MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RpFLCL | 2025-07-28 01:04:56+00:00
Even if they can't be traced back to a name/photo identity, it would still be a privacy disaster if you could only make one proof per service.

If a user can only make one then they'll have to use that identity with that service forever. That's a nightmare for privacy. Sometimes people need another account, unknown to their employer/family/friends. People should be able to make multiple accounts without those being tied together through a common "age check" identifier. But, of course, there is no way to prevent those from being distributed.

At some level I believe that's the purpose behind some of this. If someone can only have one proof, then someone can only have one account to speak with. They'll be easier to monitor, easier to identify, easier to silence. That's why I think these types of laws and behaviors should be resisted and protested.

I've mentioned in a previous comment that it's telling that big tech isn't resisting these totally-just-coincidental ID laws coming from western countries. It supercharges their surveillance and tracking abilities, and widens their moats.

Also, porn is a smokescreen. The definition of "adult" content will rapidly expand, and these put the ID issuers in censorious a position of control over people and services. Nothing stops a government attestation server from rejecting a request because someone is blacklisted from "mass communication services" because they're a felon, protestor, LGBT activist, etc... or because a service has fallen out of favor.
by gklitt | 2025-07-28 01:05:33+00:00
Author here. Yes, I think the original GitHub Copilot autocomplete UI is (ironically) a good example of a HUD! Tab autocomplete just becomes part of your mental flow.

Recent coding interfaces are all trending towards chat agents though.

It’s interesting to consider what a “tab autocomplete” UI for coding might look like at a higher level of abstraction, letting you mold code in a direct-feeling way without being bogged down in details.
by E-Reverance | 2025-07-28 01:05:37+00:00
Doesn't explicitly say widowers but still relevant:

"Older people are most likely to live alone: 34% of those over 65 do so, and among those aged 85 and older, the share jumps to 56%. But young adults between 25 and 34 also stand out, with 28% living alone — well above average. Women live alone slightly more often than men (21.2% versus 20%)."

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sees-uptick-in-people-living-a...
by misterbrian | 2025-07-28 01:06:06+00:00
I'm working on Waywo, a semantic search engine for "What are you working on?" threads powered by new features in Redis 8 like the vector set data structure for semantic search.

Waywo will help users quickly digest hundreds of project descriptions, explore similar projects, deduplicate projects across threads from previous posts, visualize a graph of all projects, and more! I'll be documenting my approach to building this with coding Agents like cursor and Gemini CLI

I'm building Waywo for the Redis Hackathon on DEV.to that is running from now until August 10! Follow me on DEV/GitHub/X (@briancaffey) to see how this project turns out!
by akersten | 2025-07-28 01:07:04+00:00
> If this pans out for them, as cryptographically it will but remains to be how vendors and implementations handle it at scale, then they can introduce voting from your phone — the previously-unattainable holy grail of modern democracy — precisely because it lets the government forcibly stop the cheating that device-to-app/web attestation solves. And they can do so without leaking your identity to election officials if they care to! Just visit a government booth once in a while to have your identity signature renewed (and any prior signatures issued to your identity revoked). That’s how digital wallet passports and ID cards work already today anyways, with their photo/video/NFC processes.

we've banned all graphic depictions from the internet, required a verified name attached to every blog post, and made sure to confirm everyone's digital passport before letting them resolve a DNS query, but at least now I can vote from me phone instead of having to go outside. The future is bright!
by BadIron | 2025-07-28 01:07:09+00:00
I started using Claude AI, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek for helping me to develop Windows applications using Delphi Pascal a few months ago. I absolutely love it. I learned Pascal when I was 16 (high school) and throughout college. I have never been a professional programmer in my life. I'm getting old. I want to start getting back into programming. AI has helped me tremendously. AI has helped me to develop many special procedures and functions which I could not figure out by myself anymore. I am a Vice President at a company that sells computer networking equipment. Still need to keep my day job. By the way, Claude AI is the best so far when it comes to Pascal. ChatGPT is disappointing, maybe it's better in other programming languages. DeepSeek depends, it's average.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-28 01:07:33+00:00
While there are absolutely issues with kids coming across things they shouldn’t, I’d argue an equally large issue is parents buying into the delusion that they can keep their children contained within a bubble of perfect innocence until adulthood.

That idea has never really been realistic short of keeping them isolated from society until 16-18 (which most would consider abuse), but it’s not even slightly possible today with how readily available information has become. It’s an inevitability that they will learn about the topics you’ve been avoiding and take on external influences you may not approve of.

Now to be clear, I’m not advocating for letting kids run wild on the internet with no guardrails, especially earlier on. Guardrails are important, but it’s even more important in my opinion to try to stay ahead of what they may encounter by talking with them about those things so when they eventually run across it, they’re not flying blind and might even seek your guidance about the incident since they know you’re not going to get angry about it. That’s much more likely to bring positive outcomes than if they ran into these things without parental support.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-28 01:07:34+00:00
The reason appears about 1/4 of the way into the article, and it should be familiar by now:

> Sensing an opportunity, a private equity group called American Industrial Partners (AIP) began to roll up the industry.

As usual, things are the way they are because of unchecked capitalism and private equity being allowed to do whatever they hell they want.
by krogenx | 2025-07-28 01:08:21+00:00
I’ve been working on an animal management app for the last two years or so. It’s a hobby project so it’s not going very fast. Recently I’ve released a new version with support for one model of a UHF RFID reader. It allows me to count and identify my chickens from up to 15 feet away.

https://youtu.be/_iGn_pZ3IkY?si=x4ijZdAP-suhuJ7Y

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/manger-animal-manager/id674269...
by snickerbockers | 2025-07-28 01:08:33+00:00
ill take zip or even floppy over most cutting-edge technology. You don't want your nuclear deterrent to have a dependency on AWS, they're bad enough at keeping things running when the country isn't getting nuked.

I don't remember how reliable floppy disks were but at least data integrity is a well-understood science so there should be no problem detecting corruption. The new system uses SSDs which could be a bit concerning, as they're known to be more prone to corruption than HDDs; however the same thing i just said about data corruption applies to SSDs as well so it's probably not a big deal.

On the other hand, the write amplification problem is very concerning and I can only hope that they're using full-disk encryption.

I think it's important to realize that there hasn't been a lot of meaningful advancement as far as software is concerned for at least a decade. Hardware never stopped getting better but that just enabled people to write bloated, unreliable software.
by sho_hn | 2025-07-28 01:08:55+00:00
What's weird is that so many people shrug this off with "eh, it's what they said about the calculator".

Which to me is roughly as bad a take as "LLMs are just fancy auto-complete" was.

I feel it's worth reminding ourselves that evolution on the planet has rarely opted for human-level intelligence and that we possess it might just be a quirk we shouldn't take for granted; it may well be that we could accidentally habituate and eventually breed outselves dumber and subsist fine (perhaps in different numbers), never realizing what we willingly gave up.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-07-28 01:10:12+00:00
This is nonsense. Of course we want to be richer tomorrow than we are today, but we're plenty rich today. We -- the United States -- do not have a cashflow issue. We can meet all of our current obligations -- or could if there were any effort at efficient redistribution at all. The US federal government is maybe the least cashflow-constrained organization in human history. We want the $10 tomorrow, without any question whatsoever.
by geocrasher | 2025-07-28 01:10:14+00:00
Yes, it's a religious website, but it's also the site with the most languages of any site on the 'net, at 1100+ right now. Some of them are downloadable content only, most are web content as well. The translations are done at least in part by native speakers of the target language.

Figured you'd appreciate the complexity of having that many languages on a site. jw.org.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-28 01:11:09+00:00
Sensing an opportunity, a private equity group called American Industrial Partners (AIP) began to roll up the industry.

> As usual, things are the way they are because of unregulated capitalism and private equity being allowed to do whatever they hell they want.

This is exactly what happened - and why. Capitalism is a healthy system where it is a healthy system. Beyond that, capitalism is either: Beneficial thru flexible, effective governance. Or not beneficial. That's every possibility.

Exploitive manipulation of the firetruck market lies outside of the healthy-by-default area of capitalism.
by akersten | 2025-07-28 01:11:33+00:00
If we're to regain any ground here we need to adjust the messaging wrt terms like "wild west" - that's precisely the kind of terminology that scares the average voter into thinking the government needs to do something about this whole internet thing. We need to use patriotic and inspiring language, like "free" as in "free speech for the internet," or "safe and private" etc
by breadwinner | 2025-07-28 01:12:58+00:00
If LDL cholesterol is the villain it is made out to be then lowering it — by whatever means — should produce a proportionate reduction in heart disease. It does not (see ENHANCE trial [1]).

And yet lowering cholesterol using statins has proved beneficial for people who have already suffered heart attacks. How do you explain this? One explanation is that statins work for these people not because they lower cholesterol but because they reduce inflammation and stabilize plaque.

The science behind this is not fully understood. Big Pharma has no incentive to research this because they are raking in money, and any further research could only slow down the gravy train at best.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0800742
by kwillets | 2025-07-28 01:13:57+00:00
Some folks I work with have a terabyte of short string records that they regularly scan with regexes to develop classification criteria; it's a prime application for a substring index that can accelerate their queries, but the scale is daunting.

I came up with a suffix-sorting index for this domain that's interestingly simple. Most algos for this use a generalized suffix tree that's built by concatenating all the strings into one giant string and feeding it into a conventional suffix sort, but that has some big constants on the indexing throughput, due I think to the overhead of handling one giant string instead of a bunch of small independent records.

In the latter case, by making the structure slightly simpler and search slightly harder, I can get indexing throughput in the GBps, at least for the sorting part.

The output of that in its simplest form is a 4n or 8n-sized set of int's, but it can be fed further into a compressed rank/select data structure for various space/indexing time/retrieval time tradeoffs, and I don't think those are slow (eg Roaring Bitmaps)

I'll post this on show HN if anybody's interested; I'm still writing up the details, as I've barely gotten the POC code working.
by Liftyee | 2025-07-28 01:14:02+00:00
As expected based on the opening disclaimer, I'm noticing a lot of LLM "fluff" in this writing. Louis Rossmann made me aware of the "It's not ABC, it's DEF with XYZ" pattern. Also arguably overuse of the tricolons (groups of 3 things) with overlapping/redundant meanings.

I have no issue with literary devices when used thoughtfully, but thought is exactly what LLMs lack.

Makes me wonder if one day we'll need LLMs to compress this kind of writing again. Like purposefully decreasing the signal to noise ratio for transmission, then distilling it down at the receiving end.
by permo-w | 2025-07-28 01:15:42+00:00
I'm broadly supportive of nuclear fission, but I completely understand more nervousness of it than coal, particularly in the days before we cared much about climate change or industrial pollution. the worry about nuclear isn't low-level day to day pollution, it's disasters. coal disasters are essentially local incidents, and while they can have a big impact politically (f.e., Aberfan), they don't strike fear into people's hearts on a national or international level because the only people at risk to a disaster live very near a coal plant. when Chernobyl surged, half of Europe was affected. yes coal plants can have fallout too, but it's nowhere near as dangerous, even if the standard pollution is worse over time

coal plants were allowed to produce more radiation than nuclear plants because nuclear plants are nuclear plants and radiation management is an intrinsic part of the process. although they undoubtedly should have been, no one was paying attention to coal plants' radiation output, because they were invented before radiation was even discovered, and it's just not the star of the show there, nor is it the first consideration people have when considering coal pollution
by sillysaurusx | 2025-07-28 01:16:51+00:00
I largely agree with your second paragraph, but the solution isn’t necessarily to give parents control, but rather to stop draconian laws from passing.

As far as the beheading video, why be offended? Yes, I think teenagers will be naturally curious, and that gore videos will be on their watch list along with porn. It was true for most of my friends, and admitting this truth rather than running from it is how you deal with it. It’s not "defending" when it happens as a matter of course.

Again, you’re basically arguing for draconian powers not for the government but for the parents. To me, this is two sides of the same coin; whether the jailer is the government or the parent, when I was a teen both would have been the enemy. I personally don’t want my child to think of me as the enemy. Other parents can make different choices.

And yes, I think it was fine for me to watch that video when I was 13.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-07-28 01:18:10+00:00
It's not a tech issue, it's a regulation issue.

EU wants to push more control on the internet, today it's "think of the children" but when the infrastructure is rolled out, it'll be "real name verifiction" on social media, chat control, etc.

Whoever is pushing this in EU has to be removed before things will get better.
by nateb2022 | 2025-07-28 01:18:13+00:00
> This repo is about designing a server that fits within the 1U space and 1A @ 120v power constraint while maximizing computing power, storage, and value.

For a $800 setup and $30-50/mo in colocation fees, I think this is a lot worse value overall than a lot of hosting providers, e.g. Hetzner provides servers that start at ~$36/mo with around 64GB RAM and 1TB storage.

Even if someone absolutely wanted to configure + provide their own hardware to colocate, you could probably put together a much nicer server for less by scavenging parts off of eBay.

Fun yes, but practical no.
by alisonatwork | 2025-07-28 01:18:16+00:00
I'm not sure what the parent poster is getting at about information on Chinese business, politics and culture being hard to find because that stuff is widely written about in the global media, and there are plenty of English language sources. It almost seems counterproductive to provide links to resources because it's artificially limiting what you will be exposed to, but here we go anyway...

China Media Project (media analysis) - https://chinamediaproject.org/

China Leadership Monitor (political analysis) - https://www.prcleader.org/

Made in China Journal (social analysis) - https://madeinchinajournal.com/

What's on Weibo (pop culture reporting) - https://www.whatsonweibo.com/

The China Project (formerly SupChina, general reporting) - https://thechinaproject.com/

* edit to add: seems like The China Project shut down end of 2023, but leaving the link for context

Sixth Tone (state-owned media specializing in human interest stories) - https://www.sixthtone.com/

On the state-owned media tip there are also more blatant propaganda outlets like Global Times, People's Daily etc, plus private-owned media that largely toe the party line like South China Morning Post.

There are also a set of mostly US-based thinktanks that do solid macro-level reporting on geopolitical and economic issues, guys like Jamestown, CSIS, German Marshall Fund etc.

Then there are countless blogs and newsletters and influencers who report on specific niches, everything from economic analysis to boyslove fandom... You can jump on Bilibili to watch shows and see all the "bullet chat" jargon and memes, you can rub shoulders with the upper middle class on Xiaohongshu, read millions of Steam reviews or check out the forums of games popular in China, follow ABC or expat channels on YouTube etc. I find it very hard to believe that people in 2025 can't find any information about what's going on in China.

All that said, I do share the sense that there is a bit a trough between Chinese tech workers and foreign tech workers, and it's because most Chinese tech workers don't tend to prioritize learning English to the same degree that tech workers around the rest of the world do. There are lots of publications that report on the Chinese tech industry from an investor or economic perspective, probably written by all those MBAs who went to study overseas, but nerd-to-nerd level exchange is lacking imo. I suppose you could ask an LLM to summarize content from v2ex.com (HN-ish Reddit), tieba.baidu.com (Reddit-ish Reddit), segmentfault.com (StackOverflow) etc, but that doesn't really do much to engage in a social way so I'm not sure if it's what you're looking for. Chinese-language Github projects are one place you could explore, if you specifically want to interact with developers over there.
by xoa | 2025-07-28 01:18:57+00:00
Yes, the article does sort of half-heartedly acknowledge that, though via Google stating the obvious vs any journalism on the BBC's part:

>"Google says the system is supposed to be supplementary and is not a replacement for national systems."

Before immediately going into the classic "but SOME people say otherwise!"

That said, I think the more basic problem I have with this article in terms of education of the reading public is the failure to touch on the false-postive vs false-negative tradeoff that is so core to tuning warning algorithms. It's easy to cherry pick with 20/20 hindsight after the fact and it feels clear when a warning that might have saved lives isn't sent. But in reality, constant warnings can be as bad as no warning because they have the same basic effect of people "not getting the message". The mechanism (people tuning warnings out, boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome) of course differs, but the end result is the same. And outcomes should be the focus when it comes to public health and security. I think this is a super important thing for reporting to acknowledge, because without at least a somewhat educated public understanding there is a systemic incentive by a lot of governments and organizations to lean into false-positives due to being better at ass covering and blame reversal. They can say "well, we warned you, and if we were wrong other times that was just being cautious, and it's YOUR fault that YOU turned off the warnings!" If Google had set off the alert for that quake, but had also set off the alert for lots of smaller quakes previously, even if the end result was the same number of deaths I suspect this article would not have been written. Or, as you say, simply not trying in the first place and keeping their virtual heads down.

Walking the fine line of balance in mass scale public safety is just very, very hard. And to achieve a systemic approach to safety that really maximizes good outcomes takes a good faith, no fault sort of environment (short of actual malice) vs finger pointing. We can see that play out in areas of life like commercial aviation which has been incredibly successful at reducing fatal accidents over the decades.
by zahlman | 2025-07-28 01:18:58+00:00
> But in practice I bounce back and forth between two languages right now (Go and Python, neither of which have such a standard parser ecology)

https://pypi.org/project/pybison/ , or its predecessors such as https://pypi.org/project/ply/ ?

But yes, the decidedly non-traditional https://github.com/pyparsing/pyparsing/ is certainly more popular.
by hi_hi | 2025-07-28 01:19:25+00:00
Doesn't it all come down to "what is the ideal interface for humans to deal with digital information"?

We're getting more and more information thrown at us each day, and the AIs are adding to that, not reducing it. The ability to summarise dense and specialist information (I'm thinking error logs, but could be anything really) just means more ways for people to access and view that information who previously wouldn't.

How do we, as individuals, best deal with all this information efficiently? Currently we have a variety of interfaces, websites, dashboards, emails, chat. Are all these necessary anymore? They might be now, but what about the next 10 years. Do I even need to visit a companies website if can get the same information from some single chat interface?

The fact we have AIs building us websites, apps, web UI's just seems so...redundant.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-07-28 01:20:32+00:00
The idea is, that you have a 'digital ID' on your phone, tied to your real identity, that will today be used to prove you're 18, but when the infrastructure exists, it will be used for other stuff too... like needing to attach your real name to any social media account (you already have an app that does that on your phone for the 18+ thing, so adding real name is easy to implement), and that will greatly affect freedom of speech.
by hakunin | 2025-07-28 01:20:55+00:00
I guess there are some who would've enjoyed coding, but circumstances pulled them away from it. The word "intimacy" comes to mind. If you lose intimate relationship with code writing (or never gain one), you will be more okay with AI.

Perhaps I'm trying to point out that sometimes you lose it accidentally, while still instinctively thinking that you enjoy writing code.