MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by blurbleblurble | 2025-07-13 00:02:22+00:00
I'm just saying that if age verification is done via a "smart card" then it shouldn't be hard to just add that to the phone.

Unless of course they're planning on making us go to some facility to ensure our phones get the digital components of the IDs get loaded into the secure enclave? Which sounds dystopian as heck given the scenes coming out of the US right now.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-13 00:03:02+00:00
VPNs and zero knowledge proof systems are vulnerable to traffic analysis (based on packet size and timestamps) and there's almost no cure.

Mullvad is the only VPN I know of that has a mode that normalizes all packets to the same size (going into the VPN) and sends fake packets that don't get sent as real traffic. But that's only obfuscation and, at low traffic or high bandwidth (videos) or with sufficient heuristics, it can be beaten.

The US has basically zero regulation on selling this data. I can imagine a world where within a couple decades the US has one of the largest blackmail crisis ever seen, as foreign governments target civil workers. Or, I guess, at this point, the US government against the "undesirable" party within this administration.
by ninkendo | 2025-07-13 00:03:03+00:00
I firmly believe this is not the case. Putting more obstacles between me and the thing I’m trying to do, just trains my brain at rote performance of the task. It’s still “autopilot” as far as my brain is concerned.

This could be anything: starting a car, taking off a medicine cap, typing my password, clicking around cookie warnings. If I have to do it repeatedly, my brain will be able to perform it subconsciously, and I will do it without realizing it.

For fuel cutoff switches, it doesn’t matter that there two of them in a row. If you cut off both of them every single time, and you fly every day, your brain is gonna automate that task.
by tomhow | 2025-07-13 00:03:25+00:00
Comments that assert that genetic inheritance determines life outcomes are not what we want on HN. It has very ugly implications that I don't need to spell out. And it's personal for me because I, and others I know and love, have put a lot of work over many years into overcoming inner obstacles that were said by "experts" to be "hard-wired" traits.

We want HN to be a place for talking about expanding people's possibilities, not limiting them.
by ankit219 | 2025-07-13 00:04:43+00:00
i see the confusion. Initially the title of the video on BBC youtube channel was:

> BREAKING Air India crash: Pilot cut off fuel to engines - no fault with plane | BBC

and then they changed it to:

> Fuel switches cut off before Air India crash, preliminary report says | BBC News

You can decide. I had noticed it then. It was also noticed by many others as the story started getting traction and there are many x accounts (and probably elsehwere too) which would corroborate the same.
by krapp | 2025-07-13 00:06:27+00:00
How would you suggest we hold him accountable for the things he says? We can't even hold him accountable for the crimes he commits. We tried impeaching him twice. The courts are barely able to contain him and Congress is complicit, and half the country supports everything he does.

Maybe if Democrats win the midterms a few months from now they can draft a strongly worded reprimand?
by wredcoll | 2025-07-13 00:06:59+00:00
I'm sure everyone else has much more morally virtuous ways to spend money, but speaking from experience, this thing is super cool:

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/big-interactive-community...

You get both the duplo pieces to build a train track and train stations, but also the train engine itself is battery powered, drives around and includes a sensor that lets it react to different sections of the train.
by oooyay | 2025-07-13 00:09:13+00:00
I'll fill in some context. I think the value of Cursor as an IDE is probably somewhat ephemeral. It's mostly combating Microsoft's ambitions to keep other players busy and box them out of the market. Agents gain a lot of value from model context protocol and there's an amazingly short list of clients that fully support the protocol, but the VSCode Chat window is one of them: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/clients

I actually do prefer the view that having the agent built into an IDE brings me but I'll be damned if I'm forced to use CoPilot/OpenAI. Second to that, the agent does have access to a lot more contextual tools by being built into the editor like focused linting errors and test failures. Of course that demands your development environment is setup correctly and could be replicatable with Claude Code to some extent.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-13 00:09:29+00:00
No, they very much realize that. The people down voting them want these things. HN isn't some bastion of progressive thinkers or the libertarian hacker-minded anymore. It's chock full of wealthy tech-bro neocons who dote on figures like Elon Musk.

Just see how any criticism of dear leader gets flagged in mere minutes now.
by conradev | 2025-07-13 00:10:09+00:00
Yes, they are! but also because the law sets the standard, it can also provide a new one. For example:

a) you are still legally required to age verify online alcohol purchases but

b) it’s illegal to use information collected for that purpose for other purposes and

c) Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents

Maybe something around only collecting minimal data, too.

Some of the first eager customers are banks with onerous KYC requirements – they want one click account creation! Good luck changing financial disclosure laws, though, my bank knows quite a bit about me.
by throwaway328 | 2025-07-13 00:11:16+00:00
I'm following my own advice there at the end and browsing around a bit more, and one book dynamicland links to on their bookshelf (https://dynamicland.org/2024/Roots/) is "Tools for Thought" (https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/) which has this amazing blurb which reminded me of this thread:

> Tools for Thought is an exercise in retrospective futurism; that is, I wrote it in the early 1980s, attempting to look at what the mid 1990s would be like. My odyssey started when I discovered Xerox PARC and Doug Engelbart and realized that all the journalists who had descended upon Silicon Valley were missing the real story. Yes, the tales of teenagers inventing new industries in their garages were good stories. But the idea of the personal computer did not spring full-blown from the mind of Steve Jobs. Indeed, the idea that people could use computers to amplify thought and communication, as tools for intellectual work and social activity, was not an invention of the mainstream computer industry nor orthodox computer science, nor even homebrew computerists. If it wasn't for people like J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, it wouldn't have happened. But their work was rooted in older, equally eccentric, equally visionary, work, so I went back to piece together how Boole and Babbage and Turing and von Neumann — especially von Neumann — created the foundations that the later toolbuilders stood upon to create the future we live in today. You can't understand where mind-amplifying technology is going unless you understand where it came from.
by tomrod | 2025-07-13 00:11:39+00:00
No, it absolutely is conservative, just not the conservatives you might have hoped for (Frum, Reagan conservatives, etc.). Conservatives are not libertarian/classical liberal. They value strongmen and even go to the monoarchial extreme. They value hierarchy -- their full throated worship of the theory of military veterans (though typically failing in practice) is strong evidence, but also glorification of warmaking and foreign hawkish policy, their push for unitary executive, etc.

Make no mistake, MAGA is exactly what the folks that felt they failed Nixon hoped for.
by reactordev | 2025-07-13 00:12:14+00:00
no but reliability is. And if you need to re-establish the connection, you'll have to preamble your way through another handshake.

gRPC uses HTTP/2, which has a Client/Server Stream API, to forgo the preamble. In the end though, ANY HTTP based protocol could be throttled by infrastructure in-between. TCP on the other hand, can be encrypted and sent without any preamble - just a protocol, and only L2/L3 can throttle.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-13 00:12:49+00:00
> Give me your ID or stop posting on HN. No one is forcing you to post on HN. If you don't want me to know your name and address and age and driver's license number and keep a record of everything you say that I sell to anybody I want and store in an unencrypted hard drive, you don't have to post.

Do you see the problem yet?

Sgould I say "Cambridge Analytica" now or later?
by fluidcruft | 2025-07-13 00:12:50+00:00
I still don't see any reason erasing bots and captchas from my online experience is bad. I hate bots and captchas. They add absolutely no value to my life. Conversely there is lots to be gained if imagine if something like X or reddit or whatever can anonymously verify that a user is a person and over 18 or 21 or 30 even (whatever) without having to directly handle identities. It's could be all the benefits of a bouncer checking for a pulse and valid ID without the privacy invasion. If done correctly it can also make fraud more difficult.
by e1g | 2025-07-13 00:13:07+00:00
It's impossible as an IC on a team, or working where a concept of "tickets" exists. It's unavoidable as a solo founder, whether you're building enterprise systems or expanding your vision. Some details -

1. Before wife&kids, every weekend I would learn a library or a concept by recreating it from scratch. Re-implementing jQuery, fetch API via XHR, Promises, barebones React, a basic web router, express + common middlewares, etc. Usually, at least 1,000 lines of code every weekend. That's 1M+ over 25 years.

2. My last product is currently 400k LOCs, 95% built by me over three years. I didn't one-shot it, so assuming 2-3x ongoing refactors, that's more than 1M LOCs written.

3. In my current product repo, GitHub says for the last 6 months I'm +120k,-80k. I code less than I used to, but even at this rate, it's safely 100k-250k per year (times 20 years).

4. Even in open source, there are examples like esbuild, which is a side project from one person (cofounder and architect of Figma). esbuild is currently at ~150k LOCs, and GitHub says his contributions were +600k,-400k.

5. LOCs are not the same. 10k lines of algorithms can take a month, but 10K of React widgets is like a week of work (on a greenfield project where you know exactly what you're building). These days, when a frontend developer says their most extensive UI codebase was 100k LOCs in an interview, I assume they haven't built a big UI thing.

So yes, if the reference point is "how many sprint tickets is that", it seems impossible. If the reference point is "a creative outlet that aligns with startup-level rewards", I think my statement of "millions of lines" is conservative.

Granted, not all of it was revenue-generating - much was experimental, exploratory, or just for fun. My overarching point was that I build software products for (great) living, as opposed to a marketer who stumbled into Claude Code and now evangelizes it as some huge unlock.
by pitched | 2025-07-13 00:14:02+00:00
There is an interesting other layer here where the posting of an opinion is triggered by the way the content is presented. “The medium is the message.” The opinion posted didn’t itself exist before the content was consumed, making it all self-fulfilling and a positive feedback loop.

The interesting thing about HN in that context is it doesn’t fine-tune its algorithm per-user, it presents a consistent view to all users. Content should be much less positive-feedback-loop because of that.

And so OP might not be hypocritical if that consistent-view is the change we need to better our society.
by lucb1e | 2025-07-13 00:17:10+00:00
> super vague stuff, like links to the FAQ that list a bunch of technical details

Not being able to block remote fonts is a vague technicality? It's a feature I use, a user-facing setting, not an under-the-hood technicality. (Budding web designers have a tendency to pick overly thin fonts because it looks fancy/unique at a glance and being interested in the actual text on the webpage was not their job description)

I'm less familiar with the other things. Clicking one experimentally, it mentions:

>> The primary purpose of dynamic URL filtering [is] to fix web page breakage

Webpages break on adblocking not infrequently. I'm not a blocklist developer so I can't say how useful this particular function is, but I'm also not going to assume that, just because I don't know the technical details, that it's just handwavey technical details nobody needs to care about and everything will be the same regardless of what the most qualified person on the topic is saying

> I don't think I should have to read a series of 20 web pages dense with specialized technical details to understand what it's supposedly not doing

Consider that you're not paying for someone to produce marketing material; it's a free thing. Sometimes that means that finding out information requires reading source code, or in this case, it's probably data files that contain these dynamic thingies so you could see the list of what mitigations will stop being possible and on what kinds of sites those are. If you (or someone else) do a writeup that fills the information gap you are looking for, I'm sure a lot of other people also appreciate that existing
by sillysaurusx | 2025-07-13 00:18:14+00:00
> And they point to videos like this one as proof of that, ignoring that the events of discussed in the video are actually proof of the opposite.

I have no idea how this video’s chapter 6 can be titled "a call for change" and then you still deny that the video is saying there’s something desperately wrong with the aviation industry. All I can think of saying is that you’re mistaken. It’s proof of exactly what the video is saying needs to change.

We’ll have to agree to disagree. I feel bad for all the pilots who have to deal with this kind of attitude about mental health issues, as if suicidal ideation should somehow disqualify someone from working in their chosen profession. People in the military are allowed to feel suicidal. Your doctor is allowed to feel suicidal. The guy next to you on the road is allowed to feel suicidal. But pilots? Nope. It’s treated as this unspeakable awful thing, and you’re forcing people to get "treatment" where they report "yes, that totally worked" (a lie) or else suffer consequences. If you don’t see how backwards that is, no words of mine will persuade you otherwise.

Why argue so vehemently that treatment should be denied to people? That’s what you’re doing by saying there’s no problem and that nothing needs to change. I assure you, the pilot in the video likely knows far better than your friends. That’s why he made the video.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-07-13 00:19:10+00:00
"memory leaks related to Youtube"

News to me.

If this is even true, in the end it's still "so what?" Meaning, the alternative is even worse so, let's say granted there is this problem. Where is the better alternative that does not have this problem? Chrome doesn't have other equivalent or worse memory problems? Even if not leaking, it simply uses so much it's the same end result.

I've never consciously noticed a problem with youtube so if there is a problem, it's not one that necessarily matters.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-13 00:20:08+00:00
> I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works.

From a different angle: many people went into the web in disagreement with how the physical world is managed.

Those who were good at politics also tried to improve the offline rules, but not everyone can.

From that POV, opposing the application of irl biggotery into the online world isn't some illogical or whimsical move. They tried to make a better world for the likes of them, and in a way you're using the success of the platform to explain why they're not welcome anymore.

I'd be sympathetic to your logic if it was for the betterment of the online world, but IMHO it surely isn't and we're looking at bullies expanding irl power to crush other platforms as well.
Show HN: Energy-Efficient NAS via RBF Kernel Scoring (No GPU Training Needed)
by Tomomasa | 2025-07-13 00:20:12+00:00
We present RBFleX-NAS, a training-free neural architecture search (NAS) framework that leverages an RBF kernel-based scoring mechanism to rank neural networks without training. Unlike traditional NAS methods that consume significant GPU resources, RBFleX-NAS can find high-performing architectures in seconds.

Key Applications: • Edge AI Deployment: Efficient model search for Raspberry Pi, Jetson, and mobile platforms • AutoML Integration: Lightweight NAS module suitable for AutoML systems • Cross-domain Transfer: Supports both vision and NLP tasks (e.g., TransNAS-Bench)

How it works: Instead of training each candidate network, we score architectures using a Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel that captures both activation patterns and structural features.

Demo Video: https://youtu.be/QZz8s95x9xw?si=fqVs7T6no66zz_d5

Code on GitHub: https://github.com/tomomasayamasaki/RBFleX-NAS

Paper https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10959729/metrics
by bobalob | 2025-07-13 00:20:47+00:00
Puberty is a stage of natural maturation of the body. There is only one, as per your sex, and you can't go through the wrong one. The puberty of the opposite sex is not an option.

This conception of the "wrong puberty" as something that needs to be blocked is as absurd as all that "born in the wrong body" ideological nonsense.

Most importantly, children can't meaningfully consent to having their sexual function permanently damaged.
Show HN: Novaflow (YC S25) – AI Data Analyst for Life Science Researchers
by amulya | 2025-07-13 00:21:57+00:00
Hi HN! We're building Novaflow to help life scientists analyze their experimental data without needing to code. Life science researchers produce massive amounts of data, but analyzing it typically requires advanced coding skills, specialized knowledge, and heavy computational resources - all of which are in limited supply. The bottlenecks we've seen are striking: small labs spend over $100K/year per analyst while large labs spend millions, yet still outsource analysis due to sheer data volume. Most labs have a 5:1 ratio of experimentalists to analysts, creating constant backlogs. The core issue is that analyzing biological data requires both extensive coding knowledge and deep understanding of biological context. Most researchers have one or the other, rarely both. Making matters worse, existing tools are often custom-built, poorly maintained, and not scalable. Many researchers are stuck using analysis tools that are 15+ years old. We built Novaflow to put analysis capabilities directly back in researchers' hands. Here's how it works: researchers upload their raw data files (CSVs, FASTQs, HDF5s), ask questions in plain English like "What genes are most differentially expressed in this file?", and get instant, publication-ready plots. Behind the scenes, we use LLM-powered pipelines that generate and run the appropriate bioinformatics workflows. The technical challenge is ensuring scientific accuracy. We've built extensive validation systems to ensure the generated code produces reliable results. Every analysis comes with exportable Jupyter notebooks and reproducible Python code, so researchers can verify and modify our approach. What makes this different from general data analysis tools is the domain-specific understanding. When a researcher asks about differential expression, the system knows to apply appropriate statistical methods, normalizations, and generate the right visualizations - things that would require extensive configuration in generic tools. We're focusing on life scientists blocked by slow or missing bioinformatics support - academic labs doing genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics work, biotech companies trying to accelerate R&D cycles with leaner teams, and clinical groups using high-throughput technologies. We'd love to hear from anyone who's dealt with similar bottlenecks in scientific computing.
by sillysaurusx | 2025-07-13 00:22:50+00:00
I pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44546377 that this is mistaken and why. Dehumanizing someone because they have suicidal ideation is exactly the kind of attitude that puts people at higher risk.

You’re forcing people to pretend like they don’t have suicidal thoughts. That doesn’t work. Attitudes that it somehow does work are backwards.
by Manuel_D | 2025-07-13 00:23:50+00:00
"Transitioned against their will" is a very crude way of articulating the tradeoffs of prescribing puberty blockers. The core issue at hand is that absent puberty blockers, somewhere between 60-80% do not persist with a cross-sex gender identity after going through their natal puberty. Psychologists attempted to predict which patients would persist in a cross sex gender identity and which would not, but they were never able to do so.

When patients are given puberty blockers, desistence rates are miniscule, in the single digits. Proponents of hormonal intervention insist that this is proof that doctors are selecting kids that would persist in a cross sex gender absent blockers. But that's hard to reconcile with psychologists previous failures to predict persistence. While they're billed as giving "time to think", it's pretty much impossible to deny that blockers are causing patients who would have desisted in their cross sex gender identity if they went through their natal puberty.

It's not just conservative American States that are changing course on blockers for children: Finland, Sweden, the UK, Italy, Denmark, and Norway have all stopped prescription of blockers in children. Plenty of other countries never allowed it in the first place.
by Trasmatta | 2025-07-13 00:24:09+00:00
I always have to comment whenever I see a PKD thread. He's my favorite author, and nobody else has impacted the way I see reality as much as he has.

> What struck me was the oddity of a lunatic discounting his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner; Fat had intellectually dealt himself out of the game of madness while still enjoying its sights and sounds.

- VALIS