MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by echelon | 2025-12-11 22:11:05+00:00
> This would be worrying if the content was 1) actually good or 2) not freely available.

The content is not freely available. You pay for it with ads or premium subscriptions. There is a massive amount of money being passed around behind the scenes.

When IP holders cut off Google's ability to host IP content, 50+% of YouTube immediately dies overnight.

Looking at the top videos on YouTube this week, 7 of the top 10 are all "Pop IP" content: Candy Crush the Movie, Miley Cyrus, "I wanna Channing All Over Your Tatum", Superman Drawn, Star Wars Elevator Prank, We are World of Warcraft, Red Bull.

People love and drown themselves in pop culture and corporate-owned IP. Whether that's music, games, anime - they love corporate-owned IP.

If this content gets pulled en masse, YouTube is fucked. YouTube has been getting all of this for free. That's something that could be done today, but it's just non-obvious. When you package that with the "creation enablement", it's a packaged good that can be licensed or sold enterprise-to-enterprise.

Disney is about to wet their toes. Nintendo has already been experimenting with it. The concept is right there in front of them, and as distribution channels and content creation merge into one uniform thing - it'll be obvious.

> The damage to the Star Wars brand shows this isn't a long term strategy.

To be clear, this was made by some of the top humans in their field. And despite massive critical panning, it did print money for Disney (perhaps at the cost of long term engagement/interest).

> The 2nd issue on animation slop is the human element.

It's the difficulty, cost, time, talent element.

People consume more human content because more human content is created. Orders of magnitude more. It's easy.

Vivienne Medrano, Glitch Productions, Jaiden Dittfach, and many others have minted huge franchises on YouTube - views, merch, Amazon/Netflix deals, etc. The problem is that it takes them ages to animate each episode, whereas filming yourself on your smartphone is quick, easy, accessible, affordable, low-effort, low-material, and low-personnel.

Kids on twitch are watching each other become anime girls and furries with VTuber tech. They're willingly becoming those things and building fantasy worlds bigger than their public face identities. We just haven't had the technology to enable it at a wide scale yet.

This is all changing.
by magicalhippo | 2025-12-11 22:11:27+00:00
> Are you aware of any age verification systems that do not have this property?

As I understand it, it's the goal of OpenID4VP[1][2]. Using it a site can request to know if the user is over 18 say, and the user can return proof of just that one claim, I'm over 18, without sharing identifying information.

The new EU age verification solution[3] builds on this for example.

[1]: https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-presentations-1...

[2]: https://docs.walt.id/concepts/data-exchange-protocols/openid...

[3]: https://ageverification.dev/
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-11 22:11:32+00:00
So we make meaningless laws that inconsistently enforced? What do you think happens when little Johnny is caught with weed in his car in a 95% White high income school district vs little Jerome in a 95% Black school district?

Also how much “shaping of society” do you expect to happen when you pass a law that no one respects?

How many kids do you think a law is going to stop from going to the porn sites that completely ignored the law?

How many kids say “I really want to smoke weed but it’s illegally so I won’t do it”?
Ask HN: Does your team spend more time on tech or on competitors?
by agcat | 2025-12-11 22:11:44+00:00
I always thought tech startups especially in SF was about building the best product and solving hard technical problems with thinking about competitors was just noise.

But in reality, i see mostly discussion about competitive wins, what features competitors have, and positioning, sometimes even in engineering contexts.

Part of me gets it, but its hard to believe if every company does the same.

What's been your experience?
by tom1337 | 2025-12-11 22:12:16+00:00
I was a fan of NextJS in the pages router era. You knew exactly where the line was between server and client code and it was pretty easy to keep track of that. Then I've began a new project and wanted to try out app router and I hated it. So many (to me common things) where just not possible because the code can run in the client and on the server so Headers might not always be available and it was just pure confusion whats running where.
by dwaltrip | 2025-12-11 22:12:49+00:00
The author is vastly overestimating the general legibility and familiarity of things they happen to know well and are used to.

Boring names are also very generic, by definition, and thus often harder to remember. Especially when there are 10 other similar tools. Is it sql-validator, sql-schema-validator, schema-validate, db-validator, or god knows what else?

Edit: I am in favor of better “sub titles” / descriptive slugs / and so on. As well as names that are a hybrid of creative and descriptive. Sqlalchemy is a good example.

Why isn’t there a command line utility called “whatisthis” with a standard protocol that allows tools to give a brief description of what they are?

It could be extended to package managers as well. E.g “pip whatisthis foo_baz”.

Shit we should create this…
by k310 | 2025-12-11 22:13:05+00:00
As I have stated before, AI is freeing us to:

1. create our own porn at home and (soon)

2. have home orgasmatrons.

Parents have complete control of the Chat/Porn server and since the orgasmatron necessarily has all your desires stored in its LLM (Large Lust Model) it trivially knows your age and will lock you out.

And internet porn can be banned regardless of age. (that's only half sarcastically said).

Demand for home Large Lust Models and orgasmatrons will soar. You heard it here first. Opportunity for entrepreneurs. And these home-based products are the only way to keep porn away from kids (if parents don't care now, they never will) and to maintain privacy on the internet.

Every place where I've worked in I.T., the rule was "No porn downloading at work. Porn belongs in the home." (especially in the days of slow home modems)

And to be really enforceable, all offshore sites would have to agree to the scheme, including certain Russian ones who are glad to pollute our children's and adults' minds with porn, propaganda and conspiracy theories.

Lastly: There always was and will be media. Micro-SD cards now? If not phones, thrift store picture frames and RPi's. "Porn finds a way."
by alephnerd | 2025-12-11 22:13:39+00:00
When I was in the policymaking world and was considering grad school/academia, an underlying theme in my research was that the principal-agent problem is a reflection of misaligned incentives which leads a stag-hunt dynamic to become a Nash Equilibrium.

Long story short, incentives matter, and understanding how to align your initiatives with the incentives of veto players helps build coalitions that you need to get initiatives out the door. That said, these initiatives also need to be executed successfully, becuase organizational dynamics are inherently multi-agent games.

Essentially, I made sure to understand how to speak (ie. Understand the incentive structures) of multiple stakeholders (eg. How to convince Mgmt and IC Engineers, PMs, salespeople, customer success, and customers) and also how to execute successfully on initiatives (ie. How to successfully launch products, lead a round, land customers, or manage an M&A event).

This meant both building domain knowledge about each of the stakeholders fields as well as building domain knowledge in a handful of fields I knew I could specialize in.

Basically, understanding incentive structures and being able to show how your interests and goals align with those incentives is critical.

For example, back when I was an IC level engineer, if I wanted to get tech debt prioritized, I made sure to:

1. Show that it was tied to active issues to customers that matter - eg. fixing a bug for a customer who spends $20k a year at a company generating $100M a year in revenue is a misallocation of resources for EMs and PMs

2. Show that it is tied to speeding up feature delivery: it converts a conversation around "maintenance" into a conversation around adding new capabilities that are assumed to generate revenue, thus aligning Sales, PM, and Leadership

A lot of people on HN neurotically and reflexively don't care to understand how organizations work or how to make a case. A number of them assume that just because it's a technical problem it should actually matter to the top line of a business. In most cases, it does not if you cannot make a case for it. A number of them also don't care to leave a bad organization if they are in one (I have worked in 2 in my career, and made sure to leave).

I have no MBA, I just have an undergrad CS degree (and a secondary in Government). Even though my current day job doesn't demand it, I can still code, but I also taught myself how to do basic FP&A, marketing, user experience research, and other functions. If you want to survive and thrive in the tech industry, nowadays you will need to build industry specific domain experience, technology specific domain experience, and basic product management, sales, and user experience chops.
by azalemeth | 2025-12-11 22:13:50+00:00
This is a clearly terrible idea. It's clear to us, at least, not to them. As is on the public record, there are three proponents behind this amendment. They and their contact details are:

LORD NASH [Tory, contactholmember@parliament.uk] BARONESS CASS [Crossbench / 'independent', rivisn@parliament.uk ("staff")] BARONESS BENJAMIN [Liberal Democrat - which particularly disappoints me – benjaminf@parliament.uk]

All three can be contacted by sending an email to contactholmember@parliament.uk using the proper form of address as detailed in https://members.parliament.uk/member/4270/contact

If you're reading this website and are either living in the UK or are a British citizen I strongly urge you to write a personalised and above all polite email stating with evidence why they are misguided. The "think of the children" brigade is strong – you may well be able to persuade these individuals why it is a bad idea.
by mzajc | 2025-12-11 22:13:52+00:00
Is there a good explanation of how ZKPs prevent attestation providers (which presumably know your identity) from linking an issued proof back to you if, for example, the website elects to store it? I can wrap my head around RSA and ECC and PKI, but I haven't managed to make sense of this yet.

Assuming that's even a goal, of course. The cited paragraph mentions RPs (the websites, from what I understand), but makes no mention of attestation providers.
by _ache_ | 2025-12-11 22:14:18+00:00
I really like SVG, I did a lot of things with it and some interesting ones. The only blame I have is that it is sometime slow.

Like for QR Code, precise maps or +100 pixels wide squares. More than 100 "DOM" elements and it will take multiple seconds to show.

The animations also are slow too, compared to canvas, plain CSS or Lottie but nothing very cursed, it's mostly fine.
by 5upplied_demand | 2025-12-11 22:14:59+00:00
> to allow you to omit having some tough but needed conversations with your child regarding harms of social media

As any parent knows, if you tell your kids that something is harmful, they will stop immediately. No questions asked. I've never met a child who did something their parents told them not to do, have you?

> I support government protecting me from violence in some capacity

So, you do like big government telling people what they can and can't do, as long as you feel it directly helps you. That said, laws against violence don't protect you from violence, the laws kick in after the fact.

> I don't support "chat control"-like laws since the cost/benefit doesn't seem to be favorable.

Possibly because you don't have kids and thus maybe not a full understanding of the cost/benefit? Perhaps, instead of lecturing actual parents about what parenting is like, you could ask questions about the cost/benefit you claim to be interested in.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-11 22:15:19+00:00
We don't disagree. It's just that I have a funny definition of advertising. It's more narrow than what people usually mean. Basically, if I asked for it, then it's information, not advertising.

For example:

> as are the recommendations for other games and things like that

I asked for this when I opened the Steam store. It's not advertising, it's just the exact information I wanted. I went to the market to see products, and they showed me products.

If they start bringing the products to my home by plastering ads on billboards all over the place then it's advertising and abusive.

> That is why I will permanently have an adblocker

I recommend the same to everyone.
by ____tom____ | 2025-12-11 22:15:37+00:00
while I definitely agree the autocorrect has gotten worse, what I find more of a problem is all the various other pop-ups that occur. For example, they recently added the ability to 'undo' an autocorrect, but this pop up grabs focus, and you can't click on text near this pop up, because the pop up will claim the click.

I've also had trouble getting rid of pop up menus (copy, etc). If I want to click on text, but it has decided to pop up a menu, it can be a real pain to get rid of it. (I had no problem on previous versions of IOS).

There's a fundamental law of features: Every feature you add may may make it better for people who use it, but it makes it worse for everyone else.

If you keep adding features, anything will eventually become unusable.
by ericmcer | 2025-12-11 22:15:54+00:00
They have done automated enforcement a few times and it always sucks because the systems don't use discretion.

Someone going 40 in a 30 and swerving around other cars gets treated the same as someone going 40 when the road is empty. Someone slowing to 1-2mph before safely rolling through a stop sign get the same ding as someone blowing through it at 30mph.

If AIs can somehow learn how to take all this footage and enforce the spirit of the law (citing dangerous driving) instead of the letter I will fully support it.
by weebull | 2025-12-11 22:15:57+00:00
> Zig, for all its ergonomic benefits, doesn’t make memory management safe like Rust does.

Not like Rust does, no, but that's the point. It brings both non-nullable pointers and bounded pointers (slices). They solve a lot of problem by themselves. Tracking allocations is still a manual process, but with `defer` semantics there are many fewer foot guns.

> I kind of doubt the Linux maintainers would want to introduce a third language to the codebase.

The jump from 2 to 3 is smaller than the jump from 1 to 2, but I generally agree.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-11 22:16:45+00:00
> But at the same time parental concern is real

... only to the degree it hasn't been manufactured by tabloid media and Russian propaganda warfare, that is.

With every little news about local shootings, robberies, rapes, beatings, thefts, whatever not just making national, but in the worst case international headlines, one might think that Western countries are unsafe hellholes of the likes of actually legitimately failed states - despite criminality rates often being on record lows. Of course parents are going to be afraid for their children, and it's made worse by many Western countries financially only allowing for one, maximum two children.

On top of that, a lot of the panic is simply moral outrage. Porn and "trans grooming" it seems to be these days, I 'member growing up with the "Killerspiele" bullshit after some nutjob shot up a school in the early '00s. My parents grew up with the manufactured fear of reading too much as it was supposed to make you myopic. Again, all manufactured fear by organized groups aiming to rip our rights to pieces.

Parents should relax and rather teach their children about what can expect them on the Internet, how people might want to take advantage of them, and most importantly, that their children can always come to them when they feel something is going bad, without repercussions. When children think that they cannot show something to their parents, that is where the actual do-bad people have an in.
by topkai22 | 2025-12-11 22:16:58+00:00
Age verification is absolutely about kids. It’s also being used (or hijacked into) a vehicle for people who want increased surveillance.

There is a ton of evidence that there are harms to unrestricted online access for kids and teens (the book The Anxious Generation is cultural touchstone for this topic at this point). There is a real, well reasoned, and valid movement to do something about this problem.

The solutions proposed aren’t always well targeted and are often hijacked by the pro-surveillance movement, but it’s important to call out that these solutions aren’t well targeted instead of declaring the age verification push isn’t addressing a real problem and constituency.
by thayne | 2025-12-11 22:17:10+00:00
But it also makes it easier for library developers to identify that a change is breaking. Without static types you can easily make a change you think is fine, but it ends up breaking user code because they depended on something you didn't expect. Granted, static typing doesn't completely solve that problem, there can still be changes in behavior that break things, but it is a useful tool in identifying certain classes of breaking changes.
by ilamont | 2025-12-11 22:17:13+00:00
“People don’t want to come out and drink anymore. They’d rather sit at home and get drunk, or surf the Internet."

There's also the question of what kind of music people want to listen to. Rock music seems to wax and wane according to youth preferences and other pop culture and social trends. Bars and clubs that fail to adapt will usually fail.

In the late 90s dance/rap/electronic was rising while guitar-based rock seemed to be fading, or splitting into niches like nu metal. By the early 2010s rock really seemed to be in a deep trough ... at that time I saw some bands that had once been considered big rock acts in 90s like Deftones, Helmet and Kula Shaker playing much smaller venues and neighborhood clubs in Boston.

But 10 years later the pendulum seemed to swing back to rock. I saw Deftones once again on their 2022 tour, now playing a 4,000-seat arena.
by ellrob88 | 2025-12-11 22:17:14+00:00
Decisions made under the context of a global pandemic, which needed to be consistent, easy to understand, and easily enforceable. I'm comfortable with the way that was handled in these circumstances. A mask is hardly an inconvenience.

Anyway, to get back on topic, which country do you think is the best example of the level of government you think is optimal?
by nearbuy | 2025-12-11 22:17:54+00:00
This is a mischaracterization of the optimization. This isn't a standard optimization that games apply everywhere. It's an optimization for spinning disks that some games apply sometimes. They're expected to measure if the benefits are worth the cost. (To be clear, bundling assets is standard. Duplicating at this level is not.)

This doesn't advance accepted industry wisdom because:

1. The trade-off is very particular to the individual game. Their loading was CPU-bound rather than IO-bound so the optimization didn't make much difference for HDDs. This is already industry wisdom. The amount of duplication was also very high in their game.

2. This optimization was already on its way out as SSDs take over and none of the current gen consoles use HDDs.

I'm not mad at Arrowhead or trying to paint them negatively. Every game has many bugs and mishaps like this. I appreciate the write-up.
by aatd86 | 2025-12-11 22:17:57+00:00
LOL. I must have divination powers. I am currently working on a UI framework and opened an issue just 3 weeks ago that says:

***

Seems that server functions are all the rage. We are unlikely to have them.

The main reason is that it ties the frontend and the backend together in undesirable ways.

It forces a js backend upon people (what if I want to use Go for instance).

The api is not client agnostic anymore. How to specify middleware is not clear.

Requires a bundler, so destroys isomorphism (isomorphic code requires no difference between the client and the server/ environment agnostic).

Even if it requires a bundler because it separates client and server implementation files, it blurs the data scoping (especially worrying for sensitive data) Do one thing and do it well: separate frontend and backend.

It might be something that is useful for people who only plan on having a javascript web frontend server separate from the API server that links to the backend service.

Besides, it is really not obvious to me how it becomes architecturally clearer. It would double the work in terms of security wrt authorization etc. This is at least not a generic pattern.

So I'd tend to go opposite to the trend and say no. Who knows, we might revisit it if anything changes in the future.

***

And boy, look at the future 3 weeks later...

To be fair, the one good thing is that they are hardening their implementation thanks to these discoveries. But still seems to me that this is wholly unnecessary and possibly will never be safe enough.

Anyway, not to toot my own horn, I know for a fact these things are difficult. Just found the timing funny. :)
by ben_w | 2025-12-11 22:17:58+00:00
Extra languages aren't too hard to pick up.

My degree mostly focussed on Java, my industrial placement year (AKA internship, I guess?) was mostly python and bash scripts and IDL (I never used IDL after that) and a tiny bit of C++ and JS, my first job was pure Java, my second (after some self-employment) was pure Objective-C and a bit of JS, that career path transitioned into Swift, now I'm doing python, JS, and code-reviewing ruby produced by Claude.

Somewhere in all that there was some SQL and some VisualBasic (and Xojo), too.
by baazaa | 2025-12-11 22:18:39+00:00
On a related note, they built their digital ID so that third parties could verify attributes (it's NOT just a single-service login across government + a linking ID across government services, which is how it was sold by the BBC).

They're pretty close to completely de-anonymising the internet for UK citizens. Say they introduce an Australian-style social media ban for under 16s, then requires all social media to link their accounts to digital IDs for this verification.

Naturally the only remaining loophole is if a UK citizen manages to avoid being flagged as British ever by using a VPN, so I expect they will focus on that going forwards. Keep in mind the UK already arrests and imprisons vast numbers of people for speech offences, there's no slippery-slope argument here because the UK is already at the bottom of the slope as an ultra-authoratitarian anti-speech nation.
by epolanski | 2025-12-11 22:18:52+00:00
You know that 30%+ of Swiss population is foreign born?

36% of the workforce is foreign born.

In Zurich, Geneve, Lausanne, 44%+ of the residents are foreigners, and more than half the workforce is foreigners. And that's even ignoring how many people work there but reside in neighbouring countries (France border is close to Geneve and Lausanne is close and even has a boat between the two sides mostly carrying workers).

If you think that a Swiss national (which has several advantages from a hiring perspective) is going to be cleaning your toilet, no matter the money, without having higher paying options you're absolutely out of your mind.