MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MITSardine | 2025-07-25 20:28:52+00:00
If people are so interested, they'd presumably read and cite null-result publications, and their authors would get the same boons as if having published a positive result.

There's some issues, though. Firstly, how do you enforce citing negative results? In the case of positive results, reviewers can ask that work be cited if it had already introduced things present in the article. This is because a publication is a claim to originality.

But how do you define originality in not following a given approach? Anyone can not have the idea of doing something. You can't well cite all the paths not followed in your work, considering you might not even be aware of a negative result publication regarding these ideas you discarded or didn't have. Bibliography is time consuming enough as it is, without having to also cite all things irrelevant.

Another issue is that the effort to write an article and get it published and, on the other side, to review it, makes it hard to justify publishing negative results. I'd say an issue is rather that many positive results are already not getting published... There's a lot of informal knowledge, as people don't have time to write 100 page papers with all the tricks and details regularly, nor reviewers to read them.

Also, I could see a larger acceptance of negative result publications bringing perverse incentives. Currently, you have to get somewhere eventually. If negative results become legitimate publications, what would e.g. PhD theses become? Oh, we tried to reinvent everything but nothing worked, here's 200 pages of negative results no-one would have reasonably tried anyways. While the current state of affairs favours incremental research, I think that is still better than no serious research at all.
by ben_w | 2025-07-25 20:28:58+00:00
> Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that.

The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society".

I don't agree with such things in many cases (and many people disagree with me when I'm the one saying something is damaging to society), but it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim.

> No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.

It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things; but an automatic extension of that is, it's not the job of the payment processors… and I think they should be banned from doing so because it's damaging to society to let them take on this role.
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-25 20:29:23+00:00
> Computers and networks are unreliable. Dropping some requests occasionally or having a weird bug for a small fraction of requests

This seems to come with the obvious implication that Golang should only ever be used to implement "services" that are essentially a part of the network infrastructure, passing requests along to other parts of the backend but not implementing any "logic" themselves (since that's where the correctness issues we're discussing might have severe consequences for the business). Isn't this a rather sobering take, all things considered?
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-25 20:29:28+00:00
Unless they are intimate images (in which case revenge porn laws are likely to apply), copyrightable images for which someone other than the poster is the creator posted without the copyright holder’s permission (in which case copyright applies), or being used for commercial promotion or to suggest endorsement (in which case, depending on which states law applies, state law right of personality/publicity, especially if the subject is a celebrity, might apply), that's generally legal in the US.
by fryz | 2025-07-25 20:29:34+00:00
FWIW, not saying it's right (as a hunter I wouldn't ever do this myself), but most of the biologists that build the population models, inc. the ones that they use to set the amount of hunting licenses or tags sold, build a certain amount of poaching into their models.

It's a particularly hard problem to solve - the hobby is usually spread through traditional means (you do it if your parents did it), and going all the way back in certain communities this was the main way to get meat, even before it became regulated. It's difficult to stop something that not only puts food on the table for your family, but has been done that way for generations.

This was one of the main contributors to the decline of the turkey population in the lower 48. In the early 1900's, a lot of folks thought turkey's were extinct because of over hunting and poaching, and the National Wild Turkey Foundation took efforts to restore the population for hunting.
by ary | 2025-07-25 20:29:43+00:00
This quote comes up often in SJ biographies or anecdotes and they universally attribute it purely to aesthetic concerns. Admittedly the man cared quite a lot about "beauty", but I've always thought this was more about the caring and less about the beauty.

To spend time making something most people never see look just as good as the things they do see you have to care quite a lot. This care begets a wide range of (usually) desirable secondary effects brought about by diligence. In my view it's similar to the effect of spending the time to make many iterations of a thing versus one perfect thing, with the former usually resulting in an end product much closer to "perfect".
by fsckboy | 2025-07-25 20:30:28+00:00
MIT "units" of class divided by 3 = other American university credits. 3, 4, and 5 credits would be 9, 12 and 15 units; generally 15 units includes lab time, although there are more or less pure lab classes too.

credits are hours spent in class per week, and units are ostensibly hours of class plus homework, except it's a lie, there is much more homework than that.
by woodpanel | 2025-07-25 20:30:30+00:00
I can do nothing but agree - but don’t tell the author about Louis Rossmann, who has been opening, repairing, and bemoaning the horrible electronics design of Apple products.

Like someone here noted, the scapegoat of our times, Car manufacturers figuring out how to „appear nice on the back“, Apple managed to hide its poor engineering behind the veneer of branding and shiny materials.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-25 20:30:41+00:00
I'll take the hard stance on this. I don't see how Sex is anymore harmful, addicting, or dangerous as any other number of socialties. Including Alcohol, fast food, gambling, and simply getting to into any given hobby (be it video games or playing guitar).

A habit I've noticed is that a person vulnerable to being addicted to X is more prone to fall back on Y, Z, etc. even when X is fixed. So I only see "this hurts certain people" as a scapegoat. Stairs probably hurt more people in any given day than many activities, we don't base law purely on harm and potential harm.
by icedchai | 2025-07-25 20:31:19+00:00
When I went to university in the 90's, Scheme was used in a couple of early courses. I had already learned C and Java on my own, but greatly enjoyed how Scheme made me think about problems differently. (I didn't learn Python until much later when I was out of school.)

As long as students are exposed to multiple languages, I think starting w/Python is fine. Every language has its issues.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-25 20:32:08+00:00
>Religion and taboo often exist for a reason, because endless self gratification does not lead to flourishing.

So then why aren't those activists going after Instagram, TicTok, X/Twitter, etc. you know, the OG spyware, brain rot and anxiety inducing companies, because that would actually benefit society and not too many people would mourn their loss.

Why are they instead going after a dozen random horny video games nobody heard of? Oh that's right, because those random game devs don't have the power to fight back in court, unlike Meta/X, so it's an easy win for them to collect brownie points, for performative nonsense.
by fossgeller | 2025-07-25 20:32:32+00:00
Well yes, one could argue that if games like GTA don’t turn people into criminals than these games are also harmless. Imo it’s a bit different in this case, as a more natural instinct (sexuality) is affected.

Sure, games can be beneficial for living out fantasies, but how will it affect your view on women if you frequently consume highly sexist content? The bottom line of my point is that I think this type of content is too easily available nowadays, and especially too much of it.
by viccis | 2025-07-25 20:32:45+00:00
>author of Unschooling

You say this like it should give him more credibility. He created a homeschooling methodology that scores well below structured homeschooling in academic evaluations. And that's generously assuming it's being practiced in earnest rather than my experience with people doing it (effectively just child neglect with high minded justification)

I have absolutely no doubt that a quack like John Holt would love AI as a virtual babysitter for children.
by shadowgovt | 2025-07-25 20:32:45+00:00
IIUC why medical cares at all, this is really insightful. Because as far as I'm aware, the medical industry basically uses birthdate as a key; it helps to (a) tell two patients with other primary keys (like name or address) apart and (b) do a quick mental-acuity check on the patient by just having them regurgitate the value and doing a human-brain string= on it.
by leakycap | 2025-07-25 20:32:56+00:00
> "At least for men who'd prefer to feel useful over being listened to, which, in my experience, is most of them."

This article is dangerous nonsense dressed up as helpful advice. DHH seems to misunderstand what therapy actually does and who it helps. He talks about therapy like a person who has never been talks about therapy.

> "signing up for an educational quest into Linux, history, or motorcycle repair actually is an incredibly effective alternative to therapy!"

This is harmful stereotyping wrapped in folksy wisdom. DHH is reinforcing the idea that needing to be heard is somehow less masculine than fixing motorcycles.

Stop creating barriers where none need to exist. Stop telling people what they do or don't need based on your limited experience, especially if your experience is one involving a custom-made supercar. Like, where's the self-awareness? Probably in therapy waiting to be discovered.
by kccqzy | 2025-07-25 20:32:57+00:00
That's exactly why I propose a multiple of 400, not a multiple of 100. The proleptic Gregorian cycle is a 400-year cycle. There are 97 leap years in it. What's tricky about it? Just take a look at my code: https://github.com/kccqzy/smartcal/blob/9cfddf7e85c2c65aa6de...
by Fargren | 2025-07-25 20:33:45+00:00
You want to handle refunds, fraud, money laundering, chargebacks... That stuff is really hard, and if it's not your main line of business, you really don't want to do it. And if you don't have a payment processor do it, and you don't do it yourself, criminals will scam your customers and use your platform to commit fraud and launder money and you will get in hot water with the law.

Bitcoin can be used as currency for occasional transactions between individuals. But you don't want your business to depend on it. It doesn't scale, not due to technological reasons, but because of legal issues and customer experience expectation.
by JoeJonathan | 2025-07-25 20:34:38+00:00
I don't think there's any legal exposure here. Article 16 of 14.063 gives an exception to code protected by Law 12.527/2011. Articles 22 and 23 seem to clearly allow for not releasing source code if that release risks the "financial, economic, or monetary" stability of the country.

Beyond that, Pix is so popular that I doubt a challenge would hold up in court. If it went to the STF, there's no way they wouldn't give Pix a carve out.

I'm as big a fan of open source as anyone else, but can we audit any other payment systems anywhere? Is that a reasonable expectation to have for payment systems?
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-25 20:34:57+00:00
The odds are clear as day. ~90% of startups fail, and the truly good ones are very rare. Do small pockets of good exist? Yes, absolutely. But most of the startup ecosystem is convincing employees to grind for peanuts until founders and investors (whether that's accelerators or institutional) hit liquidity (if ever). Of course, if you find the unicorn (good comp, target work life balance, meaningful work [to you]), hold on tight and don't mess it up.

https://www.marketsentiment.co/p/the-yc-report

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42828198
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-25 20:35:32+00:00
Wait until you hear about my private library that resides on a Synology NAS. I can access it from anywhere in the world, on any device, and it's filled with whatever books I can bother to decide that I want that title. I have about 20,000 (not counting periodicals) all carefully curated and retail quality. I even got rid of those annoying generic Bantam Press covers and replaced them with the high-res stuff off the publisher's site.

Not sure what the appeal of the public library is, when you can have your own.
by dahart | 2025-07-25 20:35:33+00:00
The first three pictures in the article have direct sun visible in the sky and not clipping. I was referring to that. The sun itself does blow out when you look directly at it, but please don’t spend time staring at the sun as it will damage your eyes.

The dynamic range of human eyes is not vastly superior to cameras. Look it up, or measure. It’s easy to feel like eyes have more range because of adaptation, foveation, iris, etc.

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.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-07-25 20:35:54+00:00
Like if my tabs are 2 spaces and I save a file like this:

line1 = wrapped + to_here_max if something: another_line = some_val + other

Of course this is exaggerated, especially because most lines won't be close to max width let alone exactly at it. But you can set the width of your editor to whatever number of columns that you're hard wrapping to (i.e. what you save in the file) and be sure every line will fit.

Then someone else loads it with tab width set to 6:

line1 = wrapped + to_here_max if something: another_line = some_val + other

Now the max column width of a line depends on the syntactic indentation level of it! Any width you choose for your editor will either overflow for some deeply nested lines or waste loads of space on less-nested lines.

Of course it's not a real concern because your editor can probably automatically fix this. But if it's clever enough to do that, then the supposed extra flexibility of tabs is actually possible with spaces anyway.
by mindslight | 2025-07-25 20:35:58+00:00
Please reference the specific values you're invoking to make a coherent argument. Referencing people is a setup for a Motte and Bailey and talking past one another. This especially applies when the first two people on that list lived over a century ago, making it so that views that could appropriately be called conservative during their lifetimes are likely reactionary/revanchist in the modern day.
by gowld | 2025-07-25 20:36:04+00:00
The best-looking cabinet you can make that stays up is more beautiful than a beautiful back wall that collapses.

More cynically, these stories are also a way for Steve Jobs, who lacks technical skill but is still the boss of the technical geniouses, carves out a niche for himself where he is the undisputed leader and no oen can challenge him: his own subjective sense of aesthetic.
by Saline9515 | 2025-07-25 20:36:10+00:00
The problem with simulated CSAM is that there is a risk that the viewer develops a fetish for such repulsive practices. It has then destructive consequences for the viewer and, should he try to perform it, his victims.

Either way, I don't see the harm of forbidding it. The web doesn't lack regular pornography alternatives, free or paid.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-25 20:36:18+00:00
The assumption they're making is "interactive incest and sexual exploitation games influence people's real life behavior".

In purely hypothetical terms, what would we if there was evidence for this? I can see some folks standing by their ideals and concluding that even if this was true, we shouldn't ban these games, while others would conclude that there is a moral obligation to future victims to ban them.

How would you behave if you shared the belief that incest and sexual exploitation games influence people's real life behavior?
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-25 20:36:23+00:00
>Well maybe they are bothered by its sexist content.

several Otome and BL content was hit by this as well. I don't think this is about protecting the women and children.

>not that many talk about how objectification of women is still very common in it.

It's not 2005 anymore. Show me any modern AAA game still doing this.

in terms of porn... well, yes. Your reward is sexual gratification with your chosen mate in any given game. Porn is inherently objectifying. I don't think you're seen enough of the porn market if you think porn is focused onobjectifying women, though.

>but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff .

We're on Hacker News. I really hope we had enough background growing up to not wish for "weird" to be illegal.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-25 20:37:14+00:00
> when you see something that you think is harmful to society, what determines whether or not it's moral and appropriate to advocate for and work towards its abolition

Evidence. If you think something is harmful to society, you have a hypothesis. The next step is to test it. Not assume it's true and ban everything.

I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful. If I had to hazard a guess, and this is again just a hypothesis, I'd actually suspect that a teenager exposed to porn games is less likely to suffer mental-health issues than one on algorithmic social media or forming intimate connections with chatbots.
by gs17 | 2025-07-25 20:37:21+00:00
> Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks.

This is commonly repeated, but doesn't hold up. Chargeback fees (especially for card-not-present transactions) are paid by the merchant and are simply increased (with reserves required) for high-risk accounts. It also wouldn't make sense to target hyper-specific niches if it were really about chargebacks, they would go after all of it, and go after things like the CS marketplace.

But the biggest giveaway IMO is that they do not allow, e.g., Steam selling these games crypto-only. It's either remove them entirely or remove credit cards entirely. If it was really about specific titles having high fraud/chargeback rates, selling them some other way would be fine.
by scythe | 2025-07-25 20:37:44+00:00
Seems like a good place to repost my comment from earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676726

> I think the root of the problem is that it's just extremely unpleasant to moderate user-generated adult content. It's already difficult to moderate content on a somewhat serious online forum like Hacker News. Facebook moderators have been in the news and on South Park due to the emotional drain of the task. Who's going to sign up to pore over everyone else's weirdest thoughts given form? Certainly not me.

> So this results in websites that allow people to upload pornography having lapses of moderation where something bad gets through every now and then. One day some creepy clip goes viral among some social conservatives and they try to make legal threats against the site and anyone they consider "affiliated". This creates problems, credit card companies are very protective of their reputations, and they usually decide the conservatives seem less bad.

> Then someone sets up a new site that allows user-generated adult content and the cycle repeats.

Anyway, a truly censorship-resistant platform is not going to be able to control child porn or anything else, by definition. Censorship occurs at the level of bits, and pornography doesn't exist at the level of bits.

What you need is something like Section 230 but tailored for the situation facing user-generated adult content. Strict liability is not a good framework for criminalizing the possession of any digital material, be it a schematic for thermonuclear weapons or whatever else.
by viccis | 2025-07-25 20:37:50+00:00
It is a good one. I'm going to keep it in my pocket for future discussions about AI in education, as I might have some say in how a local college builds policy around AI use. My attitude has always been that it should be proscribed in any situation in which the course is teaching what the AI is doing (Freshman writing courses, intro to programming courses, etc.) and that it should be used as little as possible for later courses in which it isn't as clearly "cheating". My rationale is that, for both examples of writing and coding, one of the most useful aspects of a four year degree is that you gain a lot from constantly exercising these rudimentary skills.
by CalChris | 2025-07-25 20:38:04+00:00
This was just a preference cliff, plain+simple. Windsurf got paid maybe $3B for itself. But the investors and senior management got their cut first. How? Well, the preferences they negotiated.

No one really knows how the game is played The art of the trade How the sausage gets made We just assume that it happens But no one else is in the room where it happens

#2 wasn't in the room when it happened. In a very real sense, he's lucky he got anything. Management owes a fiduciary duty to the shareholders and #2 is a shareholder. But negotiating the $3B covers that duty.
by carabiner | 2025-07-25 20:38:09+00:00
There needs to be a startup accelerator or VC that solely focuses on recycled ideas. We could have an app that gathers strangers for dinners, one for reviewing people, and so on. Since all of these gained traction at some point, the idea would be you get 1-2 quick puffs of these discarded cigarette butts before selling or shutting down. Just vibe code it, go viral, collect some subscriber fees, then close due to whatever reason.
by blitzar | 2025-07-25 20:38:16+00:00
Easyjet [0] - £48 Fee for any non-purchased bag (per item) brought to the departure gate that is over a customer’s small cabin bag allowance which is a maximum size of 45 x 36 x 20 cm or any bags outside of standard entitlements. The bag will be placed in the hold.

United Airlines [1]: Basic Economy tickets only include one personal item. They do not include carry-on bags. If you decide to travel with a carry-on bag, you must check it in the airport lobby for a fee starting at $35. If you bring a carry-on bag to the gate that won’t fit under the seat, you need to pay a $65 fee to check it.

As for others ... the gate check fee for Spirit Airlines' carry-on bags is typically around $99 when charged at the gate, Ryanair charges typically around €55-€60 for items deemed too large for carry-on at the gate etc.

[0] https://www.easyjet.com/en/help-centre/policy-terms-and-cond... [1] https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/travel/inflight/basic-econo...
by gosub100 | 2025-07-25 20:38:36+00:00
> seemingly pointless refactoring, instead of tackling issues that are actually important to users

its not a dichotomy. Xorg was built on X11R6, a platform that was written circa 1993. You cannot "tackle issues important to users" based on an outdated stack. They were painted into numerous corners that only a rewrite would fix.