MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by devnullbrain | 2025-07-26 12:19:39+00:00
>If you are in the middle of typing a comment and switch to another app, when you come back, it will reload the display, losing your comment.

This is the rule for a lot of apps and mobile websites now. I don't understand why - we have so much RAM available - but they love to refresh whether there's a reason to or not. And even if there's a reason not to. I can't count the number of times I've tapped on a tab that has a minature version of all the information I want, only for it to be replaced by a loading screen or 404.

A while ago I noticed my battery usage had gone way up. It was because any time I was distracted from my phone (or lost internet connection on a train), I would just leave the display on. Locking the phone meant that I'd lose whatever context I had.
by consumer451 | 2025-07-26 12:20:22+00:00
Sure, but that's against individual Keyhole style sats. Many countries have that capability.[0] The USA has demonstrated the ability to kill a single sat from a USN ship, and a USAF F-15.[1] However, even the USA has no solution for a mega constellation. That's why the CCP is deploying at least 3 different mega constellations, with a planned total of >40,000 satellites.

There is no existing kinetic solution for the entirely novel concept of Starlink sized mega constellations in LEO. (actually near "very" LEO which is a significant factor)

Take out 10, oh that's nice, we have 10,000 more currently in orbit.

Oh, you took out 120 Starlink sats somehow, that's how many we launch per month.

Maybe a nuke with chaff? That could create a dead spot that orbits around the world every 90 minutes? Still, not a killer solution, right? Please, anyone feel free to correct me.

However, a network engineer could be hungover/bribed/comprimised and push a bad BGP route... that would take down an entire mega constellation network for a bit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT#/media/File:An_ai...
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-26 12:21:14+00:00
You're making this far more complicated than it needs to be. It requires no cryptography more than a random number generator.

Create a service that generates a random token and then gives it to anyone who is over 18. Any service with any employee who is over 18 can get the token and then compare it to the one submitted by the client. Everyone uses the same token across every service and the token is only available to someone over 18.

The security isn't any worse than having user or service-specific tokens and the privacy is significantly better.
by swores | 2025-07-26 12:21:31+00:00
Somewhat ironic that you start by acknowledging that it will be different depending what country you're in, and then write an anecdote on a website used by an international audience saying "around here" with no mention of what "here" means to you! (Well, ironic is the wrong word unless you're Alanis Morrisette, but you know what I mean)
by swiftcoder | 2025-07-26 12:21:33+00:00
> there's a lot of sex trafficking going on in the porn industry, but not so much in the censorship industry

[citation needed]

I'll grant that there is sex trafficking going on at least in the fringes of the porn industry - but that's at least in part because of censorship. If porn production was widely legal and appropriately regulated, there'd be significantly less market for the edgy stuff filmed in Eastern European basements (i.e. the exact same argument as for marijuana legalisation).

There are also a bunch of regimes around the world who love censorship, and also engage in a bunch of human trafficking. For example, the UAE is notorious for both widespread censorship, and an entire class of foreign workers in various forms of indentured servitude (which for women is often prostitution)...
by tptacek | 2025-07-26 12:21:33+00:00
This is all the vibe I get too, but also just: the science isn't there. You can actually end up worse off trying to do PGS screening for intelligence; we may not know enough to do it without also selecting for negative traits, like autism (intelligence and autism aren't as I understand it inextricably linked, but can be confounded in polygenic scores; the notion that you can get any reliably signal at all from PGS for intelligence is itself super shaky). There are embryo selection companies that did intelligence screening that stopped doing it, because it turned out their methodologies were busted.
by jxntb73 | 2025-07-26 12:22:11+00:00
I put your AI written-in-Markdown article into AI and asked it to respond critically. TLDR; LLMs cannot do science.

The concept of "Computational Thermoepistemics" ambitiously seeks to unify computation, thermodynamics, and information theory into a single theoretical framework claiming to reveal fundamental energy limits of AI and intelligence. While its interdisciplinary ambition is commendable, the framework overreaches by treating computational processes too literally as thermodynamic microstates with physical quantities like pressure and chemical potential, which lack rigorous empirical grounding in current computing technologies. The core claims about logical depth and undecidability bounding thermodynamic efficiency conflate abstract computability theory with physical energy costs in a way that oversimplifies highly distinct domains. Moreover, practical quantum advantages are currently limited by error correction and decoherence costs rather than fundamental thermodynamic laws, so the paper’s distinctions are mostly theoretical, not yet substantiated by experimental evidence. Biological efficiency comparisons often ignore the vastly different operational scales and purposes between brains and silicon AI. Finally, while energy-aware algorithm-hardware co-design and reversible computing are promising research paths, the lofty promises that energy efficiency gains could approach biological levels or exploit deep thermodynamic parallels remain speculative. Overall, the framework presents an intriguing synthesis but lacks conclusive validation, so it should be seen as a stimulating hypothesis rather than an established theory reshaping AI energy paradigms.
by MrJohz | 2025-07-26 12:22:54+00:00
What do you mean? It's possible to apply attributes to any element in an arbitrary state: `hover:bg-black` would give an element a black background on hover. It's also apparently possible to apply attributes based on whether a state is fulfilled for a child element (i.e. the :has selector). E.g. `has-[:hover]:bg-black` would give an element a black background if any child is hovered.
by sigseg1v | 2025-07-26 12:23:20+00:00
Regulate software development. Other industries already do this.

You could: - make Software Engineer a protected title that requires formal engineering education and mentorship as well as membership to your country's professional engineering body (Canada already does this) - make collecting and storing PII illegal unless done by a certified Software Engineer - add legal responsibility to certified Software Engineers. If a beach like this happens they lose their license or go to jail. And you easily know who is responsible for it because it's the PEng's name on the project - magically, nobody wants to collect PII insecurely anymore or hire vibe coders or give idiots access to push insecure stuff - bonus: being a certified Software Engineer now boosts your salary by 5x and the only people that will do it actually know WTF they are doing instead of cowboys, and that company will never hire a cowboy because of liability. The entire Internet is now more secure, more profitable for professionals, and dumb AI junk goes in the trash
by atoav | 2025-07-26 12:24:10+00:00
I was curious what the percentage of false allegations are, as this is often quoted as a problem by men online¹. The conclusion of my research is that the rate of false reports is essentially the same as for any other crime (so somewhere in the single digits).

¹: I am a man myself and I understand that men feel threatened this may happen to them. But I personally know multiple women who experienced sexual violence and zero men who were accused of rape
by constantcrying | 2025-07-26 12:24:29+00:00
No. Europe has some small manufacturers, Infineon and NXP but nothing targeting the ultra high end of chip manufacturing.

The EU should obviously set up an Initiative like Rapidus and their ignorance there will certainly cost the continent a lot.

Europe is the only place in the world where you could have a meaningful "made in Europe chip", basically everything in the Semiconductor value chain is already there, except for the manufacturing. China is trying to get there, the EU is just neglecting the opportunity that exists.
by lispitillo | 2025-07-26 12:24:38+00:00
Why do I program? I program as a hobby but I am always looking for an idea or concept that can be framed into programs so I can obtain wealth.

The TFA claims "Sometimes the hardest part is maintaining focus and not chasing every shiny new thing", and I agree.

I think you have to go beyond programming, since programming is just a tool for a higher order concept. For example design a solution to a problem.

But I haven't find the way, yet.
by uecker | 2025-07-26 12:24:43+00:00
It may be debatable, but I would say C++'s template syntax is not nicer. I do not think working with void pointers is annoying, but I also prefer the container_of approach. The ## certainly has the limitation that you need to name things first, but I do not think this much of a downside.

BTW, here is some generic code in C using a variadic type. I think this quite nice. https://godbolt.org/z/jxz6Y6f9x

Running a program for meta programming are always a possibility, and I would agree that sometimes the best solution.
by JetSetIlly | 2025-07-26 12:25:16+00:00
According to the article, Ofcom are encouraging "parents to block or control VPN usage by their children to keep them from dodging the age checkers."

This might be stupidest advice I've ever heard. If parents aren't willing to block or control access to porn sites, there's even less chance of them blocking or controlling VPN usage. But if nothing else, it does show up this law for the nonsense that it is.
by bsenftner | 2025-07-26 12:25:18+00:00
Are people still thinking a face image can be used to verify age? That's absurd. Former globally leading facial recognition developer here, and the article lightly mentions using a face image and age verification face analysis - that's not age accurate at all. Ask many ethnicities with experience, "age verification" image analysis is so unreliable it is fraud used in this context.
by anovikov | 2025-07-26 12:26:12+00:00
But whole point of innovation is to give 1000x people the leverage they can claim by their performance, and let them become obscenely rich at the expense of others. If you don't do it, they will just do it where they are allowed to, the world is big, and European citizens are full of privilege when it comes to exploiting it: they are white, speak languages, and are visa free just about everywhere, not at all seen with suspicion. It's easy for them to jump the boat, easier than for anyone else, so they all do it before they are allowed to ruthlessly exploit others.

It's a bind: either become dog-eat-dog rat race society, or just rot in backwardness, age, and eventually get invaded and overrun when no one will care anymore.

You can try holding them from running away but... i come from Soviet Union where they did just that, and i know how it ends.

A society that is persistently in denial about people's innate inequality is doomed.
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-26 12:27:24+00:00
EU is working on something like this[1] (got limited discussion here[2]).

I haven't looked into it very much, but at a glance it doesn't sound terrible. Here's the basic flow[3]:

- The User initiates an age verification process by enrolling with an Attestation Provider (AP), which collects the necessary evidence from authentic sources or trusted 3rd party private data sources.

- The AP generates a Proof of Age attestation and issues it to the Age Verification App Instance (AVI) of the User.

- The AVI presents the attestation to a Relying Party (RP) when attempting to access age-restricted services.

- The RP checks the validity of the attestation, referencing the trusted list to confirm the AP's authorisation.

So it uses an app on a mobile device as a proxy of sorts. They're also working on incorporating zero-knowledge proofs[4].

[1]: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-mak...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44561797

[3]: https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/archit...

[4]: https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/archit...
by fxtentacle | 2025-07-26 12:28:13+00:00
I find it odd that you call it "disturbing". He studied "Divinity and Theology" and the first sentence says that someone asked him to "outline the Church's response to abortions", which he then did, mostly by quoting articles published by the church.

(We probably both disagree with him on the topic and the arguments, but that's secondary to my question.) Which part of him stating his opinion is "disturbing" to you?
by Amezarak | 2025-07-26 12:28:50+00:00
I think the problem is the framing. The problem is with people, not men or women, but women get most of the focus.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2663360/

> There is increasing evidence to suggest that women commit as much or more IPV as men (Archer, 2000; Melton & Belknap, 2003). Among adolescents, research consistently shows that females perpetrate more acts of violence in intimate relationships than males.

or:

http://www.ejhs.org/volume5/deviancetonormal.htm

> Anderson (1998, 1996), presented self-reported prevalence rates for women's sexual coercion of between 25% and 40% and for physically forced sexual contact between 1.6% and 7.1%. Of perhaps greater significance was the women's self-reports of engaging in a classic date-rape scenario - taking advantage of someone who was under the influence of alcohol or drugs. When asked about initiating sexual contact with a man when his judgment was impaired by drugs or alcohol, between 32% and 51% of the women said that they had. Further, between 5% and 15% of women reported giving a man alcohol or drugs in an attempt to have sexual contact with him.

Obviously, these self-reported female rapists are going almost completely unpunished! Everyone needs equal access to these groups. That also solves the problem of libelous claims that the victim doesn't have an opportunity to address.
by swiftcoder | 2025-07-26 12:29:11+00:00
A very large part of this project is built on the efforts of the wgpu-rs WebGPU implementation.

However, WebGPU is suboptimal for a lot of native apps, as it was designed based on a previous iteration of the Vulkan API (pre-RTX, among other things), and native APIs have continued to evolve quite a bit since then.
by exDM69 | 2025-07-26 12:29:29+00:00
No, it does not. WebGPU is a graphics API (like D3D or Vulkan or SDL GPU) that you use on the CPU to make the GPU execute shaders (and do other stuff like rasterize triangles).

Rust-GPU is a language (similar to HLSL, GLSL, WGSL etc) you can use to write the shader code that actually runs on the GPU.
by jajko | 2025-07-26 12:30:11+00:00
Its their opinion, nothing more, nothing less. Opinions are like farts or some related body parts - everybody has them, so what? Just that I and bunch of folks around have some opinion doesn't mean we have the right to push it to the rest of society.

That's inferiority complex pushed into moral superiority feeling. All just emotions of unbalanced/uneducated people who should know better but clearly don't. No place for such behavior in truly democratic society, their rights to decide what should be happening and what shouldn't generally end at the door of their house (and even that just within legal framework).

Otherwise lets give some room for neonazis too for example, they certainly have a vision about how the society should look like and behave. They are at the end just bunch of folks who want to change society for what they consider a better one, right?
by jxntb73 | 2025-07-26 12:31:21+00:00
Like all text, even this, written in an authoritarian/strongheaded/textbook way, people believe. They believe textbooks, the news, political reasonings, company mission statements, and federal reserve policies. Turtles all the way down.

Humans search for certainty and authority. LLLMs are so 'confident' in their answers. The truth/reason issue is not unque to AI - look at those who wide up in cults.

Coding aside, their not made for theraputics, they're predictive, and as a scientist who damn well wishes it could DO science FOR ME (would make my job easier), it cant, i tried, it cannot create anything new, it cannot reason from first principles, its a glorifed spell checker that summarizes articles reall well for me.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-07-26 12:31:44+00:00
This is amazing and there is already a pretty stacked list of Rust GPU projects.

This seems to be at an even lower level of abstraction than burn[0] which is lower than candle[1].

I gueds whats left is to add backend(s) that leverage naga and others to the above projects? Feeks like everyone is building on different bases here, though I know the naga work is relatively new.

[EDIT] Just to note, burn is the one that focuses most on platform support but it looks like the only backend that uses naga is wgpu... So just use wgpu and it's fine?

Yeah basically wgpu/ash (vulkan, metal) or cuda

[EDIT2] Another crate closer to this effort:

https://github.com/tracel-ai/cubecl

[0]: https://github.com/tracel-ai/burn

[1]: https://github.com/huggingface/candle/
by zelphirkalt | 2025-07-26 12:31:45+00:00
The table of listed date formats doesn't look too difficult to implement. A quick look at the RFC tells me, that the RFC even specifies a grammar, though very incomplete. It would be prudent to specify a complete grammar in the RFC of course. Then it would be even simpler taking that grammar and translating it to whatever library one uses for describing grammars for parsing stuff. I really hope all these libraries didn't make silly things with regexes ...
by notsydonia | 2025-07-26 12:31:54+00:00
Great piece. There was a point last decade where literally every person I encountered, upon hearing about my site, would start badgering me to "get an app." If asked what this hypothetical app could do that the site didn't, the answer was that it would just be good to have an app.

Now in 2025 my biggest app-pain is being in the already useless live support chat for a phone co or utility company and they keep insisting that I'll get actual support if I download their stupid app. Again, they can't cite a reason - it's just "better." For data-brokering, sure - for the user, barely ever.
by carlosjobim | 2025-07-26 12:32:05+00:00
I can compare my eyes to a camera everywhere I go, because I carry a smartphone in my pocket. And so do most people. My eyes can handle scenes with varying brightness much better than any camera, and the reason is probably that cameras have to take still pictures while the eyes receive a continuous feed. Even shooting film or video, cameras still work by a series of still pictures.

> Again, I didn’t argue that games should imitate cameras. But that would be better than what we have in games; movies look way better than the game screenshots in this article.

I agree, but movie makers take care to avoid having visible over or under exposure in scenes. And they do other things that take away from realism, but makes the movie better looking. If they aimed for total realism, any movie would just look like a soap opera.
by constantcrying | 2025-07-26 12:33:42+00:00
>Brussels is reacting with new support plans

Pure insanity. The money the government or the EU in this case, has, comes from corporations who pay taxes or people who work for the corporations and then pay taxes.

The government financially supporting corporations is just giving the profits of one company to another company. Which does exactly nothing to make the economy at large better. It also punishes successful corporations, because they now have to pay for the losses of other sectors.

What is desperately needed are better conditions for business. First and foremost the electricity prices have to come down. You can not have successful industry with electricity prices this high. The entire continent is suffering from it yet the measures taken to do anything about it are miniscule. Europe needs energy production right now to keep it's industry afloat.
by the__alchemist | 2025-07-26 12:34:03+00:00
Protobuf is fine if:

A: You control both ends of the serialized line, or: B: The other end of the line expects protobufs.

There are many [de]serialization scenarios where you are interfacing with a third party API. (HTTP/JSON web API, a given IC's comm protocol as defined in its datasheet etc)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-26 12:34:07+00:00
It's the same thing that happens every time the government tries to ban something that customers actually want. You get a black market, criminals make more money than ever and use it to fund other crimes and the banned thing continues to be available but now the suppliers don't have to follow other laws because then the customers can't object when they're both doing something illegal.

Governments never seem to learn.
by austin-cheney | 2025-07-26 12:34:56+00:00
It doesn't matter where output comes from whether its government or the private sector. People expect some manner of output at a certain acceptable price and quality. But, this completely misses the point.

The bottom line is government income must increase and government spending must decrease. That income can be from taxes, competing with commercial enterprise, donations, or whatever. It really doesn't matter.

The only part of this that has been evidently clear is that massively firing people from the government without a plan has proven extremely expensive. If you really want smaller government you need a plan to reduce the work force over time in a way that does not diminish the quality and quantity of output.
by MrJohz | 2025-07-26 12:35:36+00:00
I don't think it's possible, though. Or at least, I think it's harder now than ever before. The internet isn't completely decentralised, but it's at least spread out enough that it's seriously difficult to shut down any one part of it, at least without being willing to take some serious authoritarian measures. Look at how difficult it's been for the most influential media companies in the world to fight piracy, for example.

I genuinely think our society is one of the most censorship-resistant societies in history. This comes with its own problems (how do you deal with media that genuinely is harmful, like calls to violence or plots to abuse children?) but I think this is the tradeoff that one has to make when dealing with censorship and liberty. The more you make it difficult for the authorities to shut down good speech, the more difficult it becomes to protect against harmful speech.
by jMyles | 2025-07-26 12:35:52+00:00
> Porn is an addictive behavior with measurable effects on the brain similar to hard drugs.

This comparison alone soundly defeats your argument. Prohibition of hard drugs has been a spectacular failure, directly resulting in increased rates of death, disease, and crime, and elevating drug cartels to enormous international influence.

The danger of porn as an addictive substance - which is very real as you point out - is a great argument against its prohibition.