MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by derbOac | 2026-01-13 22:03:53+00:00
I've also had to deal with the IRB a lot as a professor. The retroactive application is extremely weird (although maybe better than nothing?).

This seems like one of those situations that would usually require regular review to err on the side of caution if nothing else. It's worth pointing out there are exceptions though:

https://grants.nih.gov/sites/default/files/exempt-human-subj...

Generally those exceptions fall into "publicly observable behavior", which I guess I could see this falling into?

It's ethically unjustified how the whole thing actually happened but I guess I can see an IRB coming to an exemption decision. I would probably disagree with that decision but I could see how it would happen.

In some weird legalistic sense I can also see an IRB exempting it because the study already happened and they couldn't do anything about it. It's such a weird thing to do and IRBs do weird things sometimes.
by rsanek | 2026-01-13 22:04:05+00:00
Here's a couple concrete examples I found. It seems like most have to rely on multiple revenue streams for it to work -- something like 1/3 reader revenue (membership), 1/3 grants/philanthropy, 1/3 earned income (events, merchandise, etc).

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ferret_(website)

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Correspondent
by GenericCanadian | 2026-01-13 22:04:22+00:00
Good learning resources for those curious:

- https://taintedcoders.com/ (I'm the author)

- https://bevy.org/learn/book/intro/

- https://www.youtube.com/@chrisbiscardi

- https://www.youtube.com/@PhaestusFox

Lots of good stuff on the official Bevy discord too
by MadnessASAP | 2026-01-13 22:04:34+00:00
It's strange, but is it really surprising? It's not like hypocrisy and moat building are new things in American politics.

These days I wouldn't even be surprised to discover it was intentional. Some person or group wanted to ensure they could engage in sex trafficking with a superficially legal cover, but didn't want it to actually be legal.
by Groxx | 2026-01-13 22:04:49+00:00
There is the nuance that much code that is available publicly (which includes a GIGANTIC amount of that "written by people in their spare time" stuff) is put there for the explicit goal of showing other people all the details so they can read, reuse, and modify it. Open-source licenses in some form are incredibly popular, though the details vary, and seeing your side project in a product that 100k people use is usually just neat, not "you stole from me".

Artworks have their relatively-popular creative-commons stuff, and some of those follow a similar "do whatever" vibe, but I far more frequently see "attribution required" which generally requires it at the point of use, i.e. immediately along-side the art-piece. And if it's something where someone saw your work once and made something different separately, the license generally does not apply. LLMs have no way to do that kind of attribution though, and hammer out stuff that looks eerily familiar but isn't pixel-precise to the original, so it feels like and probably is an unapproved use of their work.

The code equivalent of this is usually "if you have source releases, include it there" or a very few have the equivalent of "please shove a mention somewhere deep in a settings screen that nobody will tap on". Using that code for training is I think relatively justifiable. The licenses matter (and have clearly been broadly ignored, which should not be allowed) but if it wasn't prohibited, it's generally allowed, and if you didn't want that you would need to choose a restrictive license or not publish it.

Plus, like, artists generally are their style, in practical terms. So copying their style is effectively impersonation. Coders on the other hand often intentionally lean heavily on style erasing tools like auto-formatters and common design patterns and whatnot, so their code blends cleanly in more places rather than sounding like exclusively "them".

---

I'm generally okay with permissive open source licensed code being ingested and spat back out in a useful product. That's kinda the point of those licenses. If it requires attribution, it gets murky and probably leans towards "no" - it's clearly not a black-box re-implementation, the LLMs are observing the internals and sometimes regurgitate it verbatim and that is generally not approved when humans do it.

Do I think the biggest LLM companies are staying within the more-obviously-acceptable licenses? Hell no. So I avoid them.

Do I trust any LLM business to actually stick to those licenses? ... probably not right now. But one could exist. Hopefully it'd still have enough training data to be useful.
by quietsegfault | 2026-01-13 22:05:11+00:00
There is no privacy in amateur radio. That is not a matter of preference, it is a regulatory and physical reality.

Amateur radio transmissions are public, unencrypted, and attributable. Callsigns are required, modes and frequencies are well known, and transmissions are trivially direction-findable. In a country like Iran, where RF spectrum is actively monitored and unauthorized communications are treated as a security issue, transmitting on amateur bands is effectively broadcasting your location and intent. Direction finding is routine, fast, and does not require exotic equipment. One transmission can be enough.

In the US and most other countries, amateur radio is tightly regulated. Encryption to obscure content is explicitly prohibited. Ignoring this can result in fines, seizure of equipment, and loss of license. Foreign operators encouraging or participating in such use are not insulated from consequences simply because the target country is authoritarian.

I did not claim to have a better solution. That's the point. When the threat model includes surveillance, attribution, and enforcement, there may be no safe civilian workaround. Suggesting amateur radio in this context is not “imperfect but helpful”, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what amateur radio actually is and how it is regulated.

Amateur radio can't provide privacy, safety, or reliable information flow under an active crackdown. Pretending otherwise is irresponsible.
by meindnoch | 2026-01-13 22:05:14+00:00
>I've spent many hours learning to play guitar and ukulele but I'm really not very good, and probably never will be - but I can hear the music in my head I want to create. I'm not interested in monetary gain at all, just being able to hear it for real and maybe share it with some people.

Luckily there are hundreds of MIDI editor DAWs available. Open the piano roll, and write down the music note by note. Surely, it's not that hard if you can hear it in your head.
by alexjplant | 2026-01-13 22:05:38+00:00
Spotify failed and continues to fail to verify the provenance of the music on their platform. They also routinely allow bedroom EDM and trap producers to associate their releases with older artists just because they have the same name. If they have hundreds of millions of dollars to sign podcasters to exclusive deals then they certainly have the resources to respond to these egregious cases of misclassification. Unfortunately their report submission system will only allow this class of problem if you can verify that you're the copyright holder. This therefore means (unless I'm missing something) that it's easier to submit fraudulent music than it is to take it down.

Do not shift blame here. Spotify is actively complicit in this. Hell, they could sic a few crafty data scientists on this and build an ML model to weed these bad tracks out. It'd be great PR for them ("we're saving artists from stolen revenue and preserving the sanctity of their work") and would be a novel contribution to the field of fraud prevention. The problem is that they're not incentivized to do so.

And, by the way, card transaction fees exist to cover the exact case you're talking about. Card companies make you whole in the case of fraud.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-01-13 22:05:42+00:00
> even though you have no reasonable expectation that such commits are likely to contain malicious code and you're actually just butthurt

Other than the tiny bit where that's not true.
An institution just demonstrated that they are willing to submit malicious code, and don't feel any need to tell you that they did so (even after the fact). It's perfectly reasonable to ask if they've done this before.
by madhadron | 2026-01-13 22:06:30+00:00
Indemnification only means something if the indemnifying party exists and is solvent. If copyright claims on training data got traction, it would be neither, so it doesn't matter if they provide this or not. They probably won't exist as a solvent entity in a couple years anyway, so even the question of whether the indemnification means anything will go away.
by tensor | 2026-01-13 22:06:41+00:00
> If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me,

This is a rather sad take. If someone learned from my art or music and did something new and more popular, I would be happy! I had influence, I mattered. That new more popular work takes nothing away from my previous work. In fact, when I do science I'm doing it explicitly for this reason, to build on.

For me, creating music is not about "being the best" or "making more money than some other artist." It's about telling the stories I want to tell. An AI would not tell my stories, ever. It might produce things that somewhat similar, but it won't tell a human story, just a shallow imitation.

On the flip side, AI can be immensely useful. For example, stemming means that DJs or visualizer applications can do more with music. Perhaps AI can be used to create interesting new effects, or interesting new instruments or sounds. It can give ideas and help with inspiration.

I honestly have a hard time seeing AI actually driving musicians out of business because it can't tell a story. And it can't do that because it hasn't lived a life. Yes, I can see it producing low quality ad-jingles or low quality filler tracks like you see in spotify, so some people will be impacted. But we're long past time for some form of universal basic income to deal with this. It's not just artists that need a basic income at this point.
by Majora320 | 2026-01-13 22:07:02+00:00
> The decline of the US means that there will be increasingly fewer deep-pocketed customers able to pay 5 figures for anything.

Those at the top are doing very well, it's those without access to capital who are struggling. America in decline looks like a bifurcated economy where low-paying jobs catering to the desires of the wealthy take up an increasingly large share of the economy. You can decide for yourself to what extent this is already happening.
by sodafountan | 2026-01-13 22:07:13+00:00
yeah, there's just really nothing left to discuss. Apple could have been a real leader in the AI space had they hired the right researchers to implement LLMs and beaten OpenAI to the punch.

I understand that AI assitants need access to tools in order to do anything on a computer, I've been working with AI augmented development for a few months now and everytime I need a prompt to run a tool it asks for permission first, or just straight up gives me the command to paste into a terminal.

ideally this would have been abstracted away if siri were an LLM, with Apple controlling which apis siri has access to and bipassing user confirmation all together.

It would have been neat if I were able to say, "Hey, Siri: send a text to John Smith with a playfully angry prose thanking him for not inviting me to the party". which would have the LLM automatically craft the message and send upon confirmation, perhaps with a disclaimer "made with ai" at the bottom of the text or something along those lines.

"Hey, Siri: What's the weather in Los Angeles, California" would fallback to a web api endpoint.

"Hey, Siri: How do I compile my C# application without Visual Studio" would provide step-by-step instructions on working with MSBUILD.

different prompts would fallback on different apis that only Apple would expose. Obviously not allowing the user to gain root access to the system, which is what you would expect from Apple.

I guess from a purely technical standpoint, you'd train two models, one as "Safe" and the other as "Unsafe". "Safe" is what would be used by the end-user, allowing them to access safe data, apis, messaging, web.. you name it. "Unsafe" would be used internally at Apple and would have system-wide access, access to unlimited user data, root privileges, perhaps unsafe image generation and web search... basically no limit to what an LLM could achieve.
by nozzlegear | 2026-01-13 22:07:14+00:00
> You could do that for free. Most are obviously looking for more.

And everyone can use Pornhub for free, yet Pornhub still makes money on their premium subscriptions. Are those also parasocial relationships? Is all porn just a big parasocial relationship?!

> It kind of sounds like you are trying to justify whatever it is you are doing, in which case you do you.

You know I thought about putting the obligatory "I don't use OF" in my first comment, but felt it wouldn't be necessary. I see that it was; by the way have you stopped beating your wife?
by giantrobot | 2026-01-13 22:07:17+00:00
Couriers and USB flash drives can be pretty effective. They're high latency but can be very high bandwidth. Look at the El Paquete network in Cuba[0] as inspiration. Self-contained HTML/JavaScript SPAs can provide navigation and the likes of TiddlyWiki[1] can allow for collaboration. A network of couriers can move as fast as road traffic and distribute stuff pretty widely.

Contents can be re-shared locally over ad-hoc or mesh WiFi networks even without Internet access.

Encryption and steganography can obscure the contents of drives from casual inspection. You can stuff a lot of extraneous data in Office XML documents that are just zip files and look innocuous when opened.

1. For current events content add descriptions, locations, and timestamps to everything. The recipients need that context.

2. Even unencrypted files can be verified with cryptographic signatures. These can be distributed on separate channels including Bluetooth file transfers.

3. Include offline installers for browsers like Dillo or Firefox. Favor plain text formats where possible. FAT32 has the broadest support in terms of file system for the flash drives. Batch, PowerShell, and bash scripts can also be effective in doing more complex things while not needing local installation or invasive installations on people's computers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki
by bb88 | 2026-01-13 22:07:42+00:00
States like Iran have signal catchers, where they can get a rough idea where a signal is coming from through triangulation. The US military has had this for over 20 years now. Often these coordinates are fed in as targets into weapons systems.

If you're going the radio route these come to mind:

Meshtastic: 1W, one band, local. Useful if Iran doesn't know about it. But easy to jam and probably triangulate.

Wifi Halow: 1W, can possibly hop between bands, but probably also really easy to jam and triangulate.

WSPR: Possibly good, transmitters can hide in the noise floor, and can go long distances with 100mW of power, but slow. Probably triangulable, very easy to jam once located in the spectrum. Data can be transmitted and received with off the shelf components.

Military Radios: Very good. Transmitters can frequency hop, making triangulation and jamming difficult. Also encryption. You can easily transmit in the same frequency space that Iran would be using to avoid jamming. But also, mostly unobtanium. I have heard stories about US military radios showing up at Ham Fests.
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-13 22:07:48+00:00
Related today:

90M people. 118 hours of silence. One nation erased from the internet

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46603910

What we know about Iran's Internet shutdown https://blog.cloudflare.com/iran-protests-internet-shutdown/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602066)

Among a number of other posts previously getting into it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46591974

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542683
by casey2 | 2026-01-13 22:07:49+00:00
Suddenly people change their tune, what gives? All we are talking about is the forced wealth transfer of trillions of dollars to the richest megacorps on the planet.

Most people didn't choose to be part of your moon shot death cult. Only the people at the tippy top of the pyramid get golden parachutes off Musk's exploding rocket.

They never changed their position, corpos shouldn't get any money! That's always been the position. They are inherently unethical meat grinders.
by galleywest200 | 2026-01-13 22:08:43+00:00
> For an individual, renting and managing one's own domain is a costly PITA that gets you less than nothing in return.

A counterpoint: When I see someone trying to sell me professional services, and their email is some @gmail.com or similar domain I immediately think they are less professional. Getting a domain for your blog or business is useful in certain regards.
by bayarearefugee | 2026-01-13 22:08:44+00:00
> Whereas the art is was trained on is, broadly speaking, copywritten

The overwhelmingly vast majority of the code you're talking about (basically, anything that doesn't explicitly disavow its copyright by being placed in the public domain, and there's some legal debate if that is even something that you can do proactively) is just as copyright protected as the art is.

Open Source does not mean copyright free.

"Free Software" certainly doesn't mean copyright free (the GPL only has any meaning at all because of copyright law).
by deng | 2026-01-13 22:08:47+00:00
There was no "demonization" about these things even remotely comparable to what we are witnessing now w.r.t. AI generated music (and I'm old enough to remember most of these things). Of course there was intense dislike from certain groups representing the "old-school" around new styles of music and new techniques. However, at the same time, you also had the "new-wave" which loved it and made it successful. For instance, a ton of people hated Disco music, at the same time, you had a ton of people who genuinely loved it. Same with practically any kind of electronic music. This simply does not exist with GenAI music. People listen to GenAI music because they either don't care, or don't know, not because they genuinely prefer it. There's absolutely nothing new about GenAI music that would make it exciting.
by JeremyNT | 2026-01-13 22:08:50+00:00
I doubt a random internet commenter can persuade you, but LLMs and tools built around them are fundamentally different from NFT/crypto.

NFTs/Crypto are just ways to do crimes/speculate/evade regulations. They aren't useful outside of "financial engineering." You were right to dismiss them.

LLMs are extremely useful for real world use cases. There are a lot of practical and ethical concerns with their use: energy usage, who owns them, who profits from them, slop generation, trust erosion... I mean, a lot. And there are indeed hucksters selling AI snake oil everywhere, which may be what tripped off your BS meter.

But fundamentally, LLMs are very useful, and comparing them to NFT/Crypto does a disservice to the utility of the tech.
by wat10000 | 2026-01-13 22:09:06+00:00
China spent a century being invaded and oppressed by the outside world, culminating in a massive war against a much smaller country that killed maybe 20 million of their people and which was only won due to a huge amount of outside help.

Today, China is the first or second richest and most powerful country in the world.

That trajectory changed when Mao came into power. Maybe it could have been done better, but he's the one who did it.
by jrm4 | 2026-01-13 22:09:41+00:00
I respect this choice, but also I feel like one might need to respect that it may end up not being particularly "externally" valuable.

Which is to say, if it's a thing you love spending your time on and it tickles your brain in that way, go for it, whatever it is.

But (and still first takeaways) if the goal is "making good and useful software," today one has to be at least open to the possibility that "not using AI" will be like an accountant not using a calculator.
by dcastm | 2026-01-13 22:10:05+00:00
I live in Spain. I’ve been in the industry for the last 10 years.

I’ve seen from a very close distance several European companies move a big part of their operations to India. Have had close friends laid off recently and seen them struggle for months to find a new jobs. Plus, I see tighter freelance market these days.

This was unthinkable not long ago.
by super_flanker | 2026-01-13 22:10:23+00:00
> I was referring to mandate to use it at big companies.

I've worked in almost all of big tech, and these companies don't create mandate just because "Trust me bro" or to gain some "political achievements". Their are teams who champion new technology/languages, they create proof of what new technology will bring to the table which cannot be filled with existing ones.
I left amazon 7 years ago so don't know about recent development. However at Meta/Google teams are encouraged to choose from the mandate languages and if they can't they need to request for exemption and justify the exception.
by mystraline | 2026-01-13 22:10:37+00:00
Maybe his corpse can identify as 'living'?

If you think that's repugnant, then I refer you to his comic where he parodies a black engineer as white.

https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/uh21my/scott_adams_...

The guy had a point about 1990s business culture, but lost that narrative down extremism and conspiracy theories. Guy was pure trash for the last 10 years.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-13 22:10:47+00:00
yes and no. "agile" has become doctrinaire and "one size fits all." i miss the eXtreme Programming era where standups, pair-programming, test-first, timeboxing, etc. were all "tools in a toolbox" to be applied as needed. i think the OP is experiencing a world where they're told "oh, here's AGILE. you have to do everything in this book," which i think i would push back on as well.

but... if you're going to do standups and retrospectives... i agree with you. do them synchronously. the idea is to get everyone to listen to everyone else. the reason they're STAND-ups is 'cause everyone's supposed to be standing so there's motivation to keep them short. this often makes it difficult to do "follow the sun" development. i quit a job a couple years back because my management insisted my engineers on the US west coast be included in standups for teams in Pune (India).

and that 1-on-1's are for surfacing issues that haven't come up elsewhere seems like received wisdom among my peer group. it seems to work well for me, so +1 on that too.

the phrase "when done correctly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. i bet people who have bad experience with these practices were in situations where they weren't done correctly.

one of my problems with environments where management thinks devs are interchangeable bots motivated only by money is that there is zero motivation for management to change their approach when it doesn't work. if they think the only thing that motivates people is money, they think they have to add more money or fire their devs and get devs that are appropriately motivated by cash.
by Finbarr | 2026-01-13 22:11:01+00:00
I'd recommend trying Gemini for the escapes. Claude was quite superficial and only appeared to be trying to break out at the surface level. Gemini was very creative and has come up with a whole sequence of escapes that is making me rethink whether I should even be trying to patch them, given preventing agent escapes isn't a stated goal of the project.