MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zer00eyz | 2025-09-05 21:31:52+00:00
> It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use,

I think that this is a distinction many people miss.

If you take all the works of Shakespeare, and reduce it to tokens and vectors is it Shakespeare or is it factual information about Shakespeare? It is the latter, and as much as organizations like the MLB might want to be able to copyright a fact you simply cannot do that.

Take this one step further. IF you buy the work, and vectorize it, thats fine. But if you feed it in the vectors for Harry Potter so many times that it can reproduce half of the book, it becomes a problem when it spits out that copy.

And what about all the other stuff that LLM's spit out? Who owns that. Well at present, no one. If you train a monkey or an elephant to paint, you cant copyright that work because they aren't human, and neither is an LLM.

If you use an LLM to generate your code at work, can you leave with that code when you quit? Does GPL3 or something like the Elastic Search license even apply if there is no copyright?

I suspect we're going to be talking about court cases a lot for the next few years.
by ajross | 2025-09-05 21:31:57+00:00
That metaphor doesn't really work. It's a settlement, not a punishment, and this is payment, not a fine. Legally it's more like "The store wasn't open, so I took the items from the lot and paid them later".

It's not the way we expect people to do business under normal circumstances, but in new markets with new products? I guess I don't see much actually wrong with this. Authors still get paid a price they were willing to accept, and Anthropic didn't need to wait years to come to an agreement (again, publishers weren't actually selling what AI companies needed to buy!) before training their LLMs.
by hansvm | 2025-09-05 21:32:15+00:00
Which is a bit shocking in its own way, even if the numbers were break-even instead of 20-50%.

Public transit is widely touted as being more efficient than the alternatives, but for most trips it's cheaper (factoring in maintenance, depreciation, gas, etc, and pretending that BART is as convenient and reliable) to drive than to take BART, and not by a little bit.

Income just from gas taxes, tolls, and registration cover ~half the infrastructure maintenance, so there exists effectively another $200-$300 per capita per annum subsidy, but that's nowhere near enough to make BART cost less than just driving, even if I had to account those extra fees against my driving.

Why is that? How is BART worse than driving and still losing money when it's supposedly a more efficient solution? Is it just low volume? Is the organization making bad bets? Is the premise that trains are more efficient flawed?
by kragen | 2025-09-05 21:32:34+00:00
You would restate his main argument as "I kind of thought it was a red flag that you were accusing me of not understanding the post, which is about how SQL is bad at hierarchical data, while defending the bad SQL he used to defend his argument. But I didn't make a big deal out of it."? That doesn't make any sense.

I think you don't understand what the post is about, you don't understand what the query is trying to achieve, you don't know a better way to do it, and you're just engaging in ego defense instead of contributing anything.
by _mlbt | 2025-09-05 21:32:41+00:00
Is there a specific reason you’re choosing Delaware?

I know that it used to be the favorite state for this, but there have been recent changes to laws that make it less business friendly than it used to be.

https://news.law.fordham.edu/jcfl/2025/03/31/delawares-corpo...

In 2025 there are better states to incorporate in…

https://www.entrepreneur.com/starting-a-business/the-best-an...
by estimator7292 | 2025-09-05 21:32:45+00:00
> Consider this: electronics engineers routinely design systems with millions of components, intricate timing relationships, and complex interactions between subsystems.

As an EE: no, just no. This is like asserting that the average programmer routinely writes thousands of lines of C in a highly distributed environment. And like programmers, once you're at this scale of complexity, it's far too big to fit into a single human skull, and you absolutely must have an entire team of people.

> Yet they don’t rely on anything analogous to our type checkers.

We absolutely do. Every day. When we lay out a PCB, there are dozens and dozens of safe/sane checks happening in the background at all times.

Counterpoint: we have all kinds of situations where type checking would save us. Ask anyone who has implemented an I2C driver. We're twiddling bits and we have a huge pile of magic numbers from the vendor. There is absolutely no way to verify that your driver isn't going to set the chip on fire other than to try it. It takes hours and days to validate.

When we write to CPU registers, there is absolutely no way to check in advance if you've set the bit you want, or if you've set a bit that permanently burns some efuses and bricks the chip.

> They use different architectural principles—isolation, explicit interfaces, and time-aware design—that make their systems naturally more robust and understandable.

I'm gonna stop reading right here. Hardware systems are exactly as robust and reliable as software. Because hardware is software. There is almost nothing in the modern day that operates on straight digital/analog logic without any code. Everything is running software and the vast majority of it is written in C with Classes.

I surmise that the author has never met an EE or even seen a circuit board. They also have never written or seen a single line of C.

But really, C is the only argument you need. We invented typed languages because C is so godawful.

I think this is the same thing as vaccine denial. We've lived in a world without these problems for so long that certain people without critical thinking skills just don't believe the problem ever existed in the first place, so the remedies we've spent generations building are an undue and dangerous burden. This is a remarkably unintelligent and uninformed line of thinking that is sadly far, far too common.
by nomel | 2025-09-05 21:33:54+00:00
> If you can get an agentic framework to work on a problem with a local model, it'll almost certainly work just as well on a cloud model.

This is the exact opposite from my tests: it will almost certainly NOT work as well as the cloud models, as supported by every benchmark I've ever seen. I feel like I'm living in another AI universe here. I suppose it heavily depends on the use case.
by dlcarrier | 2025-09-05 21:34:24+00:00
I think the problem with BART is that it is self hosted.

By "self hosted" I'm not referring to it being run directly by the government, but that in comparison to every other government-run transit system, everything at BART is done the BART way, limiting access to an entire industry of light rail infrastructure, reducing safety and reliability, while significantly increasing costs.
by username135 | 2025-09-05 21:34:33+00:00
Amazon was unprofitable for years (like over a decade), famously. I don't see any difference with AI companies.

There is clearly some kind of market for this technology. It will eventually be profitable either through some technology breakthrough that allows creating/processing tokens cheaper or by finding a cost structure consumers can live with.

The cat is already out the bag. This technology isn't going away.
by animal_spirits | 2025-09-05 21:34:39+00:00
Lot's of internet porn is either real or simulated abuse. I'm not an expert but based on anecdotal experience abuse kinks are largely related to some history of abuse or trauma experienced by the individual. I think it's fine for adults to have these kinks and explore their sexuality but exposing it to children can normalize sexual abuse among youths, which again I am close with someone who's had a personal experience with this.
by rsolva | 2025-09-05 21:35:14+00:00
It really depends on just how cold it is outside and how much (or little) heat you are comfortable with inside. For mild winter weather (+5 to -5°C) and 18°C in the cabin, the range drops to around 80km or so. On a sunny summer day, I can easily get about 130km on Norwegian country roads, probably more.

When driving to the Netherlands in the months between March and October, the consumption has been around 8.3kW/100km. The car is light and has little tech that consumes power.

Since the car has no heat pump, heating the cabin has a noticable impact on range during cold winter days.

That said, it is a really good car to drive in the winter as the cabin gets warm in no-time and the windows in the front and back are heated and melts away thick ice in about a minute, even in really cold weahter! When doing normal commutes, the shorter range does not matter at all. But I would probably not drive to the Netherlands in -10°C during the winter!
by Esophagus4 | 2025-09-05 21:35:15+00:00
When I fit this pattern over my comments and irl connections, I get something like:

I have some pretty strongly held, but also probably divisive opinions, that I’m afraid would push people away from me if I voiced them to my irl people.

So the thought / emotion is feeling limited irl, and feeling less limited in an anonymous Internet forum. And even occasionally validated in an Internet forum when you find someone that agrees with you. (Or sometimes, when I’m proven wrong, I get something to think about for a little bit.)

Interesting thought exercise, thanks.
by lolc | 2025-09-05 21:35:31+00:00
> faithful to the actual historical event

What event?

I understand you saying that a flood actually happened, and that Noah's story is based on that. Well that may be, but with a quibble: that flood is prehistorical. We have no records to say when and where it happened. Unless I'm behind on research.

To me, flood stories serve to show how powerful gods are. The stories are likely based on several floods experienced by different people over time.

Imagine you see the Nile flood your general area every year with varying intensity. It's easy to worry that one year it just won't stop rising. To people living in those times, a flood story is gripping in ways we don't follow today.
by dwb | 2025-09-05 21:35:40+00:00
> And the key thing to recognize is that there's nothing in the system to enforce that standard. "Good at making money" or "Good at running a business" doesn't mean one is good at anything else, or, indeed, is good.

I’m well aware of that, no need to get all pedagogical. The system is quite far from what I favour. I’m saying that we shouldn’t be shrugging and saying “well that’s just what they are”, it’s no excuse.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-09-05 21:36:23+00:00
Too easy to set up offshore sites that can make money on ads. Sport piracy is rampant and the leagues are spending as much money as they possibly can to ban it but are unable to. In spain the entire interent basically shuts down during la liga games because the league convinced the government to ban cloudflare during games and people still have no problem pirating them
by lllllm | 2025-09-05 21:36:41+00:00
benchmarks: we provide plenty in the over 100 page tech report here https://github.com/swiss-ai/apertus-tech-report/blob/main/Ap...

quantizations: available now in MLX https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx-lm (gguf coming soon, not trivial due to new architecture)

model sizes: still many good dense models today lie in the range between our small and large chosen sizes
by jbjbjbjb | 2025-09-05 21:36:46+00:00
Small but organised communities that are on Twitch and YouTube live streams seem to counter that “series of one-offs” the author is talking about.

I often watch YouTube live streamed sports watchalongs and have become familiar with the regular super chat contributors that are read out. Similarly on Twitch there are many regular streamers with small communities and regular chatters.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-09-05 21:36:54+00:00
All containers use user namespaces, but only rootless containers require unprivileged user namespaces. Unprivileged user namespaces didn't have a great security record for the first few years, but vulnerabilities are relatively rare these days.

Running podman with SELinux enforcing (the default) and with "--security-opt=no-new-privileges" combined with running applications as non-root inside their containers should further reduce the security risk. You could also disable unprivileged user namespaces inside the containers if you want, which would mean that exploiting unprivileged user namespaces would first require arbitrary code execution on the host.
by vb-8448 | 2025-09-05 21:36:55+00:00
According to the data in the post, the cost of running the model for open AI in 2024 was 2B and if we strip out all training/research costs they had a loss of about 1B, peanuts. They can raise a little bit the standard subscription prices and turn profitable.

The bulk of the cost was model training and research(~4B). They are forced to train new models and improve existing one because of the market and competition.
by godelski | 2025-09-05 21:38:03+00:00
Sure, you're right, we don't have to treat time as a zero sum game (normally I'm upset about non-zero sum games being treated as zero sum lol). But that's a different problem. Yes, we don't need to worry about time if our goal is to meet a fixed quality of education. You can increase the quality of education, getting more done in less time.

But that's a different optimization problem. My assumption here is that we want to maximize education, not meet a specific threshold. Especially if we're talking about the US. Maybe there is a specific threshold we want to reach, but I don't think we're close enough that this is the main concern.

So that's why I'm treating time as a finite and scarce resource.

And you're right to point this out. We're making different assumptions about what problem to solve and we should make sure we're not talking past one another. So I hope this helps clear up some of my assumptions.
by pvtmert | 2025-09-05 21:38:11+00:00
I mean I get the overall benefits of having rootless and all, but the premise of security in this article is a bit misleading.

Obviously having a daemon running as root is larger attack surface than a program running as the user.

Going to the github.com/containers/podman/releases, the latest release is actually addressing a security risk that involves overwriting files of the host.

# v5.6.1 (Latest) ## Security - This release addresses CVE-2025-9566, where Kubernetes YAML run by podman play kube containing ConfigMap and Secret volumes can use crafted symlinks to overwrite content on the host.

As always, the most secure computer is the one that is unplugged & turned off.
by timeinput | 2025-09-05 21:38:24+00:00
I've been trying that, and I just keep running into miserable query performance.

What order of magnitude do you use this on and find it acceptable? 1MB, 1GB, 1TB, 1PB? At 1GB it seems okay. At 10GB things aren't great, at 100 GB things are pretty grim, and at 1TB I have to denormalize the database or it's all broken (practically).

I'm not a database expert, but I don't feel like I'm asking hard questions, but I'm running into trouble with something I thought was 'easy', and matches what you're describing.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-09-05 21:38:43+00:00
> The EU would use public funding to build some sort of Google alternative and it would take ages, would be mediocre and most money would go to waste. Instead of incentivising entrepreneurship, which is what they probably should do.

Something like web search is basicallly part of a modern digital infrastructure. We don't want entrepreneurship in water or energy supply, I don't think we should rely on it in web search, because it will inevitably end up chasing profits over everything else.
by anonym29 | 2025-09-05 21:39:00+00:00
You are confusing present knowledge with capacity.

2/5ths of Gen Z not currently knowing how to navigate between folders in a hierarchical file system doesn't mean that 2/5ths of Gen Z is incapable of learning how to navigate between folders in a hierarchical file system.

The gap between present knowledge and capacity doesn't exist due to incompetence, it exists due to lack of motivation, and rest assured, once teenage boys discover how great boobs are, they'll have all the motivation they need to learn how to use technology to achieve the goal of viewing and appreciating that kind of material, pretty much regardless of how many restrictions you put in their way.

They'll make their own in a paint app or with ASCII art in a notepad, push come to shove, but that won't be necessary. It's hilarious to think that states have the slighest hope of winning the whack-a-mole game of trying to sue every single website on the entire internet that hosts any pornographic content.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-05 21:40:09+00:00
Is it distribution though if someone trains a model in switzerland through downloading copyrighted material, training AI on it and then distributing it...

Or what if not even distributing it but rather distributing the outputs of the LLM (so closed source LLM like anthropic)

I am genuinely curious as to if there is some gray area that might be exploited by AI companies as I am pretty sure that they don't want to pay 1.5B dollars yet still want to exploit the works of authors. (let's call a spade a spade)
by magicalhippo | 2025-09-05 21:40:45+00:00
I haven't been able to find concrete stories either, though these[1] statistics might be an indication. It shows there's a few EVs per year that lead to a building fire, though sadly nothing further about source. So could be something else like battery.

That said there's been a campaign for several years trying to get rid of sockets for high current or permanent installations. I recently replaced both an electric water heater and mini split AC, and in both cases the previous appliance had used a socket and that was not allowed anymore.

Could well be they're just being proactive.

[1]: https://brannstatistikk.no/search?searchId=6EB5433C-AC28-4F6...
by taeric | 2025-09-05 21:41:01+00:00
I think it is somewhat of a natural failure of DRY taken to the extreme? People seem to want to get it so that they describe the API in a way that is then generated for clients and implementations.

It is amusing, in many ways. This is specifically part of what WSDL aspired to, but people were betrayed by the big companies not having a common ground for what shapes they would support in a description.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-09-05 21:41:15+00:00
When I first subscribed, my vpn provider allowed bigboxstore gift cards and other forms of payment. I think it also allows cryptocurrency, though I don't pay attention to that stuff.

Hell, you can download scans of old porn magazines on archive.org.

I don't think that would be effective, and I definitely don't think there is a political will.
by privatelypublic | 2025-09-05 21:41:18+00:00
Few. This settlement potentially weakens all challenges to the use of copyrighted works in training LLM's. I'd be shocked if behind closed doors there wasn't some give and take on the matter between Executives/investors.

A settlement means the claimants no longer have a claim, which means if they're also part of- say, the New York Times affiliated lawsuit- they have to withdraw. A neat way of kneecapping a country wide decision that LLM training on copy written material is subject to punitive measures don't you think?
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-05 21:41:23+00:00
I'm sure one can try, but copyright has all kinds of oddities and carve-outs that make this complicated. IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that, for example, if you tried putting in your content license "Free for all uses public and private, except academia, screw that ivory tower..." that's a sentiment you can express but universities are under no obligation legally to respect your wish to not have your work included in a course presentation on "wild things people put in licenses." Similarly, since the court has found that training an LLM on works is transformative, a license that says "You may use this for other things but not to train an LLM" couldn't be any more enforceable than a musician saying "You may listen to my work as a whole unit but God help you if I find out you sampled it into any of that awful 'rap music' I keep hearing about..."

The purpose of the copyright protections is to promote "sciences and useful arts," and the public utility of allowing academia to investigate all works(1) exceeds the benefits of letting authors declare their works unponderable to the academic community.

(1) And yet, textbooks are copyrighted and the copyright is honored; I'm not sure why the academic fair-use exception doesn't allow scholars to just copy around textbooks without paying their authors.
by vineyardmike | 2025-09-05 21:41:43+00:00
I feel like proportionality is related also to the scale. If a student pirates a textbook, I’d agree that 100x is excessive, but this is a corporation handsomely profiting off of mass piracy.

It’s crazy to imagine, but there was surely a document or slack message thread discussing where to get thousands of books, and they just decided to pirate them and that was OK. This was entirely a decision based on ease or cost, not based on the assumption it was legal. Piracy can result in jail time IIRC, so honestly it’s lucky the employee who suggested this, or took the action avoided direct legal liability.

Oh and I’m pretty sure other companies (meta) are in litigation over this issue, and the publishers knew that settlement below the full legal limit would limit future revenue.
by wmlive | 2025-09-05 21:42:03+00:00
Glad you like it and thanks for the recommendation!

Nonetheless, being the maintainer of this project, i'd like to point out that this is no dedicated GNUstep distro, but a mostly Debian based distribution using a thoroughly preconfigured Window Maker as its primary user interface, and that just happens to have the whole range of available GNUstep applications added on.

As already written elsewhere[3], citing my own words, this is a better characterization of its scope:

»Window Maker is just a highly compatible X11 window manager and is supposed to work as such. There is no interest to specifically integrate it with the provided GNUstep applications, as this is not supposed to be predominantly a GNUstep desktop. The included GNUstep applications are just an addon to give people a practical way to verify what GNUstep has to offer. In fact, wmlive would be perfectly usable without providing any single GNUstep application. The freedom and flexibility provided by an X11 window manager instead of the walled garden of a specific desktop system is much more preferable to many Linux users. NeXT nostalgists might want to look elsewhere. [1][2]«

People who's interest has been sufficiently piqued to download wmlive are advised to better wait until after Debian's bookwom 12.12 point release this saturday. A final bookworm based wmlive release will be uploaded shortly after. This will also be the last and final 32bit i386 variant of wmlive. After that work on an exclusively amd64 trixie based wmlive variant will begin.

[1] https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

[2] https://github.com/onflapp/gs-desktop

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44640378
by alkonaut | 2025-09-05 21:42:04+00:00
> And before we "Just don't break the laws" take note of the fact the the EU has a dead tech scene.

What are you implying? That letting foreign companies break laws would help the tech scene?

Or that the attention is so limited that any attempt of enforcing law necessarily means there is less attention to fostering the tech industry?

(Neither of the above interpretations make any sense)