MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by avidiax | 2025-07-27 23:12:15+00:00
For those wondering what the purpose is: https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/archit...

https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/media/...

Essentially, the core user journey is a privacy preserving "over 18" check. I suppose this prevents under 18's from accessing porn, in the same way that most blocking technologies impose an expense on everyone but fail to block tech-savvy children.

Doesn't seem like it could ever stop someone with a bittorrent client, unless you have to attest you are over 18 to even use bittorrent.
by kelthuzad | 2025-07-27 23:14:07+00:00
>PWAs are only as good of a user experience as the developer programs it to be. The average local TV news affiliate website spends 5MB-20MB of bandwidth within a minute of downloading 1 page. My last iOS app was only 5MB shipped and only consumes a few KB of bandwidth per session.

This is a very strange argument to make, the exact same applies to "native" apps. Every app "is only as good of a user experience as the developer programs it to be". There are countless of "native" apps on iOS like "wallpaper" apps that drain the battery, consume absurd bandwidth and have outright scammy business models which App Store "review" just lets pass (because Apple gets a cut of the scam!).

>There are massive convenience features that native apps support which aren’t available to browser APIs. Auth, payments, notifications, parental controls, power efficiency, and perhaps security and privacy (depending on how prevalent analytics/ tracking/ advertising libraries are on native apps).

Auth? https://whatpwacando.today/authentication

Payments? https://whatpwacando.today/payment

Notifications? https://whatpwacando.today/notifications

Parental Controls? Use Web Content Restrictions.

Power efficiency? If JIT (Just-In-Time) compilation were universally allowed for all web browsers and PWAs on iOS, it would be a complete game-changer, dramatically closing the performance and power efficiency gap with native apps. (see above why Apple actively sabotages PWAs)

Security and Privacy? PWAs benefit from the OS's sandbox and its own sandbox

>A well crafted PWA can compete on most features with a well crafted app, but ultimately the App Store review process means native apps have a decently high floor, whereas PWAs have zero floor.

You can't even compare the App Store review to someone actively going on e.g. Pinterest.com and clicking on install PWA. The user has already reviewed and decided that it's an app worth installing. Finally, the App Store "review process" is a bad joke, not only because it is slow, inefficient and often arbitrary, but because it fails to even filter out the most obvious of scams:

"Apple claims its App Store is carefully curated so that only the best apps get through. The truth is, the App Store is littered with scams" -https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/06/apple-a...

"The widely used Apple App Store has become a minefield of scam apps. While several scam apps have been removed by Apple, it seems they’ve only acted when directly called out on social media. Despite the removal of some scam apps, Apple has not yet acted to ban the guilty app developers from the app store."

https://mccunewright.com/scam-apps-sold-on-the-apple-app-sto...
by andyferris | 2025-07-27 23:14:10+00:00
Separate from actual-human-identity, a internet-facing digital system needs some concept of user identity to provide privacy. Either people authenticate, or you share data publicly - where is the middle road here? How do you come back and reauthenticate with a private system later if you don't have a stable identity for the system to recognise?

I'm not sure what's forcing these DIDs being one-to-one with a human, or why have the ability to create as many pseudonomynous identities as you like results in centralization or authoritarianism?
by genghisjahn | 2025-07-27 23:14:29+00:00
Yeah, that was my point. I'm not sure what's so breath taking about what ByteDance is doing. I'm not a fan. But, with Meta, Google, Microsoft and I'll throw on Amazon, a huge chunk of the general public's web activity is tracked. Everywhere. All the time. The people have spoken, they are okay with being tracked. I've yet to talk with a non-technical person who was shocked that their online activity was tracked. They know it is. They assume it is. ByteDance's range of telemetry does not matter to them. Just wanna keep on tiktok'ing. Why does telemetry sent to Bytedance matter? Is it a China thing? I'm not concerned about a data profile on me in China. I'm concerned about the ones here in the US. I'll stop. I'm not sure I have a coherent point.
by agotterer | 2025-07-27 23:15:50+00:00
I replied to a similar discussion in April 2023 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567822#35568411) about a dinner club a friend and I host in our free time.

We work with a single restaurant each month to create a 10-20+ course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.

Here’s the 2024 update (I haven’t run the year to date cumulative numbers yet):

* Grew to over 900 members

* Hosting 2 seatings per month

* Served 1,300 guests

* Generated $140k revenue
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-27 23:16:08+00:00
That's the thing though, there is no better business model.

We have subscriptions, ads, and donations. 30 years into the internet, with the brightest minds of humanity trying to figure this out, no one has the better business model.

The cop out is saying "there has to be a better way."

What we really need is a reconciliation and recalibration of what it means to pay for something and why it needs to be done.
by bbkane | 2025-07-27 23:16:10+00:00
I've actually settled more on the opposite approach - my tool usage changes enough that I generally only care to configure the latest subset of tools when I get a new PC, and of course the others are there if I need them.

To that end, each tool has its own subdirectory in my dotfiles repo ( https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/ ), and I add READMEs to each subdirectory explaining what dependencies are necessary for this tool, what keyboard shortcuts this tool uses, etc.

This approach has been pretty resilient against my changing needs, changing operating systems, and changing tool versions; even if doesn't optimize for a single invocation of ./setup.sh
by edwardbernays | 2025-07-27 23:16:52+00:00
Wouldn't there necessarily be more lead pipes at the peak and post-peak? Assuming that pipe-building was some non-linear function of dominance, which seems a fair assumption, we would start with 0% pipes at 0% rome and asymptotically close to 100% pipes at the asymptotic 100% peak rome. Is this a bad assumption, or is it basically just pedantry?
by davidsojevic | 2025-07-27 23:17:41+00:00
I've been working on a "businesses for sale" aggregation/search engine that sources data from all of the major "business for sale" type platforms in Australia and de-duplicates listings, extracts data like revenue/profit/etc, and normalises it all for quick browsing.

I have a couple of family members and friends who are looking to buy businesses (separately), and it's been much more time-consuming than you'd expect just to browse through listings to determine if they're relevant to you or not.

The platforms seem to mostly follow the same format as real estate listings (as the brokers seemingly rely on the same software/data formats), with one big blob of freeform text that contains the various information that you'd ideally just be reading at a glance.

Add to the fact that there are over 15 "business for sale" type platforms in Australia where they have a minimum of 1,000 listings and at least 10 platforms with between 100-1,000 listings, you can easily burn hours looking through them individually.

I'm currently covering 12 of the top 15 (ranked by number of listings they contain) platforms and I just tinker away once or twice a month, adding support for new platforms.

I should probably release it and get some feedback at some point, but I suffer a bit from "it needs more polish before I let people other than my family and friends use it"
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-27 23:18:23+00:00
I don't think you are fully wrong, but the issue is your rhetoric is very much used by conservatives or "both sides are bad" which are just mask-on conservatives who end up voting the same way. And the problem with conservatives is not really the ideals and ideas, but the fact that they vote Republican (or whatever the equivalent party is in other countries), that all pretty much are the exact opposite of those ideals.

Age verification is already a thing IRL, there is no reason to not extend it online considering so much of our lives is digital. Overall I think anonymity should be reduced on the internet in general - a big reason of the world issues, especially in USA is that ideas can grow in forums where people under etherial identities can tell lie after lie without any repercussion.
by adam_hn | 2025-07-27 23:18:28+00:00
I'm sorry but why? Your government can use this data to actually hurt you and put you on the no-fly list, or even put you in prison.

But a foreign government is limited to what it can do to you if you are not a very high-value target.

So I try as much as possible to use software and services from a non-friendly government because this is the highest guarantee that my data will not be used against me in the future.

And since we can all agree that any data that is collected will end up with the government some way or another. Using forging software is the only real guarantee.

Unless the software is open source and its server is self-hosted, it should be considered Spyware.
by jleyank | 2025-07-27 23:18:49+00:00
No grants, no tenure. No tenure, no career. In chemistry, there’s a commercial path in biotech/pharma, but I’m not sure there’s a similar one in biology. Certainly not in physics.

If you want to be an academic, and there’s appeal advantages in being a tenured prof, you have to chase opportunities. What advantages you might ask? Always being at or near the forefront. Always being surrounded by young, bright people. A collegial, worldwide culture. Reasonably good compensation with a chance of commercial activity.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-27 23:19:45+00:00
> It has a grey neutral tone, something Apple understood for platinum if you worked on graphic design, video and photo editing, or as a journalist (the 99% of the Apple users in late 90's).

Modern day “light mode” would benefit from taking notes. The surge in demand for dark mode lines up pretty cleanly with the advent of the stark white themes that the flat UI epidemic ushered in.
by LinguaBrowse | 2025-07-27 23:19:50+00:00
A very good thought! Deno and Bun have this formidable funding for sure, but Node.js is still innovating. Things like type-stripping and require(esm) come to mind. I think as long as big companies use it for Electron, Node.js will continue to get investment. Even if the investment were to dry up, experience teaches us that old tools die hard.

I would hope that interoperability goes up. The React Native community are closing in on support for Node-API, and with that maybe we can start sharing native code between desktop and mobile. The WinterCG effort is also going well.

As for canaries, I think sustainability is the main thing to look at. What is the surface area of this tool, how much expertise and effort does it take to maintain it, and who is invested in its survival? The more we can share common implementations like Intl and Temporal, the easier it is for smaller players to keep up. And of course, the more the big players try to diverge (looking at you, Chrome), the harder it gets.
by danbolt | 2025-07-27 23:21:13+00:00
I embedded it at a game studio for PC and game consoles a few years ago. We opted for JavaScript over Lua for reasons I can’t disclose, but runtime performance was sufficient for our needs. I liked having reference counting since the determinism gave our tech lead a bit of confidence before cert.

We had some performance issues with marshalling and unmarshalling, but that was mostly due to API design and how our codebase was structured. As per usual, optimizing scripts was the best bang for buck.
by bsder | 2025-07-27 23:21:26+00:00
> But deer are pretty?!

Deer are simply tall, disease-carrying vermin--basically rats with long legs.

They eat everything. They multiply like bloody rabbits. They host a ton of diseases--especially when overpopulated (effectively everywhere that doesn't have lots of wolves or big cats).

I really don't understand why we don't hunt them aggressively when there is no apex carnivore to keep them under control.
Show HN: Finch – a fingerprint-aware TLS reverse proxy
by 0x4d31 | 2025-07-27 23:21:58+00:00
Finch is a lightweight reverse proxy that inspects TLS and HTTP traffic to extract JA3, JA4, JA4H and Akamai HTTP/2 fingerprints. It uses hot-reloadable HCL rules to evaluate requests and can allow, deny, route, or even deceive attackers with LLM-generated responses!

Finch outsmarts bad traffic—blocking noise with high-fidelity fingerprints, tarpitting scanners, and dynamically deceiving attackers.
by WalterBright | 2025-07-27 23:22:30+00:00
Ironically, the V2 program was a net detriment to the Reich. It consumed vast resources that would have been far better spent on conventional weapons. The V2's problem was it was hopelessly inaccurate (the guidance system was a clock and a gyroscope) and did only insignificant damage to the Allied war machine.

The V1 was more cost effective - not because the V1 did much damage, but because it diverted a great deal of British effort at trying to shoot them down and blow up their launch sites. The Germans eventually figured the latter out, and built lots of fake launch sites for the RAF to uselessly destroy.

Missiles only became effective due to better targeting or nuclear warheads.
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-27 23:23:18+00:00
Leaning how to use AI in the upcoming years will be equivalent to knowing how to use the internet and microsoft office in the 2010s. You don't need to absolutely know it, but

The thing with AI is that its pretty easy to use - 80% of it is just prompt engineering. For example, agents are nothing more than a big system prompt to really any LLM, with instructions like "if you want to create a code file, surround the code with <code></code> tags", and then the wrapper program that runs the chat detects those tags and actually does the thing.
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-27 23:23:33+00:00
The technical specification can be found here[1], with further details here[2].

Well, it's more like a framework, so not a ton of details. I've just glossed over it, but from what I can gather they have thought about it:

No personal data, especially no information from personal identification documents such as national ID card, is stored within an [Age Verification App Instance]. Only the Proof of Age attestation, specifically indicating "older than 18", is utilized for age verification purposes

Stored Verification(8b): [Relying Parties] may optionally store information derived from the Proof of Age attestation in the User's account, allowing the User to bypass repeated verification for future visits or purchases, streamlining the User experience. In this case, authentication methods such as WebAuthN should be utilised to ensure secure access while enabling the User to choose a pseudonym, preserving privacy. Risks in case of the device sharing should be considered.

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

[2]: https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/annexe...
by rightbyte | 2025-07-27 23:23:52+00:00
> As a resident of the aforementioned political climate, I find their concerns to be reasonable.

No. The lesson is that stuff like this is concerning what ever the "political climate".

Anyway, you mainly don't want the gov in your vicinity to snoop. Non-local OS:es is probably advantageous in that regard if you choose to run proprietary code...
by skissane | 2025-07-27 23:23:57+00:00
I totally believe they get swamped with eager candidates, but highly experienced ones?

Someone ex-NASA may well have deep experience in certain specific areas which few other candidates could claim.

The thing about a voluntary "deferred resignation program" – the people most likely to take it are those who are confident they can find good opportunities somewhere else. If you didn't have that confidence, you'd be much less likely to sign on to it.
by latentsea | 2025-07-27 23:24:19+00:00
Ugh. There's just no winning with tech anymore.

I use GrapheneOS as a daily driver and I absolutely love it. It should be the default. There's already one app I use that must do something similar and absolutely just won't run on it, so I have an entirely separate phone running stock Android just for that one app. Still worth the hassle.

Glad I don't live in a place where all this madness is taking root, but still, the trend itself sucks.
by avidiax | 2025-07-27 23:24:27+00:00
> it's so clearly a draconian slippery slope for invasive surveillance and choice restriction

It's a privacy preserving over 18 check.

Is it a "slope"? Sure, you can imagine an extension to the system that is "worse".

Is it "slippery"? This thing isn't draconian enough to be effective. It will be a minor speedbump that prevents exactly zero determined under-18's from accessing anything that they'd want to. So then the question is, does the government react by trying something more draconian, or does it give up?
by thepryz | 2025-07-27 23:24:39+00:00
Everything Bezos, Jassy and Amazon have been doing in the last ~5 years has been Day 2.Despite this, I think the question to ask is what was the real motivation for Jeff being the Post and what does success look like in that context.

If the goal was to have more control over the narrative in this country and influence news reporting and public opinion in support of Jeff's ambitions, I think there's an argument to be made that he's accomplishing that as we speak.
by gosub100 | 2025-07-27 23:25:09+00:00
10 years ago I made an "encrypted voice channel" by chaining the following 3 commands together (I dont remember exactly how it looked, this is just a sketch):

arecord - | openssl aes-128-cbc -pass:'secretstring' - | nc <dest ip> <dest port>

on the receiving end

nc -l <dest port> | openssl aes-128-cbc -pass:'secretstring' | aplay -

I don't remember exactly which audio device I used back then. It worked okay-ish, but there was definitely lag from somewhere. Just kind of neat that you can build something so useful without a bloated app, just chaining a few commands together.
by jonmc12 | 2025-07-27 23:25:54+00:00
Agreed. The constraints of software engineering are mostly idiomatic. I used to use my "Scribe" mind to crawl through library dependencies for days to solve some artificial sub-problem.

No software engineer is good enough to time-efficiently write the whole stack from machine code up - it will always be an arbitrary and idiomatic set of problems and this is what LLMs are so good at parsing.

Using "Scribe" cycles to define the right problem and carefully review code outputs seems like the way.
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-27 23:26:58+00:00
Not actually a problem? Have you seen what NASA is doing lately?

SLS. Orion. Gateway. Ambitionless Artemis. JPL's disaster of an MSR proposal. NASA reeks of rot and decay. It's not in a good place, and hasn't been in a long time now.

If you "just continue operating", it's only going to get worse.
by titanomachy | 2025-07-27 23:27:22+00:00
Without getting into the ideological weeds too much, is there a solid technical reason for this? Like if this verification wasn’t in place, could I just alter the source code or binary to always return “yes I’m 18” (or whatever) and completely subvert the intent of this tool? If so, is there a straightforward way to prevent this without involving Google?
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-27 23:27:57+00:00
I'm a fan of bringing back Web Rings.

Perhaps a site could kick off where people proposed sites for Web Rings, edited them. The sites in question could somehow adopt them — perhaps by directly pulling from the Web Ring site.

And while we're at it, no reason for the Web "Ring" not to occasionally branch, bifurcate, and even rejoin threads from time to time. It need not be a simple linked list who's tail points back to it's head.

Happy to mock something up if someone smarter than me can fill in the details.

Pick a topic: Risograph printers? 6502 Assembly? What are some sites that would be in the loop? Would a 6502 Assembly ring have "orthogonal branches" to the KIM-1 computer (ring)? How about a "roulette" button that jumps you to somewhere at random in the ring? (So not linear.) Is it a tree or a ring? If a tree, can you traverse in reverse?
by latentsea | 2025-07-27 23:29:48+00:00
I think social media does more damage than porn. We should just instead legislate that all social media has to shutdown and just let everyone watch porn and be done with it. Sure, you wind up with ED if you watch that stuff since you were a kid, but hey, if birth rates around the world are anything to go by, no one seems to really want to bring children into this world anymore anyway, so it's not as if that actually matters anymore.

I think I have become far too cynical.
by avidiax | 2025-07-27 23:29:56+00:00
Or using a torrent. Or trading a fileshare with your friends. Or finding a box in the woods. Or finding dad's "tax returns" folder. Or getting on TOR. Or finding an open directory. Or asking AI to produce something.

Basically anything other than going to a legally compliant website and trying to attach your mom's passport to the age verification app and doing the challenge.
by stephen_g | 2025-07-27 23:29:57+00:00
I mean there's a perfectly rational possible explanation for this - if the fines are actually just an extra targeted tax on these companies (but it's politically inconvenient to just do it honestly by levying a tax), and they would therefore adjust the laws to make sure they could still fine them if they had already complied...

It may be that the people in charge in the EU don't really care about the market dominance as long as they can collect enough extra money from them...
by matheusmoreira | 2025-07-27 23:30:23+00:00
I have a Clevo-based laptop. Our experiences were similar. The nvidia dGPU offers terrible performance and doesn't do much besides heat up the laptop. I disabled mine via the firmware. The CPU reaches 90 degrees when given almost any sort of load. It quickly thermal throttles itself down to uselessness despite three loud fans. I often have to use systemd shells with CPU quotas to manage this.

I hope the Asahi Linux project succeeds so I can buy the fabled Apple silicon laptops just to run Linux on them.
by brudgers | 2025-07-27 23:30:42+00:00
My 1990’s were indeed different.

I was firmly into adulthood when they began, I worked at ordinary small businesses, and was often involved in technology purchasing decisions.

Where I was working in 1997, I set up the company’s Yahoo email…one address for the whole office which went to the receptionist’s computer. Which was fine because important communication was done by phone or fax and if you needed to reach someone out of their office you probably called their pager…though cell phones were around, most business people could not justify the expense and cell phone culture did not exist yet.

The office moved files with floppy disks via courier or USPS. Backups were to Qic tape and files moved within the office via sneaker net…cd burners were still uncommon, large, SCSI, slow, and expensive. So Zip disks were more common.

To put it another way, I spent all 10 years of the 1990’s using computers for work. It was a very different life.