MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-05-14 12:26:25+00:00
The lower birthrates are also happening in countries like Sweden/Finland/Norway where higher education is "free" and healthcare is also "free" so those are not the reasons why women opt out of motherhood, or at least not the complete reasons anyway.

The trend is global so the main reason is most likely something global. In this case couldn't it be simply that motherhood is no longer attractive to women and they want to do other things instead of raising kids?
Show HN: I made a tool that markets your book for you
by Florin-Adrian | 2025-05-14 12:26:26+00:00
Hi Everyone!

I’m a technical founder with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and 10+ years of hands-on AI experience. Once large-language models began to truly grasp long-form context (and could weave stylistically on-brand prose) I saw how perfectly they fit the needs of authors and publishers, whose books demand that same nuanced understanding.

That insight led me to launch ManuscriptReport.com, an AI-powered platform that turns manuscripts into market-ready assets, helping writers and presses conquer book marketing with unprecedented speed and precision.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-14 12:26:35+00:00
Three quarters of US auto execs know something that Trump doesn't --- isolation has never worked over the long term and is a prescription for a less prosperous, less relevant, less GREAT society.

Instead of (or in addition to) tariffs, what the US should be focusing on is education and robotics.

A highly trained/educated workforce in a mechanically enhanced industry is the only way to negate the cost advantage of the Chinese.

Isolation is for idiots.
by kaibee | 2025-05-14 12:26:58+00:00
> Yes, kids are expensive. But countries like Korea and Singapore are pouring money into incentives and still seeing fertility drop to record lows.

This is what you're missing. They are not.

When the Titanic hit the iceberg, you could have gone from 0 people bailing water on the ship with buckets to the whole complement of crew and passengers (if you had enough buckets). You could talk about how there's now thousands of gallons of water being bailed out of the ship per minute. Without the context of the actual cause it would sure sound like a lot of water, like a meaningful attempt. But the Titanic would still sink.

In the last 100 years, we went requiring 1 income to support a household to 2 incomes to support a household. Everyone acted rationally, but its a very large scale prisoner's dilemma. Women wanted economic freedom and the economy was happy for more labor. There was no accounting for the labor women had already been doing. And so dual income households, at every level, pushed up the prices of everything that can't come out of factory in China. Even at the scale of ~300k individual incomes, a second person bringing in 100k-200k makes a noticeable difference, right? So for 99% of the population, dual income for some # of years, just til we buy our first house, just need a new car, well you get used to the standard of living dual income provides... and houses are more expensive now... jobs less secure... and you'd have to see online what you'd be missing out on...

Well, we took the "slack" out of the system and sold it. Without really being aware of its value.

And now governments, like those of Korea and Singapore, are trying to buy it back, but they haven't _really_ grappled with the scale of debt that was incurred, because it wasn't on any balance sheet.
by snowwrestler | 2025-05-14 12:27:02+00:00
Vacation home rentals have been a thing for decades. As far back as the 1980s my family would book houses for vacation, usually in areas where lots of houses booked out that way.

In vacation destinations there are real estate companies that specialize in this. In the old days you would contact the local chamber of commerce for a referral, or look them up in the phone book. After that, there were websites like VRBO (still around, still works well). Now they put their stock onto AirBnB as well.

AirBnB did not invent short-term rentals. The parent is right that housing supply issues have a much deeper root cause than AirBnB.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-05-14 12:27:23+00:00
No, AirBnB just became much more expensive. And it's disguised as processing fees, cleaning fees, etc.

So if I ever take the risk of getting an Airbnb instead of a hotel, then I know the next time I book I'll pay cash directly with the host because it will be that much cheaper.

It's like uber: the bait and switch to a service that becomes less good and more expensive is costing them because the competition survived the first wave.

Also, the regulations caught up with them.

Basically, they wanted to win by scummy means, like a lot of American startup that calls doing illegal or immoral stuff "growth hacks".

Still worked well, they are a leader, but not enough to kill the game, and now they have to fight.

Good.
by berkes | 2025-05-14 12:28:40+00:00
It is not wrong.

For one, it's semantic: It's only a contribution if it adds value to a project.

What you probably mean is that "not everything handed to us is a contribution". And that's valid: There will be a lot of issues, code, discussions, ideas, and what more that substract, or have negative value. One can call this "spam".

So, the problem to solve, is to avoid the "spam" and allow the contributions. Or, if you disagree with the semantics, avoid the "negative value contributions" and "allow the positive value contributions".

A part of that solution is technical: filters, bots, tools, CI/CD, etc. Many of which github doesn't offer, BTW. A big part is social and process: guidelines, expectations, codes-of-conduct, etc. I've worked in some Open Source projects where the barriers to entry where really high, with endorsements, red-tape, sign-offs, wavers, proof-of-conducts etc. And a large part is simply inevitable "resources". It takes resources to manage the incoming stuff, enforce the above, communicate it, forever, etc.

If someone isn't willing to commit these resources, or cannot, then, ultimately, the right choice to make is to simply not allow contributions - it can still be open source, just won't take input. Like e.g. sqlite.
by ghaff | 2025-05-14 12:28:40+00:00
There's a lot of truth in that.

Normally, I never use a kitchen when traveling. When with GF, she does often like eggs in the morning though. So if there isn't a hotel/inn breaffast that can sometimes be useful.

I agree with respect to circumstances where you want houses or at least multi-room apartments though. Hotels aren't mostly a good fit for that although suite hotels sometimes have a couple of bedrooms.
by drooopy | 2025-05-14 12:29:19+00:00
You're right that many aspects of life have improved since the 1930s, but that doesn’t mean the current conditions for raising children are good or sustainable. In high-income countries, lower birth rates correlate with rising housing costs, lack of affordable childcare, stagnant wages, and job insecurity.

People in the 1930s did have more kids, quite often out of necessity. Child labour was the norm, birth control access was severely limited cmpared to today, and high infant mortality rates meant larger families were a survival strategy.
by Tade0 | 2025-05-14 12:29:37+00:00
I don't think it's that and it's more about how conscious a decision it is nowadays. It's not the future - it's the attitude towards it.

Teen pregnancies are at an all time low everywhere in the developed world and it's not just thanks to the availability of contraception, but also a generational shift in attitudes towards risk taking.

Overall people are having children later and therefore fewer because they feel that they need to be more established in life first - the larger the city, the stronger this sentiment.

I have children myself so I had plenty of conversations about people's decisions in this regard and the majority of those I spoke with who don't have children see it as some kind of grand undertaking that either requires more preparation (indefinitely) or is just too much to bear.

Meanwhile my parents' generation would essentially yolo people into this world, sometimes by accident.

We've become too cautious for our own good.
by rorylaitila | 2025-05-14 12:29:56+00:00
I've always been a fan of Model Driven Development (MDD), which is by today's standards an ancient paradigm. You define the core data model (resources), properties (attributes), and actions, and auto-generate the UI/API. It was more popular back when OOP first met Web Development. It seems to have fallen to the wayside with manually constructed "fat controllers" being the dominant way to organize web apps today. I have my own framework in MDD style. For a long time I've told people "I can code at the speed of thought." My apps are 80% the data model, 20% the UI, with the middle layer almost entirely generated. Tools like GraphQL, Supabase, and auto-admins kind of go in the same direction.
by jokoon | 2025-05-14 12:30:19+00:00
Sorry, but it's easier to learn basic C++/C, and let beginner developers get lessons from a basic linter or clang-tidy for about the same result, for a fraction of the developer cost.

I want rust to be adopted and I believe companies should force it, but you will not get adoption from young developers and even less from senior C++ developers.

Not to mention rewriting existing C++ code in rust, which cost would be astronomical, although I do believe companies should invest in rewriting things in rust because it's the right thing to do.
by heelix | 2025-05-14 12:30:22+00:00
Looking back, much of pilot training is handling things gone wrong and honing skills that keep things safe. CFI would make the joke we were going to practice crashing, as almost every flight would lose a (simulated) instrument, engine, or have something abnormal happen.

Looking at my training, I had about 7-8 hours of dual training - landing, takeoff, radio/tower, spins/stalls (w00t) - before I flew solo. From there, my world slowly expanded to not getting lost, staying out of clouds, and other more advanced topics and areas further from home. Suspect it was another 40'ish hours of learning about crashing. :)
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-14 12:30:27+00:00
> Some kinds of work benefit greatly from a keyboard, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want oneall the time

I would say most kinds of work.

Even if you're just on teams discussions - a real keyboard is much more productive than messing around on a touchscreen. Same with just reading. Sometimes I read a forum thread on my phone and then when I get back to the real computer I'm surprised how little I read and how much it felt like.

The only thing where I don't see this being the case is creative work like drawing where a tablet is really perfect, much better than a wacom or something.
by Ragnarork | 2025-05-14 12:30:38+00:00
> I'm really surprised that a 5% performance degradation would lead people to choose C over Rust

I'm really surprised that because something is in Rust and not in C, it would lead people to ignore a 5% performance degradation.

Seriously... when you get something that's 5% faster especially in the video codec space, why would you dismiss it just because it's not in your favorite language... That does sound like a silly reason to dismiss a faster implementation.
by CreepGin | 2025-05-14 12:30:49+00:00
After trying out Electron, Tauri, Dioxus, Flutter, and Wails, I’ve come to the conclusion that when it comes to desktop apps and UI, nothing really beats the combo of the JS ecosystem, Chromium, and V8. It's just very powerful and well-supported.

Experienced devs or teams can easily keep perf overhead to be under 15% compared to native. IMO it's a great trade-off for the amount of dev time you save.

That said, native still has its edge in:

- ultra-low input latency

- battery efficiency

- memory control (especially GPU)
by sotix | 2025-05-14 12:31:39+00:00
Wow you got a lot of responses! I was given a take-home assignment from Kagi to build a RSS scraper where Vlad responded to only one of my four questions. I asked how long I should spend on it, and he responded with a single sentence saying as long as I thought necessary. After four days of work to get an MVP complete, I submitted the project. I received a single sentence rejection a week later.

Love the service. Very disappointed in the process. Four days for a take-home with absolutely minimal feedback is really bad. I decided to jump through the hoops because it seemed like a really cool company to work for.
by hermannj314 | 2025-05-14 12:31:50+00:00
Most Americans don't have the mathematical rigor to understand a rent vs. buy calculator, but I love the idea that every American without kids understands how to calculate the present value of a deferred annuity against the cost of raising a kid and have made the multi-decade commitment to forgo family life simply as a result of that calculation and knowing that they will come out ahead in the end.
by Xenoamorphous | 2025-05-14 12:32:03+00:00
They’re supposedly regulated where I live, too, but the property has to meet certain criteria like having an independent entrance in the building, which most apartments can’t meet so they operate illegaly, and Airbnb happily allows them to be in their platform.

So now I have to put up with the apartment next door being an illegal Airbnb, with all the inconveniences that come with that.
by Robdel12 | 2025-05-14 12:32:05+00:00
I applied to neon last week and then the news broke about the acquisition. They rejected it this morning — I have never been happier to receive a rejection to an application.

This would’ve been three acquisitions straight for me and… I’m okay, they’re awful. I just want stability.

Congrats to the neon team! I use and love neon. Really hope this doesn’t change them too much.
by Benjamin_Dobell | 2025-05-14 12:32:22+00:00
> especially for something like a video codec

Why especially video decoders?

> I wonder if they really care or if this is one of those "we don't want to use Rust because of silly reasons and here's are reasonable-sounding but actually irrelevant technical justification"...

I would have thought video decoders are specifically one of the few cases where performance really is important enough to trump language guaranteed security. They're widely deployed, and need to work in a variety of environments; everything from low power mobile devices to high-throughput cloud infrastructure. They also need to be low latency for live broadcast/streaming.

That's not to say security isn't a concern. It absolutely is, especially given the wide variety of deployment targets. However, video decoders aren't something that necessarily need to continually evolve over time. If you prioritize secure coding practices and pair that with some formal/static analysis, then you ought to be able to squeeze out more performance than Rust. For example, Rust may be inserting bounds checks on repeated access — where as a C program could potentially validate this sort of information just the once up front and pass the "pre-validated" data structure around (maybe even across threads) "knowing" that it's valid data. Yes, there's a security risk involved, but it may be worth it.
by Pikamander2 | 2025-05-14 12:32:44+00:00
I've become a lot more jaded about online reviews over the years.

I had an Amazon review removed because apparently mentioning that a competing product is more effective goes against their TOS.

I had a WordPress plugin review removed because apparently a critical vulnerability that got our site hacked isn't a valid reason to give it one star.

I had a local BBQ chain offer to give me a free bottle of sauce if I let them watch me give them a 5-star rating on Google.

I've seen tons of video game and app websites apply "anti review-bombing" measures to factor out thousands of low ratings for being supposedly off-topic, often for major games that they're financially affiliated with through sales or advertising.

And that's just for third-party websites. If a company's website has customer ratings/reviews for their own products, then the conflict of interest is too great to even pretend that they might be legitimate.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-05-14 12:32:55+00:00
> and you can reasonably expect there to be a ton of ads

Expect? Yes. Reasonably expect? I'd dispute that: ads aren't inherent to much of the web (advertisement archives and classifieds sites being exceptions).

You can run an ad blocker that completely removes ads, so you don't have to interact with them at all, and it's an improvement. Try to run a baseball blocker, and you've ruined the game of baseball. The risk of injury from a baseball is a consequence of the presence of baseballs, thanks to physics; and the harm from advertisements is likewise a consequence of their presence, yet there is no reason for the latter to be there to begin with!
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-14 12:33:08+00:00
11" laptops are not fine to type on all day unless you give them huge bezels (even the 11" macbook which did have those huge bezels was space-constrained on the less important keys). Ergonomics is really important.

Sure it's fine to get by for an hour or two but spending 8 hours 5 days a week on one is a really bad idea and will provide a great path to crippling RSI. In fact using any laptop that much is a bad idea, due to the bad posture it provides (with the screen attached to the keyboard). This is why docking stations are still so important.
by camgunz | 2025-05-14 12:34:07+00:00
> Anywhere you could build a hotel you could also build more housing

Not really in practice. Ex: there's lots of hotels around airports and highways. Would anyone want to buy a house there? Definitely not. The markets and thus economics are totally different.

> having short term stays is important for those visiting even for non-tourism reasons (e.g. in town to visit family, for work, etc)

I don't know about "important", but "useful" yeah. The thing is like, how ubiquitous is this? I'd naively guess for every 1 person who finds this useful, 1000s more are negatively impacted by Airbnb.
by masfoobar | 2025-05-14 12:34:28+00:00
Honestly, I dont think it really matters if there was a fight between Odin, Zig and Jai. I doubt one is going to be a "winner" but one could be the more popular of the 3 and, chances are, it is not because the language is better but how it is advertised.

Truth is Rust gets a lot of headlines especially in relation to "memory safety" being thrown around in recent years. Not saying it isn't something to be taken seriously but "Rust" and "Memory Safety" are interchangable when a non-programmer blogger writes an article.

- Its Rust that being added into the Linux Kernel. - Its Rust being added to Window Kernel - Its Rust building replacement software (might I add already battle tested projects!) such as coreutil + Expect there to be (if not already) rewrites of git, nginx, sqlite -- in memory-safe, blazingly fast Rust.

Rust, rust, rust, rust... RUST!

Truth is Rust is taking over. This will either become a HUGE waste of time or mistake.. or it will be the standard for low-level, memory safe software... cancelling out C or C++ originals that have existed for decades (and already stable)

The way things are going, you will have Rust... and in the distance (some further than others) is Go, Zig, Jai, Odin, C3, etc. Of course, language like Java, C#, Javascript, etc -- will continue as they are.

This is not a dig or hatred. This is just how I see it... and I am really liking Odin. I mean what jobs will I see advertised in the next 10-15 years? I bet I will see more and more Rust in the coming years. The others I mentioned above... I expect to see some Go and some odd Zig... but will I see an Odin or Jai?

I hope I am proven wrong. As I wrote, I like Odin!
by klinki | 2025-05-14 12:34:36+00:00
ZWCAD doesn't really do BIM in China, although the ZWCAD software is integrated with Archline XP, which is BIM software.

A popular standalone BIM provider in China is KuSpace, which is made by Manycore Tech. Manycore KuSpace

Wondershare fotophire is often used in place of Adobe Photoshop in China. In fact, Wondershare has a whole suite of apps similar to Adobe in China. Wondershare Filmora is made deliberately simple, as a lot of video editors are new to the profession in China. I expect Filmora to become more and more advanced, like Adobe Premiere Pro as the video editing industry matures in China.

Then there is KANVID for vector graphics, similar to Illustrator to some extent.

I agree with you, there will be more effort to chip away at these professional tools over time as several sectors in these related industries mature in China.
by brokegrammer | 2025-05-14 12:35:42+00:00
> People living in rich first world countries with stagnating economies like Canada expect a better future and standard of living for their kids than those from impoverished third world countries

Most parents want their children to live a good life, whether they're from poor country or not. Besides, people used to have more sex in the past when life seemed much more hopeless than it is now. Granted, condoms didn't exist but these days, people aren't even dating anyway.

> The reasons have been written in this thread

It's all speculation at this point. If we knew the reasons, we'd solve the problem. Like the meaning of life, there are some things we can't know.
by louthy | 2025-05-14 12:36:27+00:00
When people are considering having children, of course the first thing they think is “our lives are objectively better than the 1930s, let’s go for it!”

As the GP makes clear, most people think about the future, not the past. And many think the future is looking pretty bleak right now.

I do think there’s a tendency to overstate the potential future problems (humans are resourceful and will find ways to solve them), but the psychology of this seems fairly clear cut.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-14 12:36:40+00:00
> Having all your data always with you stored locally (on your phone) is simpler than syncing and more private than cloud.

You need to sync it anyway. Having that phone with you all day also means exposing it to a lot of risk involving theft, drops and other kind of damage. You need that sync for backup purposes.

I agree actually having it on the phone is great though. I use DeX a LOT, it's a great way of working when I don't have my laptop with me but do have a docking station available (e.g. at the office when I forget my laptop or just dropped in unplanned)
by notpushkin | 2025-05-14 12:36:50+00:00
This is cool, though you would definitely make changes to make UI look decent, and a lot of changes on top of that to make it something that’s a joy to use. For API though, it should probably just work - but then again, there’s tons of stuff like Django REST Framework which, while also a bit dated, works really well in 95% of cases (and lets you handle the other 5%).

Yet here I am, writing CRUD endpoints by hand in Node.js...
by pjc50 | 2025-05-14 12:36:53+00:00
Why have two people linked the same youtube video as if that's some kind of response to a graph? The population has (past tense) levelled out. It is roughly flat over the past few years. It is not yet falling at a significant rate. It is a long time away from "the population is 5% off its peak", and my argument is that that is the real signal (in the control theory sense) which people might respond to, the rise in empty properties and unfilled jobs.

> find people who are good at child-rearing, give them training, and give them government support to raise 8 kids.

"Mother of the Soviet Union" or "welfare queen"?

It might work, but a lot of people get really, really mad at taxpayers money subsidizing other people's children.