MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dubme1 | 2025-12-18 14:50:59+00:00
I run https://aliveai.app a large uncensored (i.e. adult) AI image and video generator.

It started as a small side project but slowly grew every month and recently exploded to well over 50k USD revenue per month. It's fun to have a large community of paying users but honestly I never thought out of all my side projects this one will make it.

I am still a one man show managing everything from development, marketing, customer support and content moderation. If I am honest the money is nice but I am severely burnt out and not sure if I can or want to do this much longer. It is a 24/7 job and I miss the days where I can just sit down and code a nice feature that people will like. Also looking at NSFW content all day kind of messes with your mental health.

I had some discussions of potential buyers but selling something for less than its monthly revenue seems crazy so I am still here trying to do my best and waiting for the right exit.
by josteink | 2025-12-18 14:51:09+00:00
> mass surveillance comes from the European Council, the thing is that literally are "just" the locally elected leaders...

Factually incorrect.

The European Parliament is elected. The Council is appointed, so there is no direct democratic incentive for the council to act on and no direct electorate to please.

On top of that the actually elected European Parliament can only approve (or turn down) directives authored by the Council. They have no authority to draft policies on their own.

To make matters even worse the European Council, which drafts the policies, has no public minutes to inspect. Which obviously makes it ripe for corruption. Which evidently there is a lot of!

Looking at the complete picture, the EU looks like a construct designed intentionally to superficially appear democratic while in reality being the opposite. The more you look at how it actually works, the worse it looks. Sadly.

Europe deserved something better than this.
by weinzierl | 2025-12-18 14:51:11+00:00
I agree with your point and this is just a minor thing but it annoys me whenever it comes up:

Telegram is a terrible example. It is one of the few messengers that do not support end-to-end enrypted group chats. It is also heavily moderated. Your group will not be closed immediately but before anyone could pick up their pitchfork and certainly before it reaches a critical mass.
by 1qaboutecs | 2025-12-18 14:51:47+00:00
If X is a smooth projective curve over an algebraically closed field k, then we can make a (huge, useless) abelian group Div(X) which is the set of formal sums of points on X. (The "free abelian group" on X).

It would be flippant to say Div(X) is an answer to your question, since it has nothing to do with geometry at all (we can form the free abelian group on any set). An element of Div(X) looks like \sum n_i P_i where n_i are integers and P_i are points on X, and they "add" in the obvious way. The sum doesn't "mean" anything. But we can get to geometry from it.

Inside Div(X) there is a subgroup, Div^0(X), of formal sums of points such that the set of coefficients is zero. Still nothing to do with geometry.

Inside Div^0(X), there is a very interesting subgroup, which is the set of "divisors of functions." Namely, if f is a rational function on X (meaning it's locally a quotient of polynomials), we get an element of Div^0(X) by taking \sum P_i - \sum Q_i where P_i are the zeroes of f and Q_i are the poles (caveat - you have to count them with multiplicity). This is an element of Div(X) but is not obviously an element of Div^0(X) -- this uses the fact that X is projective. Let's call the subgroup that comes this way Princ(X) (for "principal" divisors).

Now we get an interesting group that does have something to do with geometry, which is called Pic^0(X), by taking the quotient Div^0(X)/Princ(X).

Amazing theorem: there is a natural isomorphism from X to Pic^0(X) if and only if X is of genus one, i.e. an elliptic curve. (In general, Pic^0(X) is an abelian variety whose dimension is the genus of the corresponding curve.) This is why only elliptic curves (among the projective ones) are "naturally" groups. The relationship with the usual picture with the lines is that the intersection locus of the lines is the principal divisor associated with a functional that vanishes along the line.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-18 14:51:50+00:00
Gift cards: it's a steal, so just say no. I want to say if you get one from your sister-in-law give it back but now I'm afraid she'll face terrible consequences from cashing it out.

... note an update on this story: Paris got his account unblocked today, thanks to the story being covered here and throughout the blogosphere. It's a good outcome but not a path open to most people:

https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
by Shocka1 | 2025-12-18 14:52:03+00:00
This is well said here. Off on a small tangent, but I received my undergrad from a well known for-profit technology school that isn't respected at all. My understanding is that a resume with this specific school is sometimes thrown out by hiring managers. I am now finishing up my Master's from a very well known and respected NY private university. I have noticed no differences in the caliber of students or quality of education between the two. The students that live and breath software engineering excel, while the others do not.

I was aware of all this before, but the experience has tainted my opinion even further of higher education. Graduates of the for-profit tech school are likely to face professional discrimination, while students from the more prestigious university will receive interviews and opportunities because of a name listed on their resume.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-18 14:52:25+00:00
A lot of core game logic is presumably Tonda's work. He's a director, not a software engineer. He came into this, many years ago, wondering if the "easy" tools to make a video game meant he could just make the video game he was imagining, and of course the answer is "Yes, but..."

Blue Prince is (an extrapolation of) that first game, but it looks and sounds like competent people worked on it, not like something slapped together by a non-engineer in a week. However while you can hire experts to make "You know, like cool jazz for a mysterious underground area" or "Art that looks thematically like it was sketched, but also feels solid enough that you could lean on it" it's very difficult for software engineers to "just" fix the software to get rid of bugs because what's a bug? Only the puzzle designer knows for sure what they intended.

[[Spoilers! Do not read if you are still playing or might play]]

Is it a bug that "Swimming Trunks" don't let you swim? No! That's a Dad Joke. They're Trunks. Large locked wooden boxes. They're in the swimming pool, and if your pool has water in it, that means they're swimming.

When I picked a time from my near future in Shelter, it didn't work, that's a bug right? Nope. The Shelter cares about game time, not real world time. Make sure you know the date in game.

OK but is it a bug that being in Clock Tower at the Sacred Hour doesn't have any effect? Um, maybe? It seems as though the software doesn't believe clocks repeat, so only the first time will actually work. Or, maybe the second does too? It's hard to say. Try again?

I need food but somehow I keep digging up keys and money. That's a bug right? Nope, probably means you have made a Contraption which changed your dig probabilities.

OK, so that's also why my Door facings are weird even though I put my Compass-based Contraption in a Cloak Room? That one's probably a bug.

Still, "If you draft it quite late" ought to mean my Music Room has the key right? Well, maybe, what did you think "Quite late" meant?

"I thought after a few hours would do it". Huh. Well, maybe. "OK, what about Rank 7?". Rank Nine would be better, but it might be enough, depends. "I still get no key, are you sure this isn't a bug?". The most likely problem is that you've done Music Room. If so the most likely key to wrongly believe you did instead is Vault, although Station is also possible. Check the other locations.
by oidar | 2025-12-18 14:52:40+00:00
I'm glad that got resolved for Paris, but what the hell is a normal person supposed to do. Not every one has that kind of public reach to get a satisfactory resolution. First he had understand what happened technically, then he needed a public platform to tell people about it, then that writing needed to get reposted by others, than PR needed to get involved. Not something that's going to happen for a normal user.

Apple, Google, and the big players are not a trustworthy place to entrust precious data. Increasingly, Apple and Google aren't very much different as they are both in the advertisement business: the great misaligner of incentives.
by empath75 | 2025-12-18 14:53:05+00:00
> The end result would surely look better, but how would we be assured it resembled historical reality?

You can be fairly sure that no reproduction would literally resemble the reality, _including the existing reconconstructions_, but you can certainly produce a range of possible reconstructions which would have produced the same evidentiary record, and which would be at least inspired by what we know about contemporary taste that we can derive from surviving paintings and the textual record.
by chrismatic | 2025-12-18 14:53:26+00:00
This is a point well taken, but it also instills a certain incuriosity about expert opinions which is on display in this article.

In fact you can find a question to this very answer with a quick search: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nfz67t/comm...

Experts are also not a monolithic block. Within architecture and arts you can find many people who agree with your aesthetic preferences.

It is like claiming that there is a "curly-braced" orthodoxy in programming when you just haven't engaged deep with modern varieties.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-12-18 14:53:40+00:00
it is de facto national because California has the most people and is insanely wealthy; there is no F500 company handling broad consumer data that does not have a presence or customers there.

there have already been CCPA enforcements against companies like Tractor Supply, Sephora, Honda, and Google (tho the GOOG was more of a "violated a lot of stuff including CCPA").

It doesn't have enough teeth to scare FAANGs, who have the money and technical ability to do whatever, but it can definitely keep companies in line.

source: did CCPA compliance and security at multiple F500
by kube-system | 2025-12-18 14:53:50+00:00
>How can there be a meeting of minds when Vizio's mind disagrees with the contract.

Because "modern contract doctrine requires only objective manifestations of assent"

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/meeting_of_the_minds

Courts started doing this because people were playing dumb in court to get out of contracts: "oh I didn't know I was agreeing to that"

So instead, courts started calling bullshit on it, and today judge things as: "look, you went along with the transaction as if you agreed to it and a reasonable person in your situation should have known you were agreeing to it, and that's good enough"
by Davidzheng | 2025-12-18 14:55:04+00:00
I think there are two separate things. Slowness of progress in research is good bc it signals high value/difficulty. This I wholeheartedly agree. The other is, the slowness of solving a given problem is good, which is less clear.

I think indubitably intelligence should be linked to speed. If you can since everything faster I think smarter is a correct label. What I also think is true is that slowness can be a virtue in solving problems for a person and as a strategy. But this is usually because fast strategies rely on priors/assumptions and ideas which generalize poorly; and often more general and asymptotically faster algorithms are slower when tested on a limited set or on a difficulty level which is too low
by AndroTux | 2025-12-18 14:55:27+00:00
I really don't understand what you're not getting here. I'm not trying to be condescending, but I explained it as simple as possible. But let's break it down again:

1) You currently reside in Iran for whatever reason.

2) You download, or have downloaded previously, a VPN software that does not tell you where you exit truthfully.

3) You connect to Pakistan, because you want to spread information that is illegal in Iran, but legal in Pakistan. You choose Pakistan because it is near you, so you get better latency.

4) In reality, your VPN exits not in Pakistan, but in Iran. Because they lied.

5) Iran is now able to monitor both your connection traffic to the VPN, and your VPN's exit traffic.

6) You die.

Simple as that. I don't see why this is not a realistic use case in your mind? One very prominent selling point for VPN providers is exactly this. Allowing reporters and other minorities to still safely access the internet in areas in which it is not allowed by law. You don't have to be an Iranian for that. You can just be there, as an international correspondent, using a western VPN, for example. Or you're visiting family after purchasing that VPN in Europe somewhere.

> No VPN providers are accidentally routing into an oppressive dictatorship.

The entire point of this article is that you as the user can't know that. And almost every country is applying some kind of censorship that may or may not affect you. As I mentioned in my previous example, Snowden is a real life situation in which this exact thing would have mattered. He didn't live in an oppressive dictatorship, yet a VPN exiting in Canada vs. exiting in the U.S. would have made a significant difference in safety for him.
by Rperry2174 | 2025-12-18 14:55:42+00:00
LOC is a bad quality metric, but its a reasonable proxy in practice..

Teams generally don't keep merging code that "doesn't work" for long... prod will brake, users will push back fast. So unless the "wrongness" of the AI-generated code is buried so deeply that it only shows up way later, higher merged LOC probably does mean more real output.

Its just not directly correlated there is some bloat associated too.

So that caveat applies to human-written code too, which we tend to forget. There's bloat and noise in the metric, but its not meaningless
by danaris | 2025-12-18 14:55:43+00:00
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I am not remotely misremembering, and I'll thank you not to tell me what's happening in my own head.

IE 6 stood stagnant for years, while the W3C moved on without them, and there was no new version.

> The something being the other browsers. Chrome and Firefox.

And can you name a single thing Firefox does right, that Chrome didn't do first, or that came from an actual accepted web standard (not a proposal, not a de-facto standard because Chrome does it), that Safari doesn't do?
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-18 14:55:57+00:00
As always, incentives must be intelligently made.

I worked for a branch where the manager's bonus was tied to gross sales. So what did he do? Prioritize a product line that sold well, with low (actually negative!) profit margins.

He didn't sail blindly into icebergs; he targeted them like our factory was his personal pinball.

In this case, CEO compensation should have carefully nuanced incentives, not simply quarterly increments in stock price.
I built a website security scanner
by pelmenibenni | 2025-12-18 14:56:01+00:00
I’m a solo developer and over the last year I kept running into the same problem: I’d ship projects thinking “I’ll secure this properly later” but my cybersecurity knowledge is bad honestly.

I’d forget things like: - missing security headers - weak TLS / SSL configs - basic misconfigurations that scanners should catch early

So I built SecureNow a security scanner that checks websites for common vulnerabilities and gives a clear report with fix recommendations.

It’s not trying to replace pentesting — it’s meant as a fast “baseline security check” you can run before or after deploying.

It's designed for developers / small teams

Some features I thought were pretty cool: - Open Port Scanning (Not many websites have these) - Rate Limit Detector - API Route Checker

I launched it today and would genuinely love feedback: - Is this useful? - What checks would you expect from a tool like this? - What would make you not trust it? - Is it too overpriced?

Link: https://www.securenow.dev

Happy to answer any technical questions.
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-12-18 14:56:28+00:00
1 in 100k cancers also disappear spontaneously, should I wait and see for my kid and not treat them?

As a parent, a cancer survivor, and the child of a high anxiety parent, Yes, yes you should wait and see. Every doctor's visit is a chance to catch something worse.

That said, if you're a chill parent reading this, you should probably be more proactive about it. There is a middle ground, overreacting is usually worse than under reacting, but it is important that you react.
by justin66 | 2025-12-18 14:56:36+00:00
In protest at the suspensions, over 120 out of the 400 Metropolitan Police officers authorised to use firearms handed in their firearms authorisation cards, with Glen Smyth, a Police Federation spokesman saying, "The officers are very concerned that the tactics they are trained in, as a consequence of the verdict, are now in doubt."[10] The officers' suspensions were lifted shortly afterwards.[11]

What a joke.
by breppp | 2025-12-18 14:57:13+00:00
The CIA had supported coups in many countries yet these countries have not kidnapped 50 diplomats, that's probably the single worst thing you can do diplomatically.

Countries as religiously deranged as Iran are close US allies (Saudis), Iran had many chances of changing that in the last 40 years.

Also, that popular 50s coup story of bad imperialists vs good natives does not only seem too simple to be true, it is
by srmatto | 2025-12-18 14:57:29+00:00
This fiasco stirs up a lot of different topics for me, none of which seem like they are likely to be resolved anytime soon.

First, with so much importance placed on an Apple/iCloud account in our current era it's not good that they can be shutdown so trivially. Someone can be shut out from using Messages, Apple Wallet, Digital Identification (depending on where they live) and all their subscriptions and media purchases without any recourse, in an instant. It's not hard to imagine someone being put into a pretty bad situation as a result of this with just a little bad luck and bad timing. It's easy to point out that you shouldn't be overly reliant on these technologies but I think it's more important that there be ways to safe guard people from this scenario. Apple should do more to handle these scenarios given the importance of an account now.

Second, there are other recent events that point out the failure modes and gaps that Apple (and Google?) need to address. There apparently is no way to cleanly divide purchases in a Divorce or separation, even if the person was fleeing an abusive situation. There's also no way to leave a "family" account even as an adult or how to assign children to multiple families. Again we can trot out the easy "Just don't use these things, use FOSS, Nextcloud, etc..." but I think Apple should do more to address these types of scenarios regardless of what people choose to use.
by anonnon | 2025-12-18 14:57:41+00:00
You didn't see all of the thinkpieces from leftwing academics (inlcuding Mark Zuckerberg's sister) making the link between white marble and "white supremacy," and emphasizing polychromy as a means of de-whitening the represented figures? It never quite made sense to me, as even with coloration, the figures still appeared European, though the academics seemed to think the (unsurprising) uncommonness of blonde hair and blue eyes in the recreations was a "win."
by workwithtrp | 2025-12-18 14:57:51+00:00
Hey Product Hunt!

I’m Atul, the maker of FastRAG.

We all have that one AI idea we want to build. But every time I started a new project, I found myself spending the first 20 hours doing the same boring setup: Configuring Pinecone indexes Wrestling with LangChain pipelines Figuring out how to parse PDFs

By the time the backend was ready, I was too tired to build the actual product.

I built FastRAG to skip the "boring" part. It is a production-ready boilerplate that gives you a fully functional RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) pipeline out of the box.

What’s inside: Citation Highlighting: The UI actually highlights the exact source text in the PDF (users trust this way more than a black-box answer). Markdown Support: Full rendering for code blocks, tables, and lists. The Stack: Next.js 16, Tailwind, Supabase, and Pinecone.

The Holiday Launch Deal I want you to actually ship something over the break, so I’ve set up a race:

First 69 Makers: Get 69% OFF (approx $9).

Code: FAST69

Too Slow? You can still get 40% OFF.

Code: HOLIDAY40

(Base price is $29, so grab the code while it lasts).

I’ll be hanging out in the comments all day. Let me know what you think about the citation feature!

Happy Building, Atul
by pjc50 | 2025-12-18 14:58:04+00:00
The public, or at least the section that buys newspapers and gets onto the Question Time audience, seem to be in favor of this. Like a lot of people, they will vote in favor of repression so long as they think it's being done to someone else. Especially immigrants. You can even see it in the comments here.

"Tough on crime" and "tough on terrorism" are magic bullets for winning authoritarian support. That's how people are being persuaded that ECHR is a bad thing.
by mothballed | 2025-12-18 14:58:08+00:00
I see that in poor areas of the midwest. You need enough single working moms with no time to supervise their kids that it saturates the area with enough independent kids that a Karen can't damn all of them no matter how fast they call CPS. The other kids get jealous too so the whole dynamic changes.

If it's a rich area with stay at home moms (#1 Karens) or enough retired boomers sitting around with nothing to do but enjoy the power of calling modern CPS, forget it.
by estearum | 2025-12-18 14:58:20+00:00
Agreed it isn't necessarily a bad reason. In some cases it's a good reason for failure (like the one you describe).

In other cases it's a bad reason for failure: it's also incredibly expensive to prove your drug works even if it does work for a lot of people.

That's bad! It'd be better if it were cheaper.

Actually counterintuitively, due to a weird drug approval and payor reimbursement policy arbitrage, pharma companies are highly incentivized to produce drugs for tiny populations.

One of my hobby horses is railing against this specific dynamic.
by arrrg | 2025-12-18 14:58:35+00:00
Did he talk to people who make those reconstructions?

Why speculate from that outside perspective when you could talk to people who worked on them and the decisions they made. I think that would be very interesting. As is that‘s completely missing and it feels a bit like aimless speculation and stuff that could be answered by just talking to the people making those reconstructions. My experience is that people doing scientific work love talking about it and all the difficult nuances and trade offs there are.
by bayindirh | 2025-12-18 14:58:46+00:00
I'm slowly decoupling things and hosting parts of my infrastructure myself. Let it be on a cloud server or a home machine.

Doing everything and/or all-at-once is not practical, but having backups for most critical infrastructure helps a lot, and when it's rolling, it rolls without effort.

One can go step by step and call it's done when it becomes too much to bear or satisfactorily decoupled.