MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by basisword | 2025-12-10 21:20:18+00:00
Curious about your thoughts on (a). I understand privacy concerns but not your point about scams. How are people going to lose their life savings? A photo ID is useful because you can compare the photo on it to someone human. Passports contain mirochips. If losing your ID was so dangerous people would be in trouble all the time, because people lose them all the time.
by saulpw | 2025-12-10 21:20:23+00:00
I do understand that, in principle. But having a mathematical reason to let some 'difficult' votes go uncounted gives ammunition to those who would put political pressure on vote counting for their advantage, while also making people in general feel disenfranchised. (We have a huge problem with turnout in the US in general, and the message you're presenting only adds fuel to that!) This is why I wrote "sometimes not even counted then", because we do have a kind of apathy towards these small and easily disenfranchisable groups, and once you open it a crack, it becomes easier for some partisan to drive a wedge into it (see Bush v Gore 2000).

Also, it's a mistake to think that the only result of voting is to produce the winner of the election. The margin matters also. A politician winning by a large margin (or even a majority) can claim a 'mandate'; one who only wins by a plurality will have more spirited opposition.

We've seen this in the most recent US election; imagine if small percentage of those who didn't vote in the solid blue states because their vote didn't matter (a refrain I've heard from many people) actually voted, and Trump swept the swing states but lost the popular vote. The entire political landscape would be different, and we might even have momentum in the coming years to abolish the Electoral College.

So if we are fans of liberal democracy, we should be doing everything in our power to structure the system to make people feel as though their voice and vote matters.
by Sevrene | 2025-12-10 21:20:26+00:00
They are different laws with different contexts but the type of rhetoric and logic used to justify them are very similar, right? I already agreed they are not 1:1 nore was it meant to be. I agree with you there. If there's a more specific point you want to make, I'm keen to hear it!

> the arguments against these types of laws aren’t based on the premise that these sites aren’t bad. I haven’t seen anyone saying that TikTok is a societal good. Almost everyone agrees there.

There's people in this thread talking about jews being behind this ban to ensure zionism continues, using only a social media agitprop post to justify it. We are in the mud at the moment, so I'm sorry but I'm not taking that for granted, people have diverse views.

> I’m saying that the main arguments are different. I am suggesting that there are more differences between the seatbelt debate and the age-verification-for-websites debate than there are similarities.

Let me try explain this figuratively:

A doctor might give free care to someone in a medical emergency on a plane after all they have an ethical responsiblity to do so if they can, but that doesn't mean they're obliged to care about your canker sore.

Now imagine a doctor not treating one or the other because "It's not that serious". It's the extent of the harm or risk that actually indicates how insane or sane that doctor's response is, just as much as the doctors actually response to it is.

We can sit here and say "yeah it's not that serious" but one patient is dying and another basically fine. Just like those people that thought drink driving wasn't that big of a deal, people think social media "oh yeah that's bad but what you going to do", it's the same shrug and 'oh well' attitude. That's what I think is eerlie similar. Now whether or not that's appropiate or not depends on whether you think the patient is having a heart attack, or just has a sore lip.

I do agree people aren't generally saying TikTok is good, but people are saying TikTok isn't so bad as to regulate age verification. Do you see how these things play into each other?
by tastyface | 2025-12-10 21:20:29+00:00
Pretty much everywhere in Europe has better public transit than the US. It's actually embarrassing.

Putting up a GoFundMe for healthcare expenses seems like a uniquely American phenomenon.

And there's simply no equivalent of something like skid row or the tenderloin in any major European city. We let our neediest simply... fall through the cracks. Then step over them on the way to work.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-12-10 21:21:31+00:00
> a) normalising people uploading identification documents and hence lead to people becoming victims of scams

The reasonable approach to solve this problem is verification protocol that mandates integration with the apps chosen by users. You have your wallet with digital ID and you use only it on any website, sharing the bare minimum of details. No uploads of anything anywhere. Independent wallet providers ensure privacy and prevent state overreach.

> (b) a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.

Unfortunately dark places existed in mainstream social media too. It’s something that should receive sufficient attention from law enforcement, nothing has changed here.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-12-10 21:21:35+00:00
Sometimes doing absolutely nothing is the right thing to do. Not everything can be improved through top-down intervention, and many things can only be made worse.

The comment you’re replying to raised the idea of empowering the users. That’s probably the way to look, but the danger is always if we do that using top down enforcement in a way that promulgates more harm, including stifling vibrant and necessary speech.

My very radical opinion is that section 230 of the CDA was our original sin. The Internet was better when it wasn’t divided into a few centrally managed private social media silos. It’s better to have a vibrant, messy, competitive, and very grass roots public square.
by Hasz | 2025-12-10 21:21:36+00:00
It is done for entire species.

There is plenty of fruits (Pawpaw, loquat, soursop come to mind) that are really not grown at-scale commercially in the US due to spoilage, easy to bruise, or other similar issues.

If you like interesting fruit, I highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/@WeirdExplorer/

for many fruits you will have never seen before.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-10 21:21:50+00:00
I'd argue there is, you just need good locations to board.

One problem that faces my city, as an example, is that we have a community that is being built out in a mountain area. There is a 2 lane highway going up there and, as you can imagine, it gets absolutely jam packed. On a clear day you can do the trip in 10 minutes, during rush-hour it can take over and hour.

This is the perfect place for something like a toll and a park and ride location within the community.

But instead we are maybe going to spend 10s (or maybe hundreds) of millions of dollars expanding the road.

This concept works great for airport's economy lots. It's a bit crazy that it doesn't seem to work for anywhere but the top 6 largest cities in the US.
by hamdingers | 2025-12-10 21:22:22+00:00
Only the government is bound by the fourth amendment, as long as the people setting up the cameras and running the network are private citizens it's fair game (correct me if I'm wrong).

Imagining a universe where companies are also bound by that is an interesting thought exercise. Many products (cloud photo backup, foursquare style "check-ins," location sharing with friends, etc) would be simply impossible because the aggregated data amounts to comprehensive surveillance.
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by wrxd | 2025-12-10 21:22:56+00:00
a) is solvable by a system that instead of collecting IDs reveals only the single bit of information required b) parents still need to do their job

Arguably parental control should have been enough to avoid all of this but the regulation still helps parents. It’s way more difficult to ask kids not to have social media when all of their friends have it.

I would have preferred stricter social media platform regulation for everyone forcing tech companies to take responsibility for what happens on their platforms. It’s not that they are dangerously only for kids
by 0x_rs | 2025-12-10 21:23:06+00:00
An absurd decision with dangerous second order effects, many of which lead to VPNs and other privacy tools being next, just look at UK hyping and building that up right now. I hope they will vote accordingly when they're of age, not forgetting what liberties were taken away from them in the name of very dubious benefits, easily circumvented, and prone to exposing them to greater danger going through unofficial channels. Trying to really address the issues younger generations are facing is clearly too difficult for the geriatric, decrepit ruling class that just won't let go, and this helps them further every government's ambitions of increasingly regulating the means of communication between people. Actually, it's not that it's difficult, they simply don't care.
by gertlex | 2025-12-10 21:23:11+00:00
Am I wrong in feeling like the solution you outline is only applicable to an individual's kids? But at the societal level, it clearly seems we can't depend on enough parents to do what you talk about. Something else is needed.

I don't have answers to give. Certainly not a fan of the government approach of "everyone must prove their age online now", which I believe is how the AU law is done. (casual listening to Security Now podcast about this for a long while now)
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-10 21:23:18+00:00
>The Geneva Convention ought to have something to say about how a general may and may not be attacked.

Except nobody in power actually gives a damn about the Geneva convention or the "laws of war" being thrown around in this topic.

Those laws were made up so that victorious powers can bully smaller countries when they lose a war, but superpower nations themselves don't have to abide by them because there's nobody more powerful than them to hold them accountable when they break those rules. Because laws aren't real, it's only the enforcement that is real.

Like the US also doesn't care about the Geneva Convention with all its warmongering and crimes against humanity in the middle east, and the torturing in Guantanamo Bay, and the likes of George Bush and Tony Blair will never see a day at the ICJ. Hell, not even US marines accused of using civilians for target practices in Afghanistan got to see a day at the Hague because the US said they'd invade the Hague if that happened. Russia also doesn't care about the Geneva convention and Putin won't see a day at the Hague. Israel doesn't give a crap about the geneva convention when bombing Palestinian hospitals, and Netanyahu won't see a day at the Hague. And if China invaded Taiwan, they won't care about the Geneva convention and Xi Jinping will never see the Hague. Trump can invade Venezuela tomorrow, and same, nothing will happen to him or the US.

THAT IS THE REALITY, that is how the world really works, dominance by the strong, subservience of the weak, everything else about laws, fairness, morality, etc only works in Tolkien tales and internet arguments, not in major international conflicts.

Edit: to the downvoters, could you also explain what part of what I said was wrong?
by SilentM68 | 2025-12-10 21:23:31+00:00
There was a time when there were some VB clone languages including Envelop Basic: https://members.tripod.com/joe__shmoe/indext.htm These tools did a pretty good job of creating forms and software. Rebol was another language that was sleek at making UI Form: https://www.rebol.com/index-lang.html Now a days, you need to master many technologies to create one UI component. Too much bloat.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-12-10 21:23:35+00:00
This incident did not occur in a vacuum. If this had been a surprise attack during peacetime, the calculus would be different, but it wasn't.

Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israeli civilian populations more or less indiscriminately very soon after the October 7th terrorist attack. Just a few months before the pager incident, a Hezbollah rocket killed 12 children in a Druze town in the Golan Heights.

Israel was justified in defending itself against an aggressor. Not to do so would mean continuing to let their civilians be killed. Once you start from that premise, then blowing up pagers that only belong to Hezbollah members is a much better option than any alternative.

The standard can't just be "you aren't allowed to take any action that could kill innocent people". To have that as the standard is the same as to have no standard at all, because it's so unrealistic that nobody would follow it. The standard has to take into account whether the action is offensive or defensive, what the relative risk of killing innocent people is, and what the alternatives are.

That's why I talked about the allied bombings during WWII, which killed enormous numbers of German and Japanese civilians. To suggest that the allies should not have used bombers in, say, 1941 because they would inevitably kill many civilians is unreasonable. But you can distinguish between, say, the RAFs nighttime bombing campaigns, which were intended to strike civilian targets for the purposes of demoralizing and starving the population, and the USAAFs daytime bombing campaigns, which were intended to destroy factories. Both killed many, many innocent people, but there are clear moral differences.
by torginus | 2025-12-10 21:23:47+00:00
Dunno. I used to do embedded. A ton of (highly capable) systems have tiny amounts of RAM (like 32kb-128kb). Usually these controllers run a program in an infinite event loop (with perhaps a sleep in the end of the iteration), communication with peripherals is triggered via interrupts. There's no malloc, memory is pre-mapped.

This means:

- All lifetimes are either 'stack' or 'forever'

- Thread safety in the main loop is ensured by disabling interrupts in the critical section - Rust doesn't understand this paradigm (it can be taught to, I'm sure)

- Thread safety in ISRs should also be taught to Rust

- Peripherals read and write to memory via DMA, unbekownst to the CPU

etc.

So all in all, I don't see Rust being that much more beneficial (except for stuff like array bounds checking).

I'm sure you can describe all these behaviors to Rust so that it can check your program, but threading issues are limited, and there's no allocation, and no standard lib (or much else from cargo).

Rust may be a marginally better language than C due to some convenience features, but I feel like there's too much extra work very little benefit.
by janalsncm | 2025-12-10 21:23:54+00:00
“At what?” is really the key question here.

A lot of the press likes to paint “AI” as a uniform field that continues to improve together. But really it’s a bunch of related subfields. Once in a blue moon a technique from one subfield crosses over into another.

“AI” can play chess at superhuman skill. “AI” can also drive a car. That doesn’t mean Waymo gets safer when we increase Stockfish’s elo by 10 points.
by zmmmmm | 2025-12-10 21:24:08+00:00
I'd like to know if there is any real world data about the effectiveness of TLS inspection in preventing harm. It's empirically a massive tax on any organisation that engages in any kind of software engineering or technical work. I estimate that something like 3% of all our engineering effort goes to working around the TLS inspection which breaks security on literally every piece of infrastructure we build. And it embeds all the harm that the article alludes to (and more). So it takes quite a significant balance of upside to counteract that.

So is the benefit worth it? Is there data to prove it? Or is it just authoritarian IT departments drunk on power implementing this stuff?

I'd love to know.
by shafoshaf | 2025-12-10 21:24:20+00:00
My takeaway is that jfindper is saying that seatbelt laws had a justification that does not have a parallel with this action regarding social media.

IDK if this is how they would say it, but I think argument for seatbelts is that there is minimum disruption to usage, there is limited revocation of other rights, and the societal benefit is large and pretty unambiguous.

The idea that I have to give up privacy, expose myself to additional risk (by having my identity logged), increase the chances that mentally susceptible people will have more exposure to fraud in order to get a solution that is not clear on how effective it will be makes the parallel a bit academic, if not an out right straw man.
by magnumpowers | 2025-12-10 21:24:27+00:00
The "built for choice and control" messaging is interesting timing given how most AI tools are going the opposite direction - trying to be everything to everyone with complex configuration screens.

I've been thinking about this a lot while building in the productivity AI space. Most tools I've tried require you to set up elaborate workflows, connect 12 different services, and spend weeks tweaking prompts. The cognitive overhead defeats the purpose.

What's compelling about Firefox's approach (if they execute well) is that browser-level AI could actually understand context better than bolt-on solutions. Your browsing patterns, form fills, research sessions - there's rich signal there that doesn't require you to explicitly configure anything.

I got early access to ungrind.ai which takes a similar philosophy for email/meeting productivity - zero configuration, just connects to Gmail and starts working. The technical challenge is making the AI smart enough to infer intent without explicit rules, but when it works, the UX is so much cleaner.

The real test will be whether Firefox can resist feature creep. "Built for choice and control" sounds great until product managers start adding dozens of toggles and options.

Anyone know if they're planning to expose APIs for developers to build on top of their AI layer?
by mamonster | 2025-12-10 21:24:32+00:00
>No it wouldn't, as long as the target is military and you didn't have opportunity to killed him in base it is fine.

"Opportunity to kill in base" is completely vague and varies depending on the military tribunal that will try you. Israel has, AFAIK, never said that there was no other way to kill those people.

>At most you could complain it is violates proportionality however no car bomb would kill 100 people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_car_bombings

Plain disinformation

>Not to mention your analogy is flawed - hezobllah doesn't have any marked bases.

This line of thinking justifies bombing (with massive collateral damage) any partisan /resistance movement that is constantly on the move. Which I guess makes sense since that is what Israel did a lot in Gaza.
by KK7NIL | 2025-12-10 21:24:38+00:00
It almost certainly refers to 300 mm wafers, which are the largest size used right now. They offer significantly better economics than the older 200 mm wafers or lab experiments done in even smaller (i.e. 100 mm) wafers.

The text in the article supports this:

> This is a commercial 300mm monolithic silicon photonics platform, meaning the technology is ready to scale today, rather than being limited to laboratory experiments.
by keeda | 2025-12-10 21:24:41+00:00
As mentioned in the thread I linked, they acknowlege the productivity puzzle and try to control for it in their studies. It's worth reading them in detail, I feel like many of them did a decent job controlling for many factors.

For instance, when measure the number of PRs they ensure that each one goes through the same review process whether AI-assisted or not, ensuring these PRs meet the same quality standards as humans.

Furthermore, they did this as a randomly controlled trial comparing engineers without AI to those with AI (in most cases, the same ones over time!) which does control for a lot of the issues with using PRs in isolation as a holistic view of productivity.

>... whose participants are working for organizations that are heavily invested in future success of AI.

That seems pretty ad hom, unless you want to claim they are faking the data. Along with co-authors who are from premier institutes like NBER, MIT, UPenn, Princeton, etc.

And here's the kicker: they all converge on a similar range of productivity boost, such as the Stanford study:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbDDYKRFjhk (from Stanford, not an RCT, but the largest scale with actual commits from 100K developers across 600+ companies, and tries to account for reworking AI output. Same guys behind the "ghost engineers" story.

The preponderence of evidence paints a very clear picture. The alternative hypothesis is that ALL these institutes and companies are colluding. Occam's razor and all that.
by gsnedders | 2025-12-10 21:24:41+00:00
This is exactly the sort of breaking change that I really struggle to see the value of — maintaining the deprecated method seems incredibly unlikely to be a notable maintenance burden when it is literally just:

@deprecated("Use response.headers.get(name) instead") def getheader(self, name): return self.headers.get(name)

Like sure — deprecate it, which might have _some_ downstream cost, rather than having two non-deprecated ways to do the same thing, just to make it clear which one people should be using; but removing it has a much more significant cost on every downstream user, and the cost of maintenance of the old API seems like it should be almost nothing.

(I also don't hate the thought of having a `DeprecationWarning` subclass like `IndefiniteDeprecationWarning` to make it clear that there's no plan to remove the deprecated function, which can thus be ignored/be non-fatal in CI etc.)
by basisword | 2025-12-10 21:24:59+00:00
>> Our kids are up against problems we didn't have during the great expansion of social.

I'm not sure I agree with this. Our societies globally have become hugely polarised and are manipulated daily because of social media. The damage done by social media is 100x greater than any good that came from it and the lives of adults have been affected by on it a societal level at least as much as the danger to kids.

It isn't possible, but if social media was suddenly completely unavailable I think the world would get a lot better in a very short period of time.
by autoexec | 2025-12-10 21:25:10+00:00
> hat feels like blaming Canon for the behavior of a paparazzi, but perhaps there are reasons those aren't equivalent I'm not aware of.

The difference between ring cameras and paparazzi using a canon camera is that the photos recorded to film/local storage can't be automatically compiled with the footage captured from everyone else's canon camera to create databases of people and track their movements, activities, attributes, etc.

It really depends on where the data goes and who can access it. I'd even go so far as to say that keeping that data on the cloud is fine as long as the data is encrypted, amazon doesn't access it beyond storage and deliver to the customer (meaning that they can no longer mine it for personal data) and amazon cannot give access to anyone else (including police who should have to request footage directly from the camera owners).