MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-06 19:05:05+00:00
> In Judge Alsup's case, it largely hinged on whether you had a right to the initial copy in the first place. If I read (and recall) his ruling correctly, the initial pirated copy (that is, downloading from a source that didn't have the right to distribute it in the first place) made all subsequent intermediary copies necessary to the training process also not fair use.

But that's the issue, isn't it? Someone has bought a legitimate copy and put it on Napster with the intention of providing copies to people when it's fair use.

If people then download it for non-fair use purposes while they all wink at each other, it doesn't become fair use just because you said it was.

But if the person(s) downloading it actually do make fair use of it, isn't that different? How is it unlike borrowing a book from the library and quoting an excerpt from it in your criticism?

> Can you and your buddies do this without forming a legal corporation or partnership?

Partnerships aren't corporations and are generally what gets formed by default if nobody files any paperwork. There are often reasons that's not what you want, but that's not the point here.

It's also sort of like, so if you filed official paperwork for a limited-liability partnership that lets anyone in then you could do it? If that was actually the thing that matters then they would just do that, right? Which also implies that it shouldn't be, because vacuous requirements are unproductive.
by crdrost | 2025-11-06 19:05:15+00:00
I also found that first one surprising, even if he gives his back-of-the-envelope calculation (He guesstimates, 75% of healthcare spending is for metabolic-syndrome type chronic diseases, and then he guesstimates that 75% of that is preventable, $3.5T times .75 times .75 gives his figure of $1.9T/year.)

But even if the margin is not quite as wide as the back-of-the-envelope calculates, it's still bigger by a decent margin, right? For instance [1] estimates with more detailed methodology that it's $2.9T over 3 years or ~$1T/year, with at least 44% of that attributable to obesity, so like ~$400B/year, whereas [2] talks about $240B/year cigarettes, $250B/year alcohol.

Of course Lustig would say "TOFI people exist, obesity isn't the problem, obesity is just another symptom of metabolic syndrome, so 44% is an underestimate for the costs of bad nutrition." Not sure I agree there but he'd defend higher numbers even if we agreed to use these sources as kicking off points.

And yeah I agree that the question of "what do we do about it" is something that he appears to have a very opinionated take on, but I'd like to see more hard data. Like I'm happy for him that he had a big study that showed reversal of metabolic syndrome symptoms just by switching sugary food out for starchy food while holding weight and calorie consumption constant, but how we get from there to "eat real food -- the problem is not what's on the nutrition label but all of the antibiotics and adulteration that they don't have to tell you about on that label" stuff seems a bit opaque.

[1] https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/the-economic-co...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/chronic-disease/data-research/facts-stat...
by dima55 | 2025-11-06 19:05:45+00:00
Maybe it's a fallacy and maybe it isn't. But I often hear people say "I don't use tool X because it doesn't actually increase my productivity". X is emacs or debuggers or profilers or Linux or version control or code comments or whatever. And after observing such people work over time I decided that most of them are just trying to justify their laziness. YMMV.
by ok_dad | 2025-11-06 19:06:46+00:00
The boats they are attacking won’t have drugs, these are the slow fishing boats that are at most refueling the go-fast boats with the drugs. Killing these people is just murder and nothing else. We have been doing drug interdiction for years without killing everyone until the orange dictator came into power.

Source: I did a deployment in counter drug interdiction in the Navy.

Edit: if you really want to know how threatening these guys are, they usually spotted our aircraft and the first thing they did was ALWAYS to jettison any weapons they had immediately, then start throwing out the drugs. They knew they weren’t fighting a USN ship and that we weren’t guns to harm them if they were peaceful. I suspect they might fight back now, though.
by spunker540 | 2025-11-06 19:06:52+00:00
They may have some idea, but they definitely don’t know for sure— there could very well be innocent people on the boat. I’m not sure why arrests are not an option in these cases. It would be great press to announce “x kilos of cocaine captured”, “6 drug smugglers apprehended”

Instead it’s just “boat bombed, terrorists killed, drugs destroyed” with no proof that they’re terrorists or that there are drugs.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-11-06 19:06:54+00:00
Wow. Everything in life has good and bad consequences. It is important that we remember to look towards the light.

What you describe at its worst is still better than the exploitation many of the children in the Philippines endure today by westerners. Hopefully, being able to communicate on the 'evil Internet', the rest of the world, like you, can truly understand what they endure.
by impossiblefork | 2025-11-06 19:07:06+00:00
Microsoft employees in the EU are committing a crime if they do participate in the sanctions though.

There's an EU law, 'blocking statue' which also means that contracts can't be broken with reference sanctions even if the contracts themselves say they can be, and the services must be provided anyway.

This isn't GDPR type stuff. This is a path to infinite fines. Ending up jail for years is also a distinct possibility if you help people access their data, since spying on these institutions is actually treated as espionage. We recently passed a law here in Sweden forbidding espionage against international organizations in which Sweden is part.
by kergonath | 2025-11-06 19:07:10+00:00
> In fact John Yoo, most famous for authoring the "Torture Memos" for Dubya over 20 years ago, has been perhaps the most prominent legal thinker arguing in favor of the actions Trump's taken against the ICC

True. Trump did not appear suddenly out of nowhere and he’s only able to do what he does thanks to people who prepared for this and have been pushing us down the slope for the last couple of decades. Thanks for the quote, it’s important we remember this sort of things.

> It's just that many have decided to bizarrely retcon the Bush administration into respected elder statesman instead of the lawless war criminals they were and are.

I think that’s the fact that Bush is at least able to finish a sentence. But yeah, you’re right. It was the golden age of enhanced interrogation techniques by masked men in black in illegal prisons in foreign countries.
by andrewinardeer | 2025-11-06 19:07:48+00:00
On the flip side here in Australia the government for years encouraged us to get panels put on our house by selling it as, "You can export power and create a small income exporting the surplus you create".

So many people did so that at one point last year the government said, "So many people are exporting it now, and the surplus is so great on the network we may have to charge you for exporting it". Wholesale power prices become negative during peak solar times - but retail companies will still charge you for using it!.

Obviously, that didn't go down too well and this is the response - free electricity during peak solar hours.

That said, my understanding is that free electricity is only for people who are on the "default offer" from the electricity companies - that is effectively the highest tier of pricing. Most people are not on the default offer.
by ragnese | 2025-11-06 19:08:18+00:00
It's been a long time since I've done C/C++, but I'm not sure what you're saying with regard to provenance. I was pretty sure that you were able to cast an arbitrary integer value into a pointer, and it really didn't have to "come from" anywhere. So, all I'm saying is that, under-the-hood, a C pointer really is just an integer. Saying that a pointer means something beyond the bits that make up the value is no more relevant than saying a bool means something other than its integer value, which is also true.
by zurfer | 2025-11-06 19:08:25+00:00
The current go to solution for the kinds of problems that TabPFN is solving would be something like XGBoost. In general it's a good baseline, but the challenge is always that you need to spend a lot of time feature engineering and tweaking the data representation before something like XGBoost can deliver good performance on your regression or classification problems.

For me the promise of foundation models for tabular data is that there are enough generalizable patterns, so that you need less manual feature engineering and data cleaning.

And kudos to the team, I think it's a really creative application of neural networks. I was always frustrated with neural networks, since they were hard to tune on "structured" data and always under-performed (for me), but we also never had real foundational models for structured data.
by maciejgryka | 2025-11-06 19:08:35+00:00
I think it’s going to be a while before we see small models (defined roughly as “runnable on reasonable consumer hardware”) do a good job at general coding tasks. It’s a very broad area! You can do some specific tasks reasonably well (eg I distilled a toy git helper you can run locally here https://github.com/distil-labs/gitara), but “coding” is such a big thing that you really need a lot of knowledge to do it well.
by lukan | 2025-11-06 19:08:36+00:00
There is international law. It is made up of all the treaties the big and small powers implemented together. But yes, not much is left now, but I would argue before Bush and 9/11 .. it was in a way better shape.

Global military is not necessary, just consensus to enforce it.

Practical example, there is no EU military, but there surely are EU laws EU members have to follow.
by whytevuhuni | 2025-11-06 19:08:39+00:00
I don't know what the next programming language after Rust will look like, but it will definitely have built-in effects and capabilities.

It won't fix everything (see TARmageddon), but left-pad-rs's build.rs file should definitely not be installing a sudo alias in my .bashrc file that steals my password when I cargo build my project.
by pncnmnp | 2025-11-06 19:08:47+00:00
Hi! Author here. I agree that I should have explicitly stated the word "priority queues" since it is an ADT people can directly relate to. I will add it in. However, it is simply not true that I did not describe how a priority queue-based solution works.

I have described it in the "Timer Modules" section:

> A natural iteration of this approach is to store timers in an ordered list (also known as timer queues). In this scheme, instead of storing the time interval, an absolute timestamp is stored. The timer identifier and its corresponding timestamp that expires the earliest is stored at the head of the queue. Similarly, the second earliest timer is stored after the earliest, and so on, in ascending order. After every unit, only the head of the queue is compared with the current timestamp. If the timer has expired, we dequeue the list and compare the next element. We repeat this until all the expired timers have been dequeued, and we run their expiry processing routines.

And then, I go on to talk about its runtime.

Truth be told, this is a chapter for my book on data structures and algorithms that I think are interesting and obscure enough that not many people talk about them. Its goal is not widespread practicality, but rather a fun deep dive into some topics.
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-06 19:09:25+00:00
If Mozilla were consistently making good decisions in the years since then, nobody would be wasting their time with "What if Eich were still in charge?" The only reason anybody still talks about that ousting is because they have other more current grievances with Mozilla.

Also, the reason HN has so many people ready to gripe about Firefox is because HN still has a large number of people using Firefox. I never complain about technical or policy decisions from Chrome or Safari because I don't use those browsers! The only reason I have complaints about Mozilla is because I actually use Firefox.
by janalsncm | 2025-11-06 19:09:32+00:00
I don’t think there’s any privacy that OpenAI or Anthropic are giving you that DeepSeek isn’t giving you. ChatGPT usage logs were held by court order at one point.

It’s true that DeepSeek won’t give you reliable info on Tiananmen Square but I would argue that’s a very rare use case in practice. Most people will be writing boilerplate code or summarizing mundane emails.
by CrimsonCape | 2025-11-06 19:09:49+00:00
Your experience is one that the internet identified long ago under the moniker "special snowflake" as a derogatory. Derogatory because you are not special or unique even though someone conditioned you to think so.

That said, do you go so far as to accuse an entire generation of parents of conspiracy to brainwash their kids? Have you ever considered that the advice they gave was appropriate? For a while in the 80s and 90s, pretty much all white collar jobs had multiple specializations within each job, such that it made sense to expect your kid would need to find some unique niche.

Instead, the subsequent decades demonstrated that specialized knowledge was being centralized behind corporations, and corporations would use the same technology available to individuals to centralize even more. It's not hard to see the internet and global connectivity as disruptors of 'old' normality.

I guess the point is that the advice given to you was fresh but went stale fast due to the world changing.
by refulgentis | 2025-11-06 19:10:57+00:00
I have spent the last 2.5 years living like a monk to maintain an app across all paid LLM providers and llama.cpp.

I wish this was true.

It isn't.

"In algorithms, we have space vs time tradeoffs, therefore a small LLM can get there with more time" is the same sort of "not even wrong" we all smile about us HNers doing when we try applying SWE-thought to subjects that aren't CS.

What you're suggesting amounts to "monkeys on typewriters will write entire works of Shakespeare eventually" - neither in practice, nor in theory, is this a technical claim, or something observable, or even stood up as a one-off misleading demo once.
by robby_w_g | 2025-11-06 19:11:19+00:00
If there wasn't global-scale theft of art and content or if LLMs could produce something better than an inferior facsimile, I bet there would be less backlash.

But instead we had a 'non-profit' called 'Open'AI that irresponsibly unleashed this technology on the world and lied about its capabilities with no care of how it would affect the average person.
by zamadatix | 2025-11-06 19:11:41+00:00
Oh good catches! I must have grabbed the wrong chart from the consumer CPU benchmark, thanks for pointing out the subsequent errors. The resulting relations do make more sense (clock speed certainly helps, but there is wayyyy less of a threading wall than I had incorrectly surmised).

Here is the corrected link for the 9950X review with allmod instead of def for equal comparison (I couldn't find the def chart in the server review) https://www.phoronix.com/benchmark/result/amd-ryzen-9-9900x-...
by cameldrv | 2025-11-06 19:11:47+00:00
Thread is fine, but also wifi is fine. Sleepy end device doesn't work very well with wifi, as I understand it, (from trying to implement it using the ESP32 SDK), because Matter generally wants all devices to check in several times an hour at least.

Take a smart scale for example. Mine uses wifi and is in deep sleep almost all of the time. When you step on it, it weighs you, connects to wifi, and sends the measurement. This does fine on battery because it only gets used a few times a day max, and I think it may power up the radios to look for a software update once a day or something. If it had to power up the radios every 5 minutes though it wouldn't last a year on a charge.

Another example would be a water/flood sensor. The overwhelming majority of the time, it has nothing to report. Maybe once a day or so it should report the battery level and that it's still there. You can still get great battery life as long as you don't have to turn on the radio all the time, but Matter doesn't really let you do this, in my understanding, at least as of the current revision.
by pron | 2025-11-06 19:11:50+00:00
I think the president of the United States believes all or nearly all of these things (or claims to).

And I did ask such people such questions - for example, people who fly a lot yet and "chemtrails" are poisoning us - but their answers always ended up with some arbitrary choice that isn't appliled consistently. Pretty much, when forced to choose between claims A and B, they go by which of them they wish to be true, even if they would, in other situations, judge the process of arriving at one of the conclusions to be much stronger than the other. They're more than happy to explain to you that they trust vitamins because of modern scientific research, which they describe as fradulent when it comes to vaccines.

Their epistemology is so flagrantly inconsistent that my only conclusion was that they're stupid. I'm not saying that's an innate character trait, and I think this could well be the result of a poor education.
by vel0city | 2025-11-06 19:11:56+00:00
From 2025:

https://apnews.com/article/south-china-sea-thitu-island-phil...

From 2024:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/philippines-china-sea-conflict-...

Another incident in 2024

https://news.usni.org/2024/08/31/chinese-vessels-ram-surroun...

And the very violent Second Thomas Shoal incident:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2024_Second_Thomas_Shoal_...

Whoever told you its just fishing vessels doing this are liars spreading misinformation. It has been official coast guard and naval vessels for years. This is very well documented.
by keeda | 2025-11-06 19:12:25+00:00
Wait, if I reading the original article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45830380) correctly, this is not a bailout? It's more that the US government acts as a guarantor for loans from other parties, and only steps in if the debt is defaulted on.

Also this is not a loan for what has already been done so far, this is what will be built out in the future, so the US is getting something in return: huge amounts of infrastructure, most of which would be datacenters, chips, and power. (In an alternate timeline this would be clean power, or at least be built out in Australia, cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45836104 -- but sadly this is not that timeline.)

Worst case, when the bubble pops, we get a glut of power and compute which (ideally) should reduce overall electricity and the obscenely bloated cloud bills. However, at the rates that demand is growing, this seems unlikely.

So to rephrase: The real problem is that the infra needed to support the forecasted growth is very expensive, and requires trillions in funding, which gets very expensive to borrow. And so the US government is being asked to provide loan guarantees, because who better to appreciate what interest payments on trillions of debt look like?
by RobinL | 2025-11-06 19:13:11+00:00
I think it's best to view this from an economics point of view - in a nutshell price signals are usually the most powerful way to create behavioural change; in this case, we want people to shift demand away from peak times. Nobody is being forced to, they just have to pay more for the convenience of not bothering.

> IMO this is just setting us up for insane surge pricing for those people who don't do the good citizen thing of becoming nocturnal

It actually costs a lot more to produce marginal energy at peak times, the cost just reflects the cost of production. It doesn't seem unreasonable for me for the consumer to bear the cost, and also get the benfit if they choose to put their car to charge overnight rather than at peak time.

This also has a nice secondary benefit: anyone on agile tariffs who shifts demand away from peak time actually benefits those who don't want to bother, because the peak price/cost goes down, and so the overall average price of electricity goes down.

> I see this as just yet _another_ job the government/business is making us do instead of them

In most other market, people are expected to respond to price incentives. When local apples are cheap relative to imported cherries, people don't complain that government/business is making us do a job to push demand in the direction of apples.

> Is it too much to ask for my government to provide sensibly and simply priced energy so we can get on with our day, working, studying, raising kids etc?

The free market price _is_ the agile price. The government intervention is actually in the direction of fixing prices (e.g. by the energy price cap, which is sometimes below the free market price at peak times). In general, markets do not work very well when the government fixes the market

When you let the market clear and send out price signals, markets almost always become more efficient (which means that consumers benefit overall)
by wikipedia | 2025-11-06 19:13:44+00:00
I can confirm that (something similar to that) is what regularly occurs to share CSAM.

Have dealt with content from when I was ~11 on Omegle appearing across the internet for years at this point (NCMEC is an amazing resource).

Archive sites are regularly abused by bad actors.

Here is real example on archive.is:

https://archive.is/https://ezgif.com/maker/*

I submitted multiple complaints to NCMEC but didn’t get results. Germany, though, was able to get the archives purged.

On the page, you will see the text:

> In response to a request we received from 'jugendschutz.net' the page is not currently available.
by bragr | 2025-11-06 19:13:46+00:00
>Bit banging is a term of art that describes a method of digital data transmission as using general-purpose input/output (GPIO) instead of computer hardware that is intended specifically for data communication. [1]

I guess it depends on whether you count the PIO as "general purpose IO" or specific chip for data communication. The ability to run custom programs on them sort of pushes it away from general purpose IO and towards something like a network card that has its own firmware and compute. I think in this case it is fair to say it is debatable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_banging
by wry_discontent | 2025-11-06 19:14:03+00:00
This seems naive to me.

There are plenty of things I work hard on because I like them, but there are also lots of things I have to work hard on because they need to get done.

I have similar feelings about Ikigai, the overlap of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Those things don't really overlap for me.
by throwaway13337 | 2025-11-06 19:14:35+00:00
Lack of autonomy is the most draining thing.

Not many have the luxury to do what they think makes sense. I've been running my own small business for years. It's lonely to not have coworkers but work is extremely enjoyable.

The author, too, had autonomy but doesn't seem to make a point of that.

The system that we've built is why people aren't enjoying their work. The bigger the organization, the less autonomy an individual has.

Markets are beautiful things when they work. They allow individuals to offer their services to the world in exactly the way they find best. Which feels good. And is great for a positive sum society.

The amount of people employed in small businesses or self employed is shrinking and has been for a while. The rules are too complex to start a business. In tech, there is no common protocol to speak. You are a surf of the platform you find yourself on. They extract the value.

To help people find meaning in their work, we must first force open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that are gradual by business size.