MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-05 21:42:11+00:00
> let's be honest - there isn't equivalent demand for meat markets of men

I wouldn't underestimate that market. While men seem to consume more porn, "men" also includes "gay men" of course, who won't be quite as interested in seeing naked women even if we pretend women aren't interested in sex.

Plus, women may only be about a half as interested in pornography as men (according to https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review 38% of visitors were female), the market sure seems large enough.

There are definitely market differences (the pay gap for male actors, for instance, and of course the double standard that judges women more than men for consuming such content) but the divide is not even close to absolute.

Your post ("it is extremely unlikely that someone in the sex industry is Swedish/Norwegian/Icelandic/Danish given the mixture of social bias and social safety net") supposes that women go into the sex industry out of desperation, but that's not true. Some people are fine with selling their bodies, to various degrees, and don't have a problem making an income that way.
by acdha | 2025-07-05 21:43:35+00:00
It’s not a Ponzi scheme, it’s successful class warfare. We had a balanced budget at the turn of the century and could easily have addressed the Medicare gap by removing the tax giveaway to the wealthiest and reforming our healthcare system to be more like literally every peer country in the world.

Instead, we blew an enormous hole in the budget with Bush’s tax cuts and wars of choice, followed by bailing out the bankers’ fraud under Obama, and then adding trillions more debt with Trump’s first tax plan. At each and every time, we could have hit financial stability by taxing the wealthiest quintile slightly more but instead chose to take on debt giving them a tax cut instead. The way you’re talking about it as a generational issue rather than a “tax rich people like it’s 1990” issue illustrates how successful the generations of propaganda have been furthering the goal of rolling back the New Deal despite every bit of sober analysis showing that social services have significantly transformed millions of lives and restoring taxes to sustainable levels at the top brackets would have minimal impact on the rich.
by ThatPlayer | 2025-07-05 21:44:52+00:00
Most indie games I've play don't even run their own online infrastructure because of costs. Why bother, when you can just use a storefront's matchmaking for free? And storefronts provide it as a means of soft lock-in. For example one of my favorites, Deep Rock Galatic, doesn't have crossplay between the Steam PC version and the Xbox PC store version of the game.

And there's already software to emulate Steam's matchmaking because it's so common.
by modrena | 2025-07-05 21:45:12+00:00
I built LogDog to help mobile teams debug and wirelessly inspect app behaviour.

With LogDog, developers, QA engineers and PMs can: • View live logs and network traffic from real devices • Override API responses at runtime (status, headers, body) • Enable an in-app debug console to toggle flags or capture context • Securely stream the device screen to the web dashboard

The setup is dead simple: Integrate the SDK with a few lines and build your app. Logs will appear instantly in the dashboard. There are also demo apps (no-code setup) on the App Store/Play Store if you want to try it without integrating anything.

Learn more: https://logdog.app Full docs: https://docs.logdog.app

I would love to hear some feedback — especially from mobile devs and testers — on usability and features you’d want in a tool like this. Happy to dive deep on the tech stack, too.
by free_bip | 2025-07-05 21:45:15+00:00
Thanks for clarifying. And yes, you're right that objectively sex work (as in, having sex with someone, not the revisionist definition including onlyfans) is high up on the most dangerous professions list.

However, that doesn't mean it has to be that way. My personal belief is that it should be treated a similar way to alcohol:

- there are only specific, licensed places where you can get it

- you must be over a certain age

- you cannot enjoy it in public

- establishments have a right to refuse service if you seem intoxicated or belligerent

Plus, adding on security to check for weapons and intervene in the rare case of violence.

In my opinion, if you combine all those regulations, sex work would be more than safe enough for it to not be considered a "dangerous" profession.
by kadoban | 2025-07-05 21:45:21+00:00
> That has been known since at least the 1990s with TD-Gammon beating the world champions in Backgammon.

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that reinforcement learning (or applying it in this way) is novel. It was just important to work out how to apply that to go specifically.

> In a sense, classic chess engines do that, too: alpha-beta-search uses a very weak model (eg just checking for checkmate, otherwise counting material, or what have you) and search to generate a much stronger player. You can use that to generate data for training a better model.

I would say that classic chess AIs specifically don't do the important part. They aren't able to use a worst model to, with computation, train a better model. They can generate training data, but then they have no way to incorporate it back into the AI.
by kaycey2022 | 2025-07-05 21:45:37+00:00
Stop killings games is reasonable, but why can’t “you” stop demanding free labour? This whole thing is categorisation and labelling issue. The terms of transaction must be made clear with as big and bold letters as possible. Game devs should be free to create and sell games as they wish provided the terms of transaction are clear. If they don’t want to sell server binaries or open source code, then it is crazy to force them to do so.

Platforms can encourage games which have a clear sunset plan over those that don’t. Eventually the market should come up with viable solutions rather than a law made by untrained people over what and how software should be created.
by ibizaman | 2025-07-05 21:46:16+00:00
My guess as to why most apps are now a web UI on top of a DB is because it’s easy to “install”. SelfHostBlocks is admittedly geared towards a central server serving web apps. Or at least apps with a desktop or mobile component but geared towards synching to a central server.

Feel free to give it a try though, I’d love that! Also feel free to join the matrix channel UF you have any questions or just to get some updates.
by onli | 2025-07-05 21:47:01+00:00
No, that is not correct or at least it has not been. Amazon was said to intermingle the inventory in the warehouses, mixing third party products with those shipped and sold by Amazon. So that gave you zero protection.

I read that they made internal changes to tag shippings properly to reduce the risk of that behaviour, but am not sure it is true or has been effective.
by satvikpendem | 2025-07-05 21:47:47+00:00
But who said anything about AI? Lots of local-first apps have nor need any AI whatsoever. And by the way, Topaz Labs has good offerings for editing photos and videos with AI that run locally, works great for many use cases (although it's not fully generative like Veo etc, more like upscaling and denoising, which does use generative AI but not like the former).
by serbuvlad | 2025-07-05 21:47:51+00:00
But that's exactly the thing. I DON'T understand the technology without AI.. I know stuff about Linux, but I knew NOTHING about Ansible, FreeIPA etc. So I guess you could say I understand the problem space not the solution space?? Either way, it would have taken us many months to do what it did take us a few weeks to with AI.

> So the whole appeal of AI seems to be to let it do things without much oversight.

No?? The whole appeal of AI for me is doing things I know how I want to look at the end but I don't know how to get there.

> The common failure mode of AI is also concerning. If you ask it to do something that can't be done trivially or at all, or wasn't present enough in the learning dataset, it wouldn't tell you it doesn't know how to do it. Instead, it'll make shit up with utmost confidence.

I also feel like a lot of people made a lot of conclusions against GPT-3.5 that simply aren't true anymore.

Usually o3 and even 4o and probably most modern models rely a lot more on search results then on their training datasets. I usually even see "I know how to do this but I need to check the documentation for up to date information in case anything changed" in the chain of thought for trivial queries.

But yeah, sometimes you get the old failure mode: stuff that doesn't work. And then you try it and it fails. And you tell it it fails and how. And it either fixes it (90%+ of cases, at least with something powerful like o3), or it starts arguing with you in a nonsensical manner. If the latter, you burn the chat and start a new one, building better context, or just do a manual approach like before.

So the failure mode doesn't mean you can't identify failure. The failure mode means you can't trust it's unchecked output. Ok. So? It's not a finite state machine, it's a statistical inference machine trained on the data that currently exists. It doesn't enter a faliure state. Neither does a PID regulator when the parameters of the physical model change and no one recalibrates it. It starts outputting garbage and overshooting like crazy etc.

But both PID regulators and LLMs are hella useful if you have what to use them for.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-07-05 21:48:25+00:00
Hi

> Good ones who can’t type fast, I assign them typing lessons their first few paid days on the job, and a half hour twice a week thereafter for a while.

This is very interesting to me - I’ve actually been building https://www.typequicker.com recently and was curious about potentially adding features and marketing it towards businesses who then can use it to train their workers.

Typing quickly is extremely overlooked and since I learned touch typing, it completely improved my productivity and career trajectory. (Went from 40ish to about 100-120wpm depending on what I’m typing)

What are some tools that you use when you say you assign lessons?
by dataflow | 2025-07-05 21:48:28+00:00
> He just wants to virtue signal. These people have no idea what sort of hard work it takes to get these things done, and just want to blame people for not being perfect or having perfect foresight.

Not only is this assuming bad faith (against the rules, and kind of insulting) but it's just manifestly false.

Nobody was expecting or complaining about lack of foresight, denying the hard work that went into the language, or blaming anyone for not being perfect. D had a fantastic vision ahead of its time, with a ton of blood, sweat, and tears poured into it, and a ton of people wanted to see it dominate, including me. Yet... it did not, and its lunch (becoming the successor to C or C++ for a large portion of their users) is now being slowly eaten by other languages, most notably Rust.

You hopefully saw [1] that I was not the only one being frustrated with the virality of the GC. It took until DMD 2.066 (2014, some 7 years after D 2.0's release, with years of people complaining repeatedly in the interim -- just a year after Rust's initial release) for enough of the GC's problems to be acknowledged that @nogc was finally introduce to make it even possible to detect the lack of GC in a program. 11 years later, we still aren't even seeing an acknowledgment of the other long-standing, well-known problems I (and others) have gone through great pains to re-outline above -- let alone even a statement that anyone has any intention to even attempt addressing them.

Summarizing all of this as "virtue signaling" and "blaming people for not being perfect or having perfect foresight" when many of us users who have otherwise loved the language were incredibly frustrated with these GC problems and hoping for at least a mere acknowledgement at some point over the past 18 years of hindsight makes for an incredibly gross characterization of both the reality we've faced and everyone's goals here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44452446
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-05 21:48:36+00:00
That's probably why the headline was phrased this way. They criminalise the buyers, no matter what person or country they're buying from. I don't think OF models will face difficulty selling to people in other countries.

On the other hand, I can imagine there's a certain market for people speaking the same language as you, and by forcing Swedish models to go international they are now competing with models from every other country.
by threetonesun | 2025-07-05 21:49:01+00:00
The old model of boxed updates is still in use by some companies today, JetBrains comes to mind. In either case you tuck major new features in a new major version or rolling yearly releases and sell the customer a license to the software that gets a year of updates. In a similar vein many apps I use on my Mac have monthly subscriptions but cancelling them limits their use to essentially one device, but doesn't remove the application or my access to the data.
by sneak | 2025-07-05 21:49:21+00:00
Where did I refuse to watch anything? No amount of this attitude is going to make Casablanca or The Godfather or Pulp Fiction or Infinity War or Star Wars or Fight Club or 2001 or Top Gun be in any framerate other than 24fps.

If they start making films in higher frame rates today, that won’t change that fact. Do you think people are going to stop watching films from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s?

It would take a concerted effort, beginning now, at least an entire generation (30-50 years) to remove or reduce the cultural impact of the 24 frames per second widescreen tradition. No such effort is presently underway, because higher framerates don’t help movies’ visual storytelling, and they may hurt it.

The Hobbit was Peter Jackson’s attempt. It went nowhere.

https://gizmodo.com/the-hobbit-an-unexpected-masterclass-in-...
by agumonkey | 2025-07-05 21:49:41+00:00
I don't know man, very often sophisticated problems require recursive thinking (even if you don't write it so later on) to be able to see similarities in sub problems. Just last week I had to resort to this to flatten-index json files. I started confused and then made an inductive leap and the solution unfolded itself (no pun intented) as a two-liner.

It's way beyond brain-teaser for me, it's the sharpest tool I know of.
by lxgr | 2025-07-05 21:49:50+00:00
Kind of, but the analogy does break down since there isn't only one store that Dyson can sell you vacuums at. There is some level of stickiness since Costco requires an upfront membership, but it's really not as pervasive.

Imagine people living in houses or apartments with a proprietary kind of power outlet, and the patent owner/real estate developer is willing to grant you, an appliance manufacturer, a license for power plugs compatible with that outlet – under the condition that you exclusively sell them in their storefronts, for a 30% cut.
by sundaeofshock | 2025-07-05 21:50:16+00:00
Yes, there are plenty of unflagged political posts. I don’t deny that at all. I also acknowledge that my experience may be purely confirmation bias and nothing more. Having said that…

I follow the HN raw RSS feed, so I see a lot of articles that don’t make the front page. I find that pretty much any article that refers to trans people is flagged. Many — not all — articles that are show the Trump regime or Musk in a negative light are likely to be flagged.

YMMV.
by jbermudes | 2025-07-05 21:50:31+00:00
Many of the things the author accuses Amazon of doing are troubling, but the logic the author used in the Chris Brown music buying example to tie it all together shows of a lack of distinction between types of cooperation with evil.

When an act has both a potentially good and bad effect Philosophers like to distinguish the morality of this act of "cooperating with evil" by analyzing the degrees to which your cooperation is:

- formal or material (do you want the bad thing to happen and that's why you're buying from Amazon?) - immediate or mediate (are you supplying a critical component such that without your specific instance of cooperation the evil could not occur?) - proximate or remote (Do you work for Amazon?)

Each of these dimensions should be taken into consideration because without such analysis one can easily become scrupulous about every act that one does that may have unintended side effects. This is how you get people who say things like "there is no such thing as ethical consumption in capitalism" and other extreme statements that would otherwise force you to be a monk in a desert lest your acts accidentally create harm.

To learn more about this principle of double effect:

https://thinkingthoughtout.com/2021/01/24/cooperation-with-e...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/
by dummydummy1234 | 2025-07-05 21:50:37+00:00
I guess a counter, is that we don't need to understand how they work to produce a useful output.

They are a magical black box magic 8 ball, that more likely than not gives you the right answer. Maybe people can explain the black box, and make the magic 8 ball more accurate.

But at the end of the day, with a very complex system it will always be some level of black box unreliable magic 8 ball.

So the question then is how do you build an reliable system from unreliable components. Because llms directly are unreliable.

The answer to this is agents, ie feedback loops between multiple llm calls, which in isolation are unreliable, but in aggregate approach reliability.

At the end of the day the bet on agents is a bet that the model companies will not get a model that will magically be 100% correct on the first try.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-05 21:50:59+00:00
> However for many others sex is like drugs: it overrides their self-control system and they become addicts. How do you make a law in this situation?

For some, food is like drugs: it overrides their self-control system and they become addicts. How do you make a law in that situation? Or is investing in Novo Nordisk across the North Sea good enough?
by archagon | 2025-07-05 21:51:11+00:00
The fact that this is downvoted is deeply disturbing. Timothy Snyder has similar thoughts on concentration camp labor: https://snyder.substack.com/p/concentration-camp-labor

Meanwhile, SV darling Curtis Yarvin is plainly insinuating that we should bring slavery back: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:gqqqg5xi4p2x4bfgphr7akip/po...

What in the fuck is wrong with people?
by Analemma_ | 2025-07-05 21:52:47+00:00
To have a tax sytem with no loopholes would almost certainly require having no credits or deductions. I actually think there's something to that idea, but politically it's an absolute non-starter: taxpayers love the credits and deductions they have now and don't want to give them up, and governments love using them to shape policy and don't want to give up that particular tool in the toolchest.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-07-05 21:53:13+00:00
There are some loopholes that aren't actually loopholes, and I can't claim to have counted to know whether it's a majority or not. But programs like the QSBS thing the source article describes are definitely loopholes in the intuitive sense. Politicians wanted millionaire business owners to be somewhat richer, didn't want the political headache of directly giving those business owners our tax money, so they lowered the tax rate on a specific category of income that only millionaire business owners can arrange to receive.

It's true of course that there was an economic theory behind the policy. It's a subsidy; the government thinks it's important for the US to have more small businesses, and hopes that more people will set one up if the financial rewards for doing so are greater. Perhaps you could even find some business owner to explain why they would have stayed in their corporate job if not for the QSBS. But this subsidy could never have gotten majority support if it wasn't obfuscated behind the tax code.
by codedokode | 2025-07-05 21:53:33+00:00
Wikipedia says building were being moved since 19th century. We also had a large-scale building relocation during Stalin's Moscow Reconstruction (basically, destroying beautiful historical houses to expand ancient curvy streets into straight wide roads) - some buildings were moved without cutting water supply, electricity and even with residents inside [1]. This probably was intended to showcase the achievements of Soviet engineering but judging by the comments here (and by English Wikipedia article on the topic) nobody even remembers this.

Personally I think that there should be no new construction in historical areas and there is no need to move anything.

[1] https://www.mos.ru/en/news/item/13744073/
by Chris_Newton | 2025-07-05 21:54:23+00:00
IMHO, this overlooks probably the biggest advantage of all: software you can buy once and run locally is predictable.

While the modern world of mobile devices and near-permanent fast and reliable connectivity has brought some real advantages, it has also brought the ability for software developers to ruthlessly exploit their users in ways no-one would have dreamt of 20 or 30 years ago. Often these are pitched as if they are for the user’s benefit — a UI “enhancement” here, an “improved” feature there, a bit of casual spying “to help us improve our software and share only with carefully selected partners”, a subscription model that “avoids the big up-front cost everyone used to pay” (or some questionable logic about “CAPEX vs OPEX” for business software), our startup has been bought by a competitor but all the customers who chose our product specifically to avoid that competitor’s inferior alternative have nothing to worry about because they have no ulterior motive and will continue developing it just the way we have so far.

The truth we all know but don’t want to talk about is that many of the modern trends in software have been widely adopted because they make things easier and/or more profitable for software developers at the direct expense of the user’s experience and/or bank account.
by AngryData | 2025-07-05 21:55:02+00:00
Besides the repeated sanctions and embargos, propaganda, proxy wars, and military dick waving contests?

I don't know how you can believe China is on anything except an upward trend right now. Many countries won't even let people buy Chinese cars because they are so far ahead of everyone else in cost and manufacturing efficiency and I don't know any industry where China can't match foreign companies in and compete against.

They are in a prime position right now in my opinion. All of their industries have major players in cutting edge technology, yet they still have more population to modernize and sell to domestically, and they supply half the world's manufacturing needs and do work in basically every sector. They have tons of foreign investments into infrastructure and mineral extraction to keep feeding themselves raw materials, they have all the processing equipment to convert raw materials into base materials, they have all the manufacturing to turn those base materials into pretty much any goods they want or need. They have highly educated people and education programs and schools, a robust government, a domestic population still fairly far away from dropping off a cliff like every western nation, they have a strong enough military to be secure against basically any nation outside of global nuclear war, and a populous that broadly supports their government. Outside of multiple chartoonish sized blunders I don't see any path for the near future that doesn't result in Chinese economic growth and increased global positioning and power.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-05 21:55:04+00:00
Funnily enough, by not recognising sex work as a job, sex workers actually lack these protections in many European countries.

Furthermore, in Nordic countries, minimum wage and such are not government-mandated, but maintained by collective bargaining agreements negotiated by powerful unions. In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and also Italy, there is no legally defined minimum wage.