MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arcticfox | 2025-09-05 21:42:06+00:00
> 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.

This seems too cute by half, courts are generally far more common sense than that in applying the law.

This is like saying using `rails generate model:example` results in a bunch of code that isn't yours, because the tool generated it according to your specifications.
by kriro | 2025-09-05 21:42:14+00:00
Really happy to see this and will give it a good spin. They seem to be doing things the right way in my subjective opinion:

""" To implement this filter, we begin by ranking URL domains according to the volume of texts they contribute to the FineWeb (Penedo et al., 2024a) and FineWeb-2 (Penedo et al., 2025) corpus, as an approximation of web-level English and multilingual data. From this ranking, we select the top one million English domains and the top one million non-English domains. Due to domain overlap and the fact that some sites are now offline, the total number of accessible robots.txt files is smaller than two million. For each domain that remains reachable, we retrieve its robots.txt file as of January 2025 and examine the directives relevant to AI training. In particular, we focus on those targeting the AI-specific user agents listed in Appendix A. Any contents blocked by the current robots.txt is removed retroactively from the entire 2013-2024 range of the training dataset. We follow an opt-out policy, that is, if the corresponding robots.txt files are not available, we consider the data usable for training. The filtering process results in an estimated token loss of approximately 8% in English data and 4% in multilingual data. """
by jonathanfranzen | 2025-09-05 21:42:17+00:00
Creator here – everyone on the site right now is connected, and you can imagine how everyone living today could be added with photos that already exist! The really interesting cases are the historic outliers – like Harriet Tubman, Edgar Allan Poe – who were photographed with others but still can’t be linked into the main graph from anything I’ve found so far. I’m working on a write-up about these “most wanted” isolates.
by non_aligned | 2025-09-05 21:42:21+00:00
I think that the culture of a given forum plays a huge role.

There are some places where commenting is meaningful because you're a part of some closely-knit, stable community, and you can actually make a dent - actually influence people who matter to you. I know that we geeks are supposed to hate Facebook, but local neighborhood / hobby groups on FB are actually a good example of that.

There are places where it can be meaningful because you're helping others, even if they're complete strangers. This is Stack Exchange, small hobby subreddits, etc - although these communities sometimes devolve into hazing and gatekeeping, at which point, it's just putting others down to feel better about oneself.

But then, there are communities where you comment... just to comment. To scream into the void about politics or whatever. And it's easy to get totally hooked on that, but it accomplishes nothing in the long haul.

HN is an interesting mix of all this. A local group to some, a nerd interest forum for others, and a gatekeeping / venting venue for a minority.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-05 21:43:47+00:00
I actually don't believe this; for the simple reason that if you put a filter in front of porn, "once teenage boys discover how great boobs are" isn't going to happen for most of them. You only seek out porn once you already know how "great" it is, chicken and egg.

How many people do you know whose first introduction to porn was "that's sounds cool, let me look that up?" Versus discovering it by accident, exactly what a law would effectively prevent?
by markus_zhang | 2025-09-05 21:44:19+00:00
The concept of "purchase", or monetary transaction may not exist in the future dystopian world.

For people who live low lives, barter is going to be good enough. For overlords, they can also barter with each other, because who cares about money when you can grab real stuffs? There are a handful of skilled human servants who serve the overlords, but they are not numerous enough for a mature market -- their overlords will provide them with whatever they need anyway.

I have long realized that monetary transaction is just one abstraction for the elites to buy human resources and nature resources. Some currency, like the USD, also serves as "entry ticket" for some transactions (like you cannot purchase X in bulk without USD).
by golly_ned | 2025-09-05 21:44:27+00:00
> "The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes"

A judge making on a ruling based on his opinion of how transformative a technology will be doesn't inspire confidence. There's an equivocation on the word "transformative" here -- not just transformative in the fair use sense, but transformative as in world-changing, impactful, revolutionary. The latter shouldn't matter in a case like this.

> Companies and individuals who willfully infringe on copyright can face significantly higher damages — up to $150,000 per work

Settling for 2% is a steal.

> In June, the District Court issued a landmark ruling on A.I. development and copyright law, finding that Anthropic’s approach to training A.I. models constitutes fair use,” Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, said in a statement.

This is the highest-order bit, not the $1.5B in settlement. Anthropic's guilty of pirating.
by mos_basik | 2025-09-05 21:44:42+00:00
>it is nothing like buying alcohol and tobacco

The intent of the "I don't crack open a beer.." post was to draw a comparison between "show ID at physical store then later open and drink the beer at home" and "show ID at physical store then later submit the token and watch the porn at home".

>and shares the basic features which are different and more intrusive

How so?

Are you maybe assuming that some entity (the ID issuer? the physical store?) would track an association between the ID shown and the token purchased?

I suppose anything's possible, but that's not how the alcohol system works: when I show ID to purchase alcohol, the cashier looks at it and hands it back to me without recording anything. The same could work in this case, except the product changing hands is a scratch card carrying a number I type into a form on a website later.

(fwiw I don't particularly support age verification; I'm just thinking about how strong your criticisms of this proposal are.)

(OP described a single-site token with a 1 year lifetime, but I'm not sure what I think of the single-siteness. Seems like it means either every site prints its own cards, distinguishable from other site's cards, meaning the cashier can judge one's taste in adult entertainment (just like they can judge one's taste in alcohol I suppose) and when a site folds, its cards are landfill. Alternatively, there's a central authority printing the cards and tracking which have been consumed and for which site and when they expire. And that doesn't seem great either.)
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-05 21:44:52+00:00
Oh, agreed. If anything, I'm asking people to stop shrugging and saying "that's just what they are." Physicists had their come-to-Pugwash moment two (three?) generations ago and I'm hoping this generation of computer scientist can get there without waking up one day to discover their research was directly contributory to removing a quarter-million people from the face of the planet.

Their forebears, sadly, did not. Specifically the ones who worked at IBM, but others as well.
by abruzzi | 2025-09-05 21:45:06+00:00
I participate in a number of 'old school' forums, never anything like reddit or discord. On those forums, while I have posted on some a fair amount, I actually find that most of the time I spend 15 minutes writing up a post, then delete it. There are a number of reasons I don't hit the submit button. Sometimes its because I see that a lot of other posters will disagree with it, and I don't think they will argue rationally and in good faith; but the most valuable posts I don't submit are when I get to a point in my argument when I realize that I'm wrong or that my opinion or point of view is badly supported or any numer of other things that force me to re-evaluate position. I've probably held that position for a while thinking I'm right, but actually formulating the argument forces me to confront my biases or mistakes.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-09-05 21:45:06+00:00
I think having to resort to citing such a niche as truck drivers kinda makes the opposite point fairly well.

Having said that, I've taken lots of road trips in my day and it would be a change up to how they're planned, and I would have some concern about placement / availability. But then that's why, when we bought an EV for the 99% of our family use case we didn't immediately scrap yard our previous cars, which seemed to be what some family members expected when we told them we were considering getting an electric car.
by kelnos | 2025-09-05 21:45:18+00:00
I have a Clipper Card on my Android phone and pay for BART and SF Muni that way.

BART does now accept credit cards at the turnstiles now (I think this started 2 years ago). Agreed that it took a long while to get there, much much longer than in other places.

Personally I prefer the Clipper method, as it's generally faster to scan than a contactless credit card payment (that's going to always be the case for closed-loop payment system). I also like that BART (and Muni, Caltrain, etc.) will pay less to Visa/Mastercard/whomever in transaction fees if I use my Clipper card and periodically top it up (which, as I have my Clipper card on my phone, happens automatically if the balance ever falls below $10). Credit card tap-to-pay is a nice convenience for out-of-town visitors and for locals who rarely use transit and don't have Clipper (or who use a physical Clipper card but forgot it at home), but I don't think it's a great way to pay for transit day-to-day.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-05 21:46:18+00:00
Yes. Someone on this post mentioned that switzerland allows downloading copyrightable material but not distributing them.

So things get even more dark because what becomes distribution can have a really vague definition and maybe the AI companies will only follow the law just barely, just for the sake of not getting hit with a lawsuit like this again. But I wonder if all this case did was maybe compensate the authors this one time. I doubt if we can see a meaningful change towards AI companies attitude's towards fair use/ essentially exploiting authors.

I feel like that they would try to use as much legalspeak as possible to extract as much from authors (legally) without compensating them which I feel is unethical but sadly the law doesn't work on ethics.
by ggreer | 2025-09-05 21:47:16+00:00
If I'm reading this report correctly[1], California's car registration fees and gas taxes cover more than the cost of roads. Caltrans estimates $20.2 billion in revenue from fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees, while their budget is $18.7 billion.

It also looks like public transportation is mostly paid for with sales taxes, federal loans/grants, and $1 billion of taxes on diesel fuel.

1. See chart A on page 24, and chart F on page 28: https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/budgets/docume...
by dmbche | 2025-09-05 21:47:21+00:00
Because their use case dorsn't need it. They have TBs of data and fast CPUs (or it's all on the cloud - and the same applies), they can just crtl-f for the name of their file or the date.

Are they capable of using computers to achieve their goals? Yes. Does that require navigating folders? No.

EDIT0: I remember writing a 4 line program to crash the school computer (recursively executing itself) on notepad, and I'm pretty sure I didn't know what folders and directories were.

I can also attest to many of my coworkers not understanding what file extensions are, while being over 40 and working in aeronautics.
by rpcope1 | 2025-09-05 21:47:48+00:00
Something that isn't said or asked is what scrapyards are accepting these. For catalytic converters, most yards are supposed to measures in place to deter accepting stolen cats. Someone has to be seeing loads of things like statues or guardrails coming in by someone who almost certainly doesn't own them (and probably looks like it). There's financial incentive to accept anything and everything that comes in, but there needs to be more aggressive measures to punish yards that are unscrupulous and end up accepting stolen goods without a fight.
by Cheer2171 | 2025-09-05 21:47:58+00:00
Yes, completely possible if we completely turn all of digitized society (which is all society now) into a completely walled garden with signed bootloaders at the root so nobody actually owns their devices, then total surveillance where the digital world appears in the physical world, even at the playground!

Work out how much state and corporate power we would need to come to bear to enforce the vision of the world you are advocating.

Or, bravo on the HN troll. This is perfectly triggering for this crowd.
by mdp2021 | 2025-09-05 21:48:18+00:00
> Buying used copies of books

It remains deranged.

Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library.

(Edit: in fact initially I wrote 'is supposed to' in place of 'has more than a right to' - meaning that "knowledge is there, we made it available: you are supposed to access it, with the fullest encouragement").
by hollowturtle | 2025-09-05 21:48:51+00:00
While animations in general may add juice they can also hide better ux, like the feedback button, it's one more click(actually two as it seems not to automatically focus on the textarea once opened) to send feedback. But the more years come by the more it looks being a choice to not have a great ux, in the case of the feedback button one might want to be sure the user intention is to send some
by dotancohen | 2025-09-05 21:49:06+00:00
Probably because us old geezers are still using CLI interfaces on our servers and, often, on our desktops. We still use VIM. And we still listen to Led Zeppelin.

Your new fad NoSQL may or may not be relevant tomorrow. SQL has inertia. I have no problem finding experienced SQL developers. Do there even exist experienced developers for technologies that have been invented yesterday? Will you be able to find somebody to maintain it tomorrow?
by kelnos | 2025-09-05 21:49:24+00:00
I'm sorry to report that you're looking at that tech through rose-tinted glasses. I remember electronic systems that would routinely fail to properly scan the mag stripes. I remember all the people working retail who had special tricks to try to get a card to scan, which would help maybe 25% of the time. I remember cards becoming demagnetized for random reasons and becoming useless. I remember when merchants would have to take a physical carbon imprint of the card, and would have no idea if the card was even real until the paper was processed, days or weeks later.
by spacebuffer | 2025-09-05 21:49:30+00:00
Your initial comment made sense after reading through the openai docpage. so I opened up my site to add those to robots.txt, turns out I had added all 3 of those user-agents to my robots file [0], out of curiosity I asked chatgpt about my site and it did scrape it, it even mentioned articles that have been published after adding the robots file

[0]: https://yusuf.fyi/robots.txt
by anonym29 | 2025-09-05 21:49:48+00:00
Teenage boys in public school don't need to be the first in their peer group to view pornography in order to be exposed to pornography. No amount of technical measures will prevent this. They will literally dig old porno magazines out of dumpsters, procure VHS players to watch VHS porn, stay up until 4 in the morning to watch 30 second censored adult content commercials on TV.

But again, none of that will be necessary. Rule34 websites, imageboards, video game rendering glitches... the list goes on and on.

It's truly delusional to believe that it's possible to exhaustively censor imagery of the human body from the most motivated seeking/viewing demographic on the planet.

Are you by chance a woman? Were you homeschooled? Do you not have memories of being a teenage guy in the US public school system? I don't mean to denigrate you, I just cannot fathom how anyone can possibly credibly believe that it's even slightly realistic to keep teenage boys completely unaware of what boobs look like in the real world.
by jonathanfranzen | 2025-09-05 21:49:54+00:00
Creator here — the site runs a shortest-path search over the set of photos I’ve manually verified. Thanks for pointing this out, I just added Carson-Leno and Leno-Cooper, so now their interview guests are all down to a couple hops. Talk show hosts are major connectors! Letterman is a real skeleton key to the 20th century, he interviewed Edward Bernays who has a pic with Eleanor Roosevelt, and it all pops off from there.
by pvtmert | 2025-09-05 21:50:10+00:00
Why would docker should create such tool in the first place? It's the job of the target/destination to provide compatibility layer. In this case, Kubernetes already does with kompose.io tool.

kompose: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/tra...

Also, technically docker-compose was the first orchestration tool compared to Kubernetes. Expecting former to provide a translation layer for the latter is rather unorthodox. It is usually the latter tool provides certain compatibility features for former tools...
by alex1115alex | 2025-09-05 21:50:34+00:00
Mentra Live runs AOSP similar to the other AI glasses on the market (Ray-Ban, Xiaomi AI Glasses, RayNeo V3 AI Glasses, etc). It's heavy, but allows us to ship fast. You'll find this code in `asg_client` folder.

We're also working on a pair of HUD glasses that will release in 2026 using an NRF5340 MCU. The code for this is being developed in the `mcu_client` folder.
by yannyu | 2025-09-05 21:50:38+00:00
It's one thing to have a community that has tendencies towards cynicism, skepticism, and assuming the worst. It's another thing to build an algorithm optimized for "engagement" which prioritizes polarizing content above all others because it keeps people addicted to the platform.

Maybe the problem is the websites that amplify the most controversial and problematic content because they get the most clicks, so these companies can report better DAUs and MAUs.
by rudedogg | 2025-09-05 21:50:45+00:00
> The use of a ZIP archive to encapsulate XML files plus resources is an elegant approach to an application file format. It is clearly superior to a custom binary file format.

Can anyone expand on this? Why would it be better than a binary format?

I was watching a talk Andrew Kelley gave about a simple binary format he’s using in Zig: https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/05c72e39-c07e-41bc-ac40-85e83...

Having to map between SQLite and the application language seems like it’d add lots of complexity, but I don’t have any experience with custom file formats so would love some advice.
by red2awn | 2025-09-05 21:50:56+00:00
I don't think they were intentionally rug pulling the community. More likely they started out thinking they can build a python superset, realised it wasn't a good idea so quickly pivoted to the current design. Making Mojo more Python-like is now on their long term roadmap (https://docs.modular.com/mojo/roadmap/#phase-3-dynamic-objec...).
by lenerdenator | 2025-09-05 21:51:05+00:00
Maybe I should expand it to say it sounds like they're under a mandate to keep people more-or-less economically stuck.

They need to keep employment high and keep prices stable. Their main lever for controlling these two things is the prime interest rate. They kept that rate low for a long time. Capital now thinks that being able to get money for cheap is the norm. If it can't get money for cheap, well, that's a problem, because capital's mandate is to get more capital.

If you're being incentivized to keep prices low and employment high by this institution, while also trying to accumulate capital for yourself, you are more likely to employ people at lower wages in order to keep prices low instead of taking the hit in reduced capital accumulation to employ people at higher wages while keeping prices low. Furthermore, any sort of sane prime interest rate now seems high to capital, so that additional cost is also factored in as why costs must rise and wages must drop to keep the accumulation rate of capital as high as possible.

Is there anything wrong with accumulation of capital? In and of itself, no, but when you have people with net worths in the hundreds of billions of dollars making the decisions on how to allocate resources for their own continued benefit, well, you get a reduction in economic returns for the rest of the economy.
Show HN: I built a free AI tool that makes a pdf fillable
by alexander-g | 2025-09-05 21:51:08+00:00
Some PDF forms have no fillable fields. When opened in Adobe Reader, there are no fields to type into. This AI converter automatically adds fillable fields to the PDF, technically turning it into a form.

Adding fields manually is a tedious process that nobody enjoys. This is the kind of work that should be automated.

This AI PDF converter is free and capable of processing even long documents with dozens or hundreds of pages. For larger PDFs, it may take more time.

It works best on PDFs created from Word documents. Please set the right expectations and be prepared to manually adjust any fields the AI might miss or place incorrectly. This can happen, especially with complex layouts.
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2025-09-05 21:52:02+00:00
I don’t have a specific link but I’d be surprised if the CityNerd channel on YouTube didn’t have a (recent) video on it. Just as a disclaimer: Even if you don’t agree with his politics, he does take care to explain his data set sources and methodology, so it’s likely a useful source for this sort of thing.

NYC is definitely the top dog. There was a recent ranking for metro areas ranked by walkability, bike-ability, public transit, and some other urban score, but divided by average rent price for a 1BR apartment. NYC still came out #1 despite the rather large denominator.
by jdiff | 2025-09-05 21:52:12+00:00
No, in fact I block every such account I see. I go on Twitter for inspiration of various kinds, not for doomscrolling, although I recognize that that's in vogue. But the owner of the platform has been demonstrated to artificially push posts and accounts into people's timelines and notifications, particularly his own, and he has retweeted, replied to, and otherwise boosted blatantly antisemitic conspiracy theories. It's pretty well documented as something that does actually happen, and not just as some sort of algorithmic quirk.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-05 21:52:45+00:00
Well, let me tell you how it happened for me. I must have been... probably 8-10. I saw something pretty innocuous in a magazine. An adult wouldn't have even thought it was pornographic; risqué at the most. But it aroused me. Then I went looking for that kind of stimulation again. Not actively, mind you, just stayed prepared for when the chance came. We didn't have Internet at home at the time, but if we had, you can bet I would have tried looking something up (not sure now how that would have worked in the late '90s, though).
by zdragnar | 2025-09-05 21:52:46+00:00
Ah yeah, that makes more sense. I lived about half a mile or a mile south of where the green line now runs and had to take a bus down university ave.

Sadly, my neighborhood had long waits between buses that connected to university ave, and neither my neighborhood or university ave had heated stops. So, odds were pretty good that I'd suffer the weather for 20-30 minutes each trip.

I also tend to get motion sickness if I read or use a laptop in cars or busses, so there really wasn't anything I could do on them that I couldn't do by driving anyway.