MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Spivak | 2025-07-26 17:04:00+00:00
What are you talking about? The government gets to cheat and use the IRL ID verification they do already for licenses.

* You create your account as part of your license renewal and have a normal-ass login. As part of that your account is manually marked as being 18+ (or just your age) by the person behind the counter.

* The government publishes a few public certs which will be used to verify.

* Then you go to your account page and click the button to generate a certificate signed by one of the government's private keys. The cert is valid for say 7 days.

* You upload the cert to the website you want to access and the website validates it.

Done. You make it illegal to provide your tokens to minors like it's illegal to provide booze to minors. Good enough for government work. It's literally just an EV cert.

The problem gets a lot easier when you have a country wide IRL ID system already in place and can write laws.
by t_a_mm_acq | 2025-07-26 17:04:06+00:00
I’m not sure - I think between the NIST tracks for age estimation and the work entities have done to gather large, diverse sample sets shows meaningful progress and perhaps real world usage.

Your points above are valid and real concerns, in addition to liveliness. There is work further to be done and improvements to be made. But it seems to me that they are solvable problems.

These datasets are getting granular, monolid vs non, 12+ different ethnicity sub groups and so forth.

Do you not think that with enough data it’s solvable?
by esperent | 2025-07-26 17:05:17+00:00
> why have we decided that the FOUC (“flash of unstyled content”) ... is such a dire problem

I think the answer is that different people are sensitive to different things. I'll often come across articles going to great length to reduce some minor jank in animations or page load, and I'll be looking at it thinking yeah, I can see it, but it really doesn't bother me enough to fix. Certainly not by going to these lengths.

Meanwhile, FOUC bothers me a lot, to the point where I can't understand that its accepted in any form. I'd much rather that I don't get shown the page at all until the real font is loaded. Otherwise my eye will have tracked to the text, started reading and then there's a jarring reflow and I lose my place and have to find it again. If I'm scanning for information through lots of websites, it does mentally tire me.
by rimunroe | 2025-07-26 17:05:36+00:00
> The oldest things on earth are the hydrogen atoms. Literally all of them were formed in the first 3 minutes after the big bang.

Stable hydrogen wasn't able to form until several hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang when the universe cooled sufficiently for electrons to bind to protons.

Even assuming you're counting lone protons as hydrogen atoms, it's still absolutely false. I don't know if that's true for the majority of protons in the universe, but there are mechanisms by which new protons are made all the time. Neutrons can turn into protons through beta decay, and high energy particle interactions like those involving cosmic rays can produce brand new protons. These processes can and do happen terrestrially.
by scarecrowbob | 2025-07-26 17:05:57+00:00
Well, consider that for a lot of us "a lack of meaningful antitrust enforcement" is the -direct- result of the tendancy of power to be accrued to trusts under capitalism.

I have heard a variety of explanations for how those things aren't connected, but almost always seem to me to be a "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

I mean, I think the majority of capitalists at the bottom of the pile are indeed "getting what they deserve", but the reason they deserve it is because they are naive capitalists. The rest of us are just dealing with what the folks who have all the capital decided to do to us.
by nunez | 2025-07-26 17:06:44+00:00
I would rather see a piece with grammatical and spelling flaws that I _know_ came from that person's original thoughts than a LLM-perfected read with no clue about its inspirations.

Also, you can't get better without practice. LLMs being so easily accessible will make it possible to never need to learn how to write, which is extremely dangerous given how Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon are the companies driving model development in the US and that LLMs aren't available all of the time (like, when you're outside interacting with real people).
by the_precipitate | 2025-07-26 17:08:49+00:00
To really appreciate inverted indexes, it’s worthwhile to study ISR (Inverted Stream Readers), a concept introduced by the great Mike Burrows. It’s also worth exploring encoding techniques like PForDelta. These elegant ideas demonstrate how true systems design masters can distill complex concepts into simple, powerful abstractions.

Edit: I stand corrected: it's called index stream readers (thanks atombender for pointing this out). For those who knows Mike Burrows only for the Burrows-Wheeler transformation (BZip), you might also want to know that he was also one of the main developers of AltaVista, the first real search engine for the internet. He also designed the early versions of Bing search engine. Eventually he worked for Google and designed their lock service called Chubby.
by pyman | 2025-07-26 17:09:21+00:00
Harmful in which way? Porn addiction is as harmful as gambling, tobacco and alcohol addiction.

High school students with phones at school are showing porn to their friends, even younger kids. Some schools have banned phones, but teens aged 12–17 can still access porn sites freely when they get home.

In my opinion, gambling sites and porn sites should always verify age, same goes for shops selling tobacco and alcohol.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-26 17:09:49+00:00
Oh hallelujah. I used Pocket solely as a means to get long articles onto my Kobo so I could read them when I had idle time, and was seriously bummed that they canceled it. I scripted up some stuff to pull new links from my GoodLinks app, convert them to PDFs, and upload them to Dropbox so they’d automatically sync to my reader, but it was janky and the UI for selecting and reading articles that way on my Kobo isn’t nearly as nice as the Pocket UI there.

I’m so glad this is happening. Guess I’m an Instapaper user now.
by nis0s | 2025-07-26 17:10:07+00:00
Honestly, it sounds less like a problem with “elite overproduction”, and more a problem of a society lacking imagination and creativity to divert resources in efficient ways.

It’s especially appalling that a company service meant to sell experiences is literally complaining about too many people having too much money. What the fuck are they paying their MBAs for, to create spin? Come up with services and products and experiences to sell, you numpties!
by NeutralForest | 2025-07-26 17:10:16+00:00
I'm not sure I agree, you can still use Pydantic in the domain model and update the version of the API when you change the expected schemas of your CRUD application.

Where I'm with you, is that you should take care of your boundaries and muddling the line between your Pydantic domain models and your CRUD models will be painful at some point. If your domain model is changing fast compared to the API you're exposing, that could be an issue.

But that's not a "Pydantic in the domain layer" issue, that's a separation of concerns issue.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-26 17:10:31+00:00
My spirit isn’t “broken” those people - the ones who actively support the demonization of “other” are irrelevant to me unless they are in a position to bring me harm - mostly law enforcement these days.

I see people individually how they treat people and who they surround themselves with. Don’t tell me there are “good people” who support Liberty University or who don’t speak out in churches when the leadership supports politicians and policies that demonize others.

And even then, I’m fine with ministers who say they refuse to marry gay people or allow the ceremonies in their churches. That’s there right to have a backwards belief.
by jmg421 | 2025-07-26 17:10:55+00:00
Hey @JayEquilibria — thanks again for your thoughtful comment!

I used to share some of your skepticism — a lot of network visualizations do feel like scientistic performance art. That started to shift for me after discovering NFX and reading The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen. I began thinking more seriously about network effects when I applied for my first U.S. patent after leaving JP Morgan Chase, where I spent 14 years in technology, leadership, and innovation. That experience led to the early ideas behind Nodes.bio.

I do rely on Cytoscape.js as a rendering engine — so I want to be transparent about that. But I’ve moved deliberately away from the legacy metaphors and plugin model of desktop Cytoscape. Nodes.bio is browser-native, install-free, and designed for speed, storytelling, and shareability. It's built for researchers, founders, investors, and even patients — not just PhD bioinformaticians.

I understand the “performance art” critique, but I’ve seen what happens when visualization actually delivers insight. One of my early users, Dr. Patrick Sewell, a clinical geneticist, has gone on record saying:

“Nodes.bio transformed my hand-drawn network into a publication-quality, interactive diagram in minutes—something I simply couldn't have achieved with any other tool.”

That kind of feedback reshaped how I think about the epistemic value of visualization. In a world increasingly shaped by LLMs, I believe pictures that are worth thousands of tokens are becoming essential — not ornamental.

And even from a utilitarian standpoint — forget truth claims, just ask: does this help people make better decisions, faster, with fewer errors? From what I’ve seen: yes. Visual structure helps surface non-obvious connections, prioritize experiments, flag off-target effects, and bridge gaps between data producers and decision makers. That’s reason enough to keep going.

As for scaling: I’m running on AWS ECR/EB, so infrastructure is solid. The real challenge is cognitive scaling — how to keep massive biological networks legible and meaningful. That’s where I’m focusing next.

I’ll also be publishing the Nodes.bio APIs in the near future — because the value here isn’t just in pretty diagrams, it’s in enabling others to build, extend, and integrate with their own data pipelines, dashboards, or discovery workflows.

Appreciate the challenge. If you do decide to build in this space, I’d love to trade notes!
by gwd | 2025-07-26 17:11:56+00:00
> If the value of a company is $10m and the company asks an investor to give $10m in exchange for equity, the investor should own 100%.

That's not investing, that's buying. Buying means the buyer gives $10m to the previous owners, at which point as you say, the previous owner owns 0% and the new owner owns 100%. But the company is in the same position as it was before -- the same amount of cash on hand as it did before.

For investing, you're putting cash into the company's account, which raises the total value of the company.

Value of the company before investment: intangibles + pre-investment cash - debt = $10m

Suppose I own 10% pre-investment; 10% of $10m is $1m of estimated value.

Value of company after the investment: intangibles + pre-investment cash - debt + $10m == $20m

Now I own 5% of $20m, which is still $1m of estimated value. The investor owns 50% of $20m, which is still $10m of estimated value.

In practice of course, there are different classes of shares which end up being paid out differently.
by zbentley | 2025-07-26 17:11:59+00:00
There is also a thriving wink-and-nod category of “personal massager” tools which are sold in many department stores in the US. They’re usually not in supermarkets, but I get the impression that’s mostly due to supermarkets not having many electronics/appliances in general, not because supermarkets are more family-friendly than, say, Target.
by 9rx | 2025-07-26 17:12:37+00:00
"Do not share personal information online" is a warning that has been heeded since the internet was created. You don't need tech savvy to understand that message, just as you don't need to know anything about zoos to understand "Do not enter the lion cage".

With tech savvy it is possible to understand the dangers well enough to dismiss the common advice in certain cases, but if you don't have it — you had better listen to what others are telling you. If you wish to dismiss it, you are on your own.
by nunez | 2025-07-26 17:12:44+00:00
Sorry, but this is a bad take.

We should be addressing _why_ so much of our population is functionally illiterate and _why_ people can't read financial agreements that can harm them. This should definitely not be left to an extremely-profit-motivated entity to equalize.

Instead, more states are eroding public education in favor of school choice and voucher programs, which is scary in a world wherein many parents would have no issues pulling their kids out of school or sending them to religious schools that consider the Bible as the authoritative text for everything, and for-profit schools would have no problem sacrificing curriculum, learning development and staff the minute it complicates revenue.
by ThyerMJ26 | 2025-07-26 17:13:06+00:00
The author's previous post goes into details of a categorial connection:

λ-Calculus, Combinatory Logic and Cartesian Closed Categories https://thma.github.io/posts/2021-04-04-Lambda-Calculus-Combinatory-Logic-and-Cartesian-Closed-Categories.html

Also, more in-depth:

Categorical combinators, P.-L. Curien https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001999588680047X

(or maybe you're looking for something beyond that)
by reactordev | 2025-07-26 17:13:28+00:00
Nah, the issue with PS3 was everyone coming from a specific set of instructions and having, that, hard wired into their brains. Yes, the cell processor did things differently but it was us engineers who had to learn to think of a world beyond x86. This was a good thing. It let us learn. And when Arm came around, we were ready.
by jmward01 | 2025-07-26 17:13:34+00:00
Strongly decoupling API implementation and, well, actual implementation, is pretty key when you start to evolve an application. People often focus on 'the design' like there is one perfect design for an application for its lifetime when in really it is about how easy the mass of code you have is able to change for the next feature/fix/change and not turn into a hairball of code. That perfect initial design where the internal and external objects are exactly the same generally works well for 1.0, but not 1.1 or 2.0 so strongly decoupling the API implementation is a good general practice if you think your code will continue to evolve.
by sgarland | 2025-07-26 17:13:50+00:00
> Loading stuff from db, you need validation again, either go from binary response to 1 validated type with pydantic, or ORM object that already validates.

You shouldn’t need to validate data coming from the database. IMO, this is a natural consequence of teams abandoning traditional RDBMS best practices like normalization and constraints in favor of heavy denormalization, and strings for everything.

If you strictly follow 3NF (or higher, when necessary), it is literally impossible to have referential integrity violations. There may be some other edge cases that can be difficult to enforce, but a huge variety of data bugs simply don’t exist if you don’t treat the RDBMS as a dumb KV store.
by JayEquilibria | 2025-07-26 17:13:58+00:00
This is a postmodernist, market fundamentalist, meta narrative that has basically nothing to do with reality.

As if there is some kind of no-arbitrage condition arbitrage, to be made between humans playing baseball.

This is nothing new though. Baseball is America's pastime in a very deep way. I collected baseball cards in the 80s like I was trading stocks in another bullshit, market fundamentalist delusion.
by jraby3 | 2025-07-26 17:14:51+00:00
I feel like this didn't touch on the second most important reason not to download the app.

Most of us over use (or are addicted to) our phones and especially to social media. Every barrier you can put in you way to prevent opening it is an improvement.

Opening safari and then having to type in the site name is a better barrier than just opening an app. Logging out every time is a barrier. Putting timers on websites through screen time is a barrier. All these tools help us fight against tech controlling us instead of us controlling the tech.
by VivaTechnics | 2025-07-26 17:15:18+00:00
Start with “A” if possible to ensure top-of-list visibility. Use “AI” as a prefix when relevant to anchor the identity in AI/infra/dev tooling. Keep it short—4 to 5 letters ideal, max 6. It must be memorable: phonetically crisp, simple, and sticky. The name should be brandable—distinct, clean, with no generics or clutter. Prioritize domain availability under .dev, .io, .tech, .host, or .xyz. Don’t obsess early; names evolve and rebranding is easy. Examples like “Aidev” balance AI-focus and clarity well. Currently, devo.host and aidev.host are available.
by woodruffw | 2025-07-26 17:15:19+00:00
Okay. That’s a very different argument than the original one: we’ve gone from “it wouldn’t be a competitive risk” to “the reduction in competition would have made midcentury rail profitable such that Conrail wouldn’t have been necessary.” But that presumes a change in bartering power and operating efficiency that can only come in a less competitive rail market.
by tinaclaussen | 2025-07-26 17:15:40+00:00
The other unique bit about the US is we have uniquely strong consumer protection laws and a uniquely large amount of fraud.

This has nothing to do with instant payment. Lets say $1000 is lost from your checking account due to fraud then is it covered by visa or mastercard? consumer protection there is different.

With SEPA or UPI it is irreversible but it is the same like you ACH transfer. If you do a mistake then it is irreversible.

Some people here talk about Amex, VISA or mastercard giving free damage insurance on purchase of consumer items like phone etc. That is not consumer protection. That is more like one gets this free insurance for paying yearly fees or maintaining account.

Another reason for fraud is the use of magnetic stripe based card readers.
by gruez | 2025-07-26 17:16:17+00:00
Your source is only for all crime statistics. If you look at the detailed breakdown rape has increased[1]. More worrying is the fact that charge rates have fallen[2], which makes the claim that crime was "down" doubtful.

[1] https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250726_EPC...

[2] https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250726_BRC...
by tomhallett | 2025-07-26 17:16:49+00:00
Depends on the definition of SPA, but in the days of jquery, I hardly consider any of that single page app. For example, the server rendered page had most of the html initial rendered, jquery would attach a bunch of listeners, and then on an update it incrementally. If lucky, we had a duplicated x-template-mustache tag which had a logic-less template that we could use to update parts. Jquery and duplication was the “problem” which drove everyone to SPAs.
by lrvick | 2025-07-26 17:17:19+00:00
Note I described MNT reform as -mostly- open and the Precursor as -maximally- open (as in the the maximum extent currently possible to mass produce).

If Bunnis ASIC efforts succeed, then we have auditable reasonably fast chips in the next few years and a truly 100% open device. Tropic Square is another to keep an eye on.

Fully aware of everything in your descriptions here, but you always repeat this stuff as though I am not. Probably useful for others though.

Where we always seem to disagree is you usually try to dismiss mostly open solutions as no better than mostly closed as though the effort to pursue transparency is pointless. I feel every single component with open firmware and open hardware is a huge win, making accountability and community improvement possible. Likewise every blob is an eyesore that should be reverse engineered and replaced... or switch to more transparent alternatives when they exist.

Sure, auditing never catches all bugs, but it catches a -lot- of them. There are many severe security flaws I would never have had a chance in hell of having the time to find in closed binaries, let alone fixing them.

Sure underhanded C and all sorts of sneaky bugs can exist, but an open C solution could be replaced with an open Rust solution structured for east auditing or another language that makes it harder to do many common types of sneaky in.

If a vendor will not let me look at their code, I am extra suspicious of glaring backdoors or bugdoors until proven otherwise given countless examples in the wild.

I have always agreed open source alone does not mean code can be trusted. Most open source code is shit and should -not- be trusted (I review it for a living) but I am absolutely certain open source is an prerequisite to a community maintainable trustworthy solution existing where we get both freedom and security.
by yawpitch | 2025-07-26 17:17:51+00:00
You seem to have misunderstood the concept of evolutionary pressure: there is no force somehow pushing living things to be, in your somewhat problematic phrasing, “compatible” with life, there is instead a general trend of the more-adapted-to-the-needs-of-its-moment individual to survive and reproduce over the less-adapted-to-the-needs-of-its-moment individual. Nothing about being a conjoined twin inherently augers against life or survival or in fact reproduction… in fact I’d argue that most instances of developmentally-conjoined twins survive as one pretty much bog standard surviving individual that, probably unaware, possesses some minor amount of tissue remnant from a non-surviving twin that in no way interferes with their odds of survival or reproduction. While it certainly can be a life-limiting deviation from the “normal” gestational path, it isn’t some sort of hard bar that eliminates the possibility of life or ongoing contribution to the surviving genome of the species, nor is it obvious (never mind well-established) that being a conjoined twin requires a germ-line mutation that will pass genetically to your offspring. Evolutionary pressure can’t apply in any meaningful way over a single generation.
by rtpg | 2025-07-26 17:18:28+00:00
Shrug, I find them more helpful than Pydantic models for lots of canonical cases.

I have had good success with DRF model serializers in like Django projects with 100+ apps (was the sprawling nature of the apps itself a problem? Sure, maybe). Got the job done

As with anything you gotta built your own wrappers around these things to get value in larger projects though
by K0balt | 2025-07-26 17:18:51+00:00
No, that’s what the subcutaneous tracking chip is for. lol.

But seriously, for us it matters, since she is much younger than I am. We make an effort to signal that we are a committed couple so that people don’t make crass assumptions.

Still, my ring is tungsten carbide and hers is a family wedding band handed down in my family for generations. Our engagement ring was also a family heirloom. In that way the rings have meaning.

She likes to wear her ring because she feels like it is a symbol of belonging, and I wear mine to honor our relationship.

To us, the rings are symbolic of our vows, a gentle reminder that our lives are in service of one another.
by reactordev | 2025-07-26 17:19:20+00:00
Yeah, merely asking for posterity in case someone wants to iterate on it. The dev tools need just as much attention as the hardware. Sometimes the community can surprise you. Take fritzing for example. I think the hardware design is novel but to benchmark it fully requires dev tooling that knows how to utilize it all, and in such a way that it abstracts those details from the average developer.

A good example of this is abstracting SIMD instructions for vector multiplication, or CUDA with torch. Normal people don’t care how it’s done, only that it’s done, as fast as can be done.