MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tpmoney | 2025-11-28 02:29:44+00:00
> LLMs definitely store pretty high-fidelity representations of specific facts and procedures

Specific facts and procedures are explicitly NOT protected by copyright. That's what made cloning the IBM BIOS legal. It's what makes emulators legal. It's what makes the retro-clone RPG industry legal. It's what made Google cloning the Java API legal.

> If you took some GPL code and renamed all the variables, is that suddenly ok?

Generally no, not sufficiently transformative.

> What if you mapped the code to an AST and then stored a representation of that AST?

Generally no, binary distribution of software is considered a violation of copyright.

> What if it was a "fuzzy" or "probabilistic" AST that enabled the regeneration of a functionally equivalent program but the specific control flow and variable names and comments are different?

This starts to get a lot fuzzier. De-compilation is legal. Creating programs that are functionally identical to other programs is (generally) legal. Creating an emulator for a system is legal. Copyright protects a specific fixed expression of a creative idea, not the idea itself. We don't want to live in the world where Wine is a copyright violation.

> This is starting to look more and more like what LLMs store, though they're actually dumber and closer to the literal text than something that maintains function.

And yet, so far no one has brought a legal case against the AI companies for being able to extract their copyright protected material from the models. The few early examples of that happening are things that model makers explicitly attempt to train out of their models. It's unwanted behavior that is considered a bug, not a feature. Further the fact that a machine is able to violate copyright does not in and of itself make the machine itself a violation of copyright. See also Xerox machines, DeCSS, Handbrake, Plex/Jellyfin, CD-Rs, DVRs, VHS Recorders etc.
Show HN: I built a website for games that catch my eye
by RaycatRakittra | 2025-11-28 02:30:16+00:00
I built a website for games that catch my eye or have something interesting going on. I made it for fun but then updating became a habit. Maybe you'll find your next "must-play" game here?

GitHub repo: https://github.com/RaycatWhoDat/games-list
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-11-28 02:30:48+00:00
Both of your statements are true.

But in practice we are rarely interested in single writes when we talk about consistency, but the consistency of multiple writes ("transactions") to multiple systems such as microservices.

It is difficult to guarantee consistency by stopping writes, because whatever enforces the stopping typically does not know at what point all the writes that belong together have been made.

If you "stop the writes" for sufficiently long, the probability of inconsistencies becomes low, but it is still not guaranteed to be non-existant.

For instance in bank payment systems, end-of-day consistency is handled by a secondary process called "reconciliation" which makes the end-of-day conflicts so improbable that any conflict is handled by a manual tertiary process. And then there are agreed timeouts for multi-bank transactions etc. so that the payments ultimately end up in consistent state.
by ajb | 2025-11-28 02:30:53+00:00
In most cases the data a kalman filter is working on has some precision which is much lower than the available precision in the floating format you are using. The problem is inherently a statistical one, since the expected precision depends on the statistics of your data source.

So you would probably adopt some conservative approach in which you showed that the worst case floating point rounding error is << some quantile of error due to the data.

But, I think specialised tools are more commonly used than general process. Eg, see https://github.com/arpra-project/arpra
by johng | 2025-11-28 02:31:14+00:00
Man, never seen anything like that in my life. I have seen the bamboo scaffolding but didn't think anything quite that bad could happen.

How likely is anything like this to happen in the US? I mean besides the scaffolding... haven't seen so many buildings go up half done here in my life.

Edit: From some of the video and photos I can't believe some of the buildings haven't collapsed as well.
by latentsea | 2025-11-28 02:32:11+00:00
> I don't think it is perfect but I have also lived in Tokyo where the system is literally impossible without a GPS because the locations are not as neatly arranged as here.

Even GPS and being a native speaker of Japanese isn't enough to successfully navigate somewhere in Japan sometimes often enough that it's super common for businesses to include detailed access instructions on how to get to their business.

The amount of times I've seen my wife not even be able to read a place name here makes me wonder why they don't just do something slightly more sensible. A recent funny one was when city hall sent her some mail advertising some seminar and she couldn't read the name of the train station on the pamphlet, so she called city hall and enquired about it and the person she talked to couldn't read it either.
by CitrusFruits | 2025-11-28 02:32:16+00:00
I've worked at a couple of companies with pay scales on part with FAANG, as well as a startup that was extremely selective in hiring. We rarely looked at GitHub, and never used it as a in a situation where someone got hired. I could see a situation where someone had good open source contributions it might help them get noticed by a recruiter, but that's so incredibly rare and hard to discover that it's kindof the last place people look. Having a good GitHub profile can't hurt, but LinkedIn is still king here
Can RGB light strips produce 16M colors?
by emmasuntech | 2025-11-28 02:33:29+00:00
Dear family members, who understands!

I always thought that RGB light strips were just three colors - red, green and blue - flashing alternately, with at most an additional "seven-color gradient" to reach the end... Today, after a careful study of it, I was directly shocked!

It turns out that by adjusting the brightness of the red (R), green (G), and blue (B) channels with a controller, theoretically, over 16.7 million colors can be mixed!!

Yes, you read that right - 16,777,216 kinds! This is more comprehensive than all the colors my phone screen can display. (Well, it's actually about the same, but the key point is: it's right in my room!) .

I randomly adjusted a parameter: R=255, G=100, B=50, and instantly a super cool warm orange-red color emerged. Try R=0, G=255, B=200 again, and it immediately turns into a dreamy lake blue... Slide the color wheel and the atmosphere of the entire room will switch in an instant, from cyberpunk to a gentle sunset, all thanks to a small light strip!

I used to think "smart lighting" was just a gimmick, but now I just want to kneel down and shout: Technology is so romantic!

Has any expert ever done more amazing operations with RGB light strips? For example, changing color with music, automatically adjusting color temperature according to the weather... Please share! I'm ready to wrap all the corners of my house with light strips. (Don't stop me!)

#RGB Light Strips #DIY Light Magic
by threethirtytwo | 2025-11-28 02:33:45+00:00
I don't want to introduce 50 tangential branches to argue about with no end in sight.

It's not pessimism, it's reality. Think about how unlikely it is. Humanity had one stretch where we reached for the stars and that stretch ended and by sheer luck some crazy guy made it cheap. What happens when he's gone? Will it happen again? Most likely: no. In your lifetime? Even Less likely.
by mattm | 2025-11-28 02:35:43+00:00
The same principle holds for quality management. You don't need to inspect every single product. However, if you inspect a small number of products at random, you'll detect a large percentage of the quality issues.

While leaders can't know everyone they should make it a priority to have those random connections outside their inner circle. If they don't, they become in danger of hearing only the info that their inner circle wants them to hear.
by Incipient | 2025-11-28 02:36:20+00:00
1000 acres - for crop, typically located in our hot and dry areas - is a hobby farm. 1000 acres in the wetter and greener areas running dairy cattle could be more commercial (but I lack experience there). The people I know running commercial farms are 10,000+ hectares.

What pulls up the average would be our cattle stations (ranches for the Americans) if they count as farms. These are huge - eg. Big ones 2-6 million acres.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-28 02:39:09+00:00
I'm not using the word "forever" literally. Please try to give some benefit of the doubt.

For one, the company can stop hosting the installers when it goes out of business (but they should do their best to not leave customers in the cold). And if they don't have 30 year old files around, I won't complain too hard (but I will make fun of them if they lost the ability to look back at their main product historically).
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-28 02:39:43+00:00
That's the inverse. Mass surveillance is bad so it should be banned, vs. using AI to thwart proprietary lock-in is good and so shouldn't be banned.

But also, is the inverse even wrong? If some store has a local CCTV that keeps recordings for a month in case someone robs them, there is no central feed/database and no one else can get them without a warrant, that's not really that objectionable. If Amazon pipes the feed from every Ring camera to the government, that's very different.
by kyledrake | 2025-11-28 02:39:49+00:00
I'm hoping I'm only at the halfway point in my life. So many cool and interesting things have developed in my existence, and there are so many more cool and interesting things to come! Looking forward as I have for the last 17 years to reading about them on HN as they happen.

Not sure what I would tell my young self back in the 90s first. Self driving cars, LLMs that can fix bugs I've been trying to fix for 12 years. Maybe I would start with "Linux distros where you don't have to manually compile 15 random dependencies to run a single piece of software".
by rexpop | 2025-11-28 02:39:59+00:00
Ugh, your attitude really pisses me off, but I want to help you because my liberation is bound up in yours, so here goes.

> It's layers above me that need to hear it

Most workers socialized under capitalism feel this way, that the power rests at the top of the hierarchy and IF ONLY THEY KNEW, they could FIX THINGS. Well, guess what? Your job is to keep them from knowing. You, as a leaf-node of the hierarchy, operate "the sharp end of the system" where "all ambiguity is resolved."[0] You exist to DO the WORK, and that includes the "theory building"[1] from which the owners of the business pay you to be insulated.

However you interpret that on a moral level, practically speaking it means that YOU and your peer practicioners are actually the ones with the power and the (sometimes merely implicit) mandate to enact whichever policy you think the "layers above" ought to impose.

If you REALLY need something from the higher-ups, the only real way to get it is to march on the boss and, with sufficient leverage, demand it as a collective. You're going to have to talk to your peers to organize that, or we'll slide further into thisbdystopia in which "we fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice."[2]

To effect lasting change, one must act with consistent commitment alongside one's peers, rather than waiting for a moment of grace from the "layers above."

"Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it."[2]

0. How Complex Systems Fail

1. Programming as Theory Building, Naur

2. The Dispossessed, LeGuin
by erikerikson | 2025-11-28 02:41:17+00:00
In my opinion and in this context the common striped-down-to-its-consistent-core usage is taking the actions that expose one's inner/core emotional space/thoughts/feelings. FWIW I would agree that this doesn't have to be a true vulnerability in the dictionary or any other sense. I think many people talk past each other a lot without knowing it with this word. There is a lot of diversity in specific semantics so good question. The idea that one is vulnerable when one is known seems to encode the victim mindset many get stuck in but that's reality for many. Even when I yack at my therapists for years they still only learn small slivers of my whole person so certainly the broader being is not so vulnerable by sharing just little moments. I think openness is true strength (obvious caveats for secrets like passwords/PINs/et cetera. The contradicting position seems to be that by withholding and looking for opening for attack you position yourself for "winning". In the meantime, it seems to me, you lock in isolation and losing, missing your opportunity to connect, learn, and grow increasing your vulnerability over time. Busy night, rushed through writing so hopefully not too many errors or stupid thoughts.

[edit: Giving up control seems to be a common feature. Maybe more simply being willing to cooperate when your interactant could defect.]
by m-p-3 | 2025-11-28 02:42:24+00:00
PebbleOS was quite polished compared to the other RTOS out there. The animations were smooth most of the time, and responsiveness was great, the concept of the timeline is genius. The Pebble team made sure that it was accomplishing its main purpose (always displaying time, and time related events) really well, and then built everything around that.

I hope this revival will be sustainable and bring back some of that brilliance.
by mattm | 2025-11-28 02:45:36+00:00
Reminds me of a blog post I once read from a manager writing about all the qualities of being a good manager. I read it nodding along that they all seemed like good traits. Then in the comment section there was a post from someone saying something like "You were my manager at one point and honestly you were one of the worst managers I've had in my career. I didn't see many of these behaviours from you". The author responded with something like "I don't disagree. There's sometimes a gap between knowing and doing"
by epolanski | 2025-11-28 02:47:03+00:00
Honestly I wish people stuck with good old forums. There's forums for everything out there, in every niche, gaming, modding, hardware, cars, boats.

Every single community you can think of has likely a great forum out there, easily readable and searchable, where discussions on single topics last _years_ and go in extreme informative depth, the kind of depth that no platform like HN/Lobsters/LinkedIn can ever dream of.

The closest surrogate we have are issue trackers (like GitHub) or mailing lists, but even those offer such a poor UX that I can't but wonder..
by apatheticonion | 2025-11-28 02:47:32+00:00
Yeah, sadly, it seems almost impossible to get anything higher than 30% efficiency (theoretically with a Stirling engine, if you can find one, haha) out of a thermal battery without extreme pressures and temperatures.

Back-of-the-napkin math felt promising. A 1kg block of sand heated to 500 degrees Celsius should contain about 100Wh of electricity. Scaling that capacity up is easy, as it's just about adding sand or temperature (+ an effective method of transporting heat across the sand - maybe sand + used motor oil?).

Assuming 80% efficiency, tariff arbitrage (buy electricity during off-peak hours and use it during high-price hours) would pay off very quickly. In my area (Australia) it would be a matter of months - but the low real-world efficiency and lack of parts make it impossible.

It could work for heating during winter, though perhaps an AC/heatpump with the condenser a couple metres underground would be better value for money.
by nextos | 2025-11-28 02:48:09+00:00
IMHO, this remains a great space to explore. You type some formal specification in e.g. Hoare logic, and a mix of SAT/SMT and LLMs autocomplete it. Correct by definition.

It would also facilitate keeping engineers in the loop, who would decompose the problem into an appropriate set of formally specified functions.

They could also chip in when necessary to complete difficult proofs or redefine the functions.
by Andaith | 2025-11-28 02:48:43+00:00
Because you have an idea for a product/service that you think people will want/need enough that they'll pay for it?

Because you think you can create the product/service before you go bankrupt, and that you can then sell it for a price the market can bear that will allow you to make a profit?

It's not just a coin flip, which is the impression you get looking at statistics too much.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-28 02:49:16+00:00
Now I'm kind of curious if you give an LLM the disassembly of a proprietary firmware blob and tell it to turn it into human-readable source code, how good is it at that?

You could probably even train one to do that in particular. Take existing open source code and its assembly representations as training data and then treat it like a language translation task. Use the context to guess what the variable names were before the original compiler discarded them etc.
by anonym29 | 2025-11-28 02:50:14+00:00
Even with a flawed messenger pointing the wrong tools at the wrong target, isn't "avoiding ultraprocessed foods, seed oils, pesticides, and fluoride" still fundamentally a step in the right direction, compared to previous politically-connected health campaigns, like the infamous one not so long ago to "get out and move", which placed blame on kids for being unable to out-exercise a bad diet, while doing absolutely nothing to criticize or curtail the industry that pumps carbonated water full of sugar and then deliberately markets it to impressionable, easily addicted, easily manipulated children?

All criticism levelled at the people loading obscene amounts of sugar into bread, tomato sauce, baby formula, water, and every other food under the sun is good criticism, even if it comes from a sometimes-problematic mouth.
by K0balt | 2025-11-28 02:50:33+00:00
To be fair, I switched when apple silicon cut my compile time by 75 percent even using x86 emulation, dollar for dollar, and I got 2x battery life out of the deal for free. I run Linux most of the time in a VM these days, but I also really enjoy the ability to run largish (70b) models at Q6 with reasonable performance, thanks to the unified memory. They got some stuff pretty right, have to give them that.
by N_Lens | 2025-11-28 02:51:02+00:00
This kind of disgusting behaviour is the default wherever a large asymmetry of power and information exists (Such as with Google senior leadership). This should also make anyone wary of the current attempts at government overreach and surveillance such as Chat Control in the EU and the various attempts in the US (Flock cameras, Palantir and the entire host of private sector surveillance complex).
by TSiege | 2025-11-28 02:51:03+00:00
People used to literally live with the livestock attached to home or even under the same roof. This was probably the case for most of agricultural history.

Factory farming is bad, over use of antibiotics in live stock is bad. But OP's point is that this is how many of the diseases in human history and therefor unlikely we would ever be able to avoid this while raising animals for food. As they said, both are true
by FiddlerClamp | 2025-11-28 02:51:14+00:00
Interestingly, Peanuts started with a focus on Shermy and Violet as the 'straight men' and young(er) Charlie Brown as the comic upstart. Snoopy shows up fairly soon, but he doesn't even seem to be CB's pet for the first while.

It's fascinating to see Lucy, Linus, Schroeder and Sally grow from tots or babies to the developed characters we know today.
by bhouston | 2025-11-28 02:54:15+00:00
Nice design! I recently switched my TrueNAS setup from a bunch of HDDs to a 8 NVMes (with an HHD volume now as only long-term "offline" archiving.) No more trying to optimize the system to get 10G speeds, it just is crazy fast, no matter what type of tasks I do. I haven't yet switched from my massive case yet though - I am not sure there is DYI cases that can handle 8 NVMes yet, but it is the future.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-11-28 02:54:32+00:00
Sometimes the right move is to get a job in your degreed field with a company that is already successful, and make your mark to some extent. A big company or a multinational can be like entering a soul-crushing career, but if you don't like it you don't have to stay forever. It can be good to have early familiarity with the inside workings of massive bureaucracy even if that is not going to be your everyday destiny, as an entrepreneur some of the biggest clients may be the most bureaucratic you will have to deal with.

Also if you want to rejoin a large firm sometime in the future and hit the ground running, some corporate experience can put you head & shoulders above others if you have that on your resume.

OTOH, when it comes to biomedical devices, I don't think some of the advances in artificial heart development would have been possible without at least one doctor becoming a leading heart surgeon beforehand.
by anonym29 | 2025-11-28 02:55:27+00:00
Is including a json schema validator and running the output through the validator against the input prompt, such that you can detect when the output doesn't match the schema, and optionally retry until it does match (possibly with a max number of attempts before it throws an error) too complex of an idea for the target implementation concept you were envisioning?

It certainly doesn't intuitively sound like it matches the "Do one thing" part of the Unix philosophy, but it does seem to match the "and do it well" part.

That said, I can totally understand a counterargument which proposes that schema validation and processing logic should be something else that someone desiring reliability pipes the output into.
by gpm | 2025-11-28 02:55:32+00:00
> I was obviously talking about grid scale, that's what matters.

As demonstrated by the fine article, it is not the only scale that matters.

> Nuclear power is one of the most insanely regulated industries due to the misinformed work of science denier green militants and populist politics.

Nuclear power is a highly regulated industry for two very very good reasons

- It's incredible destructive power if you cut corners. See chernobyl and then realize that it was far from a worst case and every nuclear power plant has the capacity to do 1000x worse than that if enough corners are cut. No other form of energy, not even fossil fuels with global warming, comes close in terms of potential downside per kwh generated. And humans inevitably cut corners in the absence of a strong regulatory regime.

- It's incredible destructive power if weaponized, potentially resulting in species ending wars.

You're showing your own ignorance with regards to LCOE.
by epolanski | 2025-11-28 02:55:38+00:00
Companies where software is a cost and not an asset tend to be chilly.

You have to help the warehouse workers to optimize their picking pathing by some priority, the e-commerce to release a configurator for their new shiny car, scrape competitor's products and report it as an excel, build some search tool to help customer care find information quicker, etc, etc.

Nothing ground breaking that's gonna make your shareholders billions, but helps the business and pays you the bills without pyramid climbing or particular stress.

Of course, the pay is rarely comparable, but we're still talking way above the average salaries that can give you a comfortable life.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-11-28 02:56:07+00:00
Maybe it'd then be a good idea to have labs secretly funded by a joint venture half-US, half-Chinese, in China, doing gain-of-function research on these?

And then maybe that if some shit hits the fan, it'd then be a great idea to ask someone neck and tie deep in that funding and in that research to act as the "expert" to tell us if we should put masks on or not once it leaks?