MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 3np | 2025-04-21 00:29:23+00:00
> Byzantine has I think been misused. It’s the least number of good members you need to be successful, not the best number.

Could you elaborate? It sounds like you are talking more about challenges of distributed consensus (elections, raft). What I have in mind is distributed peering algorithms for decentralized networks. No consensus, elections, or quorum required. You may wish to run consensus algos on top of such networks but that's one layer up, if you will.

Byzantine in the context of unpermissioned networks is often explained as the sybil problem, which maps to the issues you mention.

Applying OP to this setting wouldn't mitigate that but I'm thinking it can be used as a framework to model and reason about these systems. Perhaps even prove certain properties (assuming some form of sybil resistance mechanism, I guess).
by like_any_other | 2025-04-21 00:29:46+00:00
Hungary's fertility rate was 1.2-1.3 from 2000 to 2011, and then jumped to ~1.5 [1]. Whether that is because of this policy is up for debate.

But that doesn't matter - I responded to your claim that they don't actually care about birthrate, because they don't fund families. But they do fund families, hinting that they probably do care about the birthrate, regardless of if their efforts are successful.

It takes very motivated thinking to say that, because a solution doesn't work, those that tried the solution don't care about the problem.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/HUN/hun...
by huevosabio | 2025-04-21 00:31:53+00:00
I recognized the Arab spring and the London blitz.

The gay marriage one I couldn't put a date, but noticed a flip phone on the picture so I just guessed the highest number before iPhone release year and wasn't too bad.

The disco scene was clearly a 70s Pic so I just guessed smack in the middle of the decade.

The beach black and white I was the most off. I faintly remember that it was a big discussion point during the 20s that women should be allowed to wear "revealing" swimsuits,so again I went for a year in the decade. I was off
by dogma1138 | 2025-04-21 00:32:08+00:00
Unless you want to Balkanize yourself immigration is probably not the answer.

The US is also probably not the best example because it’s a very different situation. Even in the 19th and 18th centuries natural birth rates accounted for about half of the population growth in the US.

The current projection for the UK is that between 2021 and 2036 immigration will account for 92% of the population growth, and based on the previous 2-3 years this might actually be an underestimate.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-04-21 00:32:17+00:00
The point of AMP is that the link aggregator owns the cache, not the publisher. You would have to convince Google, Bing, and all the other link aggregators to use your implementation for their AMP caches. That's why it has a standards body. If you don't understand why, you don't understand the problem that AMP solves. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43733809
by mjb | 2025-04-21 00:32:41+00:00
MySQL Serializable is pretty similar to serializable in other databases, in terms of the observable anomalies. There's a good set of tests here: https://github.com/ept/hermitage

> So maybe I'm supposed to consider this post only for 'Every transactional system' running with SERIALIZABLE transaction isolation.

No, it's a general point about the nature of transactions in DBMSs, and the different implementation choices. As the article says, there are some variations (e.g. MVCC at levels lower than serializable inherently has two 'order' steps).
by Skunkleton | 2025-04-21 00:32:54+00:00
https://kagi.com/assistant/3752c5f9-bf5c-4a43-bada-b3eccbe94...

You should be able to click left right on the prompt to see different responses. Sonnet 3.7 with extended thinking notices the issue, and then chooses to totally ignore it with no explanation.

From Claude for those who don’t want to click:

Wait, I notice a difference from the traditional riddle. In this version, the surgeon says "I can operate on this boy" (affirmative) rather than "I can't operate on this boy" (negative).

This changes the nature of the puzzle somewhat. If the surgeon is saying they CAN operate, then we need to explain why this is surprising or seemingly impossible, but actually possible.

The traditional answer would still apply: the surgeon is the boy's mother.
by cyberax | 2025-04-21 00:33:39+00:00
Smaller town in Canada don't really have skyrocketing prices.

For example, in Whitehorse in Yukon the average house was $420k (or $550k inflation adjusted to 2024) in 2015, and $660k in 2024. So less than 20% growth after inflation within the last decade.

During that time, Vancouver BC went from $640k ($820k after inflation) to $1300k.

The average square footage also went down in BC, but stayed stable in YK.
by mjb | 2025-04-21 00:34:12+00:00
This is great, really worth reading if you're interested in transactions.

I liked it so much I wrote up how the model applies to Amazon Aurora DSQL at https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/04/17/decomposing.html It's interesting because of DSQL's distributed nature, and the decoupling between durability and application to storage in our architecture.
by Triphibian | 2025-04-21 00:34:15+00:00
I always imagined a system like this could be used for a larger community to self-regulate/moderate. Moderating would be a requirement of membership -- sort of like mandatory military service. So everyone is invested in creating a good community and everyone sees what it is like to be a mod. Maybe it is a naive idea and I am sure it isn't original. Curious to see who has experimented with it before. I bet in RL communes/utopias have attempted something like this.
by alganet | 2025-04-21 00:36:01+00:00
What I take from the article is that birth rate is a statistic with many ideas tied to it.

It almost feels like it is trying to "They Live!" me into believing everything about it is "REPRODUCE" propaganda.

You can't do that using "OBEY" propaganda though, otherwise it becomes satirical. What I mean by that is that the article provides guidelines on what to focus on when discussing these things in typical conversations.

It reminds me of that scene of "Starship Troopers" in which an official appears and explains how to kill an insect from Klandatu by shooting at the heart, not the leg.

Does it really matter? I mean, for my silly stupid life. I don't care about birth rates. Maybe I care about the non statistical or political part. Most people would like to have a family, right? You media guys know that some people see things from a personal perspective, some from a partisan perspective and so on.

Well, I am the computer kid grown up. I am supposed to see things like a little tiny robot. To care about the big statistics things, and to care about the end of the world. Sounds like the article partially targets me!

You know what? Maybe I will fight for the insects from Klandatu instead. It seems that those guys need a help.

What about the low birth rates? Well, the article isn't about birth rates. Why should I talk about them?
by mrob | 2025-04-21 00:36:08+00:00
I never said it was painful for everybody to play instruments. I'm saying this is an underappreciated reason for children to hate playing. Maybe you are lucky enough that it doesn't affect you.

And I personally measured my recorders with an SPL meter and found them to reach over 100dB(A) at the ear (played indoors in an ordinary room with furniture but without acoustic treatment). The meter used does not have a traceable calibration but in all respects behaves as I would expect a correctly calibrated meter to behave. I have no reason to believe it is miscalibrated. Recorders are only quiet in the bass. The high notes require much higher air pressure and can be very loud. Perhaps you are fooled by the lack of distortion. I played without hearing protection at first, but I was disturbed by the prolonged discomfort this caused in my ears. I then recorded my playing and reproduced it with loudspeakers. I was shocked at how loud I had to turn the speakers up to reach a realistic level. I think it's easier to judge SPL from loudspeakers because they do have distortion which serves as a perceptual cue. Pure sounds can reach dangerous levels without sounding obviously loud. I also think the fact that I was playing the instrument myself and not just listening contributed to my misjudgement.
by _wire_ | 2025-04-21 00:36:54+00:00
Star Wars 4K77

A 4K fan scan of a 35mm print the was in cold storage since 1980.

It's great to see OG Star Wars looking like in did in '77, with all the optical glitches and the lower contrast with slightly green shadow bias of prints from that time. True time travel that makes the reworked releases look silly.

Another project worth a look is Harmy's fan cuts of the original trilogy, which are tastefully re-assembled from multiple sources and graded.
by cyberax | 2025-04-21 00:37:12+00:00
It's important because there's no way to make dense urban housing cheaper. Nobody has managed to lower down housing prices by increasing density (no, Austin in Texas doesn't count, guess why?).

The solution is not to build ever denser communities, but to make it so that people don't _have_ to move into a large city from an ever-shrinking list.
by Aperocky | 2025-04-21 00:37:57+00:00
As a chronic unix terminal dweller, I wrote tascli to help me manage and record tasks and records. I've looked at some of the existing offerings like "taskwarrior", and they are either slightly too feature rich, or did not support records as a separate category. With this, you can manage your tasks and record by categories or date, list and update progress.

This tool is simple, with a compiled size of less than 2mb on macos and linux and write all records into a local sqlite file.
by akerl_ | 2025-04-21 00:38:08+00:00
Just to hit this one more time as directly as I possibly can:

> The core difference is some things which are reprehensible when backed by state violence are fine when chosen individually or encouraged by social pressures.

No. It is both reprehensible for the state to tell people they're too sicky or unintelligent to procreate and for society to pressure people not to procreate based on society's assessment of how sickly or unintelligent they are.

We can set aside all the prior examples of when people have previously believed this, or tried to implement this in various ways, all of which were reprehensible. Even if this was day 0 and we were starting fresh, the idea of society pressuring the sickly or unintelligent not to procreate would be reprehensible.
by therealpygon | 2025-04-21 00:38:56+00:00
It happens several times a year in the US alone, often unreported, and about 100 times a year worldwide. I don’t disagree that every lab can have improved precautions. I know I for one am encouraged by how focused the conversation is on improving domestic lab safety and encouraging our global community to introduce stricter controls by… checks notes …staring a trade war with them, firing staff in various related agencies, decreasing research funding, decreasing health department staff, and decreasing oversight while…checks notes agains …blaming Biden. I’m shocked by how the new administration is so capable of honing in on the root of problems.
by dogma1138 | 2025-04-21 00:41:24+00:00
The nuclear family worked when you could easily have a single household provider, it doesn’t work anymore and the recent trend of having multi generational households seems to be completely driven by people not being able to afford to move out.

I always pondered if child baring should be done as a generational leap.

As in how would society look like if people have kids in their 20’s with the grandparents who are in their 40’s being the primary caretakers and rinse and repeat.

Seems that this combines the best outcomes in terms of biology and still being able pursue educational and career goals.

But this is a very major shift from where we are today. It’s going to be far more likely that more and more people will start having children in their late 30’s and even 40’s and 50’s. If we are going that way then freezing sprem and eggs at a young age should be much cheaper than it is now and people should really start considering it.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-21 00:41:27+00:00
> I wonder how Island, Greenland, Norway etc. live with a population count far lower without the fear of extinction.

Countries aren't species, they are social constructs; they are maintained memetically, not genetically. There is no shortage of humans to assure that survival of countries that pay sufficient effort to their memetic continuity.

With present population trends, in a few centuries it might be time to be concerned about birthrates if they don't adjust thermostatically to changed global population conditions, but there is certainly no imminent threat from low birthrates.
by ecb_penguin | 2025-04-21 00:42:28+00:00
> Citation needed

That's not how things work.... It's also a weird way to have a conversation or discussion.

I can't prove a negative that millions of people didn't do something.

> At some point at some position you will be ALWAYS vulnerable.

It costs $50 to become a CEO. It does not make you vulnerable nor likely to commit federal crimes.
by kevmo314 | 2025-04-21 00:43:21+00:00
Wholly agree. Too often we think about scale far too early.

I've seen very simple services get bogged down in needing to be "scalable" so they're built so they can be spun up or torn down easily. Then a load balancer is needed. Then an orchestration layer is needed so let's add Kubernetes. Then a shared state cache is needed so let's deploy Redis. Then we need some sort of networking layer so let's add a VPC. That's hard to configure though so let's infra-as-code it with terraform. Then wow that's a lot of infrastructure so let's hire an SRE team.

Now nobody is incentivized to remove said infrastructure because now jobs rely on it existing so it's ossified in the organization.

And that's how you end up with a simple web server that suddenly exploded into costing millions a year.
Ask HN: How to limit AI coding tools access to the file system?
by zzabc | 2025-04-21 00:44:30+00:00
Hello HN, is there a way to prevent AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code from having access to the whole file system, and limit them to the project directory?

I am asking as someone who works for many clients and on their own projects on the same computer and who is still hesitating to install these tools.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-04-21 00:46:51+00:00
For those motivated purely by fear of their home no longer increasing in value, faster than inflation, a scheme like this might help soften their opposition.

Unfortunately, the coalition of people who oppose housing is not purely financially motivated.

There our groups of people for whom low density living is all about status and excluding others, and there is no amount of money that would compensate them for loss of status and exclusion.

There are others for whom the argument is purely aesthetic or sentimental - they legit cannot imagine any type of nice neighbourhood composed the buildings that are single-family homes with triangle roofs.

Some have never lived in anything other than a single-family home, and their understanding of multifamily buildings comes from news media and cultural stereotypes. They believe that as soon as you have a multi family structure, it’s automatically a ghetto of some sort, while simultaneously being luxury housing.

Many fear increased traffic, but will also oppose any effort to limit cars.

Others just fear change of any kind.

I have been to more housing hearings than I can count, and the reasons people oppose housing are myriad. I don’t think there’s any sort of silver bullet to lessen opposition, and I suspect people have been opposing housing for as long as housing has existed.

What I think went wrong is that we gave people an unusually powerful set of tools in the 20th century to really lock down the aggregate total of floor space that it’s possible to build in a given region, so there’s almost no wiggle room. We made the default that building is unusual and bad, and put the onus on builders to justify construction, rather than forcing opponents to justify using government power to ban construction.

To get out of it, we either need to abolish this set of tools, or at least raise the default so significantly that it is higher than any foreseeable demand. Not only does this accomplish the goal of simply allowing housing to be built, but by ensuring that the amount that can be built is much higher than any amount anyone would ever want to build, it removes the leverage of landholders. No particular plot is more special than any other simply because the government said so.
by margalabargala | 2025-04-21 00:52:15+00:00
I'm not misunderstandings, you are conflating several different things: TRT, testosterone as a contraceptive, and testosterone as a body building steroid.

TRT is a very low dose of testosterone, used to supplement the body when it doesn't produce enough. It is reversible as you say, and has a negative effect on fertility but not enough to be reliably effective as a contraceptive at TRT dosages.

Testosterone as a contraceptive or steroid is a far higher dose. This is the one that has permanent effects.
by GianFabien | 2025-04-21 00:52:35+00:00
I appreciate you responding to my comments. Rarely do I get any responses from the person originally posing the question.

I got involved in my first startup soon after I graduated with my undergrad degree and started on a part-time masters degree. I worked on a day job to pay my rent, food, etc. And I worked for the startup the rest of the time. Sometimes I would work all night and go to the day job without any sleep, just a quick shower. It didn't work out. The startup did a pivot and in so doing screwed me out of at least a million AUD. That was lesson #1. It was decades ago.

I have since been involved in many other startups, most on a full-time basis. Varying durations until runway got burnt up. I'm very much the tech guy. In hindsight I put too much faith in the business acumen co-founders and investors. Had to return to consulting work in between those startup attempts. That is how I kept myself afloat.

I'm in Australia and VCs are nothing like those in SV. In general risk aversion is high and the success dynamics in the USA don't translate well to local conditions, culture, etc. I think you may be in a comparable environment. So you need to temper your expectations for Tillit in light of your local environment. Read up on Steve Blank https://steveblank.com/books-for-startups/ The takeaway: find product market fit. If you don't you don't have a business.

I have gone on to get my PhD in software engineering and from time to time I teach at one Australia's best universities. I'm now retired courtesy of some good real-estate investments. I learnt a lot about the business world through consulting work. I now focus technical mentoring for startups on behalf of the investors rather than the founders.
by leehuffman | 2025-04-21 00:53:10+00:00
> Is there a law mandating realtime reporting, or something

Not real time in WA, but all records are public and reported fairly consistently. See https://www.topshelfdata.com for an example of that.

> or are there just limited number of POS providers and they all have realtime API(s)?

This is Headset who is probably the largest retail POS provider (amongst other offerings on the producer/processor side and more) for legal marijuana sales. I'm assuming the data presented here is exclusively from their POS platform. I don't know of any public sources for real time sales data.

> I bet the dashboard doesn't have Johnny from my street corner's transaction...

Yes I'd also bet Johnny doesn't report his sales to a central database/platform.
by cryptonector | 2025-04-21 00:54:11+00:00
Wheeled vehicles have lots of opportunities for braking, but airplanes and boats not so much, so even if you could do regenerative braking (which you probably can't) it'd not be enough to be worth doing. It's a loss compared to wheeled EVs of 30%-50%.

And then airplanes typically need to be lighter when landing than when taking off, and jet fuel has the nice properties that a) as you use it up what you've left weighs less, b) you can toss enough jet fuel to get to landing weight if need be. Batteries have neither of those properties, which means that electric airplanes would have to be built much sturdier (i.e., heavier, therefore more expensive and less efficient) to handle heavy landings, or would have to carry less cargo / fewer passengers per unit of stored energy (i.e., less efficient).

I'm afraid that no matter how good wheeled EVs get, it's going to require a whole new kind of battery before you can ever get to practical. large electric airplanes.
by dfxm12 | 2025-04-21 00:54:31+00:00
I'm sure most people know the story. In the Twin Peaks pilot, a mirror reflection of a set dresser was briefly caught by the camera. Instead of editing this out of reshooting, David Lynch gave him a role in the show.

Anyway, movies can have revisions. A movie is as much a commercial product as it is art. I don't see why people need to get all righteous about it, especially in cases where directors, actors, etc., don't care.

Novels get revisions. Even fine art prints may have editions with differences between them. Old wood blocks by a famous artist may even be restruck decades later by a different person. They're still recognized as the piece.
by Validark | 2025-04-21 00:54:51+00:00
The story is indeed very short, but hits hard. Odin reveals himself and his mystical disc that he states makes him king as long as he holds it. The Christian hermit (by circumstance) who had previously received him told him he didn't worship Him, that he worshiped Christ instead, and then murdered him for the disc in the hopes he could sell it for a bunch of money. He dumped Odin's body in the river and never found the disc. The man hated Odin to this day for not just handing over the disc to him.

I wonder if there's some message in here. As a modern American reader, if I believed the story was contemporary, I'd think it's making a point about Christianity substituting honor for destructive greed. That a descendant of the wolves of Odin would worship a Hebrew instead and kill him for a bit of money is quite sad, but I don't think it an inaccurate characterization. There's also the element of resentment towards Odin for not just handing over monetary blessings. That's sad to me as well. Part of me hopes that one day Odin isn't held in such contempt.
by thechao | 2025-04-21 00:55:13+00:00
I have poor color discrimination, but excellent flicker detection (?). This last skill was discovered by the senior devs when I was doing GPU driver debug, and “we” were looking for an extremely transient high-refresh rate tile clear issue. The issue only occurred at 120Hz (or higher) refresh rate with solid clear color on a large screen, with nearly identical colors. About one 4x8 pixel tile every minute or so. That was a boring few days, let me tell you.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-21 00:55:41+00:00
I learned a lot by watching electricians work on things I needed done. Same with plumbers and cable guys.

It really saves a ton of money, because then you can just do it yourself. Like replacing the dimmer switch with a regular switch - costs about $2 from the hardware store for the switch, and a few minutes.

Having a plumber show up costs $300 just for him to come to your house. It pays off big time to do what you can yourself.

P.S. I always ask for permission to watch them work. They appreciate the ask, and so don't think it's creepy.