MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by irchans | 2025-08-15 14:55:07+00:00
So, I think that I can avoid a lot of the data leak problems.

There might be a simple way to do this with a crypto-currency. If possession of a credit card is considered proof of age, then possession of cryptocurrency should also be considered proof of age. Maybe the user could play $0.01 to the porn site using crypto currency to prove that he is over 18. If done properly, no one, not even the government, would know who the user was.

Here is another idea.

You have independent stores where the clerks can sell proof-of-age certificates to people. These certificates are essentially just 20 random Base64 characters. By law, the independent stores are not allowed to identify the customer (who pays with cash). The store clerk is only permitted to issue certificates to people who appear to be over the age of 18, no id required. The store keeps a list of every certificate that they have sold along with the month in which the certificate was sold so that the certificates can expire after several months.

Now I claim that it is possible to create open source zero knowledge proof software that runs on a server for each store, a few government certifying authorities, the porn websites, and on the users computer so that as long as the stores don't identify the users, no one will be able to identify the user. The government will not be able to tell which certificate was used to access the porn. The government will not have access to the certificates. It will not be able to tell which store issued the certificate. The porn site will not learn the certificate of the user nor will it know his identity.

Also, the number of lines of code needed for each program of the five needed open source programs will be less than 1000 lines, maybe less than 100 lines.

I think that all of this could be done at a cost of about $50,000 to develop the software plus the cost of running the servers. I feel like I could write all the code for less than that.

The system is not perfect. You have to trust the stores to not identify the customers and to do a decent job of identifying who is over the age of 18. Some kids will get certificates by copying their parent's code or copying the code of an older friend. Some 16 year olds will look like they are 18 and they will be able to buy proof of age certificates. But, over 80% of kids under 17 will not be able to view porn.

Despite the low cost and effectiveness of the idea above, I am not sure that it is a good idea. I don't like the government censoring content.
by daveguy | 2025-08-15 14:55:08+00:00
Apparently you do not understand how they chose the two groups. Group identity was not based on a survey or any attribute of the participating individuals.

Low and high socio-emotional groups refer to whether the group was shown the low or high socio-emotional video. The pre-test and exclusion based on lack of attention and instruction following was performed before group selection for each individual, which was presumably random.
by shmerl | 2025-08-15 14:55:30+00:00
No, they care about telling gamers what they should do, not about enabling gamers what they want to play. That's very much not the same thing.

That's a general thing with Apple - they act as if they know better than the user what user needs and they force it on their user base.

Someone keeps forgetting they literally dropped OpenGL and 32-bit support, making a lot of existing games on their own systems unplayable. Not supporting Vulkan is just another example of the above.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-08-15 14:55:54+00:00
In a related vein, Ebooks. I have a Kobo e-reader that is fantastic.

I just ran into a situation where I really wanted to buy two e-books. Unfortunately, both are on Amazon. Amazon doesn't let you just download them to your computer anymore, you need to transfer them to a Kindle. A kindle I do not have.

I tried to find any possible workaround, but they've totally locked it down. So, I didn't buy either book. I really struggle to see how this is helpful to anyone. Does Amazon seriously make enough profit off of each Kindle to be worth it like this? Ugh.
by ggariepy | 2025-08-15 14:56:02+00:00
I've been writing code since I was 12, and I'm 57 now. I majored in Computer Information Systems back in the 1980s. Honestly, I got a lot more out of the other aspects of going to college than I did from the coursework related to my major.

There's some important development that happens at traditional college student age. Some of that can be fostered by attending college. Some of it happens organically no matter where you are.

Your son seems atypical: he knows what he wants to do, he has solid skills, and he is probably already better self-educated than the typical graduating college senior would be in software development.

So at this point what he needs is not necessarily the education, but the magic piece of paper -- the diploma -- that makes him hirable in more places.

A business degree with a minor in a development-oriented course of study might serve him better than spending $160K on what essentially would be a mix of formalizing his learning / reviewing what he already knows.

Because, after all, isn't the point of an education to learn something you don't know already?

So back to that important development: your son needs to become more well rounded. He seems to have excellent aptitude for programming and data processing. How are his social skills? What is the status of his business acumen? Does he aspire to work for himself or start a company someday? To what is he going to apply those skills he's got?

The answer to that is what he should go to college to learn. A generalist degree in something like business might serve him very well. Wasting four years of his life and $160K on stuff he already knows probably won't do much except help him refine his skills in beer and girls. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but maybe not six figures worth of value, either.

I would encourage him to either go to school and round out his learning, or just jump into the working world and find where his skills are deficient and let that inform a future college decision. Just my $.50
by kennywinker | 2025-08-15 14:56:03+00:00
> Great! Here is a few million go make AI.

So how is this different from the US? It’s VC’s making the choices not the gov - seems little different. Maybe scale?

> They're not unfamiliar with burning tens of billions to get a few hundred million of value.

The chinese economy seems like proof this is a valid strategy that pays off in aggregate. Yet when gov here attempts any kind of economic development policy it seems largely unpopular.

> you are not competing, because they are just burning daddies money

So like the american defense industry then?
by mamcx | 2025-08-15 14:56:07+00:00
> it costs a ton to maintain your own platform

Truly? And considering here the option is C++?

I truly asking, how much cost is this, have been measured?

I suspect is like the issue with fail to measure the whole thing and is just like "my guys that work in the platform also work making my apps and fixing my printer, so when they work in the platform I can`t print" kind of situation, instead of "I have a platform team (that could be like very small) and a apps team, and I ditch the printer in the bin" that I suspect is just reorg correctly the same amount of people.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-15 14:56:20+00:00
This argument is undermined by the malign behavior of green activists and their academic allies, who have been caught in the past inventing non-existent new sub-species specifically so they can use the endangered species argument to block construction projects.

A notorious case is the snail darter, invented to block construction of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee. It was the first legal test of the US Endangered Species Act and it was fraudulent [1]. This raises huge questions about how the Endangered Species Act is actually being used, if the very first test case was about a species that scientists now think doesn't really exist as a separate thing at all.

Another case is the California Gnatcatcher, which is not an endangered kind of bird, but green NIMBYs argued under the ESA that the coastal California Gnatcatcher was a different species that would be endangered by construction. They have successfully kept the "coastal" variant of the bird listed as an endangered species for decades, which regularly blocks or slows down construction in CA.

They love this game! After all, what defines a species? It's a vague concept and the taxonomists who decide whether something is a new species are academics, who are all on the far left. Nothing stops them publishing a paper that concludes the animals next to any planned project are unique and special snowflakes that must be protected, purely because they just want to block progress.

To put the scale of this problem in perspective, last year taxonomists "discovered" 260 new species of freshwater fish alone [2]. They claim that hundreds of unique kinds of fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?

[1] https://yibs.yale.edu/news/fish-center-key-conservation-figh...

[2] https://fishkeepingnews.com/2025/03/04/260-new-freshwater-fi...
by pclmulqdq | 2025-08-15 14:56:46+00:00
I think Jared's video is good at conveying the mechanics of striker-fired guns, and he is completely correct that this issue exists to some degree in every striker-fired gun (and is not an issue in them). However, the parts in the P320 have so much variance that the wall is very "mushy" on some of these guns. I wouldn't be surprised if we find that these uncommanded discharges involve both movement in the trigger and movement of the slide.

It may be the case that variance is so wide that there are some P320's which are in that "depressed to the wall" state at rest, but that would require an x-ray or CAT scan of the offending guns, and I don't know if anyone other than Sig has one. There is also a safety on P320's that should be stopping this from happening, but again, it is a part with very wide variation, and on some guns it seems it doesn't work (Sig issued a recall over this already).

I agree with Jared that this problem is a lot trickier and weirder than people give it credit for. The sort of core of the issue is that everything about the gun was done cheaply and they flew a little too close to the sun, but I believe they have no idea what in particular they cheaped out on too much.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-15 14:56:49+00:00
Note that they're talking about an aisle alone, not about going to the grocery store alone. My kids were older than 8 the first time they walked to the grocery store by themselves, but I'm confident that I told them "you go grab the peanut butter you like" while I was grabbing something in a different aisle when they were around kindergarten age.
by pc86 | 2025-08-15 14:56:51+00:00
I've only been around "gun culture" for 5-6 years or so, but not a single person I know in the fairly conservative area of my fairly conservative state thinks talking shit about a gun company means you're anti-gun - especially Sig which everyone hates now.

Nobody takes the NRA seriously or cares anything about what they do, either, so maybe I just happen to be in a sane pocket of the culture but other than the obvious paid shills like GBRS who are terrible human beings anyway, even on YouTube and other sources everyone has been talking shit on Sig for a year or longer.
by ako | 2025-08-15 14:57:20+00:00
To me it feels very much like a brain: my brain often lacks knowledge, but i can use external documents to augment it. My brain also has limitations in what it can remember, I hardly remember anything I learned in high school or university on science, chemistry, math, so I need to write things down to bring back knowledge later.

Text and words are the concepts we use to transfer knowledge in schools, across generations, etc. we describe concepts in words, so other people can learn these concepts.

Without words and text we would be like animals unable to express and think about concepts
by tovej | 2025-08-15 14:57:28+00:00
Good article, it's been told before but it bears repeating.

Also I got caught on this one kind of irrelevant point regarding the characterization of the Matrix: I would say Matrix is not just diguised as a story about escaping systems of control, it's quite clearly about oppressive systems in society, with specific reference to gender expression. Lilly Wachowski has explicitly stated that it was supposed to be an allegory for gender transition.
by LeonardoTolstoy | 2025-08-15 14:58:24+00:00
Library. I order DVDs to my local library all the time. Maybe your library system is terrible, but if it isn't you certainly can do this. There are hundreds a big wide release films with, effectively, are only available on DVD from a library (legally).

Bonus when I go I can still get that browsing the aisle experience like in an old video store (but in this case I am lucky, my local library has a large DVD / Blu-ray collection to browse)
by mattmanser | 2025-08-15 14:58:50+00:00
Unfortunately it's not a tiny, tiny fraction. I thought this too once then looked up the stats.

It's horrifying when you find out. It's 1 in 20 children get sexually abused in the UK at the moment for example, and we have loads of checks and safe guards.

And waiting until they get sectioned/locked up, that means someone else has to suffer potentially life-long trauma.
by kstrauser | 2025-08-15 14:58:52+00:00
I don’t want to use a “separate but equal” Internet. Screen readers support very specific situations that don’t apply to me. I see using them as the equivalent of tweaking my knee and having to sit in a wheelchair so that I can just use wheelchair accommodations and call it a day. Nah. I don’t want to use a wheelchair or a screen reader because those devices weren’t made for my own needs and don’t suit me.
by ufmace | 2025-08-15 14:58:53+00:00
> Where does this idea come from?

Anti-gun propaganda.

Anti-gunners first started practicing lawfare against companies involved in the gun industry by suing them for crimes committed using products the companies were involved with, even though this is a ridiculous idea never applied to any other type of product. They do it because, even when the lawsuits are thrown out eventually, they are still very expensive to defend and most companies in the industry don't have particularly deep pockets.

Gun-rights advocates got laws passed in a number of jurisdictions clarifying that gun manufacturers are only liable for genuine flaws in their products. This has largely squelched these types of nuisance lawsuits.

Anti-gun activists don't like that, so they frequently spread false information that such laws prevent manufacturers from being liable for genuine flaws in their products. Despite such false claims, no law ever passed or proposed actually does this, and no law in this area has ever been repealed due to actually blocking liability for genuine flaws.
by throwaway5752 | 2025-08-15 14:59:04+00:00
At this point you just have to make peace with very bad futures. We will all die, and sometimes there is nothing you can do to prevent things. To save the world, more people have to be willing to fight for this than currently are.

The pure physics of the situation are staggering. The specific heat capacity of water is huge. The volume of ocean surface is huge. We are completely fucked. Everything you've read minimizing this or pretending we can continue with business as usual is a lie. Atmosphere SO2, enhanced rock weathering, ocean iron fertilization - it is horseshit. We had to reduce emissions 30 years ago, and simply chose not to.

The idea we can preserve our standard of living through technology is comically false. At this point, every large nation on earth would have to simultaneously cut emissions by more than half, we'd have to create a coordinated global Manhattan Project around alternative energy, and another global Manhattan Project around geoengineering (while not tipping ourselves into an ice age). It would require unprecedented leadership and cooperartion.

The US currently has the stupidest president it has ever had, surrounded by psychopaths that do not care about human suffering and act on base zero sum power calculus. The world is at war. The tech industry is greedily and actively accelerating this with crypto and AI buildout. The odds of the human species successful navigation of this extinction - at a civilization level - event is almost zero.

bondarchuk: I changed this, please delete your comment.
by mingus88 | 2025-08-15 14:59:05+00:00
Adam Walsh was 7yo and abducted from a Sears. His parents left him to play Atari while they shopped.

They made a movie about it in 1983. Politicians introduced new laws around it.

His father John Walsh went on to host Americas Most Wanted on TV for 24 seasons. Prime time TV whipped up a culture of fear for that entire generation.

Kids growing up with that culture are parents now. Not surprised to see these results.
by pc86 | 2025-08-15 14:59:12+00:00
I think the idea that if you don't know the basic names of something your opinion on it is suspect is a fair criticism. Especially with the very odd reference to a 20-round magazine. There is no state in the country where a 20-round AR magazine is legal and the standard-capacity 30-round magazine is not. Virginia has a 20-round maximum but only on handguns.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-08-15 14:59:24+00:00
The reason it seems like an easy mistake to make is that you've been consuming conservative media that uses it routinely. Presumably this is the same media that told you about this ETF whose ticker is a joke about Nancy Pelosi, and suggested that it proves some fact comparable to the current administration's misconduct. Again, I'm not saying you personally consider yourself to be conservative - but if you don't, you've been tricked, and you need to urgently reevaluate how much you listen to the people who tricked you.
by tombert | 2025-08-15 14:59:25+00:00
Sure, but at this point it just kind of feels like splitting hairs and just a means of getting offended on purpose.

Calling people “extremely conservative” because I used a term that is very commonly used pretty much everywhere but leftist circles is needlessly pedantic and very annoying. I think it’s reasonable to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Also I’m not fucking conservative. I think Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder and Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk and pretty much anyone on the internet who has ever challenged anyone to a debate is a fucking moron.
by tonfa | 2025-08-15 14:59:25+00:00
> Switzerland's public transport is nearly perfect; it can take you anywhere, fast

While I love swiss public transport, I wouldn't qualify it as fast. It's dense/frequent/reliable, but not so fast. If the core lines (e.g. St Gallen-Geneva and Basel-Lugano) where running >200km/h that would be fast.

One reason is that making those fast has a much bigger benefit for cross border travel (non swiss), while a lot of the investments are done to benefit e.g. commuters, but with the enshrined road Gotthard traffic limitation I think we'll need to make Alp crossing more attractive for cross border travels at some point (and hopefully do the same for the mittelland line, zurich to geneva in sub-2h should definitely be possible)
by snozolli | 2025-08-15 14:59:30+00:00
I had a friend in college whose mother was an immigrant and whose father had grown up bilingual and spent years in the mother's county. My friend was able to hear and understand the mother's tongue with apparent fluency, but had an extremely difficult time forming real sentences in the language, even though he'd heard and understood it for his entire life.

I think there's a significant difference between consuming language and producing it, whether that's written or spoken. It might explain the number of people I see these days who don't understand basic English grammar and make words plural by slapping on an apostrophe and an s.
by tudorizer | 2025-08-15 14:59:38+00:00
This parallel is something that I've been mulling over for the better part of this year.

Are we simply getting old and bitter?

Personally, I would add a previous cycle to this: social media. Although people were quick to point at the companies which were sparked and empowered by having unprecedented distribution.

Are we really better or worse off than a few decades ago?
Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate Beautiful PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python
by sammycage | 2025-08-15 14:59:44+00:00
Hi everyone, I built PlutoPrint because I needed a simple way to generate beautiful PDFs and images directly from HTML with Python. Most of the tools I tried felt heavy, tricky to set up, or produced results that didn’t look great, so I wanted something lightweight, modern, and fast. PlutoPrint is built on top of PlutoBook’s rendering engine, which is designed for paged media, and then wrapped with a Python API that makes it easy to turn HTML or XML into crisp PDFs and PNGs. I’ve used it for things like invoices, reports, tickets, and even snapshots, and it can also integrate with Matplotlib to render charts directly into documents.

I’d be glad to hear what you think. If you’ve ever had to wrestle with generating PDFs or images from HTML, I hope this feels like a smoother option. Feedback, ideas, or even just impressions are all very welcome, and I’d love to learn how PlutoPrint could be more useful for you.
by moi2388 | 2025-08-15 15:00:02+00:00
It should. You can’t keep your kid out off school, but keeping them off Roblox is incredibly easy; you just don’t pay for it.

Should Roblox try to keep their space safe? Of course. But the parents are the ones letting them go unsupervised on Roblox. I don’t let my kids do that.
by kleiba | 2025-08-15 15:00:03+00:00
Why should I as a user get exposed to garbage that I don't care about in addition to the actual content I'm interested in?

Well, one possible answer is that the content provider only actually provides that content under the condition that I look at the ads. After all, a lot of content providers are businesses and they don't like to give out content for free.

My stance has always been that for 99% of the stuff I consume on the internet, my condition is that I can access it the way I, as the end user / customer, prefer. And if you as the provider insist otherwise, my reaction will almost always be that I won't look at to your garbage ads but instead I'll just go somewhere else for content.

Or just read a book, ad-free [0].

[0] https://archive.is/KHPwt
Scaleify – Build native iOS apps without a Mac or coding skills
by bajero | 2025-08-15 15:00:03+00:00
I’m Amadou, solo founder of Scaleify. I built it because I saw how hard and expensive it is for most people to build native iOS apps — you need a Mac, learn Swift, deal with Xcode, and often spend months coding from scratch. For non-developers, that means a $2k+ hardware investment before you even start.

Scaleify removes these barriers by letting anyone describe their app in plain English. We instantly generate a complete SwiftUI project — navigation, UI components, production-ready screens — and run it live in the browser, so you can iterate without owning any Apple hardware. You can export the code at any time or prepare it for the App Store directly.

Right now we’re in limited beta — I can only support three users building simultaneously — but we’re onboarding paying users. If you want to try it, request access at tryscaleify.dev or ask here and I can share a beta password.

Would love feedback, especially from iOS devs — what do you think about this approach, and what would make it more useful for you?