MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by futureshock | 2025-05-25 19:07:12+00:00
I’d encourage thinking not just about yourself or your immediate circle when it comes to policy like retirement age. State run pension systems affect nearly everyone, not just the extremely fortunate few who can become financially independent at a younger age. And that is also largely an American phenomenon anyway. Salaries are much lower on average than in Europe and there is far less differential between minimum wage and what senior employees get paid. There’s also not the same culture of investing because European companies don’t have the same performance as the US stock market. Lower yield real estate investment is much more common in many European countries. And with strong social safety nets Europeans are generally less pressured to save a huge nest egg.

So this raising of the retirement age will affect a huge portion of workers and 70 is OLD to be working full time for all but the most relaxed jobs. Most older folks I know have know being dealing with multiple chronic age related illnesses well before 70.
by niemandhier | 2025-05-25 19:07:45+00:00
I can only give you the rundown for Germany, but I guess it’s similar in Denmark:

Basically the state spends to much money on humans in general. A young qualified immigrant might have a less negative impact than a slightly older German person, but both of them will be money sinks in the long run.

Statistically immigrants in Germany are less qualified than the general population, so they’ll have an even more negative impact.

The only valid solution is to reduce the spending per person, both birthrate and immigration will only delay the problem.

Denmark should be in a slightly better position than Germany since their health system is cheaper.
by keybored | 2025-05-25 19:07:49+00:00
> What a fantastic example of using “democratic” as a synonym for good and “not democratic” as bad. Thank you for illustrating the author’s point so well.

OP says that democracy is one with checks and balances. It’s a straightforward disagreement about definitions.

The author makes no points at all, but that’s neither here nor there in this context.

> By the way, the term of art for what you’re doing, of defining democracy I like as real democracy and democracy I don’t like as not democracy is to call democracy I like “liberal democracy”.

Liberal democracy is very anemic on the democracy part.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-25 19:07:57+00:00
Danes are by and large all English speakers, probably the last generation who would have much difficulty with conversational English are all 70+ years old now. And while Danes are generally very polite and friendly with foreigners, there is a level of personal closeness (part of the "hygge" concept) that you will rarely penetrate if you are not a lifelong close friend or family member. This is another part of why real integration into Danish culture is nearly impossible for a foreigner.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-25 19:08:14+00:00
The budgetary questions are unrelated to UX/UI stagnation though.

It's annoying how many modern web sites change their entire design framework once every two years, yes. But ATC? Aeronautics in general? Most of maritime? Once it's certified, it's practically ossified - and for good reason. Bad UI/UX can literally kill [1].

Nevertheless, I think it's worth having the debate - and that led by actual air traffic controllers, please - if and if yes, how, UX/UI can be improved.

[1] https://uxmovement.com/buttons/how-an-interface-mode-killed-...
by ido | 2025-05-25 19:08:32+00:00
US economic aid to Israel ended in 2007 (18 years ago).

The US since then only provides Israel with military aid (most of which is only allowed to be spent buying US-made goods). It’s more of a subsidy for the US military-industrial complex.

Also despite the military aid Israel still spends a much greater share of GDP on its military than most or all other developed countries (so the US isn't subsidising Israel’s unusually high birth rate).
by nichol4s | 2025-05-25 19:08:47+00:00
This is amazing - well done, and indeed runs oh-so smooth - even on mobile!

I see that the browser is somewhat limited as most sites try to prevent 'embedding'. However, we have a solution where we can proxy any web content in such a way to still allow you to embed it: https://www.webfuse.com/use-case/embed-unembeddable-content

Lmk if you would like to try this out and I can help you set this up.
by soerxpso | 2025-05-25 19:08:56+00:00
> In 1930 Keynes projected that by 2000 their grandchildren could work 15 hours per week

This projection came true. You can live with a 1930s living standard while working 15 hours per week at a median wage. However, nobody wants to live at a 1930s living standard. It turns out that in aggregate people prefer to spend productivity gains on conveniences and higher standards of living than on working fewer hours.
by anonzzzies | 2025-05-25 19:10:30+00:00
Yeah, probably 90 here in the EU is a good cut off. People I know seem to make 80 quite easily, but at 85 it goes down quite a bit and after that even the best seem to be done. For me that's 35 years ago at least but I am planning to not get to 90 and if I do, I won't be interested (or know it) anyway.
by qmarchi | 2025-05-25 19:10:49+00:00
To play devil's advocate: The hypocrisy that was pointed out in the post are post "post compile" events.

If you want to setup Play Services, that's on the onus of the user, same thing with distribution of GPLv3 applications.

The problem is that the utilizing GPLv3 code during compliation (and yes it's technically copying the APK more or less) of the operating system, means that it trips some of GPLv3's linking requirements.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for accessibility, but coming under legal fire is a big no-no for many open source projects.
by horhay | 2025-05-25 19:11:29+00:00
Good job buddy. You compared your first few prompt attempts on the RNG machine vs the cherrypicked outputs of other people. But also, I genuinely think you're pulling this argument away from what it was. Tell me if you can see a fidelity improvement from what the last few videogen products that came out. I can link pretty much two videos off-rip from that sub regarding this lipsync thing you seem to be honing in on.

https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1kp75j2/soul_rnb_i... Kling 2.0 output, a lot less overacted in the lipsync area.

https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1kls6gv/the_colorl... 2.0 output, multiple characters. Shows about the same consistency and ability to adapt to dynamic speech as Veo, which is to say it's far from perfect but passes the glance test.

https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1jerh56/worst_date... Kling 1.6 output. Does the lips a lot less visually jarring. The eyes are wonky, but that's generally still a problem with the video genAI space.

The things you'd profess that "will change the world" have been here. It takes maybe an extra one step, but the quality's been comparable. Yet they haven't 6 months ago. Or a month ago. Why's that? Is it perhaps, that people have a habit of overestimating how much use they can get out of these things in their current state like you are?
by mattlondon | 2025-05-25 19:12:31+00:00
So have younger people too, just their life has not been as long (yet).

The way it usually works is taxation from the current working generation pays for the current retirees. You are not paying into your own account for later (that is a private pension)

FWIW in the UK there are more children in poverty (so their parents too) than retirees who are in poverty. Kids don't vote though...
by kypro | 2025-05-25 19:13:19+00:00
Why do people owe me a nice retirement? I never really got the idea of state-funded retirement. Perhaps I should feel I'm owed something if I'm too fragile/disabled to work, but I don't know why age alone should grant me anything?

Appreciate this is a controversial view so interested in hearing why I'm wrong so I can stop holding it. I think retirement should just be replaced by disability welfare to be honest.
by polipus | 2025-05-25 19:13:30+00:00
Cph is one of the major cities, and the biggest one. It's also the area with most population density and opportunities. I won't say that you are wrong because I'm not familiar with what you can find 20 min of Aalborg, etc, but I find disingeneus portraing a picture where in dk you can buy a house for 80k USD and leaving out the information that you are probably in the middle of nowhere - no jobs, no public transport, no services. It's not that people "decide" to live in cph or in a major city, they are basically forced to if they need to have a job and do stuff. Sure, if you work remote and like being in the countryside alone you have a lot of options, most people don't have that luxury.
by dsign | 2025-05-25 19:13:38+00:00
There is an obvious solution to the problem of ageing population and declining birth rates. Furthermore, it's a solution everybody's secret soul wants very much: keep people younger for longer. Invent rejuvenation. But politicians would never dare go in front of cameras and say that they will put a dollar into R&D for such an outcome, because the wall of insults and disdain we would hurl, for no rational reason, at them, would be higher than a tsunami. There is something seriously broken in our collective psyche.
by nicolashahn | 2025-05-25 19:14:19+00:00
The difference is that this is a change in the demographics of a population, not the overall growth, which is limited by resources available. The growth of Islam isn't constrained by anything other than the cultural practices that lead to them having more children than the rest of the population and the tolerance of the country for immigration. These things could definitely shift to balance the scales but there's no guarantee that happens and there have absolutely been many times in history where a native population has been displaced by the growth of an immigrant group.

Stepping back a bit, Pew expects Islam to overtake Christianity as the dominant world religion in a few decades: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/06/why-musli...
by perching_aix | 2025-05-25 19:14:42+00:00
I might be just impressionable and naive, but if this is a false narrative, apart from me just finding it rather believable, it's also a surprisingly falsifiable one:

> According to Faris, she gave two people she’d met in a writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls lived to help with final revisions and to hunt for typos. She said one of them used AI to fix sentences without her knowledge. “I want to be clear: I never approved the use of AI and I condemn it because [of the usual talking points...]

She could just publish the Google Docs document for people to review the edit history of. Not a Google Workspaces whiz, but my impression is that edit history is immutably retained, so unless one could reasonably speculate Google being in on the con, this would conclusively prove (support) her version of the story, particularly if the timelines work out. I wonder if she'd also have a legal case against the person who made the change.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-05-25 19:14:42+00:00
that 25 watts was just for ram. You still need another ~5 watts for cpu and display at idle, so you're talking about a laptop that lasts ~3 hours with the screen on literally doing nothing. For comparison, my 2021 XPS-13 (with a pretty small 55wH battery) lasts at least 4 hours under actual use (video playback, browsing github, compiling code etc).

Also, when your laptop is using 25W just for the RAM, that's ~20 watts less that the CPU/GPU get when you want to power up the CPU/GPU.
by somat | 2025-05-25 19:14:45+00:00
> "required a full engine rebuild insanely often, something like every 1000 hours."

If that is true it is delightfully ironic. I have heard that the main reason the M1 has a turbine is that the army saw the dramatic improvement in reliability that turbines brought to their helicopters and said "that, we want that in a tank"
by BrenBarn | 2025-05-25 19:14:52+00:00
More and more I think part of the problem is the burden of proof. It's too easy for executives to hide behind plausible deniability. There needs to be a presumption of individual executive guilt if bad conduct by the company is found to have occurred. In other words, if it happens on your watch, you are guilty of it.

Another way forward is that the presumption of innocence should be a sliding scale based on the amount a person has benefited. So if you made $100 million from the company, the bar is very low; you don't get to make $100 million unless everything is absolutely squeaky clean. If you were just an average joe taking home a $50k paycheck, you get much more benefit of doubt. So it's basically like making a lot of money off any endeavor is itself something that requires extra-good conduct; the default position is no one gets to make a lot of money at all.
by fzwang | 2025-05-25 19:14:56+00:00
This is something I had to deal with as well. It also surprized me in terms of how limited their information sources are, esp with younger students. One thing I found helpful is to actually introduce them to engineers in person (like a take your kid to work day), which I think grounds them a bit. But this box-checking influence is everywhere, including in the K-12 curriculum. In some ways I understand their perspective. Most schools/teachers do have a box-checking mentality, and I think students intuitively understand that what these "educators" are after is a metric. They don't actually care about real skills. But to your point, the rest of the world actually values competency and it's something students should strive towards for the long-term.
by crabl | 2025-05-25 19:15:24+00:00
As a potential solution, do you think formal/semi-formal software development education (undergrad programs, colleges/polytechnics, dev bootcamps, etc) should lean super heavily into AI? To the extent that it's not just "use ChatGPT to help you complete this assignment" but rather "complete this assignment using *only* ChatGPT: you're not allowed to write any of the code by yourself".
by ezst | 2025-05-25 19:15:48+00:00
> does anyone else feel that this model isn’t significantly different

According to Anthropic¹, LLMs are mostly a thing in the software engineering space, and not much elsewhere. I am not a software engineer, and so I'm pretty agnostic about the whole thing, mildly annoyed by the constant anthropomorphisation of LLMs in the marketing surrounding it³, and besides having had a short run with Llama about 2 years ago, I have mostly stayed away from it.

Though, I do scripting as a mean to keep my digital life efficient and tidy, and so today I thought that I had a perfect justification for giving Claude 4 Sonnet a spin. I asked it to give me a jujutsu² equivalent for `git -ffdx`. What ensued was that: https://claude.ai/share/acde506c-4bb7-4ce9-add4-657ec9d5c391

I leave you the judge of this, but for me this is very bad. Objectively, for the time that it took me to describe, review, correct some obvious logical flaws, restart, second-guess myself, get annoyed for being right and having my time wasted, fighting unwarranted complexity, etc…, I could have written a better script myself.

So to answer your question, no, I don't think this is significant, and I don't think this generation of LLMs are close to their price tag.

¹: https://www.anthropic.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww-...

²: https://jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/

³: "hallucination", "chain of thought", "mixture of experts", "deep thinking" would have you being laughed at in the more "scientifically apt" world I grew up with, but here we are </rant>
by specialist | 2025-05-25 19:16:12+00:00
This is where I'm stuck.

For other commentators, as I understand it, Chomsky's talking about well-defined grammar and language and production systems. Think Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach. Not "folk" understanding of language.

I have no understanding or intuition, or even a finger nail grasp, for how an LLM generates, seemingly emulating, "sentences", as though created with a generative grammar.

Is any one comparing and contrasting these two different techniques? Being noob, I wouldn't even know where to start looking.

I've gleaned that someone(s) are using LLM/GPT to emit abstract syntax trees (vs a mere stream of tokens), to serve as input for formal grammars (eg programming source code). That sounds awesome. And something I might some day sorta understand.

I've also gleaned that, given sufficient computing power, training data for future LLMs will have tokenized words (vs just character sequences). Which would bring the two strategies closer...? I have no idea.

(Am noob, so forgive my poor use of terminology. And poor understanding of the tech, too.)
by crazygringo | 2025-05-25 19:16:41+00:00
Sure, the technical term is "judicial dissolution".

But the main counterpoint is that there's literally no point to that. If you want to punish the owners, there's no difference between taking the value of their investment to zero, or going beyond that and destroying every contract and job. The owners don't care if a receptionist loses their job too, but the receptionist sure does. It becomes more than just a "death penalty" -- it becomes a "nuclear bomb" that takes out everyone.

So bankruptcy already accomplishes everything you'd want from a "corporate death penalty". The company is gone as far as the previous owners are concerned.
by mistrial9 | 2025-05-25 19:17:27+00:00
my sources : "a History of the Lutheran Church in America", and a personal history written at that time. If your records are accurate and unbiased, I would accept that answer completely and admit it.. but I am not convinced both of those are true. It is interesting and more clarity is welcome. Also your estimate of the population varies by 40% so the accuracy is in question.
by tonyarkles | 2025-05-25 19:17:27+00:00
Not quite the same scale but one of my personal favourite stories involved hardware buried under a highway. The Ethernet stopped working, but the PoE was still ok. We had the foresight to install a serial line to the console on the equipment too. This meant that I could power cycle the hardware at will (through the managed PoE switch) and talk to the boot loader (U-boot) over serial. While not exactly a REPL in the conventional sense, it had enough functionality to be able to talk directly to the MAC and PHY to determine what was going on.

Sadly we couldn’t convince it to work, even at 10 Mbit. My suspicion is salt water ingress into the vault. What we did manage to do, though… There were just enough tools installed on it that I could cross-compile zmodem at home, convert it to a hex file, upload the hex file by essentially just running cat > on the target, convert it back into a binary using… Perl I think? Or xxd? And then doing the daily data offload over zmodem every night instead of over TCP as was originally planned. It was a crazy weekend…
by kace91 | 2025-05-25 19:17:55+00:00
Counterpoint: AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Things like extracting some common structure that’s present in a slightly different way in 30 places, where cursor detects it, or suggesting potential for a certain pattern.

The problem with vibe coding is more behavioral I think: the person more likely to jump in the bandwagon to avoid writing some code themselves is probably not the one thinking about long term architecture and craftsmanship. It’s a laziness enhancer.
by mrtksn | 2025-05-25 19:18:47+00:00
Its just like nationality based employment rights(need to be citizens or have a visa/permit to work) but more granular.

It can have its place, i.e. a way to balance bargaining power with the employer. It’s inherently anti meritocratic though.

In some cases it’s not about merit or about limiting supply however. In some cases it’s impractical to test someones work continuously, so instead it becomes honor based. That is, you are expected to go through an elite track and succeed in an exam once and then you are good for life unless you commit fraud or show gross incompetency.
by neilv | 2025-05-25 19:18:51+00:00
Generative AI outputs are on a spectrum of plagiarism.

Sometimes the only thing you can say is that it was using a statistical model that was trained on unclear legal ground.

Other times, you have people pushing the limits:

> It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work.

One argument against this is that not only are you not doing the work that you pass off under your name/brand, but (rather than a ghost-writer) you're doing it using a tool that stochastically copies bits of other copyrighted material, and there's smoking-gun evidence right there that you're telling it to focus that mechanical copying from a specific other author.

This is arguably plagiarism, and one of the few counterarguments is to confuse the judge with the Uber defense. ("But it's an app! So your outmoded 'laws' and 'rules' do not apply to me! Because technology! Checkmate!")
by quotemstr | 2025-05-25 19:18:59+00:00
No terminfo support? I'm probably tilting at windmills here, but I wish people wouldn't hardcode terminal escape codes. Considering zig's good interop with C, wiring up a call to tigetstr().

It's also important not to emit escape codes at all when TERM=dumb. (You'll get this behavior automatically if you implement color support by asking terminfo to the escape codes.)

const c = @cImport({ @cInclude("ncurses.h"); @cInclude("term.h"); }); pub fn main() !void { // Initialize terminfo _ = c.setupterm(null, 1, null); // Get capability strings const setaf = c.tigetstr("setaf"); // set foreground const setab = c.tigetstr("setab"); // set background const sgr0 = c.tigetstr("sgr0"); // reset // Parameterize for red foreground const red = c.tparm(setaf, c.COLOR_RED, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0); // Use it _ = c.printf("%sThis is red%s\n", red, sgr0); }
by edent | 2025-05-25 19:19:06+00:00
That's simply untrue.

Since 2010, the retirement age for women has raised from 60 to 65. Bringing it in line with the male retirement age.

See https://www.thetimes.com/money-mentor/pensions-retirement/st...

The age (for both) is gradually rising to 68.

Source https://www.gov.uk/government/news/state-pension-age-review-...
by WinstonSmith84 | 2025-05-25 19:19:28+00:00
> wouldn't you characterise any tax scheme as a ponzi scheme?

No, not exactly, that's different.

> unemployment benefits, healthcare etc? what makes them different from pensions?

That's certainly contributions I don't like either, because of how this system is abused. But to be fair, unemployment benefits or healthcare aren't a pyramid scheme, because you aren't paying for the previous "investors" - you might get back what you contributed (with a lots of caveats). In the case of the pension system, you clearly pay the previous "investors".
by programd | 2025-05-25 19:19:36+00:00
In fact Hell Let Loose is a direct copy - or let us just say homage - of the Reality Mod for Battlefield 3. It's a fantastic game because its roots are in fan made enhancements to the already fine Battlefield games of that era. I'd call it the thinking persons Battlefield.

On the other hand if you want a fun, borderline infringing clone of Battlefield 2042 give Delta Force a try. BF 2042 has about 8,000 daily players now, Delta Force 150,000. Clearly they are doing something right that EA could not with the last BF series entry.