MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmezzetti | 2025-11-27 14:44:32+00:00
I understand people want to control what happens once they build something. Too often do you see startups go with a permissive model only to go to a more restrictive model once something like that happens. Then it ends up upsetting a lot of people.

I'm of the opinion that what I build, I'm willing to share it and let others use it as they see fit even if it's not to my advantage.
by Tarks | 2025-11-27 14:44:57+00:00
> You only think it's performative because you think people are signalling

You're correct that I think something because I think something else. You're assuming I'm unwilling or unable to tell the difference.

I don't see a betrayal to state that I think it's a shame that people that have copied a performative action, gotten nothing out of it and are then hesitant to try again because they feel they've already tried that avenue and had bad results. It's the same feeling of sadness I get when people have tried therapy, for whatever reason haven't gotten much out of it and then write it off as a sham.

I do get that you're saying 'aha ! I've detected your true intent through my clever analysis of your language' - consider your assumption "You only think it's performative because you think people are signaling. They're not"

They're not? You can state absolute facts with confidence about the people I've experienced in my life that you don't know anything about? That is either some amazing superpower or regular old conjecture.

It might help you to notice how many times I said I think or in my opinion, and how many absolutes you're willing to state.
by omnicognate | 2025-11-27 14:44:58+00:00
As I said, that was merely the first of many. And there is no such thing as "virality" - see my answer to the sibling to your comment.

The "enforceability" of the GPL was never in any doubt because it's not a contract and doesn't need to be "enforced". The license grants you freedoms you otherwise may not have under copyright. It doesn't deny you any freedoms you would otherwise have, and it cannot do so because it is not a contract. If the terms of the GPL don't apply to your use then all you have is the normal freedoms under copyright law, which may prohibit it. If so, any "enforcement" isn't enforcement of the GPL. It's enforcement of copyright, and there's certainly no doubt on the enforceability of that.

For the GPL to "fail" in court it would have be found to effectively grant greater freedoms than it was designed to do (or less, resulting in some use not being allowed when it should be, but that's not the sort of case being considered here). It doesn't, and it has repeatedly stood up in court as not granting additional freedoms than were intended.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-27 14:45:08+00:00
It's not Microsoft FUD, you're describing the license as viral too, but playing with words. The fact is that if you include GPL'd stuff in your stuff, that assemblage has to conform to the GPL's rules.

You're basically saying "the GPL doesn't go back in time and relicense unrelated code." But nobody was ever claiming it does, and describing it as "viral" doesn't imply that it does. It's "viral" because code that you stick to it has to conform to its rules. It's good that the GPL is viral. I want it to be viral, I don't want people to be able to hide GPL'd code in a proprietary structure.
by hylaride | 2025-11-27 14:45:20+00:00
It makes sense when you think about it. If you made a huge capital gain and then "lost" it in Vegas how is that different than "losing" it via other means?

Also, if this wasn't the case, it'd be a massive, gaping loophole. "Oh, I settled this stock in another currency, so I don't owe taxes yet/ever".

There are some situations where it maybe there should be an exception. When employee stock options are exercised, that's usually considered a taxable event, even if the shares aren't liquid (like in startups). This means you'd have to pay tax on something that you have to hold and could be worthless or forcing people into these events because the options may expire.

But for gods sake, whenever you "make" decent or life changing amounts of money, talk to a lawyer and accountant. There's so much misinformation about taxes out there. I used to work for a forex company and people, especially expats, would constantly move small amounts of money because they thought that they'd have to pay taxes on importing money into the country. They didn't realize that the forms they'd have to fill are only for reporting to deal with laundering. They could have just moved their money in one simple swoop.
by j_mo | 2025-11-27 14:45:25+00:00
I'd say good music is objective. Whether it's hard to play, uses complex polyrhythms etc. which most listeners aren't even aware of - and those people tend to think good music is subjective as they can't perceive the quality, only whether they like it or not. There's also some incredibly skilful metal music with no "shredding" whatsoever.

I don't particularly like Mozart but I'd be an idiot to say it's not good music. On the other hand most people agree Taylor Swift does not make good music, having released lots of samey 4 chord songs with incredibly simple melodies, but she's one of the most listened artists of all time.
by rsynnott | 2025-11-27 14:45:45+00:00
You buy a bitcoin for 20,000. You sell it for 50,000. At this point you probably owe capital gains on 30,000. You then take the 30,000, use it to buy an NFT, and later sell the NFT for 0.01 (because NFT). At this point you have had gain of 30k and loss of 30k. Now, it's going to depend a lot on exactly when all this happened and in which jurisdiction, but in many countries you probably owe tax on the 30k.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-11-27 14:46:06+00:00
No, PCI-E passthrough is not enabled on non-Server, and you arguably wouldn't do this on a Windows hypervisor. anyways, you'd do it with a Linux+KVM hypervisor for either Linux or Windows guests.

Using GPU passthrough, however, is allowed. WSL2 does this by using the existing Mesa/DRI/DRM open source stack, but instead of a GPU-specific DRM driver, it is one that speaks WDDM (the DRM equivalent in the Windows driver stack), and only requires a GPU-specific ennoblement package (provided by the vendor, and matches the Windows driver it is talking to; AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all ship one inside of WSL2).
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-27 14:46:09+00:00
Yes - LLMs are useful, even if auto-regressively trained GPTs aren't the answer to human intelligence, and outside of software development (maybe there too) it seems we're still very early in companies trying to figure out what they can and can not usefully be used for.

It seems the LLM companies generating all the hype (mostly OpenAI & Anthropic) may be shooting themselves in the foot a bit here, raising false expectations of what LLMs can do, or soon will be able to do, and therefore encouraging all the misapplication and failed corporate projects that are currently happening. Anthropic are talkiing out of both sides of their mouth here, saying that AGI is imminent, about to replace developers and remote workers, yet acknowledging that the technology and use case selection is so fickle that corporations aren't likely to be successful without 1-on-1 guidance from Anthropic.

The mythical AGI, an artificial human, will presumably be transformative if/when it ever arrives, but even if we're still early days in LLM adoption it's not clear if that (LLMs) really will be. Developers get a new tool to use, consumers get a new frustrating AI customer service to deal with, corporate e-mails, marketing literature and powerpoints become enshittified LLM-generated AI slop, etc. Maybe the biggest "transformative" (widely felt) impact of LLMs is potentially chatbots and AI-search, but it seems people are just taking that in their stride, and not obvious that the experience and impact from that is going to change much going forwards.
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-11-27 14:46:29+00:00
I think it is wrong to force Apple to support various "open standards". Other device manufacturers should make better devices and have people switch naturally to them because they are better.

Like Google cried to every possible regulator that Apple is the big bad wolf that doesn't want to support RCE. Why? If it was that good, more people would use Androids for that.

The problem, as I see it, is that everyone else besides Apple spends very little on physical devices build quality and software polishing, and you end up with crap devices that are slow, with weird interfaces and so on.
by fer | 2025-11-27 14:46:34+00:00
Editing out because it can be misunderstood as a defense of tax evasion as per the child comment. I'll leave a quote from the cypherpunk manifesto instead

> We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.
by pavlov | 2025-11-27 14:47:16+00:00
Jupiter is 43 lightminutes from the Sun.

If we shoot a thousand probes at 0.1c directly at the Alpha Centauri star, they should have several hours within a Jupiter-distance range of the star to capture data. Seems like enough sensors and time to synthesize an interesting image of the system when all that data gets back to Earth.
by t0mas88 | 2025-11-27 14:47:47+00:00
Wow... If the BBC had any serious leadership they would ignore such legal advice and do their jobs as journalists.

They're bending to an imaginary threat that hasn't even been made yet. Nobody said they would sue them over quoting that line. If anyone it would be Rutger Bregman that gets sued by the Trump administration for saying it, not others reporting on it.

And even that seems unlikely as it could make this the biggest example of the Streisand effect in history. Bregman would say "See how corrupt he is? He's silencing journalists discussing his corruption" and get 100x more publicity than his lecture ever got.
by palata | 2025-11-27 14:47:48+00:00
Genuine question: if I train my model with copyleft material, how do you prove I did?

Like if there is no way to trace it back to the original material, does it make sense to regulate it? Not that I like the idea, just wondering.

I have been thinking for a while that LLMs are copyright-laundering machines, and I am not sure if there is anything we can do about it other than accepting that it fundamentally changes what copyright is. Should I keep open sourcing my code now that the licence doesn't matter anymore? Is it worth writing blog posts now that it will just feed the LLMs that people use? etc.
by supermatt | 2025-11-27 14:48:37+00:00
> This is why it's important to describe explicitly

That is a fair point. I will take it on board when giving people screenshots and videos of bugs in future.

> I did not see the change in button width

There's actually a lot more visual changes than that just the button, but I will leave that to the reader as an exercise in spot-the-difference ;)
by alexrp | 2025-11-27 14:49:03+00:00
> So much vague outrage over nothing.

So you just chose to ignore the technical problems we have with GitHub Actions and then say there are no problems. That's certainly a take.

> That CI system created by so called monkeys is the one of the best free CI service in the world.

We self-host all our CI machines so the "free" hosted runners have no relevance here.

> Not everyone has the millions of dollars like Zig Foundation to create their own CI servers.

We don't have "millions of dollars". If only!

I'd also note that we spend our money very efficiently; most of our CI machines are consumer-grade hardware hosted in team member's homes. We don't just throw endless amounts of money at cloud providers.

> After that they appreciate GitHub Sponsors, but say it is now a complete liability just because a project leader left. What are the actual changes? Any new rule? But no, it is now a "liability" and we should accept it.

GitHub Sponsors is a liability because Microsoft can increase their cut at any time, or even axe it outright if they don't think it's profitable for them anymore. This risk is very real considering that, as Andrew pointed out, the feature has been neglected for years. It is objectively less risky for us to have donors use a platform like Every.org.
by gorgoiler | 2025-11-27 14:49:14+00:00
Yes, if you accidentally push grandma and her wheelchair over a cliff you probably wouldn’t refer to it as “a recent family incident”. In particular the fourth word, a single letter ‘a’, immediately got my back up. The vagueness and defensiveness of the whole post feels very dismissive and inhuman.

”Out of transparency and our desire to share with our community…” also reminds me when I get a refund that is prefixed with ”as a one-time gesture of goodwill…” instead of ”sorry, we made a mistake”.
by GuB-42 | 2025-11-27 14:49:27+00:00
This is the kind of stories where I would like another angle.

First, to make things straight, neither Signal nor AdBlock are illegal in France, they are used by many without any problem. As in some other countries E2E encryption is sometimes attacked, and usually, it makes the news, but for now there is no problem using any privacy-focused app in France.

But, and I think it is what happened here, there is nothing stopping a prosecutor mentioning the use of such apps when making an argument in combination with other facts. It is like the use of cash. It is not illegal to use cash and possess large amounts of it (there are limits for large transactions though), but a prosecutor will certainly mention it if they can and it makes you more suspicious to justify an arrest. Not a conviction though, for a conviction, you need actual proof.

And of course, the defense attorney will point out the many legitimate uses of Signal as a way to discredit the accusation, this is the side we have here. A judge will hear both sides and settle the case in the end.

Not to say that there are not deeper political motivations, or that justice can't be corrupted, but I prefer not to make an opinion without hearing both sides.
by sputknick | 2025-11-27 14:49:30+00:00
In America, the problem comes when the gain and the loss come in different years. If you make a big gain in 2024, but didn't pay taxes on that gain, then lose the money in 2025, they will come after you for failing to pay taxes in 2024 even though you no longer have the money in 2025. The lesson is to pay your taxes.
by Glemkloksdjf | 2025-11-27 14:50:13+00:00
I'm still ahead of a company starting later:

I have the legal structure, i know my collegues, i have potentially employees and more capacity.

The problem is not that a startup is starting after you but you do not give yourself time to keep an eye on AI and not leveraging it when its helpful.

We leverage AI and ML progress constantly and keep an eye on advances. Segment Anything? Yepp we use it. Claude? Yes Sir!
by justin_murray | 2025-11-27 14:50:23+00:00
Honest question: why don’t you think it is fair use?

I can see how it pushes the boundary, but I can’t lay out logic that it’s not. The code has been publish for the public to see. I’m always allowed to read it, remember it, tell my friends about it. Certainly, this is what the author hoped I would do. Otherwise, wouldn’t they have kept it to themselves?

These agents are just doing a more sophisticated, faster version of that same act.
by AlexandrB | 2025-11-27 14:50:56+00:00
Language massively restricts LLMs because there's no way to create novel concepts while limited to existing language.

Humans create new words and grammatical constructs all the time in the process of building/discovering new things. This is true even in math, where new operators are created to express new operations. Are LLMs even capable of this kind of novelty?

There's also the problem that parts of human experience are inexpressible in language. A very basic example is navigating 3D space. This is not something that had to be explained to you as a baby, your brain just learned how to do it. But this problem goes deeper. For instance, intuition about the motion of objects in space. Even before Newton described gravitation every 3 year old still knew that an object that's dropped would fall to the ground a certain way. Formalizing this basic intuition using language took thousands of years of human development and spurred the creation of calculus. An AI does not have these fundamental intuitions nor any way to obtain them. Its conception of the world is only as good as the models and language (both mathematical and spoken) we have to express it.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-11-27 14:52:05+00:00
Hear hear. I will admit that phones everywhere ( including full speed on highway ) made me finally consider something along the lines of 'you drop the phone in this bowl upon entry in this household'( this should be easier to accomplish at movies where you tend to have codes of conduct, terms of service and the like ). It is getting really bad and it is hard to escape.
by Orygin | 2025-11-27 14:52:17+00:00
Great article but I don't really agree with their take on GPL regarding this paragraph:

> The spirit of the GPL is to promote the free sharing and development of software [...] the reality is that they are proceeding in a different vector from the direction of code sharing idealized by GPL. If only the theory of GPL propagation to models walks alone, in reality, only data exclusion and closing off to avoid litigation risks will progress, and there is a fear that it will not lead to the expansion of free software culture.

The spirit of the GPL is the freedom of the user, not the code being freely shared. The virality is a byproduct to ensure the software is not stolen from their users. If you just want your code to be shared and used without restrictions, use MIT or some other license.

> What is important is how to realize the “freedom of software,” which is the philosophy of open source

Freedom of software means nothing. Freedoms are for humans not immaterial code. Users get the freedom to enjoy the software how they like. Washing the code through an AI to purge it from its license goes against the open source philosophy. (I know this may be a mistranslation, but it goes in the same direction as the rest of the article).

I also don't agree with the arguments that since a lot of things are included in the model, the GPL code is only a small part of the whole, and that means it's okay. Well if I take 1 GPL function and include it in my project, no matter its size, I would have to license as GPL. Where is the line? Why would my software which only contains a single function not be fair use?
by jackar | 2025-11-27 14:52:25+00:00
The impulse to make the comparison makes sense. The reality is a bit different, probably leans in the right direction but is buffered by learning. I’ll explain. There is no upside to delaying purchasing if you think things will get less expensive. There is however upside in building today even if you have to rebuild tomorrow, and that upside is in learning the problem space. Specifically, what is likely to be trivialized and what truly requires domain knowledge. Horizontal apps? Little domain knowledge to encode. Vertical app? More domain knowledge to encode. Separately, there are more ways to differentiate than distribution alone, see verifier’s law. Problems that are challenging to verify are challenging for AI to trivialize.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-11-27 14:52:45+00:00
I don't know how a future loss is treated from a tax perspective (does the lost investment generate a capital loss?) but overall this seems to be similar to standard tax accounting.

Assuming an arms-length transaction: this would be like taking shares you own in one company and exchanging them for shares in another company. Typically you would sell them for money in-between but even if they were traded directly you would need to recognize the capital gain at the price you traded them, based on the current value of what you got for them. This would be applicable to the current taxation period, and if the new shares tank it could generate a capital loss.
by _jzlw | 2025-11-27 14:52:54+00:00
> keeps your release process clean, reproducible

How does it do either of these two things, exactly?

> and locked down

It doesn't lock anything down, in fact it only serves a purpose if your CI isn't locked down. Your npm token should not be visible to anything except npm. If it is, then you've got far bigger problems.

At best, this only serves as a reactionary warning / damage control in case your CI is compromised, i.e. after you've already been pwned. Which is all well and good, don't get me wrong, but pretending it "protects" you from anything is giving a false sense of security.
by leo_e | 2025-11-27 14:54:09+00:00
It really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful perspective.

We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone.

It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more vCPUs at an unoptimized Python loop. If Voyager had been built with today's "move fast and break things" mindset, it would have bricked itself at the heliopause pending a firmware update that required a stronger handshake.
by Orygin | 2025-11-27 14:54:42+00:00
Freedom 0 is not violated. GPL includes restrictions for how you can use the software, yet it's still open source.

You can do whatever you want with the software, BUT you must do a few things. For GPL it's keeping the license, distributing the source, etc. Why can't we have a different license with the same kind of restrictions, but also "Models trained on this licensed work must be open source".

Edit: Plus the license would not be "GPL+restriction" but a new license altogether, which includes the requirements for models to be open.
by danbitengo | 2025-11-27 14:55:24+00:00
Hey HN, I built SyncKit after shipping two local-first projects (RestBolt and Graft) and realizing there's no simple way to add cross-device sync.

The problem: Existing solutions are either too complex (Automerge/Yjs require learning CRDTs) or too restrictive (Firebase isn't truly local-first, Supabase has no offline support - issue #357 has been open 4+ years with 350+ upvotes).

SyncKit is the middle ground: simple API, works offline-first, self-hostable.

Technical highlights: - TLA+ formal verification: 118,711 states checked, caught bugs before implementation - Rust → WASM core (48.9KB gzipped) - 700+ tests including 80 chaos tests (zero data loss) - Server: Bun/Hono WebSocket (SDK works in any JS runtime) - Production-ready: v0.1.0 on npm and Docker Hub

Known limitations (v0.1.0): - LWW only - advanced CRDTs (Text, Counter, Set) coming in v0.2.0 - React hooks only - Vue/Svelte adapters planned - Reference server is Bun (Node/Deno coming v0.3.0)

Happy to answer questions about the CRDT implementation, TLA+ modeling, or WebSocket architecture.

GitHub: https://github.com/Dancode-188/synckit npm: @synckit-js/sdk
by FranzFerdiNaN | 2025-11-27 14:56:35+00:00
Maybe he used to be one, who knows. But I doubt he read a book or seen a movie in the past few decades. He got roasted by Joyce Carol Oates on X recently for being an oaf and he immediately started replying to tweets about acclaimed movies. And nothing insightful that proved he had seen them, just 'this is a great movie' or some other stupid oneliner. It would be hilarious if it wasnt so sad that the richest man on earth is such a pathetic little man.