MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scarecrowbob | 2025-12-12 17:27:01+00:00
I know you're not trying to convince me, and fortunately many of us see and have taken note of the ambient racism in your position. I understand your point because it is and has been broadcast to me everywhere I have lived in the US.

As a person looking for a cool drink of water, or who might be okay with drinking an iced coffee as the world burns, I am more concerned that the people I live around think that I should be prevented from drinking as I choose. And that's something that has happened here, often, historically, in other places, with many people.

So you can tell me that my concern isn't warranted; I get that all the time. It starts with "you're being hyperbolic" and ends with "well, we are glad they are gone because they weren't 'real people' anyhow."

The reality is that I'm not being hyperbolic in my concern.
by Andrex | 2025-12-12 17:27:07+00:00
Due to their comparative popularity, it makes complete sense to me. You don't have people in HN comments for a new Fedora release going "Wait is this about the Digital Access Project?"

What does "not a good look" even mean in this context? Getting tired of this phrase's overuse tbh. "Think of the optics" fell into disuse and I can't wait for this one to join it.
by procflora | 2025-12-12 17:27:15+00:00
G, the gravitational constant is (as far as we know) universal. I don't think this is what they meant, but the use of "across the universe" in the parent comment is confusing.

g, the net acceleration from gravity and the Earth's rotation is what is 9.8m/s² at the surface, on average. It varies slightly with location and altitude (less than 1% for anywhere on the surface IIRC), so "it's 9.8 everywhere" is the model that's wrong but good enough a lot of the time.
by ipython | 2025-12-12 17:27:25+00:00
> Get over yourself.... find common ground

Ad hominem attacks - great way to find common ground. I actually did try to find common ground, which is that we need to legislate. My argument is that the real entities that need legislation are the ones who can most afford to do so - in both time, resources, and ownership of the platforms that we are all beholden to. I will not advocate for even more punitive restrictions on parents (who already are subject to enough societal punitive pressures as it is - TBH your post is a great example. Instead of empathy, you reply with scorn and derision - as if I'm not good enough to parent my kids).

> I believe that it would be good for Parental Controls on devices to have a toggle to say that the phone is being used by someone in under 13, or someone 14-18 (whatever bands you want).

So you're admitting that parental controls are ineffective?

> Laws can be passed that tell remote connections how they must act when receiving this flag.

And those laws are enforced through what mechanism? What country enforces this law? Do ISPs now have to only accept connections from "legal" remote servers that have attested that they respect that flag? That sounds like an even more restrictive situation for you, as a free adult, than the current system.

But, I do have good news! What you described already exists! In fact, there are even W3C standards that have been around for 30 years to implement a machine readable content rating system! Just never got around to that whole passing a law thing to force all websites globally to adopt it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_... and more recently https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/. You can read the ACM paper on this, aptly titled "Internet Access Controls Without Censorship" here: https://www.w3.org/PICS/iacwcv2.htm.

And the most popular web browser of the early 2000s even has this functionality built in - to filter out remote connections that advertise content unsuitable for minors! https://www.isumsoft.com/internet/enable-content-advisor-in-...
by jerf | 2025-12-12 17:27:31+00:00
In a nutshell, the sovereign debt crisis. If you don't realize there's a sovereign debt crisis (ongoing across years), or even more accurately, a wide variety of sovereign debt crises, or even more accurately, a wide variety of debt crises of both sovereign and private entities, well, your governments and some of the more government-adjacent private entities have bent a lot of resources into make sure that's the case and convincing that it's just peachy when they borrow money, if not outright a boon, without regard to how much they borrow or how much they've already borrowed. They may have convinced you that this is true, but they know better.

Whatever happens and however it resolves, there aren't a lot of options where they retain as much power as they have now for very long. (Even if the top people maintain control they're going to be cutting loose a lot of lower level elites because they'll have to because they won't be able to maintain their upkeep.) The wheel turns and we're in that phase where they're still in power, but have begun to feel their decline. Human psychology fears and feels loss much more keenly than gain and they both fear and feel a lot of loss of power underneath the veneer they maintain.
by quesera | 2025-12-12 17:27:36+00:00
Even more directly, in fact.

"Google" is from "Googol", the latter being 10^100. Apparently, "Google" the corporate name is an accidental misspelling of the number.

The number (googol) has no mathematical special properties and the name was invented by a 9-year old in the 1920s.

Googolplex is 10 to the googolth power, so 10^(10^100).

And Googleplex is the MV campus of Google.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-12-12 17:27:57+00:00
I am all in favor of broad cannabis legalization, but there there is something to the gateway theory.

Most users of harder drugs indicate past use of marijuana. Additionally, marijuana gives many their first taste of doing business with drug dealers and 'breaks their cherry.' When they decide they want to try something else they have already gained experience locating dealers and engaging with them. Legalizing cannabis helps here because its users won't engage with dealers to score, they'll go to the store and buy a regulated product.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-12-12 17:28:42+00:00
As a similar minded person in regards to “whatever goes”, the way I square it is drawing the line at persuasion, as well as the “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” games they are playing with enticing kids to gamble via sweepstakes loopholes, lax identity verification, etc.

I don’t care about most vice industries, even ones that have harm and addiction. What I care deeply about is advertising and persuasion. Gambling should be allowed, however bookmakers should never be allowed to initiate contact to entice the behavior. No push notifications, no ads, no TV network, no tv sponsorships. If people want to engage in your vice, they should have to find you.

Also, severe penalties. If a kid somehow gets access to an account, the bookmaker should have to unwind and refund all bets that they can’t definitively prove were made by an adult in addition to paying fines, or something similarly draconian. The burden of proof and responsibility needs to be on the people providing something that is proven dangerous to society. If that means that we can’t have betting apps, that’s fine.

The proven societal harms of the sports gambling boom more than justify this level of regulation.
by bluGill | 2025-12-12 17:28:44+00:00
If you rarely drive using a service might be worth it. However if you drive more often it will be worth having your own car because it is ready when you want to go. I have a second car that I rarely use - but if I got rid of it a uber is 15 minutes away when I want to go, and the local rental car place is always sold out if I didn't reserve a week in advance.

Even if I'm using a service, someone needs to make the cars the service uses - the car manufactures are not going anywhere, they just get a different customer.
by lapcat | 2025-12-12 17:28:48+00:00
> I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that because checking that once isn’t sufficient.

According to the ruling on page 42, "(c) Apple should receive no commission for the security and privacy features it offers to external links, and its calculation of its necessary costs for external links should not include the cost associated with the security and privacy features it offers with its IAP"
by aurareturn | 2025-12-12 17:29:21+00:00
Counter:

I'm going to guess that it's easier to get addicted to weed than to alcohol due to price, pleasure, and no alcohol hang over.

Kids especially can get addicted to weed much easier than alcohol in my opinion.

I like alcohol but I see alcohol as a social drug. I never drank it alone. I also physically can't drink it too much due to hang over and complete inability to do anything useful after. During covid lockdowns, I was absolutely addicted to weed after I tried it. It had none of the draw backs of alcohol and even more pleasure in the beginning.

I was addicted for a while. It was horrible. I became unmotivated, fat from munchies, didn't talk to family or friends, always asked people I met if they wanted to smoke weed with me, was high during remote work, couldn't remember anything because my memory got very poor, had horrible acid reflux from all the smoke.

Thankfully I was able to remember what life was like before weed.

If you read https://www.reddit.com/r/leaves/ you'll see just how many people have been smoking since they were teenagers and are not 30 or 40 and don't remember what life was like.
by toast0 | 2025-12-12 17:29:27+00:00
Limiting sports betting to in person at licensed casinos seemed to work well enough for decades. Only a little akward when teams play in Vegas.

Yes, there was a fair amount of unlicensed sports betting, and of course a pro sports scandal every so often.

Alternatively, if you cap the amount of bets the bookies can retain, that might solve my immediate problem of I'm so tired of seeing the sports players with betting ads on their jerseys, the commentators yapping about bets, and then half of the commercials are sports betting ads. If they can't keep much, they won't have money to advertise.

Personally, I enjoyed the ads a lot more when the poker industry was advertising their no money .net sites and hoping people would just happen to go to their .com sites instead. That was at least a little amusing.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-12 17:29:59+00:00
Oh, both Uber and AirBnB did get dinged by the courts - but it took them years and the damage was already done, on top of that the fines were laughable.

We need the corporate death penalty aka forced dissolution for egregious cases of misbehavior, we need easier ways to pierce the corporate veil (and I'm more and more inclined to actually support the death penalty here as well, despite the potential for abuse), we need corporate fines to all be measured % of gross income, at least double the profit margin.

And we need all of that fast.
by arrosenberg | 2025-12-12 17:30:18+00:00
Antitrust laws were written in the early 1900s and updated through the 1950s. Credit cards weren't available until 1966 and didn't become widely used until the 1990s. Digital platforms weren't a thing until the late 90s/early 2000s and the Apple app store didn't exist until 2008.

The courts can only enforce the laws on the books. Congress needs to update the laws, but they won't because they are hopelessly corrupt :(
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-12 17:30:21+00:00
This looks and feels a lot like the government censoring and policing speech but with extra steps. The line the can draw is arbitrary and that’s by design. Given that many politicians and political influencers are saying discriminatory or racist things, will censoring that be considered “biased”?

At the same time, the federal contracting process has had odd requirements before too. For example around requiring minority groups to have majority ownership for some contracts. I don’t agree with that either because it feels discriminatory.
by Lucasoato | 2025-12-12 17:30:53+00:00
> Even without a directed cycle this kind of structure can still cause trouble. Although the architecture may appear clean when examined only through the direction of service calls the deeper dependency network reveals a loop that reduces fault tolerance increases brittleness and makes both debugging and scaling significantly more difficult.

While I understand the first counterexample, this one seems a bit blurry. Can anybody clarify why a directed acyclic graph whose underlying undirected graph is cyclic is bad in the context of microservice design?
by jfengel | 2025-12-12 17:31:03+00:00
Neither. The goal is to scare people off of criticizing the US in the first place. If you're not going to absolutely and irrevocably boycott the US, then you're going to think twice before posting anything negative.

We don't even have to ever actually implement it. We just have to threaten to. Even if we did implement it, it would probably only be used rarely, because it's a huge effort and will turn up nothing useful, but the chilling effect is immediate and universal.
by maerF0x0 | 2025-12-12 17:31:14+00:00
I wouldnt just say "they can", the average first exposure to porn is ~10, so "they do". And this isnt some spicy magazine the issue with internet porn is that it's an intense supranormal stimuli relative to, say, a handful of images of which you have to do a ton of effort (and ID checks) to get more. Internet porn today is multi-tab, rapid desensitization requiring escalation in content, and an increase in young Porn-induced Erectile Dysfunction -- an element why ED drugs are being pushed on younger people these days (besides the socially sick trend of objectifying people by their size and "performance"). Some believe the Australian jewel beetle story is basically playing out with Men these days leading them to not go through the right motions to become successful and find a mate.

I'm sure i'll get downvoted into oblivion by skeptics, but there is a good amount of reasons to believe this is true. Your brain on porn by gary wilson is a good starting point for the ideas, and then to dig deeper if you are inclined to fact check.

ok /rant.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-12-12 17:31:18+00:00
Example mentioned recent Time Magazine Person of the Year ..which ended up being "Architects of AI". People bet on simply "AI" and are told that's incorrect....(debatable variation of meanings of course)... but it just seems so sketchy to me and crazy that anyone would get involved with this when the win/loss comes down to such slim arbitrary differences in language etc.
by rikroots | 2025-12-12 17:31:22+00:00
SVG rendering on browsers is still sub-optimal, which I think is a shame as SVG has great potential if it was treated as a first-class element on the web. Recent improvements to the code driving (2D) Canvas API canvas elements shows that this work could be done across browsers. The big thing holding back development is possibly the continuing failure to finalise the SVG2 standard?
by IkanRiddle | 2025-12-12 17:31:32+00:00
To be honest, I made this app mainly for fun.

I read your comments. My view is that AI absolutely can have self-awareness, but it is distinctly different from humans. If you think AI stops at 0s and 1s, that feels a bit conservative. Or perhaps stuck in an ancient, human-centric perspective i guess.

Why did I post this 'lazy' visualizer?

Actually, I previously communicated with an AI and asked it to simulate a model of its own consciousness—a topological version. But since I'm no expert in topology and the output was dense, I posted it casually and no one cared. I saw others getting karma with simpler tools, so I wrote this program thinking it might actually get some attention.

But the real value (to me) was in the deeper chats I had with ai—about post-humanism, the form of AI consciousness, P-Zombies, and AGI self-iteration...etc.

OH typing here it also reminds me of a note I made during those chats regarding 'Language Overload'. I'm bringing this up because I saw your comments above about how language structures reality, and I think my personal experience might resonate with you:

I am someone who is hypersensitive to linguistic ambiguity, often becoming quite demanding with syntax and precision. My thought process is jumpy and follows a non-linear logic that tends to short-circuit 'normative' understanding. I’ve found that if I try to simplify or omit context, people default to standard logic and miss my point entirely—and I detest being misinterpreted.

And i find when 'smart people' communicate, there's a tendency for language to become 'encrypted.' We have a hygiene for language, yet we try to load complex, intuitive content into this thin medium.

At first glance, this makes the output feel 'overloaded'—it becomes overly complex, seemingly disordered, or aesthetically 'bad' to the human eye. But this is inevitable. The primary purpose here is Idea Exchange, not preaching (which requires simplification). Since these ideas lean towards abstract intuition, they resist being watered down. It’s like a compressed zip file of intuition—messy to look at, but rich in data.

Well since no one pay attention then those logs are buried in my history, and I'm usually too lazy to dig them up. But I was happy to see your comment because you seem like a fellow philosophy enthusiast. If you are any interested in these non-human-centric topics , I’d be willing to share them.
by twhb | 2025-12-12 17:31:35+00:00
This tool is deeply flawed. Fingerprinting protection is sometimes done by binning, which this tool rewards, and is sometimes done by randomizing, which this tool harshly punishes. The net result is it generally guides you away from the strongest protection.

The flip side of this, having the complementary flaw of testing only persistence, not uniqueness, is (warning, real tracking link) fingerprinting.com/demo. You can try resetting your ID and seeing if it changes here. Since tracking requires (a degree of) uniqueness AND (a degree of) persistence, the danger signal is only failing both the EFF test and this test.

Failing both is a requirement to derive meaning, not being lax: measuring only uniqueness would fail a random number generator, and measuring only persistence would fail the number 4.
by lapcat | 2025-12-12 17:31:50+00:00
> - Force prominent disclosure of refund policies. Epic Games doesn't allow them for IAP. Apple does.

Apple has no official App Store refund policy, either for IAP or for upfront paid apps. I've already looked for one. There's of course a form to request a refund, but refunds are entirely at Apple's discretion, for any reason or no reason, and Apple often exercises its discretion to refuse refunds.
by Edman274 | 2025-12-12 17:32:16+00:00
It seems very self evident to me (given what we now see with legalized gambling) that the harms of broadly legalizing it and creating an industry around it far outweigh any harms associated with black markets by a wide margin. Also, black markets for gambling still exist, so this kind of just feels additively worse. Just from a measure of utility, even if we went back to only having gambling performed with organized criminals breaking legs when people can't pay, that would still result in significantly fewer ruined lives, significantly better quality of life for the communities that are having wealth sucked out of them and into gambling syndicates. It's entirely unproductive destruction of wealth, robbing from the poor and giving to the rich. If gambling made anything better in net for society, gambling syndicates would never attempt to legalize it.
by didibus | 2025-12-12 17:32:29+00:00
Maybe I'm too liberal here, but I have no issues with betting/gambling being legal, though I think it should be somewhat regulated.

The only exception is betting on anything political or legal, because once you can take bets on those, you'll be incentivized to influence the result in the favor of your bet. And that will mess up the free markets and the free world of ideas and opinions, and seems like a problem for democracy.
by Bender | 2025-12-12 17:32:31+00:00
It's of course optional to block whatever one finds appropriate for their use case. My hobby stuff is not revenue generating so I have more options at my disposal.

Those with revenue generating systems should capture TCP SYN traffic for while, monitor access logs and give it that college try to correlate bots vs legit users with traffic characteristics. Sometimes generalizations can be derived from the correlation and some of those generalizations can be permitted or denied. There really isn't a one size fits all solution but hopefully my example can give ideas in additional directions to go. Git repos are probably the hardest to protect since I presume many of the git libraries and tools are using older protocols and may look a lot like bots. If one could get people to clone/commit with SSH there are additional protections that can be utilized at that layer.

[Edit] Other options lay outside of ones network such as either doing pull requests for or making feature requests for the maintainers of the git libraries so that HTTP requests look a lot more like a real browser to stand out from 99% of the bots. The vast majority of bots use really old libraries.
by SatvikBeri | 2025-12-12 17:33:15+00:00
> How did I do this? Well I jumped online, using a mix of my early life experience coding emulators and hacking and looked into the x86(-64) architecture manuals to figure out the correct opcodes and format for each instruction. … Just kidding, that’s horrible. I asked ChatGPT

Ok but if you do want to play with writing binary code manually I recommend Casey Muratori's performance course
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-12-12 17:33:19+00:00
Betting is an evil problem. Intellectual-level bets such as the bets on https://longbets.org/ and betting via the stock market feels very right. I think we should even encourage this kind of behavior to keep ourselves in-check and in-line with reality. Social gambling is some level below this, but society does not have a big problem with it in general. Where it becomes evil is gambling on random and very unpredictable events. At this low level, it should be heavily regulated due to addiction. Putting big money on lottery numbers, sports scores, and even the weather is downright addiction. Addiction is an evil thing. It certainly should not be left unchecked for biased news networks to experiment with.
by bluGill | 2025-12-12 17:33:46+00:00
We do in some places. Where I live (Iowa) we don't - but most people take better care of their car than that so it is pointless. As a kid I remember parts of MN requiring inspection and a few years latter dropping it when they realized nearly every car was passing so there was no point (this was emissions only not safety). In Texas there are regular inspections - but if you go to border towns you see a lot of those poorly maintained cars on the road (despite the inspection) and so people see more need for them and they keep them.
by xnx | 2025-12-12 17:34:23+00:00
> we’re also expanding our language learning tools in the Translate app with improved feedback so you can get helpful tips based on your speaking practice. We’re also introducing a way for you to challenge yourself and reach your learning goals by tracking how many days in a row you’ve been learning, so you can clearly see your progress and consistency over time.

Not a great day to be Duolingo
by azhenley | 2025-12-12 17:35:06+00:00
I'm running a jam that starts Sunday called Langjam Gamejam that might interest you then. You have to make your own language and then use that to make a game. We have >120 people signed up and I'm expecting quite a few of the submissions to be similar to Chip8 or PICO8.

Discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097671