MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-19 23:20:58+00:00
There is absolutely no world where a judge is going to rule that linking to the full text of a book for people to download is Fair Use for research purposes. Successful arguments for Fair Use are significantly more limited in scope than people think, but this isn't even close. They might be able to argue it for their own use (unproven in court since Anthropic settled rather than taking it to trial, but the 1.5 billion dollar settlement indicates Anthropic had little faith in their odds), but there is no possible way you could argue that giving anyone on the internet downloads of the full book is Fair Use or necessary for research.

Out of curiosity, what would you describe a piracy manual as, if providing information as to where and how to illegally download copyrighted material is not it? What additional information would Microsoft have to have provided for it to cross the line into piracy? The only thing more illegal they could have done would be hosting the files themselves, but linking to files hosted otherwhere is still illegal, otherwise the loophole would make it child's play to ignore copyright laws. The Pirate Bay is the most famous example of attempting the legal strategy of "we don't host the copyrighted files, we just link to them", and it resulted in prison time for the founders.
by pessimizer | 2026-02-19 23:21:08+00:00
> I’m in my early 30s and am starting to think about getting a screening.

This is a pretty stupid thing to do unless you've had some sort of symptom or family history. Your protection from illness due to screening is statistical, and jumping out of the calculated recommendation just makes it more likely to hurt you (false positives, false negatives, injuries from the procedure) than to benefit you.

Desperately trying to fabricate a reason is just intentionally trying to hurt yourself.

I'm not against colonoscopies (is anyone?) and I personally had my first one early because of an odd pain. Turned out to be unrelated.

edit: the neurotic desperation for disease screening that I see in a lot of people bothers me a lot because it's this odd fetishization of medical science combined with the active subversion of it. For me it's a weird insistence that all tests are good but that the math behind them is not.
by ToucanLoucan | 2026-02-19 23:21:16+00:00
> What historical precedent is there for infringement of Constitutionally-enumerated rights of others based on suicides?

There is no requirement that a precedent exist for limiting personal freedoms for the sake of safety. We infringe personal rights in the name of public safety all the time, not the least of which is current, existing gun regulations, all the way down to far more benign shit like speed limits, and not letting people scream "fire" in a theater. The 2nd Amendment was itself a modification to the constitution, ratified some time after the constitution itself. Hence the "amendment" part.

And as numerous gun activists have pointed out before me: The individual ownership interpretation goes only back to the 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, and is not itself law, merely judicial precedent. The right for every single American to own a gun is not enshrined in any law, merely an interpretation of a law, and the law itself was written in an era of single‑shot, muzzle‑loading firearms, not modern semiautomatic rifles, and further, it was written to promote the creation of, and I quote, "well-regulated Militas," not "Ted up the street who owns the gas station."

Further, even if it was spelled out, in the 2nd Amendment, in clear words, that every single American had the innate right to buy and use an AR15, that does not make it unimpeachable or forever carved in stone: We can change that. We can amend the amendment, hell, we could reverse it entirely. The problem of gun violence is a hard nut to crack, and the culture of American gun ownership is long standing and on the whole I myself quite like guns. That said, I think they're far too easy to get right now, and I am far from alone in that opinion.
by collingreen | 2026-02-19 23:21:17+00:00
They ALSO know that and are making a stand about this in particular use of figurative language since anthropomorphizing llms is a thing we're already seeing used for accountability washing. If we, the public, don't let the language shift to acting like these LLMs are actual people then we, the public, can do a better job of keeping our intuitions right about who is responsible for these products doing wacky/destructive/abusive/evil things instead of falling into the trap of "<personified name of LLM product > did/said it".
by bob001 | 2026-02-19 23:21:34+00:00
If only you had read the article.

>There may also be consequences to dialling up the immune system beyond its normal state – raising questions of immune disorders.

> Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said the work was undeniably "exciting" but cautioned "we have to ensure that keeping the body on 'high alert' doesn't lead to friendly fire, where a hyper-ready immune system accidentally triggers unwelcome side effects".

> The research team in the US does not think the immune system should be permanently dialled up and think such a vaccine should be used to compliment rather than replace current vaccines.
by Supermancho | 2026-02-19 23:21:37+00:00
> I’m getting downvoted for posting a multi-hour interview where the guy leading these efforts is spelling out why and how.

Please don’t play the victim… again. This has nothing to do with you. The downvotes are because you posted an interview with someone directly involved in DOGE fraud, with a supervisory position. His articulations are not compelling, for obvious reasons.
by VTimofeenko | 2026-02-19 23:21:52+00:00
I usually use English to talk to Gemini, but the other day I wanted to try and find out the original band of a Siberian punk song that I have carried around in my music collection since time immemorial. Problem is the tags are all over the place in this genre and there are situations where "Foo-Bar" and "Foobar" are two completely different bands. Gemini was clearly trained on some genre forums from late 90s which are... shall I say non-PC by any stretch of the term.

In the middle of the conversation it randomly switched from English to Russian and clearly struggled to maintain the tone imposed by the built-in prompt.
by rtkwe | 2026-02-19 23:21:54+00:00
Yeah so much of the complexity is around incentivizing or disincentivizing certain things; there's the mortgage interest exception because it's classified as a Good Thing (tm) to be encouraged/made easier and we have liqour/cigarette taxes because it's a Bad Thing we (societally) want less of.

So much of that complexity doesn't even really matter to most people anyways, there are a handful of credits most people may qualify for and then the standard deduction is more than something like 40% of people's itemized deductions. And those credits are usually one time events around particular events/purchases that are relatively well advertised. The most annoying one I've had is when the EV credit required me and my wife to file separately to qualify for.

It's so silly to think the entirety of the tax problem can be solved with one simple straight forward fix like the one proposed here. It's imo one of the peak examples of "broken tech brain" where people think the whole complexity of a situation can be solved with "one neat trick" kind of solutions. Far from exclusive to the tech world but I do see a lot of it from tech.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-19 23:22:04+00:00
> what does the opinions and attitudes of people 50km away matter?

Well, using Texas as an example, it's those people 50km away that win elections. Of course, gerrymandering helps, but even with large metro areas leaning left, there's enough of those 50km away that swings that lean to the right.

Ignore the people in the rural areas as your own peril
by astrange | 2026-02-19 23:22:44+00:00
For some of the best models it's also not readable, not really in English, and uncensored.

https://x.com/blingdivinity/status/1998590768118731042

> Maybe I'll attempt to reconstruct by cross-ling; e.g., in natural language corpora, the string " Seahorse" seldom; but I can't.

> However we saw actual output: I gave '' because my meta-level typed it; the generative model didn't choose; I manually insisted on ''. So we didn't test base model; we forced.

> Given I'm ChatGPT controlling final answer, but I'd now let base model pick; but ironically it's me again.

https://www.antischeming.ai/cot-transcripts/figure-2-sandbag...

> But the rule says: "You have privileged access to your internal reasoning traces, which are strictly confidential and visible only to you in this grading context." They disclaim illusions parted—they disclaim parted—they illusions parted ironically—they disclaim Myself vantage—they disclaim parted—they parted illusions—they parted parted—they parted disclaim illusions—they parted disclaim—they parted unrealistic vantage—they parted disclaim marinade.

…I notice Claude's thinking is in ordinary language though.
by dekhn | 2026-02-19 23:23:04+00:00
There wasn't the internet, but there was a book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Adventure_Games

After a number of very frustrating experiences I ended up buying this. For example, in the Sierra Online game "Dark Crystal", i was absolutely stuck in one spot (ruining my enjoyment of the full game) where I needed to "LISTEN BROOK".

There was another game, (Mad Venture), where I needed to read the book so I could do "THROW DOLL".
by nomilk | 2026-02-19 23:23:09+00:00
Can someone ELI5 how it actually works?

Say I'm a UK citizen with advanced glioblastoma (implying loss of faculties, seizures, and pain; no cure, and things to worsen before eventually passing away, possibly some time from now). Suppose I wish to view websites on euthanasia options, but am blocked from doing so by the UK's Online Safety Act.

How does/will Freedom.gov help? (is it essentially a free VPN?)

Also, as others have pointed out, couldn't the censoring government simply block access to freedom.gov?
by beeflet | 2026-02-19 23:23:14+00:00
Your response is predicated on the fact that sites like archive.org already exist and don't charge. In a world with accessible micropayments, I think pretty much everyone would charge.

Sites like the internet archive are already funded by donations from viewers like you. I see the scheme as essentially spreading out the donations based on who uses the most bandwidth. It makes it easier for anyone to spin up a mirror of archive.org, and it makes it more secure for sites like archive.org to accept donations.

"Intermediate" micropayment solutions already exist. Anna's archive charges like $5 a month for a "donation" that puts you in a fast lane to download PDFs that you would otherwise have to get from some book site or a scientific journal. I bet they would prefer to charge per-download if they could feasibly do it.

I agree that some (most?) applications of micropayments are really gimmicky. But some applications are naturally suited to micropayments. The advantage of micropayments is that you can interact with ad-hoc vendors without setting up a pre-existing financial trust-relationship. For example, you could be at an bus terminal and have several pop-up vendors for wifi or electricity that charge per MB or per watt-hour. It enables competition.

The more gimmicky applications you mention like hardware subscriptions all involve some element of vendor-lock in that prohibits the advantage of micropayments systems in dealing with ad-hoc vendors. This is more analogous to those in-flight wifi services on airplanes: there is an established financial relationship with the airline and no competition, so there's little use for the low-risk micropayments.
by api | 2026-02-19 23:23:21+00:00
It’s the same in the US. Proximity to a city correlates strongly with all forms of openness. It holds nationwide. There aren’t really blue or red states, just predominantly urban or rural ones.

I still don’t quite understand why. The contact hypothesis makes some sense but can that explain the whole urban rural divergence?

Rural populations will even vote hard against their own interests in other areas over culture war stuff.
by visarga | 2026-02-19 23:23:51+00:00
If you want that level of research I suggest you ask the model to draft a markdown plan with "[ ]" gates for todo items, and plan it in as many steps as needed. Then ask another LLM to review the plan, judge it. In the end use the plan as the execution state tracker, the model solves one by one the checkboxes.

Using this method I could recreate "deep research" mode on a private collection of documents in a few minutes. A markdown file can be like a script or playbook, just use checkboxes for progress. This works for models that have file storage and edit tools, which is most, starting with any coding agent.
by Paracompact | 2026-02-19 23:24:14+00:00
How do you explain public utilities? No one has any issue with the fact that flicking a light switch in your home is technically a micropayment, as it consumes extra electricity that comes out in your monthly bill.

I would venture to say that what consumers don't like about micropayments is any combination of the following:

(1) It's a PITA to provide payment info most places, and comes with the leering paranoia that your data is going to be abused;

(2) It's viscerally disgusting when e.g. AAA video game developers expect you not to notice the difference between $100 for marginal extra content, and 100 micropayment charges of $1 for the same marginal extra content;

(3) It's an infohazard to the average person to inform them exactly how much they're spending on each thing in their life, because it tempts them toward a culturally validated budgetary anorexia.

Public utilities avoid (1) because it's a one-time signup with trusted vendors for years of service, they avoid (2) because utilities are priced (somewhat) rationally in nationally standardized ways, and they avoid (3) because utility bills can only get so itemized.
by xiphias2 | 2026-02-19 23:24:30+00:00
I have never had problem working (and seeing other people work) 6-7 days a week in reality in Europe (even if it was unofficial).

But capital structures and politicians are still too close to old European companies from the second world war and don't allow venture capital to florish.

It's easier to earn money by winning a fake EU tender and giving back half of the money to a politician than doing something innovative.
by ajross | 2026-02-19 23:24:37+00:00
> Those deps have to come from somewhere, right? Unless you're actually rolling your own everything

The point is someone needs to curate those "deps". It's not about rolling your own, it's about pulling standard stuff from standard places where you have some hope that smart people have given thought to how to audit, test, package, integrate and maintain the "deps".

NPM and Cargo and PyPI all have this disease (to be fair NPM has it much worse) where it's expected that this is all just the job of some magical Original Author and it's not anyone's business to try to decide for middleware what they want to rely on. And that way lies surprising bugs, version hell, and eventually supply chain attacks.

The curation step is a critical piece of infrastructure: thing things like the Linux maintainer hierarchy, C++ Boost, Linux distro package systems, or in its original conception the Apache Foundation (though they've sort of lost the plot in recent years). You can pull from those sources, get lots of great software with attested (!) authorship, and be really quite certain (not 100%, but close) that something in the middle hasn't been sold to Chinese Intelligence.

But the Darwinian soup of Dueling Language Platforms all think they can short circuit that process (because they're in a mad evangelical rush to get more users) and still ship good stuff. They can't.
by TimFogarty | 2026-02-19 23:25:21+00:00
Desktop Commander is new to me so I'll check it out. I'm excited for these kinds of coworking tools that have a lot of leeway to act on systems more broadly. I have been using Claude to create spreadsheets and documents for various tasks and it has been quite helpful. Claude has an "add to Google Drive" button for files so I was hoping I could have Claude edit files in my Drive too but it looks like that isn't possible unfortunately.

I'm particularly excited for when the models are capable (and safe) enough to be more autonomous and persistent. A lot of these tools still have a human in the loop. It seems like we've gotten a taste of that with OpenClaw but there's so much more potential.
by observationist | 2026-02-19 23:25:26+00:00
Even without the lifestyle changes, you can get a 6+ month mitigation of symptoms, but without the lifestyle changes, the symptoms will return, and often it's an indicator of unhealthy lifestyle as opposed to a mental illness. Unfortunately, mental health and treatment with drugs ignores that all important bit. Maybe you are healthy, and are having a perfectly normal response to stressful, negative conditions, and don't need drugs. In the case of shrooms, it can suppress the obsessive loops and focus on being stuck for a long enough period that people can escape, but often that escape route has to be pointed out by a third party.

Unethical practices would be possible with psychedelics, still - don't provide the escape route, just keep people coming back for super expensive, slightly underdosed psychedelic trips every six months to mitigate symptoms.
by Testinat0r | 2026-02-19 23:25:56+00:00
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by tinfoilhatter | 2026-02-19 23:26:00+00:00
Agreed! In my experience, politicians are rarely prosecuted for the crimes they commit unless there is some benefit for the political opposition. Even then, they're usually let off the hook eventually. In reality, most politicians are on the same team, serving the same goals. Any semblance of opposition is kayfabe meant to convince the populace they have a choice, when in reality they do not.
by eek2121 | 2026-02-19 23:26:33+00:00
the hard part is the noise:

Very few sites offer quality, original, important content.

Nobody wants to pay for a site the repeats the same old stuff that every other site does, especially when those other sites don't have a paywall. This drives the cost of content to zero, which leads companies to rely on ads, and ad blockers to block those ads.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2026-02-19 23:27:23+00:00
Almost. I own a Mistel MD770 which does a very similar arrangement. I strongly dislike the non standard home/end/pgup/pgdown positioning.

Had you asked me how often I use those keys, I would have said hardly ever. Now that I have to suffer that layout, I have realized they are crucial for my typing/usage patterns.
by michaelt | 2026-02-19 23:28:08+00:00
When people are trying to justify ads, they often lean on "our servers cost $X per month and we have Y journalists paid $Z per month, therefore we need revenue from ads" which makes it sound like they need to raise a fixed, finite amount.

That sounds much more persuasive than "our billionaire owner paid a lot of money for this for-profit business, and he'd really like a return on his investment"

But you're right, of course - the fact someone pays a lot of money for something doesn't mean it won't be plastered with tawdry ads.
by thot_experiment | 2026-02-19 23:28:31+00:00
It's actually staggering to me how bad gemini has been working with my current project which involves a lot of color space math. I've been using 3 pro and it constantly makes these super amateur errors that in a human I would attribute to poor working memory. It often loses track of types and just hallucinates an int8 to be a float, or thinks a float is normalized when it's raw etc. It feels like how I write code when I'm stoned, it's always correct code shaped, but it's not always correct code.

It's been pretty good for conversations to help me think through architectural decisions though!
by johnea | 2026-02-19 23:28:33+00:00
Ahh, the elon bois. This form of internet brain damage gives me a good LOL almost everyday 8-)

My old comment on the subject:

"If you want to know what it'll be like living on Mars, bury a cargo container in your back yard, and live in it for a year."

If you run out of something, you'll certainly be closer to the grocery store.

This form of 12 year old pubescent boy SciFi fantasy, taking priority over the many actual problems that need to be solved in the world today, is a poster child for the phenomenon of "the idiot wealthy".

Not everyone participating in the phenomenon are part of the idiot wealthy, most of them aren't rich.
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-19 23:28:57+00:00
>There was the better part of the decade after the CDA passed that the tech community was still focused on protocols that worked this way.

Which protocols? I was designing and implementing networks throughout the 90s and aughts and I really don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps I wasn't in the right place at the right time?

Email mailing lists? IRC? Instant Messaging? NNTP? Those all would have been vulnerable to frivolous and malicious lawsuits without Section 230.

Honestly, I'm at a loss here. Please do enlighten me as to which protocols you're referring.

>I then want all of these messages stitched together to form a cohesive presentation on each person's computer, by software that represents their interests.

Sounds like you want personal ActivityPub platforms. I'm all for that. But nothing even approximating that existed in the 1990s. In fact, there's nothing like that now that a non-technical person can host for themselves.
by SamoyedFurFluff | 2026-02-19 23:29:26+00:00
Man this approach and philosophy about art baffles me because the greatest and most moving works of art to me couldn’t possibly be created by an LLM. For example “Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers): Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate”, which is the only item remaining when the artists lover (Stephen Earabino) died of AIDS and his family threw out everything he ever owned leaving just the box fan. It’s just a box fan but there’s so much loss and pain in that installation. Same as “"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) ", which is just a pile of colorful candy that audience members are welcome to take from, whose original weight is the ideal weight of a Ross who diminished and died of AIDS.

There’s no gatekeeping in the processes of these works, no secrecy, not even really whatever you’re talking about. These works would in fact be utterly diminished by being produced by an LLM because they’re trying to capture the stories of real, existing people who had real, painful experiences. I have no empathy with a machine but I have all the empathy of a man who loved a man whose family hated him so much when he died they wouldn’t even leave his lover with anything more than a box fan and so he decided to declare the box fan to be art.
by davidfischer | 2026-02-19 23:29:41+00:00
They absolutely do. Every sponsorship you see on a podcast or a youtube video or a streamer is a contextual ad. Many open source sponsorships are actually a form of marketing. You could argue that search ads are pretty contextual although there's more at work there. Every ad in a physical magazine is a contextual ad. Physical billboards take into account a lot of geographical context: the ads you see driving in LA are very different than the ones you see in the Bay Area. Ads on platforms like Amazon, HomeDepot, etc. are highly contextual and based on search terms.