MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-08-29 19:30:49+00:00
> where it can freely be downloaded by anyone at any time, by people who are then free to do whatever they like with it on their own hardware

I think you have a strong misunderstanding of the law and the general expectation of others.

I'd like to remind you that a lot of celebrities face legal issues for posting photos of themselves. Here's a recent example with Jennifer Lopez[0]. The reason these types of lawsuits are successful is because it is theft of labor. If you hire a professional photographer to take photos of your wedding then the contract is that the photographer is handing over ownership of the photos in exchange of payment. The only difference here is that the photo was taken before a contract was made. The celebrity owns the right to their body and image, but not to the photograph.

Or think about Open Source Software. Just because it is posted on GitHub does not mean you are legally allowed to use it indiscriminately. GitHub has licenses and not all of them are unrestricted. In fact, a repo without a license does not mean unfettered usage. The default is that the repo owner has the copyright[1].

> You're under no obligation to choose a license. However, without a license, the default copyright laws apply, meaning that you retain all rights to your source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work.

A big part of what will make a lawsuit successful or not is if the owner has been deprived of compensation. As in, if you make money off of someone else's work. That's why this has been the key issue in all these AI lawsuits. Where the question is about if the work is transformative or not. All of this is in new legal territory because the laws were not written with this usage in mind. The transformative stuff is because you need to allow for parody or referencing. You don't want a situation where, say... someone including a video of what the president has said to discuss what was said[2]. But this situation is much closer to "Joe stole a book, learned from that book, and made a lot of money through the knowledge that they obtained from this book AND would not have been able to do without the book's help." Just, it's usually easier to go after the theft part of that situation. It's definitely a messy space.

But basically, just because a piece of art exists on public property does not mean you have the right to do whatever you want with it.

> is equally a description of Google.

Yes and no. The AI summaries? Yeah. The search engine and linking? No. The latter is a mutually beneficial service. It's one thing to own a taxi service and it is another to offer a taxi service that will walk into a starbucks take a random drink off the counter and deliver it to you. I'm not sure why this is difficult to understand.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2qqew643go

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUnRWh4xOCY
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-08-29 19:30:54+00:00
Income inequality is a red herring, and too often it is chanted without any thought given to what support for equality means or why inequality is ostensibly opposed. There are, of course, two classes of reasons that people have for supporting income equality.

1. opposition to income inequality per se

2. opposition to something other than income inequality, with inequality as a proxy for that thing

For (2), the person may either believe that income inequality necessarily results in the problem they're concerned about, or they may be confusing it with inequality per se.

For (1), one motivation is the classic envy of the have-nots for the haves, or a basic confusion about justice where it is misunderstood as entailing equality.

The first real problem is poverty. A double income upper middle class family with a $600k home is not equal to the millionaire or billionaire down the road in terms of income, but they are not suffering because of that inequality. Furthermore, the easiest form of equality is universal poverty, something socialist/communist regimes were quite good at arranging. Obviously, this kind of equality is undesirable.

A second problem is the influence money has in politics. This isn't the result of inequality per se, only the deranged relationship to money that people, including those in politics, have. The lust for money is the real culprit here, not money per se.

A third problem, related to the first, is one arising from ineffective markets. On the one hand, this might be the result of central planning or onerous regulation and other features of economies in collectivist societies. These can crush personal initiative and responsibility, and reduce the individual to an element of the collective, thus diminishing the dignity of the person. On the other hand, while free markets are quite good at allocating goods, they aren't infallible, and an idolatry of the market can encourage a participation in the market that flouts morality and regard for human dignity, resulting in a market that instead of contributing to the freedom and good of its participants, becomes a force for exploitation in which some enrich themselves through unjust practices. (I would also add a radical, totalizing libertarianism ideology that reduces the human person to an economic actor - full stop - and construes all human activity as economic, thus dehumanizing market participants.)

I would encourage people to read JPII's 1991 encyclical "Centesimus Annus" for a balanced summary critique of the dominant economic orders of the last century or so as a corrective for their errors.

[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
by mikestorrent | 2025-08-29 19:31:22+00:00
Seems to vary greatly by region, of course. Where I live, we barely had anything you could call a lockdown, but they got really insistent about vax passports for restaurants etc.

Sometimes I think about that: vax aside, they actually managed to provision trusted certificates for a huge percentage of the population in a short period of time. Could have actually been useful for online ID, though we know of the dangers there; but look, here I am signing into my government's website using my bank as a 3rd party IDP. Shouldn't I sign into the bank using the gov't instead??
by jknutson | 2025-08-29 19:31:51+00:00
If you don’t mind me asking, how were you able to immigrate there? I have family that lives in Norway on my father’s side and I’ve sometimes fantasized about packing up my life and moving there after I visited them and saw what an amazing place it is. The few times I’ve been manic enough to actually consider its realistic plausibility I’ve always been stopped at the dead end of their immigration policy. Maybe things have changed but when I looked into it, it seemed like a very difficult bar to meet (I would’ve either tried to find a skilled trade immigration policy, or perhaps used my extended family as a reason, but neither of those routes seemed particularly possible).
by drusepth | 2025-08-29 19:32:06+00:00
Definitely fast, but initial use puts quality either comparable to or below gpt-5-nano. This might be a low-cost option for people who don't mind babysitting the output (or working in very small projects), but claude/gpt-5/gemini all seem to have significantly higher quality at marginally more cost/time.

By just emphasizing the speed here, I wonder if their workflows revolve more around the vibe practice of generating N solutions to a problem in parallel and selecting the "best". If so, it might still win out on speed (if it can reliably produce at least one higher-quality output, which remains to be seen), but also quickly loses any cost margin benefits.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-29 19:32:25+00:00
Is the difficulty in theoretical complexity of operating systems, or in project scoping/scope creep?

It's probably not that hard to write bare metal code for a modern CPU that runs and crashes. It's obviously insurmountably hard to compete with Android in features with scratch built bare metal code. An "OS" can be anything between the two. But it's very easy to imagine an "XR OS" project snowballing quickly into the latter, and Carmack's concerns would be spot on(as always is, and as proven). Is it then an inherent difficulty in "designing a new operating system", or is it technically something else?
by mikestorrent | 2025-08-29 19:32:55+00:00
> Individually, the people of the UK are generally kind, thoughtful and considerate. As a mob, they're an absolute nightmare especially when wankers like Fox and Corbyn get involved.

This is true everywhere, mobs devolve us to primate behaviour; if you've been in a crowd that ever got angry, you know this - it drives the hindbrain in amazing and terrifying ways. Happy crowds can give you elation you'll never feel anywhere else; angry crowds can make a man kill, even though normally he'd never dream of it.

Of course, most countries don't need to have Anti-Social Behavioural Orders or ban people from buying butter knives, so there's something else going on in the UK that is a bit harder to put a finger on.
by derefr | 2025-08-29 19:32:57+00:00
Presumably, they submitted a gTLD application to ICANN and paid the — at the time — USD$180k evaluation fee. They likely also made arrangements with some existing registrar to host the actual name servers, rather than doing so themselves.

They may or may not have then had the evaluation fee refunded to them, under the Applicant Support Program (https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round...).
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-08-29 19:32:57+00:00
Personally, I like to split the difference: the physical continuum definitely exists, to whatever extent any physical thing exists, but the real number line (and indeed the completed inductive set of integers) may just be a human-constructed fiction. The physical continuum is not necessarily identical to the real continuum; the latter is just a very useful model that lets us do human things like calculus.

(And the discrepancy might not be in the physical continuum being simpler than the mathematical reals, as some here postulate, but rather in the continuum being far stranger than the reals, in ways we may never observe nor comprehend.)
by lazide | 2025-08-29 19:33:01+00:00
Notably, the FBI found it was entirely possible to disable the striker block without the trigger being pulled. A combination of wear, inadequate design, and loose manufacturing tolerances.

They couldn’t get it to fire uncommanded however, unless they bypassed the trigger.

However, they got the gun because it had gone off uncommanded in the holster - with witnesses - and no hands or anything else near it.
by NoahZuniga | 2025-08-29 19:33:14+00:00
You know it wouldn't be possible for us to tell the difference between a rational universe (one where all quantities are rational numbers) and a real universe (one where you can have irrational quantities).

The standard construction for the real numbers is to start with the rationals and "fill in all the holes". So why even bother with filling in the holes and instead just declare God created the rationals?
by rkomorn | 2025-08-29 19:33:15+00:00
True, yes. Totally agree with you on the fundamental definition of opt-in vs opt-out.

You can also have a checkbox that says "I consent to having my data used for training", which would look like "opting in", and it could be true by default.

Or you can have a checkbox that says "Leave my data out of your training set", which would look like "opting out", and which could be unchecked default.

Technically, they're both "opt-out", but I've seen enough examples (intentionally confusing and arguably "dark patterns") that I personally don't really consider "it's opt-in" to be a complete statement anymore.

Edit: I'll add that, in the comment I was replying to, it very much looked like you had to go to a settings page in order to opt-out, which I think is entirely reasonably described as having been opted-in by default. Here's what they had written:

> All you have to do is flip a single switch in the options to turn it off

And I actually think "opted-in by default" is valid and calls out cases where it looks like you consent, but that decision was made for you. Although in this case I think I've seen other comments that describe the UX differently, but my comment was more of a general comment than about this particular flow.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-29 19:33:29+00:00
If Apple keeps improving things, you can run the model locally. I'm able to run models on my Macbook with an M4 that I can't even run on my 3080 GPU (mostly due to VRAM constraints) but they run reasonably fast, would the 3080 be faster? Sure, but its also plenty fast to where I'm not sitting there waiting longer than I wait for a cloud model to "reason" and look things up.

I think the biggest thing for offline LLMs will have to be consistency for having them search the web with an API like Google's or some other search engines API, maybe Kagi could provide an API for people who self-host LLMs (not necessarily for free, but it would still be useful).
by rafram | 2025-08-29 19:33:29+00:00
> LA to Vegas would rival the distance of the longest European high speed lines, but with many fewer stops between and a fraction of the passengers between.

Many fewer stops: that's a good thing. A fraction of the passengers? No, that's absolutely false. Brightline estimates 50 million trips between LA and Vegas every year [1], which is more than, for example, the total number of tourists to Paris every year.

> their population skews to one massive metropolitan center

Japan, sure, being a long and skinny group of islands definitely helps. But is that actually true of Europe? Germany has a great high-speed rail network (current on-time performance issues aside) with a very pluricentric population.

[1]: https://www.brightlinewest.com/overview/project#:~:text=Toda...
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-08-29 19:33:52+00:00
Game coding makes you have to think about thinks that a lot of web devs don't have to (or merely don't bother to) consider.

Optimization is paramount. To maintain 60 fps, you need to calculate your game state and render graphics in under 1/60th of a second. That's only 16.6[..] milliseconds. If you want to appeal to the high-end players with 240 hz monitors, you get less than 5 ms. When you're operating at that level of latency, every microsecond counts.

You start having to care about how your data is laid out in memory so that you can optimize cache usage. You start caring about branch mispredictions. Multithreading becomes an absolute must, but locks are landmines. If you're using a garbage collecting language, per-frame allocations are kryptonite and you re-use buffers to avoid unpredictable pauses.

Your profiler becomes your best friend. You're not just looking for good performance, but consistent performance. If there's a 3 ms spike in CPU time every 10 frames, your players will absolutely notice it and it will destroy the feel of your game. That 3 ms becomes a critical bug.
by runjake | 2025-08-29 19:33:52+00:00
I won't share my opinions of your statement, but I've seen no information on whether or not there was a round in the chamber at the time of the incident.

Regardless, depending on the situation and specifically in the USAF, you are ordered to either carry with a round in the chamber or not, and you'd damned well follow those orders.

It's beside the point, but I imagine, based on my own first hand experience, that USAF Security Forces typically carry without a round in the chamber, in most situations. I did Weapons Courier duty and I was ordered to carry a round in the chamber and be "locked and loaded" at all times.
by krapp | 2025-08-29 19:33:56+00:00
>or perhaps the meaning of too many words has changed, and their context. When Hippocrates claimed that the brain was an organ to cool the blood, perhaps he meant that we use our thought to temper our emotions, i.e. what he said agrees with our modern understanding.

The belief that the heart was the seat of thought and emotion was shared by numerous cultures[0], and was based on their naive interpretation of physiology and biology and cannot be dismissed as a modern misinterpretation of a single vague aphorism by a single person due to the preponderance of documentary evidence to the contrary from contemporary sources. Also, you're probably talking about Aristotle, not Hippocrates.

>Maybe because we stopped talking about "excitable" people as being "hot-blooded"

Also people still say "hot blooded" all the time.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiocentric_hypothesis
by unpopularopp | 2025-08-29 19:33:57+00:00
I will generalize but by my experience most Americans I have met just can't fathom to pay (= taxed) for some common good. Why should I pay for someone's healthcare when I live healthy and all I see that others are smoking? Why should I pay for someone's free train ticket when I only travel by car? This I saw across all genders, age groups, and political affiliation. Americans have this hyper individualist mindset that no other country does in the planet. It's good for some things like innovation (see the HN crowd) but not necessarily a benefit for the society.
by mikestorrent | 2025-08-29 19:34:23+00:00
Thanks, very helpful! My use case is a bit different: NVMe drives are now cheap and fast as hell, I want to put them in older existing machines in the ~10-15 year old sort of category that have PCIe but not much else. Buying a new mobo kinda defeats the purpose... but as I type this, I can't remember what the purpose really is anyway, lol!
by SirMaster | 2025-08-29 19:34:51+00:00
I am pretty sure the card is not using 8+ watts when all the drives on it are idle...

I can't believe people are worrying about something less than 10 watts.

10 watts in constant use for a whole year is like $12 at the average electricity cost in the US.

I don't even let my HDDs sleep, the constant spin up and spin down and temperature cycle associated with puts way more wear and tear on them and would cause them to fail quicker and that is way more expensive to replace.

I have 20 HDDs connected to one of these SAS2 controllers in my home server.
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-29 19:35:08+00:00
Dear Author,

the internet is not your friend, but a kind of alien intelligence - vast, cool, and unsympathetic, in HG Wells' formulation. Publicly melting down (even anonymously) is not going to help you; if anything, you'll just end up feeling more isolated.

You need to work out your self-image issues with a person instead of projecting them onto your environment. That person might be a friend of therapist, or several people helping you with different things, and finding the right person(s) is likely to involve several false starts and blind alleys. You should pursue this work in person. Parasocial relationships are a necessity in this day and age, but over-reliance on them is ver bad for your mental health.
by lucb1e | 2025-08-29 19:35:48+00:00
We were supposed to pentest a website on AWS WAF last week. We encountered three types of blocks:

1) hard block without having done any requests yet. No clue why. Same browser (Burp's built-in Chromium), same clean state, same IP address, but one person got a captcha and the other one didn't. It would just say "reload the page to try again" forever. This person simply couldn't use the site at all; not sure if that would happen if you're on any other browser, but since it allowed the other Burp Suite browser, that doesn't seem to be the trigger for this perma-ban. (The workaround was to clone the cookie state from the other consultant, but normal users won't have that option.)

2) captcha. I got so many captchas, like every 4th request. It broke the website (async functionality) constantly. At some point I wanted to try a number of passwords for an admin username that we had found and, to my surprise, it allowed hundreds of requests without captcha. It blocks humans more than this automated bot...

3) "this website is under construction" would sometimes appear. Similar to situation#1, but it seemed to be for specific requests rather than specific persons. Inputting the value "1e9" was fine, "1e999" also fine, but "1e99" got blocked, but only on one specific page (entering it on a different page was fine). Weird stuff. If it doesn't like whatever text you wrote on a support form, I guess you're just out of luck. There's no captcha or anything you can do about it (since it's pretending the website isn't online at all). Not sure if this was AWS or the customer's own wonky mod_security variant

I dread to think if I were a customer of this place and I urgently needed them (it's not a regular webshop but something you might need in a pinch) and the only thing it ever gives me is "please reload the page to try again". Try what again?? Give me a human to talk to, any number to dial!
by godelski | 2025-08-29 19:35:53+00:00
I'm not sure quid pro quo even matters. A search engine is more like providing a taxi service. You're just taking people to a place.

Now the AI summaries are a different story. One where there is no quid pro quo either. It's different when that taxi service will also offer the same service as that business. It's VERY different when that taxi service will walk into that business, take their services free of charge[0], and then transfer that to the taxi customer.

[0] Scraping isn't going to offer ad revenues

[Side note] In our analogy the little text below the link it more like the taxi service offering some advertising or some description of the business. Bit more gray here but I think the quid pro quo phrase applies here. Taxi does this to help customer find the right place to go, providing the business more customers. But the taxi isn't (usually) replacing the service itself.
by reaperducer | 2025-08-29 19:36:18+00:00
As someone who works with many dozens of CSS files each day, I can say the problem isn't CSS. It's devs who are too lazy to document their work.

If everyone is working from the same spec/reference, it's fine, and you get consistent, reliable results.

When devs have to stumble around in the dark and end up reinventing the wheel every few months, that's when things go badly.
by jameshart | 2025-08-29 19:36:20+00:00
Well, you’d also be forgiven for thinking ‘how on earth can a social website chatbot be a white supremacist?’ And yet xAI managed to prove that is a legitimate concern.

xAI has a shocking track record of poor decisions when it comes to training and prompting their AIs. If anyone can make a partisan coding assistant, they can. Indeed, given their leadership and past performance, we might expect them to explicitly try.
by al_borland | 2025-08-29 19:36:30+00:00
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

As someone who has strived for this from early on, the problem the article overlooks is not knowing some of these various technologies everyone is talking about out, because I never felt I needed them. Am I missing something I need, but just ignorant, or is that just needless complexity that a lot of people fall for?

I don’t want to test these things out to learn them in actual projects, as I’d be adding needless complexity to systems for my own selfish ends of learning these things. I worked with someone who did this and it was a nightmare. However, without a real project, I find it’s hard to really learn something well and find the sharp edges.