MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Bender | 2025-09-20 14:28:30+00:00
In my opinion an anonymous age verification can not involve a third party in any way. There will be leaks, either because of unforeseen design limitations or due to bad implementations.

The only true anonymous age verification would be simply adding an RTA header [1] to the server/URL and then have laws requiring common user-agents look for said header. An intern could add the check that triggers parental controls at each browser company. Not perfect, nothing is but there are no third parties involved. Tablets and phones can be locked down so that small children can not add new user-agents or change configurations. Teens can and will bypass anything. Teens stream porn and pirated movies in video games rated PG today and that will always be a thing.

For what it's worth, I think it's cool that you created something to give corporations more options. No harm in more options.

[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-20 14:28:42+00:00
... or "you can get ahead through telling people what they want to hear" or "people mistake dark personality traits for high agency", etc.

What gets me about 'rationalism' is how ahistorical it is. No reference to Korzybski or Teilhard de Chardin. There never was the movie Colossus the Forbin Project or the 1960s speculation that progress in computing would lead to accelerated progress in computing by an equation like

dx 2 -- = x dt

all dreams that died when people realized that Simon's General Problem Solver wasn't useful, when SAT and P vs NP fomulated, the rise and fall of expert systems, logic giving way to databases, etc. It appeals though to the kind of young person who's family made a great fortune and wants to jump right into philanthropy or to the person who went to San Francisco because they felt marginalized someplace else and are looking for meaning living in the shadow of "Big Tech"
by halfcat | 2025-09-20 14:29:00+00:00
Yes, that’s another good one. I’ve added “AI slop” to the list of low effort red flag phrases people say when they turn their brain off and delegate their thinking to a meme complex.

These were from a note on my phone. Originally I heard the idea from Eric Weinstein on some podcast, maybe Chris Williamson’s. Eric only mentioned a few examples, and the rest I added over time as I heard them. The meme complex idea I heard from Daniel Schmachtenberger, also some podcast.

Another variation would be when you can take someone’s response and apply it broadly to anything. Like when low effort “debunkers” like Michael Shermer reply with “well humans are notoriously bad at eye witness testimony, and let me explain confirmation bias, and a dozen other cognitive biases”, which of course doesn’t address (or even mention) the UFO or whatever topic they’re discussing. It’s a neat trick where you can just dismiss anything without ever mentioning the thing being dismissed.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-20 14:29:22+00:00
Say you’re a multinational, with offices in the US, Europe, Asia. You need to hire more people. _Where are you going to do it_? The place where the rules change every ten minutes?

This doesn’t prioritise locals; it will almost certainly cause large companies to concentrate their high-skilled employment elsewhere.

(Honestly for some of them the _chaos_ will be almost as bad as the restrictions; how do you plan with the US’s current level of nonsense? You can’t. What if he decides to revoke green cards next week, or bans enemies of the reich from high-skills employment?)
by czl | 2025-09-20 14:30:14+00:00
Wages must rise to simulate local supply. If instead a foreign worker is hired and wages do not rise the local supply is not stimulated and the foreign worker being a short term solution causes a growing long-term problem: a growing inadequate local supply of high skilled labor.

And if foreign workers are a "better deal" because they take more abuse (due to terms of their immigration) this further disincentives fair competition and makes the long-term problem larger.
by altairprime | 2025-09-20 14:30:37+00:00
You can perhaps learn more about their involvement in the community from this year’s summit panel interview: https://youtu.be/vKsOFHNSb4Q

In a brief search, they’re engineering manager for GitLab, appear to be a frequent contributor of high-difficulty patches to Git in general, and are listed as a possible mentor for new contributors.

Given the recent summit, it seems likely that this plan was discussed there; I hadn’t dug into that possibility further but you could if desired.
by prewett | 2025-09-20 14:30:46+00:00
The Chinese State hasn't provided jobs and housing for decades. Their own statistics shows youth unemployment at 19% (August 2025). The struggles of migrants in the cities is well-known. I personally witnessed homeless people in Beijing. Your leftish interlocutors haven't updated their information since Mao Zedong died; Deng Xiaoping starting undoing Communism in 1979 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_relations_in_China
by leakycap | 2025-09-20 14:30:47+00:00
> Goals don't need to be fully realized to be useful.

Maybe you're thinking of an aspiration? Goals are achievable.

> Ambitious goals are never fully realized.

"Unreachable aspirations are never fully realized" is accurate. However, I've reached many actual "ambitious goals" in life, because whether easy or difficult goals are things you can fully realize.

> This is like saying a compass is only useful if you travel all the way to the north pole.

I have no idea where this example came from and it seems to only be half explained. But, a compass is useful because it gives you direction -- not because you expect to reach the North Pole every time you check direction.

An aspiration provides value in the pursuit itself and the valuable discoveries you make along the way.

Aspiration: A journey (still valuable, but you might not reach or even have an exact destination)

Goal: A destination (As in "achievable" -- see "A" in S.M.A.R.T. goals, a very common framework for understanding how to set and use goals effectively)

Let's not confuse the two concepts. It serves no purpose and might actually get in the way of your success.
by bobro | 2025-09-20 14:30:59+00:00
Spoken language descriptions of how to do something are incredibly underdetermined. Many people are likely familiar with the meme of following exact instructions on making a PB&J where a phrase like “put a knife in your hand and spread the peanut butter” can result in stabbing yourself and rubbing peanut butter on the wound. More than half of my job is helping other people know or otherwise determining what they really want a program to do in the first place.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-20 14:31:21+00:00
Via what mechanism? Will they be ready to accept the payments a few hours from now? Ready to process the re-entry with procedures that aren’t even developed yet?

Getting into the country before the deadline is the only safe way to avoid the uncertainty and ensure you don’t get stranded out of the country or in an airport for days or weeks while the process is developed.

This hastily constructed and implemented executive order is a terrible way to run a country
by mrb | 2025-09-20 14:31:21+00:00
Oh, this reminds me of a Chrome extension I wrote to distribute Web content (images, html, js, anything) over DNS: https://blog.zorinaq.com/cdn53-a-super-distributed-cdn/ It implements the fake TLD .cdn53: when visiting http://zorinaq.com.cdn53 the extension intercepts the request, sends a DNS query for the TXT record for "_cdn53.zorinaq.com" and the response contains the HTML content, or any content, and it can be up to ~65 kb in size. It's super-distributed as it will naturally be cached by all DNS resolvers worldwide that hit the domain...
by pron | 2025-09-20 14:31:33+00:00
I think you're missing a more internecine debate within software correctness/formal methods circles than the more general one about "writing good/correct software". Deductive theorem proving was all the rage in the 1970s, to the point that prominent people (Tony Hoare, Dijkstra) believed that it's the only way to write correct software. Over the years, the focus has shifted to other methods [1], from model-checking to unsound methods such as concolic testing and even property-based testing and code reviews, which have proven more effective than the deductive proof proponents had envisioned (Tony Hoare admitted his mistake in the nineties).

The problem with deductive proofs is that it's all-or-nothing, i.e. either you prove the theorem or you don't, and it's much harder to turn a knob to trade off cost for confidence and vice-versa than with other methods. Consequently, theorem proving has not benefitted from automation as much as it's alternatives, and is now viewed as having a too low bang-for-the-buck. But if LLMs can help automate deductive theorem proving, maybe that particular approach, which has gradually become less popular within formal methods circles but still has its fans, could make a comeback.

Of coure, specification is equally important in all methods, but the particular method of theorem proving has been disadvantaged compared to other formal and semi-formal methods, and I think that's what the author wishes could change.

[1]: Deductive theorem proving may be more prominent on HN than other formal methods, but as with most things, HN is more representative of things that spark people's imagination than of things that work well. I'm not counting that as a strike against HN, but it's something to be aware of. HN is more Vogue/GQ than the Times, i.e. it's more news about what people wish they were doing than what they're actually doing.
by tanepiper | 2025-09-20 14:34:25+00:00
My wife is having to learn R as part of her Masters - she's not got a technical background and my impression is it's throwing people into programming at the deep end, and likely after the course she will never actually use it.

Meanwhile I read the material and t absolutely feels like a cult - "R is fun" is like something they say to persuade themselves they are not in a cult
by jawns | 2025-09-20 14:34:35+00:00
Several US states that have legalized assisted suicide have polled people who opted for it, to better understand the reasons why it's pursued. [1]

Interestingly, pain is not among the top reasons.

Instead, the top reasons are around a loss of independence (having to depend on other people for care) and a loss of dignity (feeling embarrassed about having to depend on other people for care).

This IS the Pandora's Box, already opened. Our culture is hostile to people who are dependent on others for care. It leads people to worry that they will be a burden on others if they need support. It leads us to look at people with disabilities and think, "I'd rather be dead than in their position." The box has been open for decades, and a rise in acceptance of assisted suicide is just one of many related outcomes.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2265314/
by christkv | 2025-09-20 14:35:17+00:00
You are to captured by your ideology. It does not really matter what you personally think about. The thing is that the EU has completely failed as a union to provide the economic growth we need and has no plan on how to address this. We are completely export dependent (about 50% of GDP, meaning any world economic crisis will cause massive unemployment and fiscal crisis) and our internal market has withered and the purchasing power is plummeting.

China is going to do what China does but it's economy is in tatters something you would probably know if you actually looked at what is happening with their economy. Combine that with the same demographic crisis as EU and you have another country that might have already hit it's economical peak. The leadership is showing no ability to create an internal market and is busy stomping out any dissent internally as economical reality sets in and people loose jobs and their future. Unless their turn their economy around creating an internal market any international economic crisis will collapse their export oriented economy.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-20 14:35:37+00:00
Sure - software development is complex, but there seems to be a general attempt over time to improve the process and develop languages, frameworks and practices that remove the sources of human error.

Use of AI seems to be a regression in this regard, at least as currently used - "look ma, no hands! I've just vibe coded an autopiliot". The current focus seems to be on productivity - how many more lines of code or vibe-coded projects can you churn out - maybe because AI is still basically a novelty that people are still learning how to use.

If AI is to be used productively towards achieving business goals then the focus is going to need to mature and change to things like quality, safety, etc.
by Is_Daouda | 2025-09-20 14:35:41+00:00
Hi HN ,

I built this 2D game using is::Engine, a game engine I coded in C++ with SFML and SDL 2.

You can play the game here: https://www.gamepix.com/play/i-can-transform

The engine’s source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/Is-Daouda/is-Engine

The goals of this project were to:

• Create a cross-platform 2D engine (Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS)

• Simplify scene, event, and resource management

• Enable a fast workflow for 2D games

I’d love to get your feedback, both on:

• the technical side (C++/SFML and SDL 2, architecture, performance, cross-platform)

• and the game itself (gameplay, design).

Thanks a lot for your thoughts and suggestions.
by liltofu | 2025-09-20 14:36:36+00:00
We built a simple game that's become oddly addictive: submit any statement, guess if it's truth or myth, then watch the community vote for 2 hours before the answer reveals. Recent submissions:

"I can lick my own elbow" (87% voted Myth... they were wrong) "Bananas are berries but strawberries aren't" (23% voted Truth... plot twist!) "My cat learned to open doors by watching me" (62% voted Truth)

What started as a weekend hack has people obsessively refreshing, debating everything from bizarre personal stories to counterintuitive facts. The 2-hour timer creates this weird suspense where you find yourself genuinely invested in whether someone's grandmother really did invent velcro. The magic happens in that gap between human intuition and reality. We're consistently terrible at distinguishing truth from fiction, especially when it comes to:

Personal anecdotes that sound fake but aren't "Facts" that sound true but are complete nonsense Edge cases of science/history that defy common sense

Try it: https://truth-wave.lovable.app/. Submit something that will make people question everything they think they know. Fair warning: you might lose your afternoon to this. Built with: Simple voting mechanics, real-time updates, and way too much curiosity about human gullibility.
by legacynl | 2025-09-20 14:36:38+00:00
I consider myself on the left, and I don't think any of those things. Not everybody on the right or left think all alike. YOu can't just assume somebody who is right or left thinks exactly the same as those few interactions you personally had with people from a certain group.

To be clear China certainly has homeless people. There actually is some form of welfare state, but often it is not sufficient, especially if you're not party related, and you can only get it in your assigned city/home town. If it's not enough to pay for housing and there aren't any jobs available in your region you're shit out of luck.
by philipkglass | 2025-09-20 14:37:17+00:00
Google's search results are personalized by geolocation and user history. When I Google for GCC, the first page of links has no results for Global Capability Center. The first page has GNU Compiler Collection, Gulf Cooperation Council, two community colleges, a manufacturer of laser engravers, and a manufacturer of cement and aggregates.

The AI Summary box at the top of the page does have Global Capability Center, but it's far enough down that you have to expand the summary box to see that meaning.
by rayiner | 2025-09-20 14:37:21+00:00
> to reduce the power of labor over the last 50-odd years and to concentrate wealth as best they can.

What happened 50 years ago? Hart-Cellar was in 1965. The foreign-born population dipped below 5% in 1970. It’s 15% today. This had major political ramifications. Democrats were able to move to the right economically because they could substitute labor voters demanding structural reforms with recent immigrant voters who would be happy with relatively small handouts from the government, or even just visas for their extended family.
by cjs_ac | 2025-09-20 14:38:03+00:00
This essay attributes rather too much to literacy. The end of feudalism, for example, started with the Black Death, and the journey to modern democracies involved centuries of concessions by kings to the emerging middle classes. Sure, mass literacy was key to enabling universal suffrage, but the end of absolute monarchy started long before that.

The present decline in literacy is probably the consequence in a temporary prestige given to other forms of media. We are very much heading into a great crisis, but the old social order where knowledge is valued by the elites will re-emerge once the crisis is resolved. The Second World War emerged from the chaos of the 1920s and 1930s, and the reason why so many people who lived through the war said they enjoyed it was the common purpose that swept away the prior disorder. This is why the 1950s were so socially conservative and repressive.

We live in interesting times, but the world will again be boring.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-09-20 14:38:06+00:00
> "I came across one recently: https://-----.site . Feels like a stripped-down Medium but for unfiltered rants and confessions."

Fake testimonial. From this user's other post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45312778 : "I just launched ------ — a publishing platform where people can post stories, rants, or confessions anonymously."
by leakycap | 2025-09-20 14:38:29+00:00
You are invalidating the pain the dependent people feel. Pain they would like to escape, clearly if they're reaching for this option.

You also define dignity as embarrassment which makes me think you don't understand the concept as it relates to the loss someone feels when facing the end of their life.

As an aside: People were terrified of gay marriage and the argument was repeatedly made that legalizing same-sex marriage was going to open a pandora's box.

At the time, I knew this was nonsense because my home state had same-sex civil unions for decades and there had been no problems except a few angry religious people (they weren't forced into gay marriages they just didn't want other people to have that option)
by Dilettante_ | 2025-09-20 14:39:12+00:00
The same reason kids are first taught the Bohrian atom model. It is less clear and precise, but thereby also less complex.

"100 baskets of apples" is easier to hold in your head than "23 baskets of red, small-ish apples, 12 of large red, 6 of any size green...", but my no means does it permit a more clear view of the Truth.

Different usage of the word "clear".
by blibble | 2025-09-20 14:39:15+00:00
yes, it supports it, but it's not the default, is a pain and fills your build file with a load of noise

so very few use it

it's not made obvious that the tag isn't immutable

although you might be happy with the contents of what you've imported right now, who says it won't be malicious in a year's time

people inadvertently give full control of their build and all their secrets to whoever controls that repository (now, and in the future)

making it easy to do the right thing is an important part of API design and building secure systems, and these CI systems fail miserably there
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-09-20 14:40:05+00:00
> "I just launched Bluntly — a publishing platform where people can post stories, rants, or confessions anonymously."

This user also posted on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45312758 "I came across one recently: https://-------.site . Feels like a stripped-down Medium but for unfiltered rants and confessions." so they're both dishonest and breaking the HN guidelines on self-promotion.
by StilesCrisis | 2025-09-20 14:40:36+00:00
Buried about 2/3rds of the way through the article: “I’m about 50% of the way through the formalization plan…”

As soon as I saw this, I became a skeptic. Anyone who has used AI tools has seen cases where the first 80% of a project came together like a bolt of lightning, but the last 20% is next to impossible for the AI to accomplish, even if it doesn’t seem more complex than the rest of the code. AI just struggles as the code gets larger and the requests get more specific. Anyway, never trust a programmer to accurately judge the “50%” mark. Once they are at 90%, they will need another 90% to cross the finish line.
by user_7832 | 2025-09-20 14:41:38+00:00
I wonder how much of this is due to sampling bias.

Folks who're eg depressed tend to "do less" and people in pain or with other such chronic ailments (eg ME/CFS) may have less energy to begin with to "spend".

In a survey, if the effort required to answer isn't very close to zero, you would expect to see lesser responses from such people; however they may be "typically" represented in terms of suicides.

In contrast, otherwise/formerly "healthy" people would not have this issue causing them to be underrepresented in the survey.
by crote | 2025-09-20 14:41:56+00:00
Storing hydrogen in general isn't very difficult. The problem is in storing enough hydrogen that having it react with air in a fuel cell can power something meaningful.

For example, the Hyundai Nexo has a range of 611 km (380 mi), which requires it to store 6.3 kg of hydrogen. At atmospheric temperature and pressure hydrogen has a density of 0.08988 g/L, so that would require a tank with a volume of 70 m3. For reference, a semi-trailer has a volume of about 100 m3.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-20 14:42:26+00:00
You've got plenty of bacteria working for you (and sometimes against you) in your gut. Microbe-enhanced cement is a significant research topic. And the most plausible route to a chemical "factory factory" that space colonists would need to make middle and top-of-pyramid chemicals is a synthetic biology platform where you could make bespoke bacteria and yeasts that could make just about anything for you.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-09-20 14:42:51+00:00
I’m a moderate American who lived in China for 9 years. China is a mixed bag, they do some things right (their transit build out, their investments in green energy/tech, healthcare, employment) and some things bad (real estate bubble that makes 1980s Japan blush, environment was in tatters until recently, autocratic, youth job opportunities kind of suck right now, 996, welfare doesn’t really exist).

As far as the simplistic “X good Y bad”, those are never right anyways.
by dgrr19 | 2025-09-20 14:43:07+00:00
Again: None of the described above makes sense. Why would a gay furry shoot someone because he is not radical enough? You have everyone who knew the guy saying that he was very left-wing. Also, try to check some of the content of Charlie Kirk, many trans students come up to him to confront him on his views, for example https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SNcVnPkZlVI
by blakepelton | 2025-09-20 14:43:08+00:00
The article quotes the Intel docs: "Instruction ordering: Instructions following a SYSCALL may be fetched from memory before earlier instructions complete execution, but they will not execute (even speculatively) until all instructions prior to the SYSCALL have completed execution (the later instructions may execute before data stored by the earlier instructions have become globally visible)."

More detail here would be great, especially using the terms "issue" and "commit" rather than execute.

A barrier makes sense to me, but preventing instructions from issuing seems like too hard of a requirement, how could anyone tell?