MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jbstack | 2025-10-16 12:37:38+00:00
Confirmation bias doesn't really apply to the same extent with law as with other fields.

If the AI says "Fisher v Bell [1961] 1 QB 394 is authority for the principle that an item for display in a shop is an invitation to treat", it's either right or wrong. A lawyer can confirm that it's right by looking up the case in Westlaw (or equivalent database), check that it's still good law (not overridden by a higher court), and then read the case to make sure it's really about invitations to treat.

If the AI says "Smith v Green [2021] EWCA Civ 742 is authority for the principle that consideration is no longer required for a contract in England" it will take you under 1 minute to learn that that case doesn't exist.

Law isn't like, say, diet where there's a whole bunch of contradictory and uncertain information out there (e.g. eggs are good for you vs. eggs are bad for you) and the answer for you is going to be largely opinion based depending on which studies you read/prefer and your biases and personality. It's usually going to be pretty black and white whether the AI was hallucinating. There are rarely going to be a bunch of different contradictory rulings and, in most of the cases where there are, there will be a clear hierarchy where the "wrong" ones have been overridden by the correct ones.
by quitit | 2025-10-16 12:38:03+00:00
Looks like you might be replying out of context. The parent comment had asked why their mac doesn't feel thousands of times faster than earlier models because they've misinterpreted the marketing claims.

However the marketing claims did not state an across the board weighted performance increase over M4 and certainly by reading the claims one would not assume one that large. Instead the claims state performance gains in specific benchmarks, which is relevant to common modern workflows such as inference. The closest benchmark stated to general purpose computing is the multicore CPU performance increase, which the marketing puts at 15% over M4.

As for that large leap in GPU-driven AI performance, this is on account of the inclusion of a "Neural Accelerator" in each GPU core, which is an M5 specific addition and is similar to changes introduced in the A19 SoC.
by IT4MD | 2025-10-16 12:38:30+00:00
This works for about 95% of the documents.

For the rest you need a purpose built reader. Often Sumatra or other open source readers will work with the more complex functions in PDFs (signing, bill processing, etc).

I have Acrobat installed on my corp laptop, but I use Sumatra rather than Acrobat, because I like my reader to simply be a reader instead of a 13GB bloated piece of garbage. I'm also a big fan of my reader not crashing at the slightest breeze.
by CodingJeebus | 2025-10-16 12:38:37+00:00
> However they are not lobbying to suppress private competitors only government-run competition that has no profit motive or competition.

But there is a profit (or rather income generation) motive: taxation is what funds the government. Parceling this work to a private 3rd party means paying a bunch of salaries that are much higher than what government employees get paid, generating profit for the company that gets taken out of the tax revenue, which increases the cost of the service for end users or the government receiving income.

Some politicians argue that government is inept and wasteful, and sponsoring no-nonsense projects that reduce middlemen in this process interferes with that narrative. If you got into office screaming that the government is your enemy, you’re not going to support projects that make it easier for citizens to interact with the government.
by myrmidon | 2025-10-16 12:39:06+00:00
> We've just made a math equation that can spit out language, you're comparing this to things that can actually _experience_ without someone clicking enter on a keyboard.

What would it mean to "experience" language properly, and what precludes LLMs from doing that?

In my view, hubris is exactly the opposite view, that our minds are somehow "more" or "better" than a bunch of matrix multiplications (with poor historical track record, see e.g. geocentrism, or the whole notions of lifeforce/soul/divinity).

I'd argue that a large amount of complexity in our brains is extremely likely to be incidental; I don't see why we would ever need to fully simulate a gut biome to achieve human-level cognitive performance (being overcomplicated certainly makes it harder to replicate exactly or to understand fully, but I don't think either of those is necessary).
by bayindirh | 2025-10-16 12:39:38+00:00
> The complicated tax code keeps many lawyers and accountants in business.

At least, some of the complications in these are not intentional, but result of centuries old evolution of these systems.

Maritime shipping uses centuries old systems to handle costs in shipping accidents for example. I forgot the exact name of the system, but while the method is extremely fair, it's equally complicated. The whole premise stems from "This ship has sailed because you wanted me to carry your cargo", and becomes something mind boggling.

I'm sure there are some steps taken to keep people busy, but chalking up everything to it is unfair and wrong.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-16 12:39:47+00:00
FSL is a much simpler court case. “You weren’t allowed to compete with us. You did. Here are the actual damages incurred. Pay us.”

An AGPL enforcement would require the court to interpret its virality which is an open question before even deciding whether a violation occurred.

The potentially overreaching nature of AGPL is one reason it maybe unenforceable. On the other hand if courts lean towards the less viral interpretation Google could get around these issues by modding an AGPL project to run on their proprietary hardware that no one has access to and then simply releasing the modified source code.
by ageitgey | 2025-10-16 12:39:58+00:00
Sure, people always claim "drivers in MY city..."

But I've lived in both places and London is very different than SF. I'd say the UK has better drivers on average (and much more strict licensing requirements), but driving in London is much more challenging due to the tiny roads you have to navigate. There is no road in SF that is as hard to navigate as the average suburban London two-way traffic single car width road with parking on both sides.

An I'm not saying London is "the worst" by any means. It's nothing like driving in Vietnam or India. But it is very different to SF.
by runako | 2025-10-16 12:39:59+00:00
> the Internal Revenue Service could prepare the taxes of most Americans

IRS Direct File[1] did exactly this. It apparently worked really well, and people liked using it, netting ~$20 billion in savings to the Americans that used it (roughly half of that came out of the pockets of the tax-prep industry).

Then, DOGE got to it and the new administration's IRS commissioner killed the program.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Direct_File
by JKCalhoun | 2025-10-16 12:40:14+00:00
Nothing on the level of Stephen Hawking's notes, but I handed off a decent sized stack of early Mac floppies to some "archivists" at a recent vintage computer festival. I understand there was a commercial game or two in the mix that had not yet been archived from the original floppy (on Macintosh Garden or archive.org).

I'm not sure what else was there that they'll find interesting. Maybe they'll let me know.

I worked in a Mac lab briefly in college and we ran Disinfectant from time to time on the lab machines. Sometimes we would find Mac viruses infecting a file or two and I collected a few of these on a floppy. The archivist seemed delighted to have a few disks with "contained" Mac viruses as well.
by hopelite | 2025-10-16 12:40:14+00:00
It’s not the simple act of just “giving them what they likely already have” once that house booked about 20 years ago. And yes, I can sue you the government had way more on me, but I seem to at least realize that that stallion is long gone.

You seem to represent a rather is phenomenon in society though. For a lack of a better term at the moment; the shift or maybe even deliberate psychological manipulation of society, civilization, culture towards not only a passive, depressive state, but also a kind of self-harming, self-destructive, nihilistic state of “what does it even matter anymore” and “I probably deserve the abuse of my abusers” type of mentality. A variation of that is “I’m not sure what I’m giving up by ceding…” an odd fatalism.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-16 12:40:22+00:00
When I’m writing something for work where I know the end goal - I don’t. When I’m streaming random thoughts without any coherent end goal for my blog or my internal notes on something that happened at work as a retrospective I will use it.

Just to be repeat myself, my blog isn’t for marketing, I don’t have any advertising on them, I don’t post a link to it anywhere and I have no idea if anyone besides me has ever read it since I don’t have any analytics. I don’t have my name or contact information on it
by Nursie | 2025-10-16 12:40:32+00:00
In the UK you get a code based on last year’s earnings, which the company uses to set a flat rate of withholding on each paycheck. If there’s any discrepancy that usually just feeds into next year’s code.

In Australia, you probably need to tell the companies about the other income sources, and they will attempt to withhold at the appropriate rate. Then at the end of financial year, you go to your pre-filled online tax return which has all the figures reported by each company you work for already present and sums up whether there’s a refund or payment due. This is also where you enter any deductions.
by Delk | 2025-10-16 12:41:28+00:00
You may find it morally objectionable to sell distributions of free software for a fee but for F/OSS licensing in no way forbids that.

GPL version 3 explicitly says "you may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey". The MIT license also explicitly allows selling the work.

No other free or open source license forbids selling either. In fact the Open Source Definition from OSI expressly says: "The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources."

Linux distributions have been commercially sold for decades. Red Hat built its entire RHEL business on that, even when they still played nicer with open source. (Of course the key really was the support they provided to their paying customers but I think you still needed to pay to get your hands on RHEL anyway.)

Of course the problem you'd be facing if you wanted to sell free software at a significant price would be that since you can't forbid redistribution of the copies you sold (and you need to provide source code), someone else can take what you sell and redistribute it for free. So you can only really sell other people's free software if you either get ignorant people to buy it despite the same thing being available for free elsewhere, or if you provide something else on top of it that people are willing to pay for.

That severely limits the possibilities of making big bucks by just selling free software developed by others.

Perhaps the community is philanthropic to the point of providing free software for other people to sell. But the community or the authors of the licenses aren't naive. The possibility has been known from the start, as was the fact that it's after all quite difficult to charge a lot of money for selling something when free downloads are also almost guaranteed to exist.

I'd be a lot more concerned about how volunteers assume active maintenance burden and responsibility for software libraries that are used for free by just about every software company on the planet.

I don't see anything about trinsic2's (or anybody else's) promoting Linux or installing it on customers' computers that would be in contradiction with open source, even morally. I certainly don't see how a "license" could be required for doing so when the individual licenses of each included piece of software already permit commercial distribution. The only way he might need a separate license would be if he installed a distribution that's actually not entirely open source and bundles proprietary components that are not freely distributable.
by Zobat | 2025-10-16 12:41:39+00:00
You might not have noticed but Microsoft has moving heavily into the open source world. Mind you, they're still a for profit company and you and I might not like everything they do to make their profit but they're a long way away from hating on open source.

"Since 2017, Microsoft is one of the biggest open source contributors in the world, measured by the number of employees actively contributing to open source projects on GitHub, the largest host of source code in the world." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_and_open_source
by ksec | 2025-10-16 12:42:24+00:00
Oh Nice, I tried to submit this but never got on to the front page.

We really need something that could store data for 80 years minimum. Which is really just a life time of a person. Stored well and right paper could out last all of our digital alternatives. The M-DISC is expensive per GB, and I think they went bankrupt in 2020, and BlueRay disc is too small in capacity.

At this rate of things we may never own anything physical again.
by vitro | 2025-10-16 12:42:37+00:00
Other editors, at least, display a pop-up indicating that the file has changed on disk in the meantime and ask me if I want to reload the file or overwrite it with my current buffer, or do nothing (geany editor does that, for example). And it happens immediately as soon as I hover over the editor's window.

Interestingly, Zed displays the change right away for the first time, but any other edits are not picked up. I'm using Zed's installer, Zed updated to the latest version, no containers or virtual fs, my partitions are ext4.
by immibis | 2025-10-16 12:42:37+00:00
SQLite is a for profit company competing for market share. They're one of those companies that gives the product away for free, and sells professional support and custom development, as well as a few add-on modules. Pricing table here: https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html

You may think these are ludicrous prices, but think of it as market segmentation. It seems like they're only a few employees, so if they get, like, 300 companies in the entire world to sign up for email support, they earn a pretty respectable salary. Or if they get, like, four companies in the whole world to join their consortium, and nobody else buys anything. In fact, there are four consortium members on the homepage: https://sqlite.org/index.html and possibly others who chose not to be listed. So we have (it seems) two people getting paid $600k per year to work on this. This is a software SMB - they're not trying to hyperscale or squeeze every penny, just make a living selling a good product at a steady rate.

This model only works, of course, because SQLite is a genuinely good product that everyone loves and uses for free in every open-source project. It wouldn't work if a copy of SQLite cost even $10, because then we'd all be using MariaDB. It might not even work if it was proprietary but free.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-16 12:42:43+00:00
LLMs struggle with reasoning --- period, the end.

They are fundamentally probabilistic, not deterministic. This makes them inherently unreliable for any application where deterministic logic is required --- like math.

Don't take my word for it, just ask your favorite LLM.

--- "Can you guarantee your results are reliable?".

While I strive to provide accurate information and results based on the data I have, I can't guarantee absolute accuracy in every case.

--- "Do you hallucinate?"

Yes, I can "hallucinate" in the sense that I might sometimes generate information that is factually incorrect, misleading, or doesn't fully align with reality.
by dmm | 2025-10-16 12:43:10+00:00
The gpu driver for Apple silicon is Rust and the author stated it would have been much more difficult to implement in C. It isn't upstreamed yet.

""" Normally, when you write a brand new kernel driver as complicated as this one, trying to go from simple demo apps to a full desktop with multiple apps using the GPU concurrently ends up triggering all sorts of race conditions, memory leaks, use-after-free issues, and all kinds of badness.

But all that just… didn’t happen! I only had to fix a few logic bugs and one issue in the core of the memory management code, and then everything else just worked stably! Rust is truly magical! Its safety features mean that the design of the driver is guaranteed to be thread-safe and memory-safe as long as there are no issues in the few unsafe sections. It really guides you towards not just safe but good design. """

https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/tales-of-the-m1-gpu/

> the whole thing seems kinda cute but like, shouldn't this experiment in programming language co-development be taking place somewhere other than the source tree for the world's most important piece of software?

Torvalds seems to disagree with you.
by torginus | 2025-10-16 12:43:21+00:00
I write C++ and Typescript and just tried Zed on Windows, it didn't feel significantly faster for me (maybe a bit).

What's worse is C++ autocomplete - both on the same project with clang and CMake - it might be that I need some more setup, but I felt like Zed understood much less of tricky modern C++ (tbf, VS Code isn't perfect either) and the autocomplete was kinda broken. I fully admit this might be due to my own inexperience, so I won't hold it against Zed, but so far I haven't seen anything significantly better to justify making the switch.
by Philip-J-Fry | 2025-10-16 12:43:43+00:00
I think the point is that the vast majority of people don't really have a unique tax situation. And all the data already exists. There's just no framework set up to allow this to be automated like there is in other countries.

It should be the case that all your basic taxes get calculated for you and taken at the point you're paid by your employer. Anything exceptional should be able to be claimed back via a web portal somewhere.

So it's not like 160m tax returns NEED to be filed. That's just how it is today.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-16 12:43:47+00:00
MIT gives less freedom to the user. GPL gives less freedom to the dev. I'm not moving goalposts, those are both very important and you can't maximize both.

> it's not at the level of the fundamental right or at the level of the license.

I would say the ability to run a competing business within two years is less fundamental than the ability to talk about what you saw at your former job.

Also what are you saying about "not at the level"? It overrides the fundamental right, but people accept that.
by xnorswap | 2025-10-16 12:44:06+00:00
"tax prep" isn't something I've had to ever think about for the UK system. I don't have to buy software, I don't have to pay anyone. I get my wage, it has my taxes taken out. That's it. I don't need to keep receipts, I don't need to work out how much mortgage interest I've paid, etc.

My individual situation is calculated, by the tax authority and rolled into a "Tax code" which acts as the personal allowance. This then feeds into payroll which pay you net of tax.

If at the end of the year, the tax authority (not you, this is automatic without a form being filled in) spots an over or under payment, they adjust your tax code for the next year to recoup or refund the difference. No cheques in the post, no forms to fill in. Just automatically happening in the background.

Meanwhile for the US, I need to fill in 2555, 1040, and other forms. These aren't "5 minutes", they're slow, and more importantly error-prone, as they get you to add up different numbers rather than just asking for the information needed.

No human should ever have to answer the series of questions ( this is legit, from the current 1040 ) :

24 Add lines 22 and 23. This is your total tax

Where Line 22 is:

22 Subtract line 21 from line 18. If zero or less, enter -0-

Line 21 is of course:

21 Add lines 19 and 20

And 18 is:

18 Add lines 16 and 17

Where 17 is:

17 Amount from Schedule 2, line 3

Where that is an entirely different form.

The only purpose I can tell for this ridiculousness is to give scope for people to make mistakes.

A form should collect raw information, not put the burden of calculation shouldn't be on the form-filler in a world where computers exist.

The data is already on the form. What purpose can that solve except opening up a possibility for someone to accidentally commit tax fraud?

You're missing the point suggesting it should be "a couple of CSV files". No, it shouldn't be any filing at all.

Demand change, demand simplification of the tax system, and demand zero-filing solutions for regular employees.
by Qwuke | 2025-10-16 12:44:31+00:00
Yes, that's the MongoDB variant which codifies it directly, and SF Conservancy and other legal entities promotion FOSS licenses states that the network stack contagion concern does not actually apply for the AGPL. But because AGPL doesn’t dig into the definition of "access", simply defining it as “users interacting with it remotely through a computer network”, nor define clear boundaries for how the "contagious" part of GPLv3 interacts with the rest of the network stack of this clause, it has meant that some lawyers think that a court may overly broadly interpret the definition.

So far this contagion concern hasn't actually played out, and big corporations/hyperscalers are often using AGPL software somewhere in their stack if they're using common Linux distros - and nothing thus far has been compelled to be open sourced that isn't AGPL software.

This might be insightful about the concerns as well as why lawyers still think it's straightforward: https://www.opencoreventures.com/blog/agpl-license-is-a-non-...

https://discuss.logseq.com/t/on-the-agpl-license-and-the-ide...

https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/01/24/Reading-AGPL

(not a lawyer): https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html
by radial_symmetry | 2025-10-16 12:46:11+00:00
I originally built this because I wanted to use git worktrees but didn't want my screen to be a mess of poorly labeled terminal windows. I kept adding features and released it open source, but the biggest moment for me was putting in Codex and Claude Code side-by-side.

They are both good models, but they catch different things and take different UI approaches. I used to run multiple Claudes together, which was helpful but they would often take the same approach. I find myself thinking more about architecture when confronted by two wildly different methods.
by adwn | 2025-10-16 12:46:16+00:00
This one?

> Turns out threads also may share resources like out-of-process files, memory mapped regions, shared memory, databases, distributed transactions

For multi-threaded parallelization,

- out-of-process files - databases - distributed transactions

aren't really relevant, and Rust directly helps with the other two aspects:

- memory mapped regions - shared memory

In practice, your "very specific" aspect is the most important one, and the hardest to get right without Rust's Send and Sync traits and their automatic enforcement.
by whstl | 2025-10-16 12:46:43+00:00
Saw this with an infamous 996 AI startup where the founders vibe coded their app.

Their app had like 3 or 4 pages, that was all, but every endpoint was a Lambda call. Every frontend log entry was a Lambda call. Every job execution was a Lambda call that called a dozen others. That was their idea of an architecture.

Even with <100 customers they were already paying >100k dollars a month on cloud, more than their entire dev team cost.

The constant firefighting, downtimes and billing issues were enough to keep the team busy instead of making new features.

I was freelancing but I didn't take the job after the "CTO" gave me a tour.