MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by altacc | 2025-08-13 08:21:44+00:00
There are many reasons that you could research with a quick search but simply put, it breaks the anonymity of web use and has huge implications for intentional and unintentional surveillance and data misuse. What is asked for here is much more and much more strongly linked to an individual than the data you refer to.

It requires everyone to upload either ID and/or high quality photos & videos of themselves to a random company. Not just one company one whomever a website chooses for age verification, which can include doing it themselves. This creates multiple massive treasure troves of IDs that will attract hacking attempts (for example the Tea app breach). It creates opportunity for blackmail from this data (for example the Ashley Madison breach but much worse). For those age verification services that require a photo/video, that creates a resource for deep fakes. Plus any 15 year old boy worthy of their digital device will be able to get around age verification using fake id/photos or a VPN, whilst a less savvy adult trying to access information about quitting drinking or drug abuse will face a barrier.

And this is for ANY website that has a very broad range of content that the OSA mandates age verification for. It's easier for a website to err on the side of caution and just block the UK. That especially includes websites that have zero reporting back to Meta/Google/etc... for usual marketing profiling. If anything it pushes more people into the limited, monitored and advertising driven Meta/Google web.
by n4r9 | 2025-08-13 08:21:49+00:00
I'm not sure where you're getting this from. Repeated studies continue to affirm that COVID is spread by respiratory droplets and that masks are effective in reducing transmission.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8721651/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-mask-effectiveness-what-sc...

https://www.ukri.org/who-we-are/how-we-are-doing/research-ou...

Why do you believe the Diamond Princess is a counterexample?
by antirez | 2025-08-13 08:22:45+00:00
The post is based on a misconception. If you read the blog post linked at the end of this message, you'll see how a very small GPT-2 alike transformer (Karpathy nano-gpt trained to a very small size) after seeing just PGN games and nothing more develops an 8x8 internal representation with which chess piece is where. This representation can be extracted by linear probing (and can be even altered by using the probe in reverse). LLMs are decent but not very good chess players for other reasons, not because they don't have a world model of the chess board.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yzGDwpRBx6TEcdeA5/a-chess-gp...
by dqv | 2025-08-13 08:23:16+00:00
Any evidence the prosecutor uses that is potentially exculpatory must be disclosed to the defendant. So your questions raise why they wouldn't: they think the defense can't find out. And it's arguably likely that they won't. But if they do, it will not only invalidate that single case, it could potentially trigger retrials of hundreds of cases because now a bunch of people know that Officer Flock is on the Brady list.

And one final thing about this... the prosecutor (who has probably said some variation of "ignorance of the law is not an excuse" to try to get a conviction) can't claim ignorance as a defense to a Brady violation. Failing to disclose, whether they knew or not, is a Brady violation.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-08-13 08:24:00+00:00
If Google loses Chrome though, it will no longer be pre-installed on Chromebooks and Android. They will just fork Chromium, call it something else, and pre-install that. Sure they might lose some Windows users who miss the news reports and don't install the replacement and keep using Chrome, until their bookmark sync stops working since that relies on proprietary Google account integration.
Ask HN: Would you use a chat-based money tracker?
by chetansorted | 2025-08-13 08:24:28+00:00
I've been experimenting with using GPT-4 to turn financial tracking into something as simple as chatting with a friend. Instead of using spreadsheets or budgeting apps with rigid inputs, I created a personal finance assistant where you just talk to it:

“Spent ₹300 on lunch” “Paid ₹12,000 for rent” “Freelance income ₹5,000” “Set food budget to ₹10,000” It understands natural language, categorizes expenses, tracks monthly budgets, gives spending summaries, and even generates charts — all inside a conversational interface. Right now, it's running as a GPT with memory and a custom backend that logs transactions, handles budget rules, and supports custom categories (like “Cigarettes” or “Loans”).

I'm working on packaging it into a mobile app with a simple chat UI. Would love your thoughts:

Is this something you'd use? Any ideas on making it more useful/fun? What features would make it better than Excel or Notion-based trackers? Live demo soon — just validating interest before I go full-on.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-08-13 08:25:18+00:00
Thanks, yes, the SWI version I tried was Fabrizio Riguzzi's one. It's possible the use of false/0 was indeed the problem because IIRC I just kept getting silent failures.

It's funny there's both fail/0 and false/0 in ISO (though not sure which version) but only true/0 and no succeed/0. My guess is that an "I-mean-false" predicate is useful (e.g. for failure-driven loops) but "fail" strikes some folks as too procedural so we also got "false". But I'm only guessing.

I'd like to blame Aleph for using "false:-" for negative examples, rather than ISO. I suspect it's a hack to make it easier to cause negative examples to fail, somewhere. Normally ":- a" should be immediately recognised as a goal with a negative literal, but since that's the syntax used in directives it's probably not immediately obvious to most that "a" is negated. It wasn't to me for the first 10 years or so.
by withinboredom | 2025-08-13 08:25:20+00:00
I spent 5 years working at a place without an ORM. Due to sharding and scalability issues, an ORM wasn't possible (the tech was nearly 20 years old when I left, so they didn't get some of the later database scaling tech). When I went to a company with an ORM, I had problems.

Namely, the ORM got in my way so much. I knew exactly which query to run and how to word it efficiently, but getting the ORM to generate sane SQL was nearly impossible. I eventually had to accept my fate of generating shitty SQL at every company since then...

That being said, I'll always advocate for ditching an ORM if given the chance and the expertise is available. If nobody knows why you generally wouldn't want to put an index on a boolean column, we're probably good. If people think it will help performance on a randomly set boolean field, we should probably stick with an ORM.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-08-13 08:26:04+00:00
Also, public officials like to be exempt because of professional requirements. They delivered the argument for it to be declared illegal violating a few constitutions.

Also because it is an undemocratic technocracy (warranted polemic) and the average citizen cannot sue before the EU judiciary, the national courts have to kill it. Of course such a process will take years...
by Skinney | 2025-08-13 08:26:44+00:00
What sort of IDE plugin are you thinking of? As long as you have a git plugin it should work just fine (if you're thinking of something similar to github/gitlab plugins then I don't think there are any, but I'm not sure what those buy you).

It's possible to setup CI: https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/ash.radicle.garden/rad%3AzwTxy...
by gylterud | 2025-08-13 08:27:04+00:00
This is the idea behind Kolmogorov complexity[0], that the complexity of a string (finite or infinite) can be measured, relative to a programming language, as the the length of shortest program which produces it.

Precisely computing the Kolmogorov complexity of a given string could be very difficult, though. In general, it is uncomputable because we cannot decide if a given program will output a given string.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
by defrost | 2025-08-13 08:27:33+00:00
Again, as reported by the shop owner ...

As noted, (both in the first link and again in this second link) the police do not consider displaying the sign in question to be an offence.

North Wales Police, however, said it did not appear Mr Davies had committed any offence. "It would be up to the shop owner to decide whether he displayed such a sign in his store," the force said.
by Kon5ole | 2025-08-13 08:27:36+00:00
>To take one example, the author speaks of using AI to chat with his favorite thinkers.Well I have favorite thinkers, so why don’t I chat with AI versions of them? Because I know it’s all fake.

That's an uncharitable take of what he actually said, he was clearly talking about being able to get information presented as if it was explained by a particular person. The training data contains everything that person ever wrote, so it might be pretty close. Fake sure, but also often correct and presented in a familiar way.

I've often thought that many concepts I struggled with in school came down to the teacher explaining them in ways that was "incompatible" (for lack of a better word) with my way of thinking for that particular concept. Not that I was special, I think every student experiences this from time to time.

Being able to continue asking questions about dinosaurs or atoms or the roman empire long after any human teacher would get tired will help many a curious kid learn faster than they could before.

>I’m left wondering if the only people who value GenAI are those who haven’t experienced the satisfaction of thinking for themselves

I find this take strange - you still have to think but LLM's help you. Googling things or tracking down a breaking change in version 9.2 from 8.7 or why a regexp is not working correctly is not thinking. It's just busywork.

Spreadsheets removed the satisfaction of "carrying the one" with pen and paper and a whole bunch of valued skills lost value - but it turned out fine. Same with going from assembly to C or C to Java. We ended up with more programmers and more software, not less.

I think once the dust settles LLM's will be a similar change, if perhaps much larger in scope.
by yorwba | 2025-08-13 08:27:58+00:00
The pudding.cool article has a link labeled "View the map of “F*ck”" but it leads to a search for "fuck" instead. If you search for "F*ck", you find gems such as "CONTRACTOR F CK-UP" https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/KhzY08H72wV2ldXamZU5HA?o=76... (Strategically placed pole obscuring the word.)
by deanc | 2025-08-13 08:28:06+00:00
This would be an interesting additional layer for google maps search which I often find to be lacking. For example, I was recently travelling in Gran Canaria and looking for places selling artesan coffee in the south (spoiler: only one in a hotel which took me almost half an hour to even find). Searching for things like "pourover" and "v60" is usually my go-to signal but unless the cafe mentions this in their description or its mentioned in reviews it's hard to find. I don't think they even index the text on the photos customers take (which will often include the coffee menu behind the cashier).
by gpderetta | 2025-08-13 08:29:29+00:00
In practice if you do a volatile read at an arbitrary mapped address it will work. But you have no guarantee regarding what you will read from it, even it if it happens to match the address of a variable you just wrote into.

Formally it is undefined, as there is no way to give it sane semantics and it will definitely trip sanitizers and similar memory safety tools.
by mft_ | 2025-08-13 08:29:46+00:00
Sure, your points about the body aren’t wrong, but (as you say) LLMs are only modelling a small subset of a brain’s functions at the moment: applied knowledge, language/communication, and recently interpretation of visual data. There’s no need or opportunity for an LLM (as they currently exist) to do anything further. Further, just because additional inputs exist in the human body (gut-brain axis, for example) it doesn’t mean that they are especially (or at all) relevant for knowledge/language work.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-13 08:31:06+00:00
> Using “has been” here makes it immediately clear that you’re a non-native English speaker,

Specifically, using the combination "has been ... in". Either "was abolished in" (simple past in the passive voice) or "has been abolished since" (present perfect in the passive voice) would work (simple past describing the event of abolition, past perfect describing the continuous state of having been abolished from the point of that event up until and continuing through the present moment) would work.
by ikskuh | 2025-08-13 08:31:38+00:00
Creator here!

I'm also having ADHD but you can get help with the focus problem ;)

It's incredible to work for many years on the same thing and it's so pleasing to have steady progress.

So: Go, start building a vision for your cyberdeck! Having a clear goal helps you working towards building it, and you cam embrace the ADHD by jumping around between the many aspects of such a project.

sw design, hw design, visual design, mechanical design, handcrafting, soldering, programming, making websites, asking people, ...
by ivape | 2025-08-13 08:32:23+00:00
Even the greatest LLM will only just give you a snapshot of a perceived world state. You’ll only ever get one state, input, to output. Each snapshot in sequence is what will perceptively appear to us as AGI initially.

If we stick with the frames analogy, we know the frames of a movie will never give us a true living and moving person (it will never be real). When we watch a movie, we believe we are seeing a living breathing thing that is deliberate in its existence, but we know that is not true.

So what the hell would real AGI be? Given that you provide the input, it can only ever be a super human augmentation. That along with your own biological world state forming, you have an additional computed world state that you can merge with your biological world state.

We will be AGI, is the implication. Perfect weights will never be perfect because they are historical. We have to embrace being part of the AI to maximize its potential to be AGI.
by BlueTemplar | 2025-08-13 08:32:24+00:00
I just so happened to read in the last few days the (somewhat disjointed and rambling) Technically Radical: On the Unrecognized [Leftist] Potential of Tech Workers and Hackers

https://wedontagree.net/technically-radical-on-the-unrecogni...

as well as the better but much older "The professional-managerial class" Ehrenreich (1976) :

https://libcom.org/article/professional-managerial-class-bar...

"Rationalists" do seem to be in some ways the poster children of consumerist atomization, but do note that they also resisted it socially by forming those 'cults' of theirs.

(If counter-cultures are 'dead', why don't they count as one ?? Alternatively, might this be a form of communitarianism, but with less traditionalism, more atheism, and perhaps a Jewish slant ?)
Why is this still not solved in 2025?
by wojciii | 2025-08-13 08:32:43+00:00
I noticed the following while visiting IKEA.

I talked to their support people at the shop because I needed to buy a missing a piece of a furniture.

At the end of our conversation they asked me to give them my info so they could send it to me using the postal service.

At this point I had to give them: Name, Address Postal Code Town Telephone number E-mail for tracking

This took at least one minute where I had to verify all the given information after the person read it aloud.

All this info is contained already in the IKEA app you can use at the shop.

I could have an app with this info that can show (QR code) or transmit it using BT LE or WiFi to the terminal the person was using.

Why is this still not solved?

Is this because the sales terminals are old and quirky and no one wants to implement new features in them?
by graemep | 2025-08-13 08:33:58+00:00
Atheism is not a sin - not if a sincere belief. An honest mistake is not sin.

If you are arguing that intrinsically good things (reading, thinking, speaking) can be turned to bad purpose, then so can almost anything. If done with honest intent I cannot see how reading, thinking of speaking atheism is sinful.

Is there anything in the the Catechism that says otherwise.
by ta1243 | 2025-08-13 08:34:24+00:00
If it's a local site then it's not subject to the GDPR. The GDPR applies to sites aimed at europeans.

However the privacy attacking malware they embed on there to mine data from their users would apply, and that's why they block it - because America allows abuse of their citizens data, but Europe doesn't.

Of course there is no enforcement for an entity attacking European citizens in this way so they could do it anyway, but like with cookie banners the point isn't to comply with a law, the point is to get citizens to blame the law rather than the abusers.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-08-13 08:34:55+00:00
> People forget that Chinese communists took over Tibet by force only around 1950.

Well they "re-took" it since this happened only because Tibet used the opportunity of the turmoil created by the fall of Qing dynasty and help from the British to declare independence from China in 1912 and to give what is now Arunachal Pradesh to the British.
by benterix | 2025-08-13 08:35:33+00:00
Yeah everybody compares traditional programming to using assembler now. This analogy would be great except that the current generation of LLMs is still quite unreliable and a large part of what it generates is a mess.

In a perfect world, there would be no problem - those of us who enjoy the experience would vibe-code whatever they need, and the rest of us would develop our skills the way we want. Unfortunately, there is a group of CXOs, such as the ones at Github, who know better and force the only right way down their employees throats.
by thrance | 2025-08-13 08:35:38+00:00
Why? It explains a lot about society and it holds perfectly. That's the definition of a good definition. What's your definition of economic classes?

There is an internal contradiction within our capitalist systems, some people live by selling their labors for wages, and some by leasing their capital for labor (to get more capital). Evidently those two interests are opposed, and ergo leads to issues when one side gains two much power over the other, because the power imbalance is very much not self-correcting.

Classes are used to refer to these groups of opposing intersts. There would be no need for classes if there was no conflict. Things only exist in their opposition to other things.
by alpaca128 | 2025-08-13 08:36:10+00:00
> they focus too much on the first letter of the word

They also do that in Apple Notes. On the iPad the search can only match word prefixes. So if you type "oo" and the entire note consists of just the word "foo", it will find nothing. This doesn't even require fuzzy search, yet they couldn't be bothered while solving the much more difficult handwriting recognition problem.

Also the iPhone's Settings app still doesn't have all settings in the search index. So it's impossible to find the section "headphone safety" & "reduce loud audio" using words like "headphone", "audio" or "safety". This setting was introduced five years ago, by the way.
by bondarchuk | 2025-08-13 08:36:30+00:00
I think that since it's not possible to reply to multiple comments at the same time, people will naturally open a new top-level comment the moment there's a clearly identifiable groupthink emerging. Quoting one of your earlier comments about this:

>This happens so frequently that I think it must be a product of something hard-wired in the medium *[I mean the medium of the internet forum]

I would say it's only hard-wired in the medium of tree-style comment sections. If HN worked more like linear forums with multi-quote/replies, it might be possible to have multiple back-and-forths of subgroup consensus like this.
by gorgoiler | 2025-08-13 08:37:05+00:00
One thing I’ve realised over the past few weeks is that some parents must be delighted to have the government control the web for them.

When the parent does the enforcement themselves then they can be put under direct pressure by their children to drop the ban. When the government does it then the parent can say, honestly, sorry, there’s nothing they can do about it: It’s out of their hands. The child only has access to tier 1 support [parent] and the support agent’s only response is “sorry, corporate policy [law] requires AV for certain sites, there’s nothing I can do. Is there anything else I can help you with today?…”

I don’t say this to make the laws easier to swallow but the social economics of it make it more understandable why this law might be so popular with anyone already overloaded with angry teenagers.

Next up: the Bedtime Is At Nine PM Act 2026, Tuck Your Shirt In Act 2027, and No We Have One At Home Already Act 2028.
by cs02rm0 | 2025-08-13 08:37:12+00:00
It's a slightly mixed picture. Knife crime is one area that's been trending up for 10 years now. Shoplifting is at a 20 year high. Fraud is up. Firearms offences are roughly level.

But criminal damage is down. Of course, if you call the police for criminal damage, everyone knows they won't turn up and you'll just get a crime number, so unless you're claiming on insurance you're probably less and less likely to report it.

We shouldn't be aiming for London (with 200 phones stolen every day as it is) to reach the level of the worst European or American cities.
My inbox is a mess from signing up for everything. How do you handle it?
by cnohall | 2025-08-13 08:37:30+00:00
My inbox is a mess from signing up for every new tool and service. It's filled with everything from password resets to marketing emails I'll never read. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

How do you all handle this? Do you use aliases, a separate "junk" account, or something else entirely? I'm curious to hear what strategies everyone has come up with.
by FailMore | 2025-08-13 08:37:34+00:00
It seems clear to me that LLMs are a useful sort of dumb smart activity. They can take some pretty useful stabs in the dark, and therefore do much better in an environment which can give them feedback (coding) or where there is no objective correct answer (write a poem). It opens the door for some novel type of computational tasks, and the more feedback you can provide within the architecture of your application, the more useful the LLM will probably be. I think the hype of their genuine intelligence is overblown, but doesn’t mean they are not useful.
by beastdevmoney | 2025-08-13 08:37:44+00:00
I’ve always been frustrated with traditional forums—posts vanish, accounts get banned, and years of contributions disappear overnight. So I built TopBidMessage: a blockchain-powered forum where your wallet is your identity, your words are truly yours, and every post is permanently on-chain. It’s my attempt to give people back ownership of their voice, and to make online conversations matter again.
by esskay | 2025-08-13 08:38:00+00:00
Most of the 3rd parties being used for this are based in the US. You're sending your photo and details to a foreign entity. That same foreign entity is likely used by lots of sites.

Oh look, that foreign entity now has a profile of you, and what sites you've visited.

Fast forward a year, they get hacked (or maybe even just sold), a copy of your personally identifiable details are pinched along with your browsing history.

I really really hope you weren't being naive enough to go down the utterly stupid "nothing to hide" route with your line of thinking.
by devnullbrain | 2025-08-13 08:38:14+00:00
It puts a UK user in a weird situation. On one hand, the more countries that join in (and I've heard of US states too), the more likely it is that age verification becomes well supported and I continue having access to the wider world's internet. On the other hand, we've reached a very thick part of the wedge already: this is terrible for competition and I do not trust any state with this power.

The best path is one of calamitous implementation that scares off other countries and embarrasses this one into a u-turn. But it's increasingly unlikely.