MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-07-28 00:09:41+00:00
> 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?

Kinda, yes.

(slightly simplifying the mechanism here)

This seems to be based on the EU Wallet project, which is still work in progress. The EU wallet is based on OpenID (oidc4vci, oidc4vp). The wallet allows for selective disclosure of attributes. These attributes are signed by a issuing party (i.e. the government of a EU country). That way a RP (relying party) can verify that the data in the claim (e.g. this user is 18+) is valid.

However, this alone is not enough, because it could be a copy of that data. You can just query a wallet for that attribute, store it and replay it to some other website. This is obviously not wanted.

So the wallet also has a mechanism to bind the credential to a specific device. When issuing a credential the wallet provides a public key plus a proof of possession of the associated private key (e.g. a signature over an issuer-provided nonce) to the issuer. The issuer then includes that public key in the signed part of the credential. When the RP verifies the credential it also asks the wallet to sign part of the response using the private key associated with that public key. This is supposed to prove that the credential was sent by the device it was issued to.

Now this is where the draconian device requirements come in: the wallet is supposed to securely store the private key associated with the credential. For example in a Secure Enclave on the device. The big flaw here is that none of this binding stuff works if you can somehow get access to the private key, e.g. on a rooted phone if the wallet doesn't use a secure enclave or with a modified wallet app that doesn't use a secure enclave to store the private key. You could ask a friend who is 18+ to request the credential, copy it to your phone and use that to log in.
by ericvolp12 | 2025-07-28 00:09:55+00:00
The article doesn't really do this justice, it's not really "opting to leave" it's that entire divisions inside the Science side of NASA have had their projects defunded and so all the work the people in those labs were doing is now gone. They're being asked to leave voluntarily so they don't have to be "fired" but all their work and resources are gone and they couldn't stay if they wanted to.

A friend of mine had her division's headcount cut by >80% that was all research focused and building instruments for deep space observation. No one is hiring people to do that in the private sector. Dozens of astrophysics PhDs in that division alone are now without work and with no real prospects doing anything related to what they've dedicated their entire lives to (and accepted modest salaries as civil servants to do).
by aBioGuy | 2025-07-28 00:10:09+00:00
I would like to point out (as I have seen this confused by many non-scientists) that the NIH (National Library of Medicine) provides a service called "PubMed" which collates peer-reviewed (and many pre-print) scientific papers into one database / website. This particular paper (like 99% of the papers on PubMed) was not published by a NIH scientist or by the NIH itself.
by rudasn | 2025-07-28 00:10:33+00:00
Cool, I've been working on similar my self. Not released yet, haven't had the time recently.

Curious as to why you store the data in the database in b64 as opposed to files on disk. What's the reasoning for that? Doesn't it make storage/backups/etc more complicated?

Not an expert myself, I opted for in browser encryption, in chunks, so as to avoid memory limitations (at least in some browsers, not FF yet), and in browser gzip so as to keep file size down and speed things up.

I find your niche quite interesting (journalists, whistleblowers) but given the high stakes of that perhaps an open source or more collaborative approach would be easier to promote.

Another idea I've tried out but not pursued, is some sort of browser extension/addon (I used nwjs, similar to electron), that offers client side encryption for any site (form field really). So you'd only post encrypted stuff to whatever service (email, reddit, hn, whatever) and only anyone with the key would get to read it (well, assuming they have the key and the same extension). Just throwing the idea out there, I'm sure others have thought about something along those lines before. The details to get it right are tricky (UX wise), but for your target audience it may be well worth the extra work.

Keep it up!:)
by alephnerd | 2025-07-28 00:10:38+00:00
> 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.

My hunch is it was due to Amazon's attempt to win a majority of the work in the JEDI tender.

WashPo was bought during the height of the JEDI tender, along with Bezos's shift in domicile to Washington DC, Amazon HQ2, and Amazon's opening of the Crystal City and expansion of the Reston city campus all happened during that tender.
by Jimmc414 | 2025-07-28 00:11:16+00:00
In the 1960s, the U.S. fertility rate was around 3.5, but dropped to 1.7 by 1976. It rose to 2.1 in 2007 before falling again. The rate in 2023 was 1.621, and dropped to an all-time low of 1.599 in 2024
by dspillett | 2025-07-28 00:12:25+00:00
> many also want to entrust all our PC games to one closed source launcher

I think that is far more that people like the other closed source launchers less, and each launcher potentially adds it's own stream of notifications and adverts to their system so there is a cost to having multiple active even if the PC resource cost is practically undetectable.

Furthermore if comparing game launches and related issues to political climates, I'd consider all the current closed source ones to be the same in those respects. Also we are not subject to several local political climates at any one time in that way (though we are when looking at a wider scale, of course).

> Or have videos/TV all on one subscription service

While there are other issues (each service tracking you etc.) this is more due to the fact that each service charges what we used to pay (in fact more, as in some cases prices have gone up by more than general inflation) for a single service that provided the same amount of content that they cared about. This doesn't really equate to trust on political climates (except where commercial greed is considered a political matter).
by johnnienaked | 2025-07-28 00:12:29+00:00
Loved it.

Enshittification is taught in business school. It's not just tech businesses or businesses with network effects. It's EVERY business. One might even say enshittification is a core tenet of capitalism.

Balanced scorecards and strategic initiatives to cut cost (and hence, increase profit) every year by ~1%, sacrificing long term cash flows for short term "growth."

Customers don't notice until they do.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-07-28 00:13:47+00:00
It's been a relatively common position to find, at least before the most recent hubbub around Steam, Itch.io, Britain, etc. For instance, while https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42071310 faced criticism, it also had lots of broadly supportive sentiment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42075518, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077025, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077421, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42074066, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42074776, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42073002, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42075043, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42076302, ...

Or at the very least, many here support the goal of keeping children and/or teenagers off of social media entirely, while disliking the means of ID verification. But it's not like there's any other obvious means.
by akersten | 2025-07-28 00:13:54+00:00
> that bothered to implement hardware-to-app attestation chaining live in production end-user devices

This is why it's important that initiatives like Web Environment Integrity fail. Once the tools are in place, they will always be leveraged by the State.

> and so once they publish all that, I expect we’ll find that they’ve petitioned their attested OS signature chain to the EU as satisfying age requirements for mature gaming.

I hope that Valve pays no mind to this nonsense and continues to allow art to be accessible to anyone.
by godelski | 2025-07-28 00:16:13+00:00
> The cuts to [...] are not really saving that much money, but are destroying literally trillions of dollars of future economic value

I think everyone (or at least the parent) understands that. I mean there's a part that's deeply connected to what I said in another comment[0]

The real issue is essentially: which would you rather have, $1 now or $10 tomorrow?[1]

People see it as savings because they have that money now. That's the way JumpCrisscross used it (and I very much don't think they agree that this is how the gov should be working). But the way you're using it is "I'd rather have the $10 tomorrow".

I'm pointing this out because now people are talking past one another. I'm pointing this out because it is a really common pattern ("now" vs "later") that is used and frequently causes miscommunication due to different assumptions about what we want (e.g. "maximize money now" or "maximize money during x period of time"). Though it doesn't always have to do with money.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705004

[1] Be careful to not trivialize this. The numbers are abstract as well as the points in time. Also consider that $1 now might be far more valuable than $10 tomorrow. For example, if you get $1 now you might be able to afford a bus ticket to a location where you can get $1m, but only if you get there today. That's worth a lot more than $10 tomorrow. So we have to be mindful of what conditions actually exist if we want to actually communicate. Unfortunately, these are usually assumed and not communicated... The people that want to just take the money are well aware of this tendency...
by gruez | 2025-07-28 00:16:39+00:00
>Facebook was breached what last month?

source? A quick search suggests the "breach" is a bunch of credentials that got harvested/phished got leaked, not that facebook themselves got breached.

>Google is an ad company. They can’t sell data that’s breached. They basically do email, and with phishing at epidemic levels, they’ve failed the consumer even at that simple task.

In other words, they haven't been breached, but you still think they're bad people.
by varispeed | 2025-07-28 00:16:55+00:00
TIL someone thinks a £60k dev job in London means you’re not being exploited - because you can afford a Tesco meal deal and a flatshare in Zone 4. Never mind your code prints money for people you’ll never meet, or that your “reward” is a Jira ticket and a perf review.

Developers went from garage-tinkerers to the backbone of the modern economy - and somehow ended up as overworked, disposable employees in open-plan office farms. The owners changed, the IDEs got fancier, but the deal stayed the same: build the machine, never own it.

You upskill constantly just to not fall behind. You work nights “for the launch.” You get gaslit into thinking stock options in a private company are equity. Then you’re laid off via email - while the founders post yacht selfies.

And the worst part? Most of you still believe you’re lucky. That’s the grift: teach engineers to think they’re “not like other workers” - then extract surplus value just like any other industry has done since the 19th century.

Developers are poorly paid - not because the salary is low, but because the upside is stolen. You created the wealth, they captured it.
by gmane | 2025-07-28 00:17:44+00:00
Here you go: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34079693/

Edit: You can also click on his name in the original post (or the link above) and see all the papers in pubmed authored by him.

Edit 2: These two papers:

Veugelers PJ, Ekwaru JP. A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D. Nutrients. 2014;6(10):4472–4475. - PMC - PubMed Veugelers PJ, Ekwaru JP. A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D. Nutrients. 2014;6(10):4472–4475. - PMC - PubMed

and

Heaney R, Garland C, Baggerly C, French C, Gorham E. Letter to Veugelers, P.J. and Ekwaru, J.P., A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D. Nutrients 2014, 6, 4472-4475; doi:10.3390/nu6104472. Nutrients. 2015;7(3):1688–1690. - PMC - PubMed
by altairprime | 2025-07-28 00:18:22+00:00
Ultimately, the web will revert to where it was before full text search harvested and profited from all the curated indexes of content — and, bluntly, we did fine back then! It was a lot less shitty of a web than we have now :) And it’ll be a lot easier to be open with others when someone can’t just full-text search their way to our bulletin board (forums used to be called that, since they derived their core structure from BBSes!) to hate on us. Will be harder to use the web for problem-solving in esoteric corner cases, because you’ll have to find the right enthusiast community and jump through some hoops to sign up and become a trusted member. Can’t wait, honestly.
by rkwz | 2025-07-28 00:18:26+00:00
I'm working on Zen Notes - a minimal, distraction-free notes app that prioritizes ownership and longevity.

The core philosophy is: your notes should be yours forever, that also includes the software stack it's built on. Everything is stored locally in SQLite with standard Markdown, so no vendor lock-in or proprietary formats. The interface is very minimal without flashy colors or icons, so you can focus on your thoughts.

Key features: instant full-text search using BM25, flexible tag organization instead of rigid folders, rich Markdown support with formatting toolbar, and custom "Focus Modes" for different contexts. It's a PWA that works offline (read-only).

The tech stack prioritizes minimal dependencies - no NPM (self-hosted Preact instead of React), Golang for rich standard library, etc. The whole app can be run from a single binary, so no messy installation requirements. Docker is also available.

I tried to design this from scratch, learning about typography, colors, spacing etc. It turned out better than I expected!

I've switched to this as my main notes app and I'm happy with it.

Landing Page: https://www.sheshbabu.com/zen/

Demo: https://zendemo.fly.dev
by gpm | 2025-07-28 00:18:45+00:00
No, it's like saying a business that has a CCTV camera recording customers, and sending that data off site to a central location, where they proceed to proceed to use the data for some non-PII-related purpose (maybe they're tracking where in stores people walk, on average), are in fact sending PII to that off site location.

Distinguishing factors from your example include

1. PII is actually encoded and handled by computer systems, not the mere capability for that to occur.

2. PII is actually sent off site, not merely able to be sent off site.

3. It doesn't assert that the PII is collected, which could imply storage, it merely asserts that it is sent as my original post does. We don't know whether or not it is stored after being received and processed.
by TrapLord_Rhodo | 2025-07-28 00:19:36+00:00
I'm one of those people who took "the money and [ran]"

I'm a digital nomad and have been traveling full time for 7 years now. It's great, it's a good balance of work/life balance but one thing you slowly start to notice is when you leave your country, no matter if you learn the language or how much integrate yourself into that country, you will always be an outsider to the majority in that country.

As an american you will always be a Yankee, Farang or Gringo and will carry the weight of the US collective.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-07-28 00:20:58+00:00
You replied after I had updated the comment to provide said evidence.

Adding to what I said earlier, this isn't even an app that any EU member state will use. It's just a PoC, as it says in the README. https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android...

Unfortunately for the authors, the pitch forks are already out, and the mob is on the march. It's too bad that HN is contributing to it.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-28 00:22:26+00:00
Because national interests always end up trumping the EU in it's current form.

American companies like Google [0][1], Amazon [2][7], and Microsoft [3][4][5][6] have spent billions in FDI and hiring, thus building strong relationships with EU states like Ireland, Romania, Poland, Finland, Sweden, and others, but French and German competitors haven't (or don't exist depending on the service or SLA).

This means a significant portion of EU member states have an incentive to maintain the relationship, because the alternative means significant capital outflows. A Polish legislator doesn't have to answer to French voters, so they will incentivize the relationship with BigTech. Thus, these nations will lobby tooth and nail against destroying the relationship.

It's the same reason Hungary courts Chinese FDI [8] and enhancing the Sino-Chinese relationship as leverage against the EU pushing too hard [9].

[0] - https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-invests-billions...

[1] - https://www.gov.ie/ga/an-roinn-fiontar-turas%C3%B3ireachta-a...

[2] - https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/job-creation-and-investment/...

[3] - https://centraleuropeantimes.com/microsoft-google-invest-big...

[4] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/nordics-efficient-energy-...

[5] - https://www.idaireland.com/latest-news/press-release/an-taoi...

[6] - https://www.government.se/articles/2024/06/prime-minister-to...

[7] - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/cloud-technology-emp...

[8] - https://hungarytoday.hu/hungary-seeks-to-stay-leading-europe...

[9] - https://theloop.ecpr.eu/hungary-and-the-future-of-europe/
by lossolo | 2025-07-28 00:22:51+00:00
It's largely a political issue. At this stage you can't create alternatives to Google and other U.S. tech giants without removing them from the market (so essentially the Chinese approach, which has allowed them to build their own massive tech giants). But that path is nearly impossible for the EU due to the risk of U.S. retaliation. The EU can't even implement a digital tax.

You also can't just say, "Here's a few hundred billion in public support to create alternatives to U.S. tech giants", because the U.S. would argue that it's unfair state aid and retaliate.

There isn't enough private capital in the EU with the risk tolerance required to take on such a challenge independently.

We also lack a reserve currency like the USD, so we can't print $2 trillion a year, much of which ultimately flows into the U.S. stock market and further boosts U.S. tech companies, making competition even harder.

EU markets are already fully penetrated by U.S. behemoths that can either withstand or acquire any privately funded competitor, thanks to their massive cash flows and valuations.

For all these reasons, the outlook isn't very promising.
by its-summertime | 2025-07-28 00:23:24+00:00
The crux of the title is from the following

> In Finland, the recommendation for daily vitamin D supplementation was gradually reduced from 4000-5000 IU in 1964 to 400 IU in 1992.

And from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4210929/ which has

> The Institute of Medicine (IOM) issues dietary recommendations on the request of the U.S. and Canadian governments. One of these recommendations is the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA). The RDA is the nutrient intake considered to be sufficient to meet the requirements of 97.5% of healthy individuals. The RDA for vitamin D is 600 IU per day for individuals 1 to 70 years of age and is assumed to achieve serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) levels of 50 nmol/L or more in 97.5% of healthy individuals.
by johnnienaked | 2025-07-28 00:23:42+00:00
It gives me recollection back to the Simpsons episode where Itchy and Scratchy writers go on strike. What follows was a beautiful scene of children rubbing their eyes in unfamiliar sunlight as they're forced to go outside, making up games, playing on playgrounds, all while Beethovens Pastorale hums in the background.

I'm all for it. Let big tech destroy their cash cow, then maybe we can rebuild it in OUR interest.
by jacobolus | 2025-07-28 00:24:38+00:00
Actually, the "rest of us" largely agree, as reflected in the laws our elected representatives have established. We have collectively appropriated the money and set up the institutional framework for spending it. Folks smashing down that system are doing a significant part of it illegally, with no credible justification or public support, in several recent cases in contemptuous violation of direct court orders.
by quesera | 2025-07-28 00:25:25+00:00
> 100 wolves in 2.2million acres

Without engaging with the rest of your comment, and even assuming that wolves are distributed evenly (of course they are not, and some parts of the park are not suitable for wolves):

This equates to 1 wolf per chunk of land measuring about 6 miles square, so about 15% smaller than the city of San Francisco (which is a small city).

Wolves are territorial and they move through forest quite well. A ~35 square mile territory wouldn't be out of the question.

Edit: Notes from elsewhere:

> Wolf packs in Minnesota, for example, can have territories that range from 7.5 mi2 to >214 mi2 — a 28 fold difference in territory size

> Average territory size in northwestern Montana was 220 square kilometers (185 square miles) but was highly variable (USFWS et al. 2002). Average territory size for Yellowstone Gray Wolves was larger, averaging 891 square kilometers (344 square miles) (USFWS et al. 2002).

> Pack size is highly variable due to the birth of pups, but is typically between 4 to 8 wolves. Territory sizes range from 25 to 150 square miles; neighboring packs can share common borders, but territories rarely overlap by more than a mile.
by elcritch | 2025-07-28 00:25:43+00:00
> Meanwhile the USDA, FWS, and DOE do those pesky regulatory things

True and that’s awesome. However to put up some of a counter those agencies also over-regulate. Bureaucracy tends to over-expand.

Musks example of SpaceX having to calculate the likelihood of a rocket hitting a shark in the pacific. Musk is certainly exaggerating a bit, but is speaking to a real issue for many businesses struggling to keep up with absurd regulations.

My grandfather fought for years with USFWS to be able to re-build infrastructure for a small town near a popular wilderness area. A small bridge upstream washed away one year and they refused to allow rebuilding it.

The claim was that rebuilding the small bridge would disturb some endangered fish species. So instead hundreds or thousands of vehicles every summer would drive through that small river instead to get to the wilderness area beyond. That created a lot more destruction and impact on the fish. Trucks and vehicles wash off a lot of oil and chemicals like that.
by mikeyouse | 2025-07-28 00:25:48+00:00
This apologia for the cuts would be more persuasive if they didn’t come in concert with record-breaking increases to the pentagon budget and historic deficits. There’s no calculation happening here with present or future value, they’re lavishly funding things they like and decimating things they don’t. You don’t place a reality TV ‘star’ as the director of any agency you care about.
by its-summertime | 2025-07-28 00:25:58+00:00
From what I can tell, the "ecological integrative approach" is referring to the approach used in the research of that paper, not on how Vitamin D acts in relation to COVID

> Following an ecological integrative approach, we examined the associations between published representative and standardized European population vitamin D data and the Worldometer COVID-19 data at two completely different time points of the first wave of this pandemic.

and

> Thus, a major limitation of our ecological approach is that we had to rely on published - but perhaps not always completely representative - data on the vitamin D status of the populations in Europe.