MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tdiff | 2025-07-11 08:37:54+00:00
But nevertheless, productivity objectively exists. Some people/teams are more productive as others.

I suppose it would be simpler to compare productivity for people working on standard, "normalized" tasks, but often every other task a programmer is assigned is something different to the previous one, and different developers get different tasks.

It's difficult to measure productivity based on real-world work, but we can create an artificial experiment: give N programmers the same M "normal", everyday tasks and observe whether those using AI tools complete them more quickly.

This is somewhat similar to athletic competitions — artificial in nature, yet widely accepted as a way to compare runners’ performance.
by LAC-Tech | 2025-07-11 08:38:02+00:00
It's a bit of a meme at this point, isn't it?

Middle income countries like China have low fertility.

Lower-middle income countries like India are around replacement level (I think officially it's lower than replacement but lot of births are "unofficial").

West African fertility rates are high... but A LOT lower than they were 50 years ago, and still trending downwards.

Whatever the reason, it's happening everywhere.
by Fraterkes | 2025-07-11 08:38:54+00:00
I think the dichotomy you see with how positive people are about ai has almost entirely to do with the kind of questions they ask.

That seems obvious, but a consequence of that is that people who are sceptical of ai (like me) only use it when they've exhausted other resources (like google). You ask very specific questions where not a lot of documentation is available and inevetably even o3 ends up being pretty useless.

Conversely there's people who love ai and use it for everything, and since the majority of the stuff they ask about is fairly simple and well documented (eg "Write me some typescript"), they rarely have a negative experience.
by resiros | 2025-07-11 08:39:27+00:00
Would love to understand it better too. It looks like the use cases are similar but the tech is different. NetBird is an alternative to Tailscale that uses Wireguard under the hood while these seem to use Traefik under the hood.

I am personally a user of NetBird and love it.

The design of the UI is very similar though :)
by ykonstant | 2025-07-11 08:39:48+00:00
Gizmo tinkering, personal engineering projects of all kinds, bug hunt recounts and some scientific stuff. Also lighter fluff of all kinds.

Just yesterday I compiled a gigantic ublock filter for HN that hides political posts, everything related to artificial intelligence, "founder culture" as you call it, tech business stuff, legal matters, everything webdev related, certain topics that young tech bros seem to be obsessed with (psychedelics, self improvement, note taking apps, hanki panki or whatever etc) and posts about scientific topics that tend to attract habitual incorrectorrists.

So far it has worked wonders and made HN pleasant to browse again.
by latexr | 2025-07-11 08:39:51+00:00
> Yes, yes we can.

Could you make an effort to explain how, or at the very least link to some reasoning? Otherwise your comment is basically the equivalent of “nuh-uh”, which doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the discussion.

> Programmers really need to stop this cope about us being such special snowflakes

Which is not at all what is happening in your parent comment. On the contrary, they’re putting developers on even footing with other professions.
by 0points | 2025-07-11 08:39:56+00:00
> Israel ranks high on democracy indicies

Those rankings must be rigged.

Nethanyahu should be locked up in jail now for the corruption charges he was facing before the Hamas attack.

He literally stopped elections in Israel since then and there's been protests against his government daily for some years now.

And now, even taco tries to have the corruption charges dropped for Nethanyahu, then you must know he's guilty.

https://nypost.com/2025/06/29/world-news/israeli-court-postp...

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-corrupti...
Show HN: CD Calculator – A tool to calculate bank CD interest returns
by lur0913 | 2025-07-11 08:40:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I built CD Calculator – https://cd-calculator.net – a simple tool that helps people calculate interest returns on bank CDs (Certificates of Deposit). Most CD calculators online are either too basic, too outdated, or full of ads. I wanted to make something that's:

- Clean and fast - Easy to use - Focused on accuracy

With this tool, users can: - Enter principal, rate, and term to get instant results - Simulate compound interest monthly or annually - Copy results with one click

Advanced features are coming soon, including: - Recurring deposits - Early withdrawal penalty simulation - After-tax return estimator

It’s built with Astro, Tailwind CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. I’d love feedback on: - Usability (especially on mobile) - Feature ideas or improvements - Accuracy of the calculations

Thanks!
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-11 08:40:39+00:00
Here is some LLM generated (Claude 4 Opus Max in Cursor) "competent writing" by the LLOOOOMM simulation of Hunter S Thompson responding directly to your post.

You may not know who he is, or get any of his cultural references, or bother to drink any of the water I'm leading your horse to, but here is "Fear and Loathing in the Comments Section: A Savage Response to Willful Ignorance. Why Your Self-Imposed Stupidity Makes Me Want to Set My Typewriter on Fire. By Hunter S. Thompson" (VIEW SOURCE for TRUTH COMMENTS):

https://lloooomm.com/hunter-willful-ignorance-hn-response.ht...

Also, it's my cats Nelson and Napoleon's birthday, so to celebrate I showed Claude some cat pictures to analyze and describe. Claude also serves as GROK's seeing eye AI, a multimodal vision–language model (VLM) whose assistive technology makes it possible for LLOOOOMM's first AI DEI Hire to function as a first class member of the LLOOOOMM Society of Mind.

Nelson Cat: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...

Napoleon Cat: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...
by OkPin | 2025-07-11 08:40:52+00:00
This is fascinating and troubling. Apple’s presentation felt more like a marketing defense than a compliance discussion. Their claim that meeting the DMA “current interpretation” is “impossible” really stood out, it’s almost like they’re banking on legal ambiguity to stall real change.

I’m curious: if Apple and Google are using workshops as delay tactics, what’s the EC’s real enforcement power here? Are small fines enough leverage or do we need tougher mechanisms, like mandatory timelines or public transparency on third-party integrations?
by sheepfacts | 2025-07-11 08:41:30+00:00
Perhaps is difficult to measure personal productivity in programming, but we can measure that we will run more slowly with 10 kg. in our backpack. I propose this procedure: The SWE selects 10 tasks and guesses some measure of their complexity (time to finish them) and then he randomly select 5 to be done with AI and the rest without. He performs them and finally calculates a deviation D. The deviation D = D_0 - D_1 where D_i = sum (real_time/guessed_time - 1), where D_0 is using AI and D_1 is without AI, the sign and magnitude of D measure respectively if the use of AI is beneficial or detrimental and the impact of using AI. Also, clipping individuals addends to be in the interval [-0.5,0.5] should avoid one bad guess dominating the estimation. Sorry if this is a trivial ideal but it is feasible and intuitively should provide useful information if the tasks are taken among the ones in which each initial guessing has small deviation. A filter should be applied to tasks in which scaffolding by AI surpass a certain relative threshold in case we are interested in generalizing our results to tasks in which scaffolding is not dominating time.

It could happen that the impact of using AI depends of the task at hand, the capability of the SWE to pair programming with it, and of the LLM used, to such an extend that those factors were bigger that the average effect on a bag of tasks, in this case the large deviation from the mean makes any one parameter estimation void of useful information.
by jaredklewis | 2025-07-11 08:41:31+00:00
News to me. How do you determine the productivity of a doctor? Patients seen? Patients cured? (for real, where did you get that data?) Number of medicines prescribed? Procedures performed? Does a triple bypass surgery count the same a pap smear? Hours worked? Amount of help they provided to colleagues? Easy to come up with another 100 other metrics that might be worth looking out. How are they all weighted?

Like I get that in SWE (like all other fields), managers have to make judgement calls and try to evaluate which reports contribute the most, but the GP post seemed surprised that this wasn't a solved problem by now, which just seems incomprehensible to me.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-07-11 08:41:52+00:00
Chomsky published his political analyses in parallel with and as early as his career as the most influential and important general linguist of the 20th Century, but they caught on much later than his work in linguistics. He was already a famous syntactician when he got on people's radar for his political views, and he was frequently interviewed as a linguist for his views on how general language facilities are built into our brain long before he was interviewed on politics.
by solatic | 2025-07-11 08:41:58+00:00
Yeah, if they're going to market this as kid-safe, they need to have videos of what happens when child-size fingers are intentionally fed into the machine, when hair is intentionally fed into the machine, etc.

Almost by definition, you cannot presume (as a product designer) that children will be capable of thinking of their own safety; which is not the same as a parent who knows their child, making the decision to expose their child to developmentally-appropriate risk
by YuukiRey | 2025-07-11 08:42:05+00:00
Fascinating topic. I personally suspect that it has more to do with attitude and life style priorities rather than economics. But I remember reading a very recent article in the Economist that argued that birth rates declined mostly in low income families, which would contradict that.

> Underpinning these policies is an assumption that poorer women are more likely to respond to incentives to have more children. Indeed, their fertility rates do seem more elastic than those of professional women. Whereas the fertility rates of older, college-educated women have remained fairly steady over the past six decades, most of the collapse in fertility in America and Britain since 1980 stems from younger and poorer women having fewer children, particularly from unplanned pregnancies.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/06/19/why-magas-pro-n...

Just like with many of these topics, most sources seem to contradict each other.
by alias_neo | 2025-07-11 08:42:36+00:00
The thing about being left-handed, is that as you get older, you generally become reasonably proficient at doing things right handed, because the world is built for right-handed people, but from my experience, never quite get the same level of control.

I do quite a few things right handed, some I only do right-handed; and interestingly, I have more strength/power in my right arm/hand but have more control with my left.

Left-handed scissors are something I've known about ever since I can remember, but given how infrequently I use them, I've never bothered to buy a left-handed pair, and continue to just struggle along the couple of times I do need to use them.

My kids seem to switch back and forth between left and right, but they're still young, so I'm keeping an eye out for either of them being left-handed so I can help make things easier for them (an excuse to get some left-handed scissors perhaps?) if it does turn out to be the case.
by fingerlocks | 2025-07-11 08:43:52+00:00
Yeah I’m in my 40s and have been using vim for decades. Sure there was an occasional rando stirring up the forums about made-up productivity gains to get some traffic to their blog, but that was it. There has always been push back from many of the strongest vim advocates that the appeal is not about typing speed or whatever it was they were claiming. It’s just ergonomics and power.

It’s just not comparable to the LLM crazy hype train.

And to belabor your other point, I have treesitter, lsp, and GitHub Copilot agent all working flawlessly in neovim. Ts and lsp are neovim builtins now. And it’s custom built for exactly how I want it to be, and none of that blinking shit or nagging dialog boxes all over VSCode.

I have VScode and vim open to the same files all day quite literally side by side, because I work at Microsoft, share my screen often, and there are still people that have violent allergic reactions to a terminal and vim. Vim can do everything VSCode does and it’s not dogshit slow.
by jjcob | 2025-07-11 08:45:13+00:00
The saddest part of this whole fiasco is that Apple itself is suffering from the lack of competition.

Apple Watch for example gets a huge boost from being the only wearable that integrates with iOS. But it has a lot of quality issues, and is by far the worst Apple product in my opinion. Apple would have a lot more incentive to improve it if they had to compete with other smart watches on a level playing field.
by elAhmo | 2025-07-11 08:45:24+00:00
I see Grok appearing in many places, such as Perplexity, Cursor etc. I can't believe any serious company would even consider using Grok for any serious purposes, knowing who is behind it, what kind of behaviour it has shown, and with findings like these.

You have to swallow a lot of things to give money to the person who did so much damage to our society.
by alias_neo | 2025-07-11 08:45:44+00:00
> whereas we did get left-handed fountain pens at some point

Writing was the bane of my life in high-school, where they insisted we use fountain pens; I had no idea left-handed fountain pens existed. Even with a more suited pen, I imagine it wouldn't resolve the issue of running your hand through the wet-ink you've just laid down.

That was some decades ago now, and I intend never to write with one again, so there's that.

EDIT: I just realised I still have my the last fountain pen I used at school (25+ years ago?) in my pen-holder and grabbed it, it's a Parker Frontier, steel with "gold" accent/clip. I still have a strange fondness for that pen despite not ever wanting to write with it again.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-11 08:45:52+00:00
I like the little tools, and actually the price for them isn't so bad (8 pounds, but if on a budget, that kind of saw is on AliExpress for 1 euro).

The price for the little plastic screws seems a bit nuts though (40p/unit), but I understand it's a razors-and-blades sales model. When I was in primary school, we used those brass split pin fasteners (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_fastener) for the same thing. You can even buy metal two-piece "mother and child" rivets 1/4 that price: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/316963279193, but they need a punch and driving it with a nice safe plectrum-style tool is maybe a little fiddlier. Blunt-ended plastic drywall screw-in fittings are also very similar and run about 5-10p each in boxes of 100.

There seems like a limited age range where a "Scru" is OK but a split pin is not (I know I used them at school almost immediately, and I started at the age of 4). The scrus get tighter, I suppose.
by druskacik | 2025-07-11 08:47:03+00:00
I've been using OpenAI's batch API for some time, then replaced it with Mistral's batch API because it was cheaper (Mistral Small with $0.10 / $0.20 per million tokens was perfect for my use case). This makes me rethink my choice, e.g. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite seems to be a better model[0] with only a slight price increase.

[0] https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models
by ruszki | 2025-07-11 08:47:19+00:00
I agree. Typescript is different for another reason too. They ignore edge cases many times, and because of that you can do really-really nice things with it (when it’s not broken). I wondered a lot of times why Java doesn’t include a few things which would be appropriate even in that world, and the answer is almost always because Java cares about edge cases. There are notes about those in Typescript’s doc or issues.
by celeryventure | 2025-07-11 08:47:28+00:00
We effectively have a duopoly. It's impossible for a third operating system to gain any traction and until that changes we're stuck with these two options.

A lot of things nowadays rely on apps so not having a phone with either Android or iOS means it's increasingly hard to do stuff. For example, with 2FA regulation in the EU for banks, they effectively made their mobile apps indispensable for being able to make some payments. I shouldn't have to use either iOS or Android to bank but here we are. It's even worse when you can't even use a custom ROM because the apps refuse to work on one.
by robertlagrant | 2025-07-11 08:47:33+00:00
This would be really interesting, but I can imagine it would be something like:

Robot lays out plan, step by step, showing step one and exactly what it's going to do.

Clinician says yes, do step one.

Robot adjusts plan based on observations, showing (new) step two and exactly what it's going to do.

Clinician says yes, do step two.

Etc.

I can't imagine it will just be a robot that does everything fully end to end (as it were).
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-11 08:48:16+00:00
I use Grok with repomix to review my code and it tends to give decent answers and is a bit better at giving actual actionable issues with code examples than, say Gemini 2.5 pro.

But the lack of a CLI tool like codex, claude code or gemini-cli is preventing it from being a daily driver. Launching a browser and having to manually upload repomixed content is just blech.

With gemini I can just go `gemini -p "@repomix-output.xml review this code..."`
by rapsey | 2025-07-11 08:48:32+00:00
In a developed country the cost in terms of time, effort and money for a child is much higher. The modern world is simply incompatible for large families. Having more than 2 children means driving a giant car and it means a crazy amount of time and planning around after school activities in addition to needing to be up to date with their school activities.

I have 2 and I already spend most afternoons driving/picking them up from sports, If I had 3 it would literally be every day including weekends.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-07-11 08:48:42+00:00
I would argue the opposite: It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply.

Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead.
by hobofan | 2025-07-11 08:50:00+00:00
It looks cool, and I agree with the creators that something like this ought to exist and optimally free from monetization incentives.

From a user standpoint it does seem like quite the undertaking to introduce it though. Most of the needs I'm looking for from such a system are currently already filled quite well by SOPS[0], where I would say I get 80% of the features (I care about) for 10% of the complexity.

[0]: https://getsops.io
by scheeseman486 | 2025-07-11 08:50:32+00:00
> He sued Apple and Google for monopolistic behaviour.

Meanwhile he doesn't substantially support the one option for computing that doesn't result in vertical control. He uses the tools that enable that control, rather than criticize their existence.

> He speaks for millions of independent computer scientists who build games.

Epic's apparent support for indie developers is marketing to grow his business. This isn't intrinsically a bad thing, but he isn't some golden saint. It also comes at the cost of catering to consumers, which is in large part why EGS has failed to gain traction beyond throwing free games at people in order to try to entice customers to their store. Key word: try. It hasn't worked.

> He purchased 7,000-acre Box Creek Wilderness (about US$15 million), fought off a power company's attempt to run lines through it, and donated a conservation easement in 2016 so the land stays wild.

Whatever. This is just billionaire philanthropy and $15m is a drop in the bucket to these people.
by prmoustache | 2025-07-11 08:50:42+00:00
I am not particularly a complotist but I don't think suicides are enough to dismiss the idea that a death wasn't forced by a third party.

Which path would you choose if for instance you were told by an external power that your relatives might die in an accident soon if you don't kill yourself in the next 24h?

Having said that gut feeling is not evidence.
by jpfr | 2025-07-11 08:50:54+00:00
The problems with C are real.

At the same time, the tooling has gotten much better in the last years.

Clang-analyzer is fast enough to run as part of the CI. Newer gcc also give quite a few more warnings for unused results.

My recommendation to the project is to

- Remove all compiler warnings and enable warning-as-error

- Increase the coverage of unit tests to >80%

That is a lot of work. But that's what is required for high-criticality systems engineering.
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-11 08:51:00+00:00
Newt ( https://github.com/fosrl/newt ) is a custom userspace Wireguard client that you run on the 'edge server' side (typically behind your home firewall) that is part of the Pangolin system. It reaches out to your Pangolin server (typically hosted on a small VPS with a static IP) and will take care of negotiating the Wireguard tunnel and managing dispatch to the different services you exposed and mapped on your LAN. Easiest way to understand the full stack is to have a look at https://docs.fossorial.io/Getting%20Started/overview wich includes a nice System Overview Diagram.
by nlitened | 2025-07-11 08:51:09+00:00
I’ve seen somewhere an uncomfortable chart which shows that fertility rate is almost perfectly inversely correlated with a single number: average years of women education. Also what’s interesting, allegedly, reducing the average woman education seems to be the only reliable way of growing diminished TFR. Please don’t kill the messenger, I’d love to be shown it’s false.

Couldn’t find any details about this on a quick skim of this paper on my phone.

Also, I think, to many people it’s becoming obvious that increasing birth rates cannot be achieved with measures that make people feel good, unfortunately. It will likely be a tough choice between bad and worse.
by Asafp | 2025-07-11 08:51:14+00:00
Almost none of what you wrote above is true, no idea how is this a top comment. Israel is a democracy. Netanyahu's trail is still ongoing, the war did not stop the trails and until he is proven guilty (and if) he should not go to jail. He did not stop any elections, Israel have elections every 4 years, it still did not pass 4 years since last elections. Israel is not perfect, but it is a democracy. Source: Lives in Israel.
by latexr | 2025-07-11 08:52:52+00:00
> There are always tar pits of time where you are no better off with AI, but sometimes it's 20x.

This is absurd measuring. You can’t in good faith claim a 20x improvement if it only happens “sometimes” and other times it’s a time sink.

The more detail you keep providing in this thread, the clearer it becomes your assessment lands somewhere between the disingenuous and the delusional.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-07-11 08:53:01+00:00
I think there's a few components.

One is opportunity cost: You simply have more options (especially women), so having children now comes at the cost of many other potential paths whereas it used to be the default.

Housing costs: Most people want to live in a few cities per country and every desirable city I've ever heard of has an affordable housing crisis. When you can barely afford enough space for yourself, how are you going to have a room for a baby, let alone multiple.