MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raincole | 2025-07-24 16:43:30+00:00
The big irony here is that we already have a widely applied age verification mechanism, which is... credit cards. In most countries minors can't apply for credit cards. Therefore in an ideal world, Steam/itch.io/etc should allow players to buy NSFW content if only they pay via credit cards.

But someone we live in an upside down reality where payment processors are the ones forcing stores to remove NSFW content.
by jandrese | 2025-07-24 16:43:30+00:00
I think there is a strong case that experienced developers can not be replaced by AI anytime soon. Where the danger lies is for junior developers fresh out of college. How are they supposed to become experienced developers if an AI can do the grunt work they normally get assigned?

It really doesn't help that AI companies are hype machines full of salesmen trying to hype up their product so you buy it. There have been a lot of amazing AI "success stories" that don't hold up under scrutiny.
by zahlman | 2025-07-24 16:43:41+00:00
> but is correct

That's the thing, though — there isn't an objective standard here; it's mediated both by the local context (how good are the local trich inspections, etc.) and risk tolerance vs. cultural expectations for how the meat should taste. The Canadian and US governments currently disagree; so it goes.

Everything "has a risk". Taste and smell are not reliable indicators of bacterial contamination, and properly cooking meat won't eliminate dangerous toxins left behind by prior contamination if the meat was improperly stored before cooking.
by johnwheeler | 2025-07-24 16:43:48+00:00
I really blame the Sam Altman hype machine for all of this dystopian nonsense. He really is like a Ryan holiday you can’t trust anything he says. He's the one who started all this "employees are going away" stuff with this $20,000 AI employee. that's not when he started it, he started it long before that with all his basic income bullshit.
by enaaem | 2025-07-24 16:43:54+00:00
Interesting thing is that cars are never considered to be threat to public safety. People have simply accepted that cycling/walking is unsafe (because of cars), so parents have to drive their kids everywhere.

During the 70s in the Netherlands there were massive protests called 'Stop the Child murder', because cars were killing too many children on bicycles. This was actually a conservative protest, because people were used to safe streets and simply did not accept that cars started killing their children.
We Launched It
by vedant_mandu | 2025-07-24 16:43:58+00:00
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by EvgeniyZh | 2025-07-24 16:44:25+00:00
I submitted questions to HLE. I tend to agree that the review was far from perfect. For example, some of my questions were just not understood, and another was claimed to have the wrong answer, though it wasn't.

I think the situation is better for math and physics, where answers are more straightforward to verify; probably even worse in the humanities. I also believe that releasing the models' answers would help verify the questions, but it has never been done (possibly in fear of even more train-on-test?)

Edit: to clarify, when I contacted orgs they helped me with the problems but I guess it wouldn't happen if the problem was in opposite direction
by wat10000 | 2025-07-24 16:44:31+00:00
Weren’t you talking about moving the entire HQ? Commuting from Canada or Mexico wouldn’t help at all. The US is going to want its taxes if you’re working in the US. It even wants its taxes if you’re not working in the US, if you’re a citizen. If our hypothetical CEO was a citizen, they’d have to renounce it, and move company HQ out of the country, and move themselves out of the country. If they’re not a US citizen then they just need the last two.
by amradio1989 | 2025-07-24 16:44:32+00:00
I'm stating the obvious, but these things tend to go either way. We either grossly overestimate the impact, or grossly underestimate it.

In the case of the internet, it ended up going both ways. We overestimated it in the near term and underestimated its impact in the long term.

They could very well be right. I don't think they are. But I've also never seen anything that can scale quite like AI.
by rsync | 2025-07-24 16:44:42+00:00
It need not be that extreme… what with the theft and confiscation of property, etc.

A much milder, and more sensible, expression of your underlying sentiment is:

If an activity becomes this essential, the government should provide a competitive entrant in the same field.

Now the incumbent provider has competition, and there is a market participant tied to other incentives, etc.

No theft necessary.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-07-24 16:44:47+00:00
The article mentions tying shoelaces.

If you have a kid who hasn't yet learned how to tie their shoelaces, you might find this video helpful: https://youtu.be/JaBmehtalAY

It shows a method called the 'Ian Knot', which:

- results in the same type of knot as the common method, and

- is faster because it requires fewer hand movements, and

- is as easy to learn as the common method (for kids learning from scratch)

When adults encounter it, they usually think it seems hard, but that's just because they're used to the method they've used thousands of times. It's not really harder to learn!

BTW I'm pretty sure I learned about the Ian Knot here on HN. It's been posted a bunch of times. The first few times I saw it, I just bookmarked it for later. But when it was time to teach my son, I figured I should use the best method.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by racktash | 2025-07-24 16:44:49+00:00
I feel the same. Am very interested to hear others say the same as it is a worrying experience, seeing a substantial part of one's life disappear in no time at all.

It's hard to say whether it was the event itself, the effect of how it changed my working life (it made me a remote worker where before I was fully in office) or as you say, just getting older. I see photos of myself taken in 2019, and I'm surprised how different I look. Aging, sure, but I just feel like 2020 changed a lot more than we think.
by westurner | 2025-07-24 16:44:54+00:00
Do the sqlite replication systems depend upon WAL checksums?

Merkle hashes would probably be better.

google/trillian adds Merkle hashes to table rows.

sqlite-parquet-vtable would workaround broken WAL checksums.

sqlite-wasm-http is almost a replication system

Re: "Migration of the [sqlite] build system to autosetup" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41921992 :

> There are many extensions of SQLite; rqlite (Raft in Go,), cr-sqlite (CRDT in C), postlite (Postgres wire protocol for SQLite), electricsql (Postgres), sqledge (Postgres), and also WASM: sqlite-wasm, sqlite-wasm-http, dqlite (Raft in Rust),

> awesome-sqlite

From "Adding concurrent read/write to DuckDB with Arrow Flight" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42871219 :

> cosmos/iavl is a Merkleized AVL tree. https://github.com/cosmos/iavl

/? Merkle hashes for sqlite: https://www.google.com/search?q=Merkle+hashes+for+SQlite

A git commit hash is basically a Merkle tree root, as it depends upon the previous hashes before it.

Merkle tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree

(How) Should merkle hashes be added to sqlite for consistency? How would merkle hashes in sqlite differ from WAL checksums?
I built a tool that hit $516 MRR with no ads
by ddoemonn | 2025-07-24 16:45:07+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently launched a small tool called createmybanner.com. It helps people create banners and social media visuals in seconds using AI-enhanced layout and styling. The goal was to make something better than a template engine, but easier than Photoshop.

I started it because I was frustrated with how long it took to design good-looking banners, especially when I needed multiple versions for different platforms. I wanted something fast, clean, and smart enough to make design decisions automatically.

I launched publicly a few weeks ago and have just passed $516 in monthly recurring revenue. All users are organic. No ads, no paid traffic. I shared it in a few niche communities, got solid feedback, and iterated quickly based on user input.

People really liked how easy it was to generate quality designs without needing any real design skills. I’ve been adding small improvements almost daily, including new presets, layout logic, and export options based on user suggestions.

There is still a ton to build. But I wanted to share this early milestone because it means a lot to see people using and paying for something I made from scratch. If you're working on something similar or have feedback on the product, I’d love to hear it.

Happy to answer questions or share what worked during the early launch.

Thanks for reading.
by vemv | 2025-07-24 16:45:16+00:00
There are infinitely many runtime properties that are simply impossible to determine statically.

Static typing is just a tool, aiming to help with a subset of all possible problems you may find. If you think it's an absolute oracle of every possible problem you may find, sorry, that's just not true, and trivially demonstrable.

Your example already is a runtime check that makes no particular use of the type system. It's a simple "set contains" check (value-oriented, not type-oriented) which also is far more expensive than simply verifying the string prefix of a Slack-style object identifier.

Ultimately I'm not even saying that types are bad, or that static typing is bad. If you truly care about correctness, you'd use all layers at your disposition - static and dynamic.
by titzer | 2025-07-24 16:45:24+00:00
It all comes back to growthism. When you're a MegaCorp, you can't make 20% more YoY revenue growth by making better products, charging more, or cutting costs. The only option is to get hundreds of millions or billions of new eyeballs with billions of hours of attention. You gotta keep them off other platforms. You gotta keep them unable to do anything but stare at the screen and consume.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-24 16:45:25+00:00
> I'm not even sure they have the leverage when faced with an 'essential' duopoly that everyone already relies on.

The fact they are so essential should give the nations all the leverage - "Your service has become too important to the function of our nation, so we are nationalizing your company and making it a public service."

Time to stop being afraid of doing that - if a private company is THAT important to the continuing functioning of your society, then that company has lost their right to be a private for profit business and needs to be nationalized, at least partially to keep them in check and make sure they are following the laws of the nations they operate in.

We, as societies, should have never allowed any corporation to become more powerful than their governments.
by whodidntante | 2025-07-24 16:45:32+00:00
There is quite a lot of easy to find information on the web that shows that the US spends twice as much per capita than our European peers and we have worse outcomes, not just on average, but worse outcomes comparing similar economic demographics, including wealthy Americans. We spend $5T a year on health care, or a comparative waste of over $2.5T a year.

Was just listening to this on NPR this morning:

https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/07/08/nx...

The health of U.S. kids has declined significantly since 2007, a new study finds

"What we found is that from 2010 to 2023, kids in the United States were 80% more likely to die" than their peers in these nations

You also do not need the internet to understand what is going on - you just have to interact with our "health" system.
by gfairbanks | 2025-07-24 16:45:37+00:00
The overall idea of using your type system to enforce invariants is called typeful programming [1]. The first few sentences of that paper are:

"There exists an identifiable programming style based on the widespread use of type information handled through mechanical typechecking techniques. This typeful programming style is in a sense independent of the language it is embedded in; it adapts equally well to functional, imperative, object-oriented, and algebraic programming, and it is not incompatible with relational and concurrent programming."

[1] Luca Cardelli, Typeful Programming, 1991. http://www.lucacardelli.name/Papers/TypefulProg.pdf

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18872535
by amendegree | 2025-07-24 16:45:37+00:00
I never disagreed that some children aren’t getting food, my point always was that the UN and Hamas are responsible for this problem, the IDF in partnership with GHF are the only organizations facilitating alleviating the suffering.

The UN has literal tons of food that they’re refusing to distribute. Hamas clearly has access to fresh fruit as recently as 2 days ago and yet they refuse to share any of it with their constituents. Egypt is refusing to allow anyone to leave Gaza as a refugee. When Israel and Trump proposed resettling the refugees temporarily until the war ended they were accused by you, the UN, and every single “humanitarian” org of ethnic cleansing.

Israel is not responsible for a problem they didn’t create, don’t want and are trying very hard to prevent and end. The only people responsible for this are the ones refusing to solve it unless it allows for a genocide of Jews.

The OP and you are both determined to only consider solutions that allow for further Arab colonization and may result in the death of millions of Jews. This is why I accuse you of genocide.

I will also add, Israel is not responsible for the health and welfare of even a single Gazan citizen, that responsibility falls on Hamas, so literally anything Israel does to help the gazan citizenry is already going above and beyond. If you have a problem with the welfare of Hamas’s constituents, take it up with them. Tell them to unconditionally surrender and return the kidnapped hostages. Instead of agitating for the wholesale slaughter of Jews.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-07-24 16:46:24+00:00
AI, which they are hoping takes over EVERYTHING, is probably one of the worthwhile ones for government to be involved in. If it has the chance to be this revolutionary, which would be better:

The government owning the machine that does everything.

Tech bros, with their recent love of guruship, with their willingness to do any dark pattern if it means bigger boats for them, owning the entire labor supply in order to improve the lives of 8 bay area families.
by the_snooze | 2025-07-24 16:46:31+00:00
I take a bit of an orthogonal view myself: the skills themselves don't matter nearly as much as the resilience necessary to build them. Consumer tech focuses a lot on low-friction interactions that abstract away challenges. Sometimes those challenges are pointless, but sometimes they're not. If you take away all the challenges everywhere, you end up with someone who's fragile to the tiniest random bumps in life.

I think this is true the value of extracurricular activities like sports and art. There's no way to shortcut those skills. The struggle is part of the experience. Every violin player will sound like a dying cat their first year. Every would-be baseball pitcher will make awful throws when playing catch with their dad. But they get better with time, and in the process internalize that they're capable of doing so.
by zahlman | 2025-07-24 16:46:37+00:00
> But we could return to enforcing some sort of clear, pro-reader writing and bury the 2010s-2020s SEO garbage on page 30.

We could.

But it will absolutely not happen unless and until it can be more profitable than Google's current model.

What's your plan?

> Not the mention that the LLMs randomly lie to you with less secondary hints at trustworthiness (author, website, other articles, design etc.) than you get in any other medium. And the sustainability side of incentivizing people to publish anything. I really see the devil of convenience as the only argument for the LLM summaries here.

Well, yes. That's the problem. Why rely on the same random liars as taste-makers?
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-24 16:46:52+00:00
It's not power, it's volume. Groups like Collective Shout are "squeaky wheels". They send enough letters/phone calls/emails to a payment processor, often via the company's legal team, often citing the processor's own terms and conditions, until the company caves from essentially peer pressure and takes all the whining and pushes it back onto their customers (vendors like Steam and Itch).

It doesn't take a lot of people/very big organization or a lot of money to do, just a willingness to be loud and obnoxious, but in a legal way.

It's the same thing with DMCA trolls that send takedown letters to demonetize things like YouTube channels. They don't need a lot of people/power/money, just a willingness to complain in volume and leave the evidence and fact finding to other people and/or automated systems like YouTube's auto-DMCA.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-07-24 16:47:04+00:00
> Even speaking is thinking. This is why free speech is the very First Amendment. Whoever denies your right to speak freely is controlling your thinking.

There's an excellent podcast (Radiolab, possibly) about how this conception of what the first amendment means is rather recent (1910s-1920s) and that the ideas of what "free speech" meant before that are really radically different.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-07-24 16:47:14+00:00
Two reasons:

1. Some businesses can't just be built from nothing-but-software-and-server. You need warehouses, logistics, and all sorts of other fixed costs that exist before you can start recouping your investment. Not everyone has the money to start such a business, despite otherwise having the ability.

2. People aren't entirely stupid. If something's a scam, con, or otherwise a detriment to human flourishing, they're not going to use it unless they have reason to doubt their assessment. Advertising is good at getting people to associate thing with sentiment, which can override their bullshit detectors.

Something that's genuinely-useful, and genuinely-better, can spread without any advertising spending, once it's past the threshold where noise no longer dominates. (For example, Plausible Analytics: I poked around their demo, concluded that it was strictly better than Google Analytics, and (after a couple of chats with one of the founders) started telling everyone with a website about it. I was clearly not the only one.)

I have no idea why anyone would give up their business to VCs if they don't need investment to kick it off, and aren't running a long con.
by wussboy | 2025-07-24 16:47:20+00:00
I don’t think you can become a talented enough software developer to benefit from using AI by using AI. Google Maps causes us to lose the ability to navigate without it. I would not be surprised in the slightest if the same is true with AI.

So. A little boost now. But at the risk of not knowing how to get where you’re going unless someone is holding your hand.

And if that’s the case, how can we possibly get to where we’ve never been before?
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-07-24 16:47:25+00:00
Complex types don't exist. Schemas do.

There is no duck, just primitive types organized duck-wise.

The sooner you embrace the truth of mereological nihilism the better your abstractions will be.

Almost everything at every layer of abstraction is structure.

Understanding this will allow you to still use types, just not abuse them because you think they are "real".
by jchw | 2025-07-24 16:47:26+00:00
I think the true answer is that the moment you have to do tricky concurrency in Go, it becomes less desirable. I think that Go is still better at tricky concurrency than C, though there are some downsides too (I think it's a bit easier to sneak in a torn read issue in Go due to the presence of fat pointers and slice headers everywhere.)

Go is really good at easy concurrency tasks, like things that have almost no shared memory at all, "shared-nothing" architectures, like a typical web server. Share some resources like database handles with a sync.Pool and call it a day. Go lets you write "async" code as if it were sync with no function coloring, making it decidedly nicer than basically anything in its performance class for this use case.

Rust, on the other hand, has to contend with function coloring and a myriad of seriously hard engineering tasks to deal with async issues. Async Rust gets better every year, but personally I still (as of last month at least) think it's quite a mess. Rust is absolutely excellent for traditional concurrency, though. Anything where you would've used a mutex lock, Rust is just way better than everything else. It's beautiful.

But I struggle to be as productive in Rust as I am in Go, because Rust, the standard library, and its ecosystem gives the programmer so much to worry about. It sometimes reminds me of C++ in that regard, though it's nowhere near as extremely bad (because at least there's a coherent build system and package manager.) And frankly, a lot of software I write is just boring, and Go does fine for a lot of that. I try Rust periodically for things, and romantically it feels like it's the closest language to "the future", but I think the future might still have a place for languages like Go.
by inanutshellus | 2025-07-24 16:47:33+00:00
I'm sure you're beyond me here, but not quite following. He's not using the argument himself he's saying this is a situation in which people are removing "the fence" (replacing scissor-and-crayon time with tablets) without asking why it was there (establishing fine motor skills).

It's clouded here because the article knows why the fence is there. Specifically - the fence (scissors, drawing, coloring) are tools we use in primary school to strengthen the childrens' hands and strengthen their fine motor skills.

When they're older and attempting to write a long essay they don't get muscle cramps and break their concentration. Instead, they... simply write. We don't hand-write anymore but we also no longer have the
by renewiltord | 2025-07-24 16:47:59+00:00
Where could it be? The places with abundant energy are where these things establish. US is about at the lower limit. Korea, Taiwan, Japan. China has SMIC and Huawei. But Europe doesn’t have enough energy to run air conditioning. They’d struggle to add more industry. India has power shortages. Africa isn’t reliable. Australia? South America too unstable.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-24 16:48:13+00:00
>Then you have tech employees who want to believe they’re irreplaceable. It’s easy to want to keep working how we’ve always worked with hope of getting back to pre 2022 levels of software hiring and income. AI stands in the way of that.

Eventually, things will stabilize to a point where we will know what the boundaries of all the new LLM based tooling is good for, and where humans add lots of value to that.

That will then drive a maximalist hiring spree, as the more people you have working at an increase in velocity, the faster you ship, and for once, perhaps the quality of code won't substantially decrease, assuming LLMs improve another few leaps in output quality and engineering workflows adjust in a normalized way.

Thats the hopeful side of the equation anyway.

I feel incredibly bad about customer oriented jobs, like white glove customer service. I already saw a trend (especially since 2020 but certainly before as well) where these AI chat bots and AI support lines will decimate that job category. These are pretty common white collar jobs, lots of people even in our industry got their starts on support lines.