MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I'm 17, built a face-verified social network to fight fake accounts
by whitelotusapp | 2025-09-30 15:06:33+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Arun, 17, from India. While my friends scroll Instagram and Snapchat, I’ve been obsessed with building something different. I don’t want a regular job — I want to push technology.

So I built WhiteLotus — a social app where every account is face-verified. No bots, no fake profiles, no spam. Just real people.

Core ideas:

AI-powered face verification (1 account per person)

1-on-1 private chats (only with friends)

Photo-based posting (keep it visual, keep it real)

“Kingdoms” (Fire, Water, Earth, Air tribes) for community vibes

Leveling system that shows how active and trustworthy you are

“TrustNotes” where friends can write notes about you

Right now, it has ~44 users. Growth is… hard. I’m shipping alone in Flutter + Django, fixing bugs, and trying to figure out how to get beyond 1 new user a day.

I know Instagram and Snapchat are addictive giants — but I believe there’s space for something real. A place where you don’t worry if the profile DMing you is fake.

I’d love feedback from this community:

Does this solve a real problem?

What would make you switch or at least try it?

How should I think about growth as a solo indie?

Even if nobody uses it, this journey has taught me more than any job ever could. But I’d love to hear your thoughts.

WhiteLotus on Play Store

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whitelotus...

Thanks for reading
by KPGv2 | 2025-09-30 15:06:37+00:00
> gamified learning vs "academic" learning, immersion by moving to a country,

I think it's not unreasonable to point out that, at least for Americans (I'm guessing the largest user base of Duolingo), of the three options you listed, one costs tens of thousands of dollars for us (academic instruction), and the other is virtually impossible to do because we aren't part of a bloc of nations with border freedom (immersion).
by mothballed | 2025-09-30 15:06:42+00:00
Not to justify it, but why isn't the founder of UPS (edit: Fedex) in prison? I don't think it was legal to go and literally spend their money at the casino.

If you turn a profit no one cares (unless you're Shkreli, don't think his investors lost money, but he pissed off some politicians because he said the quiet parts out loud about how the pharma industry works), if you lose it's fraud.

When all the winners are doing it, hard to compete otherwise... not that it makes it right.
by ninjin | 2025-09-30 15:06:42+00:00
Fujifilm's whole X-mount series is wonderful and while I shoot "full-frame" M mount to remain interoperable between digital and film, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have a Fujifilm X-mount series if I only shot digital based on how much fun they have been when I have borrowed/tested them. Great "enthusiast level" cameras, great glass, solid build, everything has a button/dial, does not break the bank, and I actually know more than one professional photographer that shoots them and one of them even shooting sports!
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-30 15:06:47+00:00
Claude is highly autonomous. You can yeet short underspecified prompts at it, and it's tuned to produce good vibe code output, though very samey since they've squashed the distribution a bit in order to effectively steer the model. GPT5 is less autonomous and also needs more steering, but the upside of this is that when Codex can't do something, it'll come back to you for feedback, whereas when Claude cant' do something it implements a toy/mock version then typically lies about completing the task successfully in the final summary output.
by actionfromafar | 2025-09-30 15:07:38+00:00
Voting? Just like the Russians and North Koreans and Iranians vote better, right? If there will be voting, it will be very vetted by the administration. No "antifa" allowed. It's too funny in a way. Like a mirror:

In Russia, it's "fascists" the administration is fighting. In the US, it's "antifa" the administration is fighting.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-09-30 15:07:56+00:00
They're only threatening to fine them for previous violations of the law, not anything after they block access. Blocking access doesn't make the existing fine from when they were doing business in the UK go away, it just prevents future fines.

Whether they can collect the money while Imgur aren't doing business in the UK is a different argument, but it's not particularly controversial that a country can fine a business operating in its jurisdiction for violating that country's laws. Even if those laws are authoritarian bullshit.
by malkosta | 2025-09-30 15:08:03+00:00
I fight against this by using it mostly on trivial tasks, which require no comprehension at all, also fixing docs and extending tests. It helps me to focus on what I love, and let the boring stuff automated.

For complex tasks, I use it just to help me plan or build a draft (and hacky) pull request, to explore options. Then I rewrite it myself, again leaving the best part to myself.

LLMs made writing code even more fun than it was before, to me. I guess the outcomes only depends on the user. At this point, it's clear that all my peers that can't have fun with it are using it as they use ChatGPT, just throwing a prompt, hoping for the best, and then getting frustrated.
by bluGill | 2025-09-30 15:08:12+00:00
Just be careful. Mass production depends on masses buying it. If they can't get the price low enough mass production may not be worth it. It is entirely possible that enough people would buy this at $1k, as to make mass production worth it, but if you target $10k not enough people would buy as to make mass production worth it. This though assumes that you could do enough mass production to get down to $1k, which might not be possible.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-09-30 15:08:24+00:00
> They pull out and have no UK assets to seize.

How do you expect the "pull out" to happen? They must have had a UK bank account or similar, whose transfers won't get approved as they're trying to escape from criminal prosecution. Or they'll work with the US to ensure responsible individuals are held responsible.

It isn't exactly the first time someone/something commits crime in a country then try to escape, there is lots of ways to work with others on this.
by yndoendo | 2025-09-30 15:08:24+00:00
I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael H. Kater. [1]

Propaganda was the control they wanted. 3rd party companies and organizations allowed for a pseud disconnect with the shared propaganda. See this paper, music group, artist supports our ideology and we are not paying them for it.

Centrally controlled does not mean being centrally employed. Just take a look at all the big businesses that assisted fascism for financial gain. Lot of it being slave labor. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_....

[1] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300253375/culture-in-naz...

* Added link to the book.
by gs17 | 2025-09-30 15:08:31+00:00
You have to click through a lot of it. If I open it and do a lesson, it will demand I commit to a streak (if I haven't done it in a while), show me the new 1-day streak, show me about streak freezes, see how much XP I got, see what quests I made progress on, see that I did not get promoted in the leagues, see my new league placement, and probably a dozen other things that aren't language learning. I don't care about this stuff, but I'm forced to interact with it to use their app.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-09-30 15:08:31+00:00
You are missing quite a bit. It is not obviously quid pro quo in diplomatic relations but on that point you are partially correct. If the US for one reason or another cuts ties with Israel, it loses its main influence in the middle east and other countries would probably quite happily pick up the tap. Only some are from the region, others are not.

All this has absolutely nothing to do with Larry Ellison and frankly this whole thread is mostly idiotic. It could have been an interesting topic but some seem to have other priorities. Which are quite transparent.
by brian_meek | 2025-09-30 15:08:31+00:00
That is was boring is what appealed to me. That is was also thought through with rigor was the other part. I wanted something to use in some pet projects, in rust, so having an implementation of the "wrangling" code I could reuse was value to me. Learning how to put guardrails on sing an LLM productively was another.
by torm | 2025-09-30 15:08:38+00:00
I'm currently holding a 1100 days of streak of Italian in Duolingo, so I think I am entitled to drop in my 2 cents ;)

To some extent I agree with the critique. Would I be able to write an assay like the op in Italian? surely not. Is their marketing annoying? yes, very much. Is the platform perfect? far from this. However - after 3 years with Duo I am capable of having causal, simple conversations, I can navigate most of the websites in Italian, I understand most of the marketing emails, I can write simple emails myself. I trust this is mostly due to DuoLingo - building the vocabulary and quickly recognizing the patterns (and It was not super simple, my native language is Polish, and I was learning Italian via English interface - there was no Polish-Italian course back then, now there is one but it's just very low quality).

Duolingo helped me build a habit, knowledge of words and patterns. During the 3 years I've spent with the platform I made trips to Italy, I tried talking to people, tried to read texts and and explored some grammar myself. About a month I go feeling I've outgrown the platform I started doing 50min conversations on Preply platform and I am now confidently moving into stage where I can build longer sentences, use past and future tenses and irregular verbs.

In my discussions with friends I emphasize that IMHO Duolingo alone is not going to teach you (complete) language. If you have a goal to learn a language (in general, not on Duolingo) and you use it as one of the tools - it could be really helpful.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-09-30 15:08:43+00:00
I have friends and family who earnestly desire to learn a language, and ask me what to use. They often end up choosing Duolingo and make no progress toward fluency in the subsequent years. The criticism is that it subverts their goal, preventing their success by replacing learning with addictive behaviors that don't educate (like someone wanting to enter a new field and getting hooked on "educational" YouTube Shorts podcast clips). It also spoils their ability to focus on alternative learning methods as none deliver as much of an immediate dopamine rush as Duolingo. These alternatives could do better at that, sure, but it doesn't change that Duolingo fries their brains preventing them from adopting productive methods without therapeutic interventions.

That's why people advocate against it and advocate for alternatives.

Their goal wasn't to defeat doomscrolling, it was to learn a language!
by cjs_ac | 2025-09-30 15:08:47+00:00
If you mean the opinion polls, I don't have any to hand, but there have been a few articles submitted to /r/ukpolitics since the Online Safety Act took effect detailing opinion polls showing that the UK Government's regulation of internet content has been well-received by the wider public (although the userbase of that subreddit has vociferously disagreed).
Show HN: Multiview Hands Only Pose Estimation
by pablovelagomez | 2025-09-30 15:09:06+00:00
Hands‑only multi‑view hand pose pipeline with a browser demo in Rerun. Outputs: per‑view 2D keypoints + boxes, 3D keypoints, MANO joint angles & shape (all predictions, not GT). Four stages: camera estimation → shape calibration → 2D keypoints → pose optimization.

Known issues: not real‑time (~5 min for 30s/8 views on a 5090), too many cameras (target: 2 exo + 1 stereo ego), struggles with interacting hands.

Code: https://github.com/rerun-io/annotation-example/tree/dbt
by acuozzo | 2025-09-30 15:09:27+00:00
> Tell me how you, without knowing the code base, get the LLM to not add these classes?

Stop talking to it like a chatbot.

Draft, in your editor, the best contract-of-work you can as if you were writing one on behalf of NASA to ensure the lowest bidder makes the minimum viable product without cutting corners.

---

Goal: Do X. Sub-goal 1: Do Y. Sub-goal 2: Do Z. Requirements: 1. Solve the problem at hand in a direct manner with a concrete implementation instead of an architectural one. 2. Do not emit abstract classes. 3. Stop work and explain if the aforementioned requirements cannot be met.

---

For the record: Yes, I'm serious. Outsourcing work is neither easy nor fun.
by PetitPrince | 2025-09-30 15:09:33+00:00
Another happy X-T3 owner here (I had in my hand a Nikon D40X, D300s, D810 before getting a X-T1 and then upgrading to X-T3 ; thanks dad).

Yes, this is a very good camera. I love UI of Fujifilm cameras; and by that I do not mean the menu system (which is... serviceable) but the physical dial for each of the main setting. Putting them in "A" for automatic just make sense compared to the usual PSAM modes.
by medstrom | 2025-09-30 15:09:52+00:00
> But if you are self directed, recognize the ways in which it is useful, [...] it's really helpful.

Yes, but once you get the hang of how to learn well from each exercise, it's interesting how the app will seem purpose-built to... slow you down.

You know that exercise where you arrange words into a sentence? I learned a lot better once I stopped looking at those words for cues, and just formed a sentence in my mind and then looked.

At that point, it's a pure waste of time to assemble the sentence and tap through all the UI transitions, I'd rather see the next exercise right away!

But the app doesn't allow me to! I have to pass the minigame first! At the end, it seems 80% of my effort was spent practicing "how to visually hunt for words in a word-cloud".
by Aachen | 2025-09-30 15:09:52+00:00
I was looking at Shiftphone but haven't been able to identify a single advantage over Fairphone. More vendors isn't bad, but it's so niche, I think more people actively use F-Droid (and that's already niche) than know the name Shiftphone! They'd stand stronger and be a more realistic option if they collaborated on some level

I'm curious if you know of any reason to buy Shift besides specifically supporting German economy instead of the Dutch one

And would you know why they don't work together? At least on the software side that's easy to do remotely. I know Fairphone has been struggling to catch up with the machine learning and other services other vendors are adding on top of e.g. the camera sensor to get good photos. They seem to be doing better now but Shift seems to still have a lot of software bugs, eyeing their forums
by dougdonohoe | 2025-09-30 15:10:16+00:00
Duolingo makes it hard to ignore - the whole app is gamified. It's like ignoring water while swimming in the ocean. Yes, you can turn off notifications, but sometimes they were helpful.

I think gamification triggers some innate feature of our brain, just like TikTok or Reels or mobile games, etc. It is designed to be hard to ignore.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-09-30 15:10:16+00:00
For sure, I've never used a language of this paradigm. I'm also bothered by the fact that I don't have a single good reason why I should, and would love to know if somebody has one. The currently given reason is curiosity.

I guess that is my point; all of the languages I know are of the same paradigm, but I need to know them all for work. So I disagree with the assertion that only languages of a different paradigm from the one you know is worth learning.
by agentmastery12 | 2025-09-30 15:10:24+00:00
We built a free, no-login “Arcade” of interactive tools for sales pros, SDRs, and founders experimenting with AI.

Right now it includes:

ROI & pipeline calculators (see how AI impacts revenue growth)

Quizzes to test your AI + sales knowledge

Mini games + interactive experiments

All tools are embeddable, shareable, and updated weekly.

We’d love feedback from the HN community on:

Which calculators/quizzes are most useful?

What other tools would you want to see in a “Sales + AI Arcade”?

Live here → https://agentmastery.ai/arcade
by txru | 2025-09-30 15:10:39+00:00
There are two elements of this situation that I'm consistently trying to open-mindedly hold in balance.

One part is what I call "The Great Defederalization". In a myriad of ways, the federal state that was erected between FDR and LBJ is being torn down. That state existed on a group of decisions that allowed independent agencies outside of the direct oversight of the president: the Humphrey's Executor agencies, NLRB, FCC, FTC. The Supreme Court and Congress are very happy to work on rolling them back, and they were constructed on pretty awful jurisprudence to begin with. That can work-- we should engage in creative destruction, the administrative state did restrict economic growth, and it did create carve-outs out of the Constitution. If it made us a more reliable partner, that did come at the cost of flexibility.

But at the same time, this executive isn't defederalizing to defer power to the states-- it's doing it to grant more immediate power to the president, who is in effect weaponizing the armed forces and police forces against non-compliant localities and personal enemies. News like this happening the same week as the president sends the Army to a passive American city in order to plainly provoke a conflict, and directing his DoJ to enact a case on paper thin justification, is troubling, to say the least.
by whatamidoingyo | 2025-09-30 15:10:50+00:00
Duolingo was amazing for learning the Russian alphabet, something I struggled with from YouTube videos, etc. I can confidently read Russian nowadays (although I may not understand everything). I did get quite far in the lessons as well, but I don't have a high opinion of them. There were things I've learned from Duolingo that I said to native Russian speakers who were like... "we don't say that".

Note: The alphabet lessons are separate from the main content.
by KPGv2 | 2025-09-30 15:10:54+00:00
DL was a core part of my German studies before my first kid was born so I could start speaking my family's heritage language with her. I spent about six months working through the entire tree (this was a small-ish tree, back in 2016), supplementing with Wiktionary + Hammer's German Grammar and by the time she was born, I was contacting tutors to work with them and saying "I'm guessing I'm around low-B1" only to have them evaluate me as probably B2 for spoken language.

The caveat here was that I was intensely motivated, my native language (English) is related to German, and I already had learned two other languages, so I had internalized a good process to learn a language (plus an interest in linguistics meant I could read "here's how the subjunctive is constructed in German" and not have to read fifty pages of explanation about what the subjunctive even is.

It CANNOT be overstated how useful it is to understand grammatical concepts at an academic level when you're learning a new language. There's so much that can be conveyed with one term instead of twenty examples you have to read over and over to grok what this construction is for. Pay attention in seventh grade English when you're being taught what passive voice is, pay attention when you're learning about mood. When you hear past and past perfect, remember it! It will make things SO much easier when you decide to acquire another language.

(Edit) Even very different languages like Japanese still have a lot of the same concepts. The most complicated verb ending IMO is the "causative-passive," and many of my classmates struggled to learn it. IMO it's probably because of the "passive" part. But passive voice exists in English, and if you can recognize it, the construction in Japanese is really easy. "To be allowed to XYZ" or "To be forced to XYZ" if you translate in your head (like most learners do at first). You speedrun the whole concept but for actually learning the mechanics of constructing it: for one category of verbs, drop -ru and add -saserareru. For the other, drop the -u and replace with -an and then -serareru.

Bam, if you already know what passive means, you're done. You've literally just learned the entirety of it, a thing I watched take a full week in my university class.
by josephclarkDev | 2025-09-30 15:11:09+00:00
I built NomadInflation.com to solve a problem I had as an expat in Latin America - cost-of-living sites like Numbeo rely on crowdsourced data that's often outdated or wrong.

So I'm scraping actual prices from local sources weekly. Currently tracking Asunción, Paraguay (shows $966/month for rent, coworking, food, transport, etc).

Features: - Interactive map of 23+ LATAM cities - Real data from local grocery stores, apartment sites, and transit systems - Multi-currency support (USD, EUR, AUD, CAD, MXN, PYG) - Weekly email updates when prices change

Built with PHP + SQLite + Leaflet.js in a day. Planning to add São Paulo, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires next based on where I can find reliable data sources.

The hardest part was finding scrapable sources that don't block bots. Currently using a mix of official government data and large retailers.

Would love feedback on what cities to prioritize and what other costs matter to nomads!
by grumbelbart | 2025-09-30 15:11:24+00:00
> the federal workforce excluding the postal service (which has actually shrunk, as a semi-private employer) has grown by about 1% per year since 2000

That's less than it seems though, given that the US population has grown with over 0.7% per year for most of those years.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
by burnte | 2025-09-30 15:11:31+00:00
Yep. All people asked him to do was slow down a bit because they felt it was too much change at once. He refused for any reason other than his own to slow down. H said he only saw three reasons to slow down and none of them applied so Linus should just accept my patch now.

I never understand why some people are unwilling to make any attempt at getting along. Some people seem to feel any level of compromise is too much.
by brian_meek | 2025-09-30 15:11:34+00:00
OP here. I frankly stopped trying to add evals for the "ready for production" happiness Claude is trained to produce. I agree, not ready for production. I did though put a intention and effort into guarding against slop in implementation and tests. Sure I can still find it, but I believe the current state is solid enough to build on, and I will be doing so for some pet projects. I'll let you know what I find when using it in anger.
by Jtsummers | 2025-09-30 15:11:55+00:00
> These people mostly already and effectively stopped working... The people I know that took this offer were told to stop showing up for work back in March-ish time frame.

Well, yes. That's what the DRP was, they were put on administrative leave through 30 September. It's kind of hard to work when you're on admin leave. Are you surprised by the fact that this group of DRP folks are resigning on 30 Sept when that was the agreement they signed under the DRP? Did you expect something else?
by zebomon | 2025-09-30 15:12:03+00:00
I first used Duolingo back in 2018. That was how I started learning French. I majored in Classics in college and had taken Spanish all eight years of middle school and high school, so my vocab progress was very fast. Within that year, I felt like Duolingo had become too slow, and decided to switch my learning over to reading books and watching movies in French.

Earlier this year, I got back on Duolingo because my partner and her brothers were trying it out, so it was more a social thing than anything. I was on it for about a month before we all agreed that the quality was too poor and the pace too slow for it to be worthwhile.

Duolingo is a case study in a good-enough-to-ship product that needed improvements and instead got dark-patterned into something much, much worse than it had been previously. I'm sure there are many superior platforms for language learning online today. I've gone back to books and movies. I'm currently enjoying watching Blaise le blasé (a Quebecois cartoon) and reading Chair de poule (Goosebumps in translation).