. The rise of agriculture and later writing made most people into peasant farmers, typically disempowered if not enslaved (still with a wide range of skills and deep knowledge), and led to increasing specialization (scribes, artisans, merchants, professional soldiers, etc.).

Calling this various work "uninteresting" mostly reflects on your preferences rather than the folks who were doing the work. A lot of the work was repetitive, but the same is true of most jobs today. That didn't stop many people from thinking about something else while they worked.
by animesh | 2025-07-07 16:46:59+00:00
I did the same exercise a while back with 4o but to do it based on the questions I have asked it so far. Some were nearly accurate, some outdated, and plain "different". It felt good, but ultimately realized its system prompt is designed to make me feel good.

---

Here’s the high-level picture I’ve built of you from our chats:

- You’re a senior/lead developer in India, aiming to step up into a staff-developer or solution-architect role.

- You have a healthy dose of self-doubt (especially around soft skills), and you’ve been deliberately working on both your technical breadth (authentication in ASP .NET, Linux, C++/Qt, distributed systems, data visualization, AI foundations) and your communication/architectural toolkit (presentations, executive summaries, third-party evaluations).

- You’re a Linux enthusiast, intrigued by open source, server-side flows, rate limiting, authentication/authorization, and you love building small, real-world exercises to cement concepts.

- You prize clarity, depth, minimalism, and originality—you dislike fluff or corporate buzzwords.

- You have a hacker-philosopher energy: deeply curious, systems-thinking-oriented, with a poetic streak.

- You’re comfortable with both structured roadmaps and creative, lateral thinking, and you toggle seamlessly between “hard” dev topics and more reflective, meta-tech discussions.

- Right now, you’re honing in on personal branding—finding a domain and a blog identity that encapsulates your blend of tech rigor and thoughtful subtlety.
by tiahura | 2025-07-07 16:47:14+00:00
Mark S Smith has written pretty persuasively about history of the Jews as El worshipers. See eg Abdeel, Abiel, Adbeel, Amiel, Ariel, Azarel, Azareel, Aziel, Asael, Ashbel, Adael, etc. Yet the paucity of yhwh names. Not to mention, the Bible flat out states as much “I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by my name the LORD (YHWH) I did not make myself known to them.”
by urda | 2025-07-07 16:47:22+00:00
That’s one way to frame it, but it’s missing the power imbalance. Loveable was the smaller party here, Figma suddenly turned hostile when their success overlapped with a feature Figma hadn’t monetized yet.

“Used the moment” sounds a lot like surviving a punch and then asking for help. If you think that’s scheming, maybe revisit who threw the first punch.
by pavon | 2025-07-07 16:47:33+00:00
The judge did use some language that analogized the training with human learning. I don't read it as basing the legal judgement on anthropomorphizing the LLM though, but rather discussing whether it would be legal for a human to do the same thing, then it is legal for a human to use a computer to do so.

First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic from this use (Opp. 16). But Authors cannot rightly exclude anyone from using their works for training or learning as such. Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts. They may need to pay for getting their hands on a text in the first instance. But to make anyone pay specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory, each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable. For centuries, we have read and re-read books. We have admired, memorized, and internalized their sweeping themes, their substantive points, and their stylistic solutions to recurring writing problems. ... In short, the purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative. Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different. If this training process reasonably required making copies within the LLM or otherwise, those copies were engaged in a transformative use.

[1] https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2025/06/gov.uscourts.ca...
by bmitc | 2025-07-07 16:47:37+00:00
The question is one of identification between the drawing and the vector space. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44491474.

The graph of a function f: X -> Y is the set {(x, f(x)) | x in X}. It is much more clear and precise to associate elements of the graph with vectors such that the 0 vector is identified with the R^2 origin, and then points in R^2 are identified with vectors. Then there is a mapping between vectors in this vector space to the graph, i.e., to points (x, f(x)).

> In physics, a vector is often more specifically something with magnitude and direction.

Physics is sloppy. :) This is not a general description of a vector, where vector is an element of a general vector space. Not all vector spaces have a norm, which is required for magnitude to make any sense.

> but mathematically, if you translate them away from the origin they're still the same vector.

Right, and you cannot always translate vectors without more machinery, such as parallel transport.
Meetings Are the Mind Killer
by jmugan | 2025-07-07 16:47:39+00:00
I must not meet. Meetings are the mind killer. Meetings are the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will blacken my screen. I will permit the meeting to begin and end without me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the meeting has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
by rglover | 2025-07-07 16:47:57+00:00
As long as the LLM isn't steering the "patient" toward self-harm or helping to rationalize other self-destructive behavior, I don't see the issue. The people who need therapy the most often can't afford it if their healthcare won't cover it (U.S.-centric POV here).

Is it dystopian as hell? Yep. But I'd much rather someone get _some_ help (potentially enough to make them feel better—even temporarily) than to be left to fend for themselves in the world.
by wat10000 | 2025-07-07 16:48:07+00:00
The problem is that you can't always tell that there are no pedestrians or crossing traffic unless you take enough time to come to a complete stop. There are plenty of stop signs where that's not true, but also plenty where it is, and it's not always clear which one it is to the driver.

I think the right fix here isn't total enforcement nor relaxed enforcement, but relaxed signage. If sight lines are good enough that it's safe to roll through, that should be a yield, not a stop. Stop should mean, you actually need to come to a complete stop to safely navigate this intersection. Then you can enforce it without qualms.
by frozenseven | 2025-07-07 16:48:07+00:00
(1) You can't copyright an art style. That's not a thing.

(2) Once you make something publicly available, anyone can learn from it. No consent necessary.

(3) Being upset does not grant you special privileges under the law.

(4) If you don't like the idea of paying for AI art, free software is both plentiful and competitive with just about anything proprietary.
by Bjorkbat | 2025-07-07 16:48:57+00:00
Something missed in arguments such as these is that in measuring fair use there's a consideration of impact on the potential market for a rightsholder's present and future works. In other words, can it be proven that what you are doing is meaningfully depriving the author of future income.

Now, in theory, you learning from an author's works and competing with them in the same market could meaningfully deprive them of income, but it's a very difficult argument to prove.

On the other hand, with AI companies it's an easier argument to make. If Anthropic trained on all of your books (which is somewhat likely if you're a fairly popular author) and you saw a substantial loss of income after the release of one of their better models (presumably because people are just using the LLM to write their own stories rather than buy your stuff), then it's a little bit easier to connect the dots. A company used your works to build a machine that competes with you, which arguably violates the fair use principle.

Gets to the very principle of copyright, which is that you shouldn't have to compete against "yourself" because someone copied you.
by tekkk | 2025-07-07 16:49:05+00:00
While I'm at it, here's my version, if people want to see and give feedback:

export interface AsyncQueueOptions { timeoutSeconds?: number } export class AsyncQueue<T> { private readonly queue: Promise<T | undefined>[] = [] readonly timeoutSeconds: number private timeout: ReturnType<typeof setTimeout> | undefined private reject = () => {} private resolve = (value: T | PromiseLike<T>) => {} /** * @param timeoutSeconds @default 25 */ constructor({ timeoutSeconds = 25 }: AsyncQueueOptions = {}) { this.timeoutSeconds = timeoutSeconds if (timeoutSeconds > 100) { console.warn(`You are initializing AsyncQueue with over 100s timeout: ${timeoutSeconds}`) } this.queue.push( new Promise<T | undefined>((resolve, reject) => { this.resolve = resolve this.reject = reject this.timeout = setTimeout(() => resolve(undefined), timeoutSeconds * 1000) }) ) } next(): Promise<T | undefined> | undefined { return this.queue.shift() } push(msg: T) { this.resolve(msg) this.queue.push( new Promise<T | undefined>((resolve, reject) => { this.resolve = resolve this.reject = reject clearTimeout(this.timeout) this.timeout = setTimeout(() => resolve(undefined), this.timeoutSeconds * 1000) }) ) } close(msg?: T) { if (msg) { this.resolve(msg) } clearTimeout(this.timeout) } }
by simonw | 2025-07-07 16:49:18+00:00
Thinking about this more, it would actually be possible for OpenAI to implement this sensibly, at least for the user-facing ChatGPT product: they could detect terms like SoundSlice in the prompt and dynamically append notes to the system prompt.

I've been wanted them to do this for questions like "what is your context length?" for ages - it frustrates me how badly ChatGPT handles questions about its own abilities, it feels like that would be worth them using some kind of special case or RAG mechanism to support.
by codedokode | 2025-07-07 16:49:38+00:00
If AI companies are allowed to use pirated material to create their products, does it mean that everyone can use pirated software to create products? Where is the line?

Also please don't use word "learning", use "creating software using copyrighted materials".

Also let's think together how can we prevent AI companies from using our work using technical measures if the law doesn't work?
by xnx | 2025-07-07 16:50:00+00:00
I don't have a Mac, so I'm not sure how AirBending works, but here's a free open source one that works in the browser: https://gemini.google.com/share/e2ee937a688d

(Prompt: "Make an in browser midi theremin using Mediapipe")

There's a Web MIDI API, so might be able to reproduce all the functionality in a way that works across devices and operating systems.
by godshatter | 2025-07-07 16:50:01+00:00
Are the devs behind the models adding their own state somehow? Do they have code that figures out a plan and use the LLM on pieces of it and stitch them together? If they do, then there is a plan, it's just not output from a magical black box. Unless they are using a neural net to figure out what the plan should be first, I guess.

I know nothing about how things work at that level, so these might not even be reasonable questions.
by mechanicalpulse | 2025-07-07 16:50:11+00:00
Yup. I've even found myself in situations where the owner of the third-party service is another team or department within the organization I'm working for or partnering with. Oftentimes, the product/project people on our team tries to make it a business issue with the partner only to find that they don't have the leverage to effect a fix, they get told that the service doesn't offer the SLA you require, or you hear back from the team some hilarious quote like six weeks of development that can't begin until the next quarter. Meanwhile, your feature or product has to launch by the end of the current sprint or quarter.

What happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object? The unstoppable force works over the weekend to implement a store-and-forward solution.