MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ellrob88 | 2025-12-11 10:53:19+00:00
I get why people from certain countries instinctively see any government involvement as bad, but I don’t think that’s a universal truth? Yes, bad government can do enormous harm, but I think good government can also raise society above what would happen if everyone were simply left to their own devices.

As others have noted, we already accept a long list of age-based rules: alcohol, driving, tobacco, gambling, movies and games, compulsory schooling, consent, marriage, tattoos, credit cards, pornography, firearms, etc.

Seen in that context, restricting social media for children isn’t some unprecedented intrusion - it’s another attempt to limit access to something that appears harmful for younger people. Will it work? I can only hope. But it seems reasonable to at least try.

I’m not claiming this opinion fits every country - it may be due to biases of where I live. Where I am (and in my opinion), social media seems like a clear and massive net negative, especially for kids. Perhaps in some places social media is a genuinely positive part of daily life, and from that perspective the same law might look like needless government overreach.
by goku12 | 2025-12-11 10:54:02+00:00
> He just didn't like the font so he ordered it to be changed.

There is your answer. He imposed his will - that's what dictators do. You have to be careful when the reason for any costly change is one individual's personal preferences. It's a bad omen.

> Equivalent to your boss ordering tabs be used instead of spaces.

That's not always equivalent, especially if it is to set a standard. Obviously, some people using spaces and the others using tabs is not ideal in situations you're referring to. It's also fine to change the standard, if they find a significant problem with the current convention. But if your boss wants it changed, and their only explanation is their dislike of the status-quo, then that's a red flag. The problem isn't very serious right now, but could grow into one in the future and you have to be on the watch.
by brap | 2025-12-11 10:54:18+00:00
Leadership roles, especially in large corporations, often favor people who are opportunistic. They don’t care about the product, they want that promo.

And to win that promo you have to ship big and ship fast. So often times what you see is people delivering vaporware that has the appearance of high quality (lots of promises, looks amazing in the slides deck, carefully selected data shows great numbers, etc). It’s a gamble, and sometimes it pays off.

By the time people accept that it’s hot garbage, the leaders have already moved on to the next opportunity. And it’s not that they were able to fool their managers, because their managers are playing the same game on an even larger scale, so they care even less.

Of course, this is not always the case. But there is a bias, and it tends to show up more in large organizations (government, large corporations, etc.)
by FranzFerdiNaN | 2025-12-11 10:54:24+00:00
> I wish wealth wasn't treated so abstractly as if it's some kind of universal measure of evil.

Wealth equals influence. So yes, it kinda is a measure of evil. It goes so far as Musk turning of Starlink at a critical moment to help the Russians for example. Or buying access to POTUS. Or donating money to groups to help undermine labor rights.

Basically, the type of person that can get this rich is in 99% of all cases also the type of person that doesnt give two shits about other people.
by JimmyBuckets | 2025-12-11 10:54:27+00:00
There are a couple of nuanced issues with what you are saying.

1. In our current political system, wealth translates into political power, which can (and is) used to change laws to secure more wealth - just look at the portfolio performance of members of US Congress. Democracy is about putting political power in the vote.

2. Many if not most of our important problems are beyond the ability of one person (or a small group) to tackle - climate change, food security, etc. Having wealth more distributed means that more economic participants are involved in deploying it, and thus greater predictive power per dollar spent.
by jononor | 2025-12-11 10:54:49+00:00
Anytime algorithms are great for robotics planning, for example. A plan does not have to be perfect to be useful, especially when it can be refined further in the next timestep. And the robot cannot act out the plan instantaneously, so by the time one is close to the point where a non-ideal segment would be, one has had many timesteps to refine/optimize it. But robot could start moving right away.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-11 10:54:55+00:00
> Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights.

Speeding and running red lights can be combated without affecting the privacy of innocents on the road. A debate can and should be had about the placement of radar traps though, many are straight off highway robberies trapping people who don't notice a speed-limit sign that is visually hard to notice.
by jkrejcha | 2025-12-11 10:55:52+00:00
A fun little tidbit, if you don't provide an init to the kernel command line, it'll try to look for them in a few places in this order:

1. /sbin/init

2. /etc/init

3. /bin/init

4. /bin/sh

It dropping you into a shell is a pretty neat little way to allow recovery if you somehow really borked your init
by jamescollinssp | 2025-12-11 10:56:05+00:00
Hi, thanks for the feedback. We actually already support `Bearer: Authorization <token>` auth scheme. It is accessible on https://mcp.serpapi.com/mcp path.

I would say the /apiKey/mcp integration path is more tailored for manual Claude Desktop / VS Code users where it might be easier, than trying to insert headers somehow.

Regarding the environment variables, the MCP is stateless so the secret management is handled on the client and obviously it could be set via env vars.
by 256_ | 2025-12-11 10:56:55+00:00
That's definitely an interesting argument I haven't seen before.

I suppose it depends on how effective these types of measures actually are, and also on how many adults refuse to identify themselves. I would assume governments are more interested in spying on adults than under-16s, so the adults are probably more relevant here.

I hope you're right, though. Maybe there'll be a renaissance of smaller platforms. Probably not, but I can hope.
by iam_circuit | 2025-12-11 10:58:47+00:00
I'm building IPASIS (https://ipasis.com), a real-time IP reputation API to detect VPNs, proxies, and bots.

The infrastructure runs entirely on Google Cloud Run. This makes it super easy to spin up instances in regions close to the customer, ensuring we keep latency under 20ms regardless of where the traffic originates.

How it works: Instead of just static geo-data, I aggregate live threat feeds and behavioral signals to score IPs in real-time. It returns a simple JSON response with flags like is_vpn, is_proxy, is_tor, and a risk score.

Tech Stack:

Go and Redis for the low-latency API.

Google Cloud Run for instant global scaling.

Ingesting data from multiple open and private threat feeds continuously.

It has a free tier if anyone wants to test it against their current logs. I’d love feedback on how to improve it further.
by ben_w | 2025-12-11 10:59:24+00:00
> In the latter case, i can't see how it can happen because no new nuclear can be politically built, no new hydro can be physically built, and wind potential is rather limited - increase wind output 2x and you are down to really marginal wind areas where ROI falls, big time. Which leaves solar, and that is a totally different level of variability and amount of lands it will take, skyrockets (if you want to reliably supply all of Germany for all it's final energy consumption with solar alone, having "only" 24-hour battery storage, all of land surface of Germany will not be enough).

Nuclear, perhaps.

Hydro comes in two flavours, damming a river and damming a valley. You dam a river to get a constant power from the watershed, you dam a valley if all you need is a battery-equivalent; we're only short of rivers, there's a lot of valleys.

Wind, you're way off. The UK's estimated wind potential is about 2.2 terawatts, which would be almost enough to double global electricity production by itself. This is because the North Sea is amazing; Germany also has some access to the North Sea.

Solar, again, you're way off. The worst parts of Germany are around 1000 kWh/m^2/year as per https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Germany_... which I believe doesn't account for cell efficiency, which we can say is 22% at this point given what the cheap modules on my patio do; the area of Germany is 357,022 km^2 = 3.57e11 m^2, so "all of land surface of Germany" is 3.57e11 m^2 * 1000 kWh/m^2/year * 22% ~= 8.9 TW, which isn't just enough to fully-electrify all of Germany, it's enough to fully electrify all of continental Europe, by a factor of a bit more than 3.8 (given https://www.iea.org/regions/europe/energy-mix).

Germany's 2023 consumption of primary energy (as a reminder, that's everything not just what's currently electricity) was just under 11 exajoules, averaging 342.2 gigawatts — if Germany was trying to convert itself alone (i.e. becoming weirdly isolationist), using just PV alone as the source (why?), with cheap modules (not the best), using the worst regions as the average for the whole country (low-balling the result), even without the boost you get from electrification because e.g. primary energy consumption is the full energy in ICE fuel tanks before the thermodynamic losses that BEVs don't have, it has 26 times as much land as it needs for that task. That's more than enough of a margin for a surprise climactic shift causing continuous all-year-round Dunkelflaute, even with just 24 hour storage (battery, or as per previous point, hydro).

Germany's land area, by itself, even despite the location, is only insufficient if you want to use it (alone) to power more than half of the entire planet. Which of course Germany shouldn't be doing: if humanity created a power grid sufficient to do that (it is doable but only by China right now) there's plenty of better places to put the PV, enough so that no batteries at all would be needed.
by pjs_ | 2025-12-11 11:00:09+00:00
Google Maps is the mind killer. We all worry about social media controlling the way we think, feel, vote etc. but Google Maps literally manipulates where people physically go in real life, what they do on holiday, where they hang out, what they eat etc. I got so sick of feeling like a four point five star Google Maps automaton I had to mostly stop with it. In addition to OSM, personal recommendations etc. the best substitute for me for a 4.5 star review is my nose, eyes and ears
by hsuduebc2 | 2025-12-11 11:00:23+00:00
It seems to me that this is much bigger problem for vulnerable or stupid adults. You can be naive when you are young but you can change.

I would say that much bigger problem is possibly the influence of these sites on development of young people. We know it's addictive, we know it's harmful. Cigarettes and alcohol are banned for the same reason so I'm kinda glad for this Australian experiment. We'll see.
by sandworm101 | 2025-12-11 11:01:52+00:00
One upon a time in SF i was told that human-driven cars would be illegal, or too expensive to insure, by the end of the decade. That was last decade. The modern tech economy is all about bubbles biult and sustained by hype people. Vertical farming. Pot replacing alcohol. Blockchains replacing lawyers. The metaverse replacing everything. Sure, we are in an AI bubble but we aslo ride atop a dozen others.

AI data centers in space? In five years? Really? No fiber connections? Does any sane person actually believe this? No. But if that is what keeps the billions flowing upwards then who am I to judge.
by roenxi | 2025-12-11 11:02:21+00:00
I haven't heard a good argument for why AGI isn't already here. It has average humans beat and seems generally to be better-than-novice in any given field that requires intelligence. They play Go, they write music, they've read Shakespeare, they are better at empathy and conversation than most. What more are we asking AI to do? And can a normal human do it?
by asim | 2025-12-11 11:02:39+00:00
I never thought I would fail. For 7+ years I think that's what drove me. Then things changed. Life changed. They attribute it to burnout and often that is the case, but you have to also factor in life and motivation changes. If the success doesn't come soon enough, you start looking towards other things, other aspects of life, if I may even say, more rewarding and real parts of life. Startups are a microcosm of what life is about, but we get hung up on the outcomes, our identities become intertwined with the mythology of the founder. It's important to break free of some of these notions and this retelling of the narrative even for failed founders in the way of "it's burnout", "lack of product market fit". Life goes on. We should look at these more as experiences to learn from, phases of life and then many go towards the next thing, and that's OK. To any failed startup founder here, it's okay, move on with life, try again, just keep going.
by maciejzj | 2025-12-11 11:03:03+00:00
> Let’s be clear that taxing this bunch of people even more will have disastrous consequences.

?

> Top 10% includes everyone pretty much in HN.

I would suggest you take more caution with statements like that. There are people who read this page and don't have much luck in life. And foremost, what does HN mean in the scale of society? Should HN commenters high five and carry one because the are not the bottom part of the society?

> AI investment for job displacement is necessary for overall prosperity and efficiency.

AI will boost efficiency at expanse of society. I will give you some random examples to ponder about, maybe it will touch some people hearts:

1) What will happen to hundreds of thousands of managers and office workers in the US and EU who built mortgages and families when economy recovered after COVID if AI wipes out their jobs?

2) What will happen to hundreds of thousands of people in English-speaking counties in Africa who earned they daily bread by providing remote help desk services when AI takes heir jobs?

3) What will happen to hundreds of thousand of CS grads in India whose family spent life savings to give them "good" education in Bangalore when AI takes their jobs?

These and many more changes happening rapidly all at once?
by MrMetric | 2025-12-11 11:03:13+00:00
Simple: A version specifier, or feature specifiers. Backward compatibility concerns vanish when I can opt-in to a newer spec. Old code keeps working, and new code doesn't suffer for legacy nonsense.

For example, the Circle compiler extends C++ with its `#feature` directive: https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/...

Sadly, the closest I've personally seen to this sort of thing in widespread use is `"use strict";` in JavaScript, which is only a single binary switch. You can't, say, turn on a new keyword, disable a keyword, switch to a different incompatible version of some browser API, etc.

I encourage all language designers to include a feature mechanism in a forward-compatible way. Don't overthink the difficulty: It doesn't need to do anything at first, it just needs to not be a parsing error. Treat it like a comment. FYI, this is the same as having a version number or header size in a binary file format's header, which all sane formats have (there are a lot of insane formats out there...).
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-12-11 11:03:58+00:00
I think this article is "why startups died pre-2020", rather than "why startups die [now]".

Lots of this article relates to the reasons startups died when cash was freely available - both from VCs and from the markets you were trying to find product in. For example, if you started an online learning company in March 2020, you'd have hit product right away (along with a thousand competitors), and been lathered with cash from every direction. But three years later, all of those startups were struggling, and I don't know of _any_ that survived. That's not a case of the business owners in 1000 discrete companies giving up. That's the entire world economy reverting back to in-person learning, and the disappearance of the ultra-low interest rates for the company to fall back on while it pivots.

In 2025, founders need to be acutely aware of exogenous factors, as they can be business-obliterating events without the social safety net of 0-1% IR.
by lucideer | 2025-12-11 11:04:37+00:00
> I will never understand

I think it's fairly easy to understand if you understand what it was a backlash against. Tables today are used sensibly, for the most part, but the pre-CSS world was truly absurd in its table use.

The reaction may well have been over-the-top, but it wasn't disproportionate given the state of table usage at the time.

CSS's initial forays into layout seem bad today because people think of tables in terms of their intended use (not the now long-gone monstrosities the community actually extracted from them), but in comparison to the previous ecosystem, floats were a relative godsend.
by justin66 | 2025-12-11 11:04:52+00:00
> The idea that in a war there can be legal and illegal actions established by international treaties to protect civilians as much as possible can only work if two (or more) legitimate states are fighting each other

This is not true (the laws of war work and have been applied successfully in conflicts not involving two or more legitimate states) and it's an assumption that seems to have negatively informed the questions that followed.

> with leaders who can be held accountable for the orders they give.

Holding leaders accountable ("legitimate" political leaders, terrorist leaders, rebel leaders, we can do it) is good, but we also hold individuals accountable.

> But does it still make sense to talk about legality and international treaties when on one side there is a terrorist organization whose method of warfare consists of kidnapping or killing civilians?

Of course it does. The notion that one side is no longer accountable for harm done to civilians in violation of the law because the other side has harmed civilians in violation of the law is wrong.

> At this point, doesn't complying to international treaties only mean further endangering their own population?

Sometimes yes. It certainly does put troops in danger often enough. Everyone who is party to these treaties is well aware that a country could be safer in a conflict if they just quickly incinerated the other side, and they've chosen to be bound by these laws anyway.
by thecupisblue | 2025-12-11 11:05:15+00:00
>Startup credits require multiple follow-ups, meetings, etc. And these reps have weird incentive structures (so they are trying to bypass each other to meet their quotas or whatever).

Man, I tried going for the credits. I've organised meetups and conferences for Google, gave talks, been a part of Google Startup campus for years now, have been invited to participate in GDE program, and as I'm making a GenAI startup I decided "well, maybe time to try getting those 300k cloud credits, I've given them so much I'll surely get it".

Well, the first person I talked to, said I'm denied, because they didn't even check the websites I added in the description. They said oh I need to add it to another field for their team to see, told me to update it, but there is no way to update it. Then we had a second call, they said it's okay I can ignore that and pointed me to another person who will be my "account manager".

That person was absolutely uninterested into what we're doing, what we want and what we plan to do. They did not even care about helping us much until we reached 15k monthly spend or so, giving a holier-than-thou attitude and sounding like they're making lunch during the call. I'd rather have the call with an LLM at this point.

Then even though our website says our product relies on AI, it is impossible without AI and I explained to him how and why we train custom models and use their GenAI products - the person decided we are not an AI company and can only get 2k in Cloud credits.

The interaction left such a sour taste in my mouth that I will _never_ use Google Cloud in our product, as I do not want to have to deal with the Account Manager.
by gpderetta | 2025-12-11 11:05:33+00:00
Even if you never copy the std::function the overhead is very large. GCC (14 at least) does not seem to be able to elide the allocation, nor inline the function itself, even if used immediately after use and the object never escapes the function. Given the opportunity, GCC seems to be able to completely remove one layer pf function_ref, but fails at two layers.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-11 11:05:35+00:00
Here is the thing: It seems there are many people out there, who are so much influenced, that they worry about something like: "But how will I reach my child via phone, when they are at school! My kids need their phones!" Not realizing, that not too long ago, no parent had to reach their kid at school via phone, and if they did, they would call the school itself and have a message delivered or get the kid on the phone. This happened so rarely, that it was not common over the whole amount of students.
by eloisius | 2025-12-11 11:07:51+00:00
I agree with that. I only mean that it’s not as simple as “if we gave everyone Elon’s money then we could all afford homes.” But you’re right, the higher concentration of wealth means there’s less investment into producing more resources that people need, so indirectly it does mean there are less homes to go around.

I do agree with what (I think) GP might have been trying to say though. Conspicuous spending itself is not a problem. Way rather have the ultra wealthy buying yachts that deciding to be a wealth-proportional amount of everyday commodities.
by scotty79 | 2025-12-11 11:09:43+00:00
The only thing that can be done is to adjust the tax rate on the rich to the point that their wealth doesn't grow faster than the economy. Then it's going to really be "tide rises all boats".

And yes, for that you have to raise tax all investments. The exactly opposite of what we are doing where investments usually get tax breaks. Will it kill the growth? Only one way to find out. Without AI companies growth is zero already.
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-11 11:10:34+00:00
The price you pay for GCC nested (local) functions is an executable stack with 'trampolines'.

I'm a fan of nested functions but don't think the executable stack hack is worth it, and using a 'display' is a better solution.

See the Dragon Book or Compiler Construction: Principles and Practice (1984) by Louden
by imtringued | 2025-12-11 11:11:06+00:00
If you paid attention then you would notice that the article isn't about income. You can have top 0.3% worldwide income and still have massive student loans to pay off.

Someone who is using all their income to pay off student loans is "giving away".

Someone in a capital city can be living paycheck to paycheck, spending all of their money due to high rent. Meaning they're "giving away", except not to people poorer than them. They're giving away to people richer than them, so the last part is somewhat correct, but it's not funny so why are you laughing?
by nabla9 | 2025-12-11 11:11:35+00:00
Wealth translates easily into political power and influence. Do we care if Saudi Royalty and billionaires have power to shape societies, use power over us, determine what media we consume etc. Most of the history the rich and powerful ruled over us, why we can't go on living like that.

Kushner, Saudi, Ellisons behind Paramount, Warner, X, ... is nothing to fear of.

“There’s so much I’m learning from being here, In the States it feels really grim; and even in the less than 24 hours that I’ve been here in Saudi Arabia, I have a renewed faith in the cinema.” -- Dakota Johnson (Actress)