MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crdrost | 2026-03-09 23:33:21+00:00
FWIW I like to explain it to folks like this: ignore all of your moral baggage around licensing and just focus on the fact that licensing is a legal tool of art that pretty much only becomes relevant in the context of threatening lawsuits.

BSD-type stuff is very simple because it says "here is this stuff. you can use it as long as you promise not to sue me. I promise not to sue you too."

Very simple.

GPL-type stuff is intrinsically more complex because it's trying to use the threatening power of lawsuits, to reduce overall IP lawsuits. So it has to say "Here is this stuff. You can use it as long as you promise not to sue me. I am only going to sue you, if you start pretending like you have the right to sue other folks over this stuff or anything you derive from it. You don't have the right to sue others for it, I made it, so please stop pretending and let's stop suing each other over this sort of thing."

Getting the entire legal nuance around that sort of counterfactual "I will only sue you if you try to pretend that you can sue others" is why they're more complex. And the simplest copyleft licenses like the Mozilla Public License have a very rigid notion of what "the software" is, so like for MPL it's "this file is gonna never be used in a lawsuit, you can edit it ONLY as long as you agree that this file must never be used by you to sue someone else, if you try to mutate it in a way that lets you sue someone else then that's against our agreement and we reserve the right to sue you."

Whereas for GPL it's actually kind of nebulous what "the software" is -- everything that feeds into the eventual compiled binary, basically -- and so the license itself needs to be a little bit airy-fairy, "let's first talk about what conveying the software means...", in various ways.

The interesting thing here is that as far as the courts are initially ruling, these from-scratch reimplementations are not human works and therefore are not copyrightable, which makes them all kind of public domain. Slapping the MIT license on it was an overstep. If that's how things go then Free Software has actually won its greatest sweep with LLM ubiquity.
by simonask | 2026-03-09 23:33:37+00:00
The unique geography of the Scandinavian peninsula combined with very low population density makes Sweden a bit less interesting in terms of achieving zero emissions in other geographies, and I doubt Swedes would be cool with expanding hydro and nuclear to the scale required by Germany.

But yeah, I mean, good job and all. The answer for the rest of the continent is going to be wind and solar in the medium term, and probably more nuclear in the long term.
by HarryHirsch | 2026-03-09 23:33:41+00:00
In Europe the law argues that cars are dangerous, and if you loan your car to a habitual bad driver, that's on you. You can either get the person who drove it to fess up, or the judge can fine you (because you lent out your car against better judgment) and impose a drivers log, so the circus doesn't happen again.

The arguing about having a constitutional right to drive bad boggles the mind, road deaths in the US are high, compared to civilized nations. Wikipedia states it's 14.2 deaths per 100000 inhbitants, that's between Sierra Leone (13.8) and Angola (15.0). For comparison, India has 12.6 traffic deaths per 100000 citizens and the worst country in Europe is Greece at 6.1.

The right metric is death per citizen, not per mile, because it's about the number of people who have lost a family member or friend.

When you get around exclusively on two wheels (motorcycle and bicycle) bad drivers are a direct safety threat. Even cagers ought to be careful about being permissive with red light running, side-on crashes are remarkably deadly for the one who got hit in the door because there is not much structural protection or space on the side of the vehicle.
by ajross | 2026-03-09 23:34:22+00:00
This take, which I've seen in a few different places now, seems 100% bonkers. A world where anyone can cheaply reimplement anyone else's software and use it on hardware of their own choosing in their own designs and for their own purposes is a free software utopia.

This isn't a problem, this is the goal. GNU was born when RMS couldn't use a printer the way he wanted because of an unmodifiable proprietary driver. That kind of thing just won't happen in the vibe coded future.
by petermcneeley | 2026-03-09 23:34:39+00:00
Corruption comes in many forms. Sending 25 billion to the most corrupt country in Europe is to me more significant (than other scandals) due to scale.

> I'm a Canadian living in Canada

I am not intending a personal attack. I see something different happening in this country than maybe others. Every aspect of the country has significant corruption. Most of it will not fall under normal (criminal) corruption.

I can leave you with two important highlights to help understand Canada:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/canada...

https://companiesmarketcap.com/cad/canada/largest-companies-...
by dataflow | 2026-03-09 23:35:07+00:00
I don't know how laws work here but I can't imagine having adequate "proof of service" fully insulates you from all possible claims of non-receipt, especially electronically? Like what if the recipient was in a coma or on active duty in the middle of a war zone or something? There have got to be exceptions here to handle some cases of non-receipt despite proof of delivery, so the question of whether spam classification might be one such exception doesn't seem automatically invalid.
by ball_of_lint | 2026-03-09 23:35:16+00:00
Would software be more or less free in a world without copyright?

I argue more free. EULAs and restrictions on how+for what software can be used, like DRM, typically use copyright as their legal backing. GPL licenses turn that on it's head but that doesn't redeem the original, flawed, law.

This seems to follow the letter but not the spirit of the license. If this does pass legal muster, we can do the same to whatever proprietary software we wish, which makes a dramatically different but IMO better ecosystem in the end.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-09 23:35:19+00:00
One of Twitter's strengths was that it was a constructive community where near services & informational/radiative bots chilled. It was a connective fabric, it made information available.

That's all been gone. The algorithm fav'ing paid blue check users massively made things worse from there.

Bluesky attempts to be better on all fronts here. Interesting apps/services are welcome, permissionless. There is no top down pro-facsism pro-racism pro-MAGA finger-on-the-dial algo-shaping.

Sure there's some who will just be burned out & not interested. But there's so many interesting structural safeguards & such a openness to play & creativity & tuning... I really encourage folks to give it a time. I would definitely hope that "bound to fail" is perhaps not a cast die, that, we tried something great once, it's gone, never again, is not how this works.
by wa5ina | 2026-03-09 23:35:49+00:00
Hey HN, OP here. I built this because grinding raw LeetCode only teaches you how to pass test cases, not how to communicate. The AI interviewer is specifically prompted to interrupt you and ask 'why' if you start coding without explaining your approach first—just like a real senior engineer would. I'm still tuning how aggressive the interruptions are. Let me know if the pacing feels natural or annoying
by DonHopkins | 2026-03-09 23:35:51+00:00
Several parts of the claim are incorrect.

First, modern LLMs are not "a huge table of phrases". They are neural networks with billions of learned parameters that generate tokens by computing probability distributions over vocabulary given prior context. There is no lookup table of stored sentences.

Second, Eliza-style bots used explicit scripted pattern matching rules. LLMs instead learn statistical representations from large corpora and can generalize to produce novel sequences that were never present in the training data.

Kent Pitman's Lisp Eliza from MIT-AI's ITS History Project (sites.google.com):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373567

https://sites.google.com/view/elizagen-org/

https://sites.google.com/view/elizagen-org/original-eliza

Third, while "pattern matching" is sometimes used informally, it’s misleading technically. Transformers perform high-dimensional vector computations and attention over context to model relationships between tokens. That’s very different from rule-based pattern matching.

You can certainly debate whether LLMs "think", but describing them as “Eliza with a big phrase table” is not an accurate description of how they work.

You have the resources available at your fingertips to learn what the truth is, how LLMs actually work. You could start with Wikipedia, or read Steven Wolfram's article, or simply ask an LLM to explain how it works to you. It's quite good at that, while an Eliza bot certainly can't explain to you how it works, or even write code.

What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...
by sravyavedantham | 2026-03-09 23:35:54+00:00
I built this after a security audit caught a live AWS key in a 3-year-old commit that had been "deleted" in a later commit. The key was still accessible via git log.

secret-time-machine scans your entire git history and flags anything that looks like a secret: API keys, tokens, passwords, connection strings.

- Scans ALL commits including rebased/amended ones
- 40+ secret format patterns (AWS, GCP, Stripe, GitHub, JWT, etc.)
- Works fully offline — no data leaves your machine

pip install secret-time-machine && stm scan ./your-repo

GitHub: https://github.com/LakshmiSravyaVedantham/secret-time-machin...
Full writeup: https://dev.to/lakshmisravyavedantham/i-found-an-api-key-i-d...
by raflueder | 2026-03-09 23:36:13+00:00
Or, just spin up your own review workflow, I've been doing this for the past couple of months after experimenting with Greptile and it works pretty well, example setup below:

https://gist.github.com/rlueder/a3e7b1eb40d90c29f587a4a8cb7c...

An average of $0.04/review (200+ PRs with two rounds each approx.) total of $19.50 using Opus 4.6 over February.

It fills in a gap of working on a solo project and not having another set of eyes to look at changes.
by tombert | 2026-03-09 23:36:33+00:00
Damn.

Tony Hoare was on my bucket list of people I wanted to meet before I or they die. My grad school advisor always talked of him extremely highly, and while I cannot seem to confirm it, I believe Hoare might have been his PhD advisor.

It's hard to overstate how important Hoare was. CSP and Hoare Logic and UTP are all basically entire fields in their own right. It makes me sad he's gone.
by cgearhart | 2026-03-09 23:36:58+00:00
I often find this kind of advice too vague to really be useful. “Have taste” in the problems you work on isn’t very actionable. (Unless perhaps you list examples of good and bad taste.)

I’ll admit that I may just be immature at research as almost all my experience has either been attempting to replicate research or to put it into practice in production systems.
by rs545837 | 2026-03-09 23:37:36+00:00
difftastic is solid. The difference is roughly: syntax-aware (difftastic) knows what changed in the tree, sem knows which entity changed and whether it actually matters. difftastic will show you that a node in the AST moved. sem will tell you "the function processOrder was modified, and 3 other functions across 2 files depend on it." difftastic is a better diff. sem is trying to be a different layer on top of git entirely.
by crazygringo | 2026-03-09 23:38:22+00:00
Sure. But it seems very difficult to argue that LLM's are harming that ability to make a living in a direct way.

This is for the same reason that search results or search snippets aren't deemed to harm creators according to copyright. Yes there might be some percentage lost of sales. And truly, people may be buying less JavaScript tutorial books now that LLM's can teach you JavaScript or write it for you. But the relation is so indirect, there's very little chance a court would accept the argument.

Because what the LLM is doing is reading tons of JavaScript and JavaScript tutorials and resources online, and producing its own transformed JavaScript. And the effect of any single JavaScript tutorial book in its training set is so marginal to the final result, there's no direct effect.

And the reason this makes sense is that it's no different from a teacher reading 20 books on JavaScript and then writing their own that turns out to be a best-seller. Yes, it takes away from the previous best-sellers. But that's fine, because they're not copying any of the previous works directly. They're transforming the facts they learned into a new synthesis.
by reverius42 | 2026-03-09 23:38:59+00:00
The out of court settlements that avoid precedent don't mean anything in a broader legal context. Legally speaking, right now in the USA, output of LLMs is not copyrighted and cannot be copyrighted (without substantial transformation by a human).

I don't think this means the same thing as whether or not LLM output can infringe on someone else's copyright though (that does pose an interesting question -- can something non-copyrightable in general infringe on something copyrighted?).
by reissbaker | 2026-03-09 23:40:13+00:00
I run a small open source LLM inference company, Synthetic.new. As far as I can tell, CNBC isn't reporting this accurately: the problem isn't that Oracle is building "yesterday's data centers": they're building Blackwell DCs! Those are today's DCs.

The problem appears to be that Oracle is building today's DCs... Tomorrow. And by the time they come online, Vera Rubins will be out, with 5x efficiency gains. And Oracle is unlikely to want to drop the price of Blackwells 5x, despite them being 5x less efficient.

It's a little unclear to me how bad this is. Nvidia's "rack scale" machines like GB200-NVL72s and GB300-NVL72s are basically a fully built rack you roll into a DC and plug into power and network. In that case, Oracle should probably just buy the rack-scale Vera Rubins when they come out instead of Blackwells and roll them into their new DCs. Tada! Tomorrow's DCs, tomorrow.

OTOH it's possible someone at Oracle screwed up and committed to buying Blackwells at today's prices, delivered tomorrow. Or maybe construction of the physical DCs is behind schedule, so today's Blackwells are sitting around unused, waiting for power and networking tomorrow. Then they're in a bit of trouble.

Regardless, CNBC's reporting seems pretty unclear on what actually happened and whether this is actually bad or not.
by evgpbfhnr | 2026-03-09 23:40:30+00:00
Our company had the same shift, but it's not so much forbidden as just unsupported as they disabled simple password auth.

If you waddle through setting up a project on the google developers console, setup your own oauth auth flow, find/scaffold something with mutt oauth script to fetch your mails locally, then you can likely get it to work too...
(And then sending mails is another sidequest, and if sending mail breaks for some reason that's one in two odds you don't notice for a couple of days.. but it's fine spending work time on this right?)

How they react after you're done is another problem though... I told the IT lead and his reaction was just a shrug, but some could be more vindictive.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-03-09 23:40:38+00:00
Yup. Cameras "improve" safety in intersections--but not overall. It's just displaced. I would have thought the displacement reduced the severity but the injury data says otherwise. It's a case of removing the top and bottom stair.

As you say, it encourages short yellows. I am aware of having "run" one red light in my life--got ticketed for it. The yellow timing was set as short as legally permitted--a driver had a narrow window to decide go or stop. Unfortunately, what happens when neither is an option? I was in the left turn lane and past the decision point. I was already slowing when the light went yellow, I saw it and knew there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

There's also the problem that a huge number of red light tickets are issued to people who "run" red lights in a completely normal and safe manner: making a right turn on red. Car #1 stands as far forward as they can without being in the cross traffic path, the other cars line up behind. First car goes, the rest move forward. Nobody pays attention to the stop line--but the camera does.

In the real world, neither speed nor red light cameras pay for themselves except when something about the situation causes a problem--and it would be better addressed by fixing the true problem. Likewise, I have never seen a cop watching a situation for offenders unless there was something out of sync between the law and the road. Half of the traps I've seen over the years have disappeared when the root cause was fixed.
by tuesdaynight | 2026-03-09 23:40:51+00:00
Don't do that, just avoid answering the "non-believers" or whatever they are called. Your comments are insightful for me (and for a lot of other people, I'm sure). You don't need to prove that they are useful, just comment about your experience and ignore them. It's like arguing about religion trying to make the other person to flip their beliefs (a waste of time for everyone involved)
by quuxplusone | 2026-03-09 23:41:33+00:00
Well, (somewhat tongue-in-cheek,) one of the defining characteristics of "good money" is that it is very inefficient to replicate!

(Several places online list "durability; portability; divisibility; scarcity; fungibility; and acceptability" as the key characteristics of "good money." Difficulty-of-replication pertains to the "scarcity" characteristic: if it's easy to duplicate, that makes it "bad" money, not "good" money.)
by fidotron | 2026-03-09 23:41:33+00:00
The confusion is possibly almost appropriate, given so much of his work was on creating systems which avoid confusion through using proper synchronized communication channels. The null pointer stuff is famous, but it's occam and the Communicating Sequential Processes work that were brilliant. Maybe it's also brilliantly wrong, as I think Actor model people could argue, but it is brilliant.

My favourite quote of his is “There are two ways of constructing a piece of software: One is to make it so simple that there are obviously no errors, and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious errors.”

While we hope it's not true, if it is a very deserved RIP.
by hrimfaxi | 2026-03-09 23:41:48+00:00
> (b) All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship, primary language, or immigration status are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

I wonder what the implications of a woman driver denying a man using this filter would be...discrimination based on a protected class?
by paxys | 2026-03-09 23:41:51+00:00
> The missing part is that current gpus are already money making machine in 2026

Are they?

OpenAI's current revenue is $25 billion a year. They are expected to spend $600 billion on infrastructure in the next 4 years to sustain and grow that revenue.

The story is the same across the industry. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta are spending a combined $650 billion on infrastructure in 2026 alone.

None of these investments are immediately profitable. And it remains to be seen whether they eventually will be or not.
by kitasan | 2026-03-09 23:41:53+00:00
Fair points. "Production-ready" was probably too strong for v0.1.0 — "API-stable" is more accurate. The crates compile, pass their test suites, and the public API surface is locked, but real production readiness comes from users hitting edge cases we haven't. (no warnings policy etc.)
On line count — you're right that more lines isn't inherently better. I mentioned it as a scale indicator, not a quality claim. The meaningful numbers are the 92 crates, the codec/container/protocol coverage, and the test results.
Happy to discuss any specific module if you want to dig into the details.
by zdragnar | 2026-03-09 23:41:54+00:00
Not at all. I'm just pointing out that code does not intrinsically convey intent, only implementation.

To use a less trite example, I'd probably find some case where a word or name can have different meanings in different contexts, and how that can be confusing rather than clarifying without further documentation or knowledge of the problem space.

Really though, any bug in the code you write is a deviation between intent and implementation. That's why documentation can be a useful supplement to code. If you haven't, take a look at the underhanded C contests- there's some fantastically good old gems in there that demonstrate how a plain reading of the code may not convey intent correctly.

The winner of this contest might be a good example: https://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_26.html
by valiant55 | 2026-03-09 23:41:54+00:00
PA did this with construction zone cameras. I'm not sure where that landed because its been a while since I've seen one. I successfully appealed my ticket to the magistrate. It initially started as a pilot program and the law requires signage which during the pilot was quite inconspicuous. After the launch the sign was changed to a tiny little thing, about 1/5 the size of the pilot program.

I was going 5 over the reduced speed limit, in the slow lane with rush hour traffic. That thing must've issued thousands of tickets.
by lnrd | 2026-03-09 23:43:24+00:00
I like the idea of OpenClaw a lot, it's a technology that I would want in my life. But in it's current form it's kinda chilling and I cannot see it become safe to use anytime soon.

It seems to me many infosec best practices that have been built over decades have been forgot in the last few months like nothing happened. People really do give this kind of software full system access, plus access to their emails, their private chats, most likely their passwords too and who knows what else via plugins. I couldn't really imagine this happening one year ago.

I'm 100% confident that any state actor and cybercrime groups are currently heavily focusing their research on these tools. You compromise the right person and you can access all kind of critical information, it would basically be the same as having some remote control software on their system with full permissions.

And everyone on the hype train seems to be absolutely unaware of this. Maybe I'm missing something, but all of this feels so odd to me.
by parl_match | 2026-03-09 23:43:31+00:00
> Wait what do you think “the pancakes/waffles thing” refers to? You posted 2 hours ago that you had never heard of it.

Quote me where I said I've never heard of the pancake/waffles thing? Of course I've heard of it, it's been around for a decade or so.

> I can see that how it could be confusing because there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay wrote about about people complaining to the CEO when the moderation team doesn’t respond as being equivalent to that meme, and then there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay started posting pictures of pancakes and waffles as some sort of… joke or dunk? I never quite got the 4D comedy chess there. It doesn’t seem like anybody is “doing the pancakes/waffles thing” in either case. Nobody is asking Jay, as CEO, to ban anyone in the thread about Jay not being the CEO anymore. And I don’t think I’ve seen anyone ironically posting metahumor pictures of pancakes. The term has become so overused that definition creep now means that it could mean “anything that might bother Jay” in this context.

I want you to read this out loud, to yourself. Maybe you'll feel as insane as I did when I read it.