MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dahart | 2026-02-19 21:54:06+00:00
The right to make derived works is covered by copyright law. It’s not legal to play madlibs on something and call it a derived work unless you already have the copyrights. If the edit distance is too small, proving infringement isn’t hard. If you change more words, you’re still in violation of copyright on originality grounds, but it might be harder for someone to prove it.

The LLMs question is more complicated. If you ask AI for a rewrite of a specific work, that’s infringement on grounds of originality. It’s also infringement when you don’t have the rights to the work that you feed to the LLM. This is part of the debate over AI training, and is covered in the Copyright Office’s draft on generative AI under the Prima Facie Infringement section https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

AI companies aren’t arguing over derived works, they are trying to get approval to classify AI training as Fair Use, because they know they are infringing existing copyright law. The Copyright Office might end up allowing it and changing the law.
by hathawsh | 2026-02-19 21:54:06+00:00
Please help me understand better, because it feels like part of the problem has already been solved. Specifically, I've been told that the independent journalists that I watch on YouTube Premium receive a portion of my subscription fee. Is that not a form of micropayments? The system seems to work well enough for videos. Isn't there some way to adapt that kind of system to other media?
by oxag3n | 2026-02-19 21:54:27+00:00
> We're thinking about AI wrong.

And this write up is not an exception.

Why even bother thinking about AI, when Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs openly tell us what they want (quote from recent Dwarkesh interview) - "Then further down the spectrum, there’s 90% less demand for SWEs, which I think will happen but this is a spectrum."

So save thinking and listen to intent - replace 90% of SWEs in near future (6-12 months according to Amodei).
by SV_BubbleTime | 2026-02-19 21:54:53+00:00
Well, it’s half if the product is equal.

Is it? Honestly, I still chuckle about black Nazis and the female Indian Popes. That was my first impression of Gemini, and first impressions are hard to break. I used Gemini’s VL (vision) for something and it refused to describe because it assumed it was NSFW imagery, which is was not.

I also question statis as an obvious follow up. Is Gemini equal to Opus? Today? Tomorrow? Has Google led the industry thus far and do I expect them to continue?

Counterpoint to that would be that with natural language input and output, that LLM specific tooling is rare and it is easy to switch around if you commoditize the product backend.
by Svoka | 2026-02-19 21:55:23+00:00
While price is definitely important, results are extremely important. Gemini often falls into the 'didn't do' it part of the spectrum, this days Opus almost always does 'good enough'.

Gemini definitely has its merits but for me it just doesn't do what other models can. I vibe-coded an app which recommends me restaurants. The app uses gemini API to make restaurants given bunch of data and prompt.

App itself is vibe-coded with Opus. Gemini didn't cut it.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-19 21:55:35+00:00
Europe isn't the one to watch, IMO. It's China. China has already significantly increased it's R&D funding and in some areas, particularly solar and battery tech, it's world leading.

China also has been playing the long game with the build out of it's technology capabilities. I could very easily see them doing the same for medicine. They aren't afraid of losing money on investment for a particularly long period of time. They are currently thinking in decades and not quarters.
by pzmarzly | 2026-02-19 21:55:35+00:00
Decentralized or direct P2P micropayments are unlikely to work, true. But why are there so few attempts at centralized micropayments providers? The only success stories I see in the space are GitHub Sponsors and LiberaPay, where their entire thing is aggregating payments together (so you have 1 big card transaction a month per user, not 20 small ones) and doing KYC procedures with donation receivers (once GitHub, or rather Stripe, says you are legit, you can take money from any GitHub user).
by zahlman | 2026-02-19 21:55:45+00:00
> it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable).

"One" is the operative word here, supposing this includes only humans and excludes AI agents. When code is executed, it does get read (by the computer). Making that happen is a conscious choice on the part of a human operator.

The same kind of conscious choice can feed writing to an LLM to see what it does in response. That is much the same kind of "execution", just non-deterministic (and, when given any tools beyond standard input and standard output, potentially dangerous in all the same ways, but worse because of the nondeterminism).
by dredmorbius | 2026-02-19 21:56:06+00:00
This has been a long-unfulfilled promise of technology for literally decades.

I remember multiple iterations of various made-to-measure clothing initiatives, dating to at least the 1990s. Levi Straus offered this in its San Francisco Union Square flagship at one point, as did other clothing producers. One of the few extant references I can find is a 16 year old Tripadvisor question with answers indicating that the option existed many years earlier than that: <https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g60713-i30-k3392413-Ma...>

More recently, in the late aughts / early teens, there was something of a flood of made-to-measure selvage jeans merchants, though I believe these have also largely ceased to operate. When I checked in on them, prices were far higher than off-the-rack options, not by percentages but by multiples, as in 3--5 times as expensive. I suspect that these to remained niche.

The broader lesson is probably that mass-produced, mediocre-fitting clothes simply offer vastly greater economies of scale that no element of automation or technology can overcome.

For men (speaking from experience) and likely women having tailored clothing made in a lower-wage region (Hong Kong, India, and Thailand seem to be the usual suspects) may remain an option. Or the self-provisioning option via a sewing machine, as noted in TFA.

Closer to HN's interests: similar failures of promises for individually-tailored technologically-mediated options to emerge, unless those serve the interests of advertisers or other mass manipulators seems to be a profoundly persistent tendency. In light of present trends (AI / LLM) I'm calibrating expectations accordingly.
by aaroninsf | 2026-02-19 21:56:13+00:00
Ximm's Law applies to the "plateau" of 10%

In other words: notionally, if not literally, by the time trailing numbers are collected they are out of date.

This is of course axiomatic, but, that staleness is a serious matter in this particular moment.

It's a cliché that six months can be a lifetime on the bleeding edge of tech.

This is the first time in my career that is more or less literally true.

Humans reason poorly with non-linear change.

This entire article is a demonstration of that.
by darth_avocado | 2026-02-19 21:56:21+00:00
While I agree, US is still the top destination for research, I don’t agree with “Brain Drain is not a concern” nor do I agree with “We need fewer PhDs”. The real risk of drain is people leaving their fields of expertise to never return. Pretty much all AI startups at the moment are coming from and being built by PhDs. The pace of innovation slows down and it can have huge long term economic impact. Having fewer PHDs also exacerbates that problem. If fewer people are looking for funding in the first place, you’d have even fewer ideas that could end up contributing meaningfully to society. The only solution to funding problems is more funding.
by eesmith | 2026-02-19 21:56:40+00:00
The "humans are fish" idea comes from cladistics.

"Fish", if taken as a monophyletic term, includes land mammals because tetrapods are osteichthyans -- bony fish.

In common use, "fish" is, however a paraphyletic group which excludes tetrapods but otherwise includes all other osteichthyans.

Since starfishes don't include tetrapods, nor vice versa (nor do they share biological features to be in a polyphyletic grouping like "crabs"), the relevant common term is "Animalia" -- "animal".
by rglullis | 2026-02-19 21:56:42+00:00
> They give users 2 choices: a) use their service via their public API, with the client(s) of their choice, at the regular price point; b) use the apps they provide, which use a private API, at a discounted price point.

There was a third choice, which was better than both of the ones presented: use any other client that can talk with our API, at whatever usage rate they deemed acceptable. If the "private API" was accessible via OAuth, then it's hardly "private".

We can argue all day, when I signed up there was nothing saying that access was exclusive via the tools they provided. They changed the rules not because it was costing them more (or even if does, they are losing money on Pro customers anyway so arguing about that is silly) but because they opened themselves for some valid and fair competition.
by h14h | 2026-02-19 21:57:05+00:00
For sure. I imagine it'd be pretty difficult to evaluate the "correct" amount of steer-ability. You'd probably just have to measure a delta in eagerness on a single same task between when given highly-specified prompts, and more open-ended prompts. Probably not dissimilar from how artificialanalysis.ai does their "omniscience index".
by deadbabe | 2026-02-19 21:57:28+00:00
Why do we care about this? Chess AI have long been solved problems and LLMs are just an overly brute forced approach. They will never become very efficient chess players.

The correct solution is to have a conventional chess AI as a tool and use the LLM as a front end for humanized output. A software engineer who proposes just doing it all via raw LLM should be fired.
by solarisos | 2026-02-19 21:57:37+00:00
Exactly. When your total memory is 64KB, all optimization is mature optimization.

It's a fascinating contrast to the modern 'move fast and break things' approach. Back then, if your routine was 3 cycles too slow, the sprite didn't just 'lag'—the entire raster effect collapsed. There was a level of deterministic discipline that we've largely abstracted away in favor of developer velocity.
by autoexec | 2026-02-19 21:57:40+00:00
I don't think that there are very many people who do reject the technology itself. I think that under different circumstances even the people who seem the most hostile towards it would be mostly fine with the chatbots and image generation technology we call AI.

There's understandably some concerns over how it will impact people's jobs in the future, but that's a societal issue, not a problem with the technology.

I think the problem people have is with how that technology was created by people looking to privately profit from the hard work of others without compensation, how it is massively destructive to the environment, how it is being used to harm others, and how the people controlling it are indifferent to the harms they cause at best and at worst are trying to destroy or undermine our society. These are valid concerns to have and it's only natural for it to impact people's attitudes towards the technology as it's been implemented and how its used today.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-19 21:57:47+00:00
I don't assume anything. From what we know about health of the last surviving hunter-gatherers, they suffer significantly less from "diseases of civilization" when taken in proportion to their settled neighbours. Some of those diseases (such as high blood pressure or diabetes 2nd type) seem to be totally absent in them. Cancers do happen, but not as often.

This pattern is quite old. Already ancient Egyptians suffered from civilizational diseases much more than hunter-gatherers, especially the richer ones (heart attacks, gout, cancer).
by AndrewStephens | 2026-02-19 21:57:49+00:00
> As I have described earlier, the race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It encourages other sites to mirror your content.

The problem is that bottom in this case is “free, with ads.” As soon as you post your well researched expensive to produce content, I will summarise it and offer 90% of the experience for free. That’s if Google doesn’t do it first with AI summaries.

There are plenty of crypto projects that tried to do micropayments. They failed mainly due to technical reasons but if they had worked they still would not have gained traction - nobody wants micropayments.
by finnjohnsen2 | 2026-02-19 21:58:11+00:00
I like this. This is an accurate state of AI at this very moment for me. The LLM is (just) a tool which is making me "amplified" for coding and certain tasks.

I will worry about developers being completely replaced when I see something resembling it. Enough people worry about that (or say it to amp stock prices) -- and they like to tell everyone about this future too. I just don't see it.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-02-19 21:58:23+00:00
I remember seeing "Choose Your Own Adventures" early in the 80s and thinking "Hmm.. Zork sure would be cool if it had a few pictures like the CYOA books." And of course, about a month later I saw the first text adventure with illustrations. I don't think I ever played Twin Kingdom Valley, but after reading the wikipedia page, I sort of want to now. Oh... aha!

https://archive.org/details/d64_Twin_Kingdom_Valley_1987_Bug...
by wrongcards | 2026-02-19 21:58:41+00:00
I taught myself to program typing out games and apps from Rainbows magazines in the mid-eighties. I was obsessed with text-adventures, and creating my own, from about age eight and onward.

Playing games back then was a wildly different experience; pre-internet, there was no way to find hints. You'd come to a wall, somehow, and be stuck. I never got to the end of Raaka-Tu, or Madness and the Minotaur, or Bedlam. I wasn't even ten-years-old, and those games were an impossible undertaking.

That said, in 2021, finally got to the end of the first graphical RPG I ever played, Dungeons of Daggorath, and killed the final wizard. I was absurdly pleased with myself that day. That goddamn wizard had been a regret-tinged concern of mine for 39 years.
by kmeisthax | 2026-02-19 21:58:41+00:00
It's important to note that the USA also has some of the fiercest opponents of private gun ownership in the world.

The most important thing to note here is that a majority of the support for gun control in America is cultural. Even the loud-and-proud pro-gun people got extremely shy about their own principles once the Black Panthers started packing heat. On the flipside, it's also not hard to find gun control supporting Democrats that happen to own firearms in their house. There's a related cultural argument over "assault weapons", or "black guns" - i.e. the ones that look like military weapons rather than hunting tools.

The result of all this confusion - and, for that matter, any culture war fight - is a lot of stupid lawmaking designed specifically to work around the edges of 2A while ignoring how guns actually work or how gun laws are normally written. Like, a while back there were bans on purely cosmetic features of guns. Things like rail attachments, that do not meaningfully increase the lethality of the weapon, but happen to be preferred by a certain crowd of masculinity-challenged right-wingers. In other words, a ban on scary-looking guns.

What's going on here is that someone figured out how to make a 3D printed gun that will not immediately explode in your hand on first firing. In the US it's legal to manufacture your own guns, and there's no requirement to serial-number such a gun, which makes it more difficult to trace if that gun is used to commit a crime. You can't really stop someone from making such a "ghost gun" (practically, not legally), so they want to take a page out of the DMCA 1201 playbook and just ban all the tools used to make such a thing possible.

Personally, I don't think that will pass constitutional muster - but that also relies heavily on existing culture-war brained nonsense that happens to be standing constitutional principle. 2A itself can be interpreted in all sorts of different ways. The original interpretation was "no interfering with state-run slave catching militias", and then later that turned into "everyone has the right to own firearms". Nothing stops it from changing again.
by jcranmer | 2026-02-19 21:58:43+00:00
The audits of people under that are going to fall under 2 or 3 categories:

a) People who filled in the wrong number on the spreadsheet that is taxes for whatever reason, and the audit is informing the filer that they filled it out incorrectly. I mean, really, taxes should start with the government sending me the form of what it thinks I owe and I should be making corrections to that, since the government already has this information and has done it, and that would make many of these audits go away.

b) People who misunderstood eligibility requirements and claimed deductions they weren't entitled to.

c) So I don't know how these people are counted, but there are absolutely millionaires and billionaires out there cheating on their taxes and claiming no income (e.g., the current president). It's totally plausible that they get listed in the "under 25k income" audit section despite the fact that they are in fact the uber-rich that is the intended target of the outrage.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-19 21:58:45+00:00
I would assume today that maybe Dioxus or Leptos would be considered. Though that would be the "all in" approach on Rust front to back... it wouldn't really reduce some of the handling conditions levied in the article though.

I find C# can be a really good middle ground on the backend (not a blazor fan)... the syntax and expressiveness improves with every release. You can burrow as lot of patterns from the likes of Go as well as FP approaches. What I don't care for are excessively complex (ie: "Enterprise") environments where complexity is treated like a badge of honor instead of the burden of spaghetti that it is in practice.
by contravariant | 2026-02-19 21:58:55+00:00
There's a particular part in the discussion that rubs me the wrong way (which is more about micropayments as alternative to ads, rather than micropayments themselves)

It tends to go something like, if not micropayments then ads, if not ads then subscriptions. And people dislike subscriptions more than ads, and ads more than micropayments so the conclusion is micropayments.

But I don't like the way ads are presented as inevitable. Usually in some alarmist fashion listing all the stuff that would work should this revenue cease.

Ads are a way for the incumbent to seek rent, the eventual return on investment after destroying all alternatives.

So don't complain to me what will happen when I decline to download ads over _my_ network, send tracking from _my_ devices, show them on _my_ screens. When people start listing the giants that will topple the only word that crosses my mind is

Good.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-19 21:59:07+00:00
Not without some major breakthrough. What's hilarious is that all these developers building the tools are going to be the first to be without jobs. Their kids will be ecstatic: "Tell me again, dad, so, you had this awesome and well paying easy job and you wrecked it? Shut up kid, and tuck in that flap, there is too much wind in our cardboard box."
by morgoths_bane | 2026-02-19 21:59:20+00:00
> I only care if it works

Okay but it is probably not going to be a tool that will be reliable or work as expected for too long depending on how complex it is, how easily it can be understood, and how it can handle updates to libraries, etc. that it is using.

Also, what is our trust with this “tool”? E.g. this is to be used in a brain surgery that you’ll undergo, would you still be fine with using something generated by AI?

Earlier you couldn’t even read something it generated, but we’ll trust a “tool” it created because we believe it works? Why do we believe it will work? Because a computer created it? That’s our own bias towards computing that we assume that it is impartial but this is a probabilistic model trained on data that is just as biased as we are.

I cannot imagine that you have not witnessed these models creating false information that you were able to identify. Understanding their failure on basic understandings, how then could we trust it with engineering tasks? Just because “it works”? What does that mean and how can we be certain? QA perhaps but ask any engineer here if companies are giving a single shit about QA while they’re making them shove out so much slop, and the answer is going to be disappointing.

I don’t think we should trust these things even if we’re not developers. There isn’t anyone to hold accountable if (and when) things go wrong with their outputs.

All I have seen AI be extremely good at is deceiving people, and that is my true concern with generative technologies. Then I must ask, if we know that its only effective use case is deception, why then should I trust ANY tool it created?

Maybe the stakes are quite low, maybe it is just a video player that you use to watch your Sword and Sandal flicks. Ok sure, but maybe someone uses that same video player for an exoscope and the data it is presenting to your neurosurgeon is incorrect causing them to perform an action they otherwise would have not done if provided with the correct information.

We should not be so laissez-faire with this technology.
by zapnuk | 2026-02-19 21:59:26+00:00
Gemini 3 was:

1. unreliable in GH copilot. Lots of 500 and 4XX errors. Unusable in the first 2 months

2. not available in vertex ai (europe). We have requirements regarding data residency. Funny enough anthropic is on point with releasing their models to vertex ai. We already use opus and sonnet 4.6.

I hope google gets their stuff together and understands that not everyone wants/can use their global endpoint. We'd like to try their models.
by ajross | 2026-02-19 21:59:34+00:00
Except all of that was widely recognized and reported on at the time. People just didn't care. Lots of people will argue about this stuff until they're blue in the face, but no one is "surprised" by any of the evidence. The malfeasance was going to happen anyway, it's an inevitable consequence of global realpolitik. There's no Rule of Law on the high seas, as it were.

My point really isn't that cynical, it's more optimistic: if you're going to do all that stuff (and let's be honest and admit upfront: we were 100% going to do all that stuff) you might as well feed a bunch of people and garner some good will along the way.
by prabal97 | 2026-02-19 21:59:40+00:00
It's just that the 'Fast' model picks up from a library of existing tracks using a small embedding model.

If you're really curious, you could try the 'Custom LLM' feature - specifically 'Gemini Flash'. Here's the track it created when I gave it the same input.

It titled it, "Throne of the Eternal Night" and here's the justification it came up with, "A glacial, minor-key procession of heavy brass hits and deep sub-pulses, evoking the suffocating grandeur of an ancient, blood-soaked dynasty ending in shadow."

Music link: https://vocaroo.com/14bW1RJyubcC
by ottah | 2026-02-19 21:59:43+00:00
You don't cooperate with abolitionists using compromise. You will never come to an agreement that satisfies both parties. By definition it is impossible.

Interests are also not always clear, any movement that wants to restrict activities using the law, is going to attract opportunistic power-seeking individuals. There's always crazy carve out exceptions in these proposals that allow the wealthy and the powerful to use and possess firearms that regular people cannot reasonably expect to have. It's laws to protect the powerful from the everyone else. Billionaires are creating armed doomsday compounds in countries like New Zealand, while supporting legislation that makes it harder to own a gun for self defense.

Also mass shootings are statistically the least likely cause of a gun related death. They are in the news because they are novel, not because they are likely to happen to most people.