MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apparent | 2025-07-15 23:48:43+00:00
Highly recommend Family Unfriendly [1] to understand how societal expectations and structures discourage large families. For example, people tend to feel like they have to get their kids into Ivies or whatever, which means tons of extracurriculars (which cost time and money).

Even if you have no interest in having more kids, it's an interesting look at how we can parent differently and have happier families.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Family-Unfriendly-Culture-Raising-Har...
by gerdesj | 2025-07-15 23:49:16+00:00
We can't really decide what is going on right now, let alone get all whizzed up about how funky European history was doing in 1660.

Why should a bunch of Londoners decide: "to start a club devoted to “improving Natural Knowledge.""

Yes, there were Universities etc but what did they actually teach (Classics, Theology etc) Bear in mind that cutting edge medicine until around 2025 involves leeches. Yes I am being a bit cruel but the point largely stands. Leeches are still used but for their anti-coagulant properties.

There was something more needed. More than what the Romans and Greeks had managed. Obviously we are ignoring vast tracts of the planet here with our Western View.

Anyway, that's only one story. There are several more in the article.

There is a final flourish too - why not read the whole article?
by g-mork | 2025-07-15 23:49:16+00:00
This is a shocking take. I can personally attest (in my 40s) to the pressure felt from professionals during the foetal abnormality scan, pregnancy especially a first time pregnancy is an incredibly vulnerable and difficult experience where those you're surrounded with in every context have massively outsized influence on your otherwise clueless state.

Our baby had no abnormalities, but the language and presentation of the doctor almost had me ready for violence. It's easy to understand from his perspective - he must dehumanize the thing in many cases he is going to encourage you to abort, and if that is what he recommends, it's a recommendation that would have carried tremendous authority for both parents, who would then have immediately acted upon each other.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-07-15 23:49:35+00:00
> People with opiate addiction have access to the cheapest and strongest narcotics ever available on the street. Unfortunately they are of uneven strength and cut with horrors that make their body shut down. I would much prefer they could just buy clean drugs from the pharma companies.

Fair point.

This is a complex societal problem having no simple solution. Unfortunately, what you proposed:

Should allow pharma to sell drugs to the market. Allow people to sue if they are harmed. Do not care about a government agency preventing access to new drugs.

Is not a viable solution either. Government agencies and regulations would be needed in order to ensure pharma's do not increase drug addictiveness or otherwise engage in nefarious activities. Agencies are also an avenue for accountability in distribution, a much cheaper and effective enforcement mechanism than civil lawsuits, and can provide options for people wanting to address their addictions.

Remember, every person who dies from an overdose cannot "sue if they get harmed" as they are dead.
by eqvinox | 2025-07-15 23:49:49+00:00
Yes, IB hasn't died… yet. But the writing's probably on the wall with Ultra Ethernet; the corporate development of Mellanox (now nVidia) is not a great sign either.

(Also you don't use IB for 1800km WAN links.)

FWIW I actually run IB and think it's a nice interconnect too :)
by znpy | 2025-07-15 23:50:01+00:00
looks like a poorer version grafana, with a worse license?

Also grafana has "observability as code" since release 12: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/whatsnew/whats-new-i...

And it seems there used to be something similar from earlier as well: https://grafana.com/blog/2022/12/06/a-complete-guide-to-mana...
by leakycap | 2025-07-15 23:50:17+00:00
Sorry, are you defending that Flash should be in the app store ecosystem in 2025?

I wasn't describing the tech stack (which was atrocious), I was describing the genre of "bad flash games"

The games developed in Flash that have lived on were better quality and had been meaningfully updated in the last decade... this app is neither high quality nor upkept.
by pyrale | 2025-07-15 23:51:09+00:00
> Article is long, but thorough, but it misses one key preceding influence

That's because the article is simply not really exploring distinct genres that had an influence on cyberpunk, but searching its ethos. It's not really like this is an exceptional omission in the article.

> I see so many people loving Gibson and crediting him for inventing the genre whole cloth

That's not exactly the point of the article, of which about half is devoted to criticizing Gibson.
by lliamander | 2025-07-15 23:51:12+00:00
This is similar to an intuition I've had about what it means to program "algorithmically". We often draw a distinction between "algorithms" and "business logic", but fundamentally they are the same thing. They are both plans of the steps necessary to accomplish a goal. The only difference, in my mind, is the style in which the program is written. To program "algorithmically" means to take steps to make undesirable program states impossible to represent.

- In the case of search or sort algorithms, where the primary concern is the speed of computation, undesirable states would be performing unnecessary or duplicate computations.

- In the case of encryption algorithms, undesirable states would be those that leak encrypted data.

- In the case of an order shipping and fulfillment system, an undesirable state would be marking an order as fulfilled when not all of the items have been delivered.

The more care that is taken to prevent undesirable states, the more the program takes on an algorithmic style. And the only way you can be sure that those undesirable states are impossible is to think in terms of proofs and invariants.
by bwfan123 | 2025-07-15 23:51:53+00:00
> We’re navigating a tightrope as Superintelligence nears. If the West slows down unilaterally, China could dominate the 21st century

I stopped reading after this. First, there is no evidence of Superintelligence nearing or even any clear definition of what "Superintelligence nearing" means. This is classic "assuming the sale" gambit with fear-mongering in its appeal.
by mccr8 | 2025-07-15 23:52:30+00:00
In my personal opinion, while the flexibility of the old XUL addons was amazing, the two big issues are compatibility and performance.

Compatibility: these addons could be broken very easily because they could depend on almost anything, and with the monthly release cycle, it is very difficult for mod authors to keep up. For instance, some addons would work by taking a core browser function written in JS, convert it to a string, run a regular expression to edit the string, then use eval to create a new function to replace the old one. In some release, the syntax of the "convert a function to a string" output changed slightly and it broke these addons, because it broke the regexp they were using.

Performance: XUL addons could do all sorts of things that are horrible for performance, and there was no real way for a user to tell what was causing it, because the addon wasn't isolated in any way. I ran into somebody who was having severe performance issues because the browser was generating colossal amounts of garbage for no reason. It eventually turned out that on a whim they'd installed a "LaTeX the World" addon, which would look for LaTeX typesetting instructions on pages and replace it with the nice looking output. The problem was, the way it worked was that every 10 seconds or so it would convert the entire contents of every single tab you had open into a zillion strings, search those strings, then throw them out.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-15 23:52:40+00:00
There's still people that don't know the difference between serif and sans-serif. That's shocking to me, yet just another sign of how deep a rabbit hole I find myself with fonts. I've done desktop layout and graphic design for print, video, web, so working with fonts is without a doubt something I absolutely hate. When it comes to computers the top two things on my hate list is 1) printing, 2) fonts. PTSD from the bad ol' days getting fonts and printers to install, then getting the printer to actually work as expected. The amount of time I've spent looking over fonts with clients and listening to them discuss pros/cons. It all just sends shivers up and down the spine.
by yumlogic | 2025-07-15 23:53:29+00:00
Typical liberal talk rather than solving the problem.

It worked for centuries. No one is stopping women from working or doing anything. But, making whole world gynocentric and policies around it is how you get mass inequality.

For a societal change, things have to change at fundamental level. Are you aware that below $120k - $150k it is impossible to raise two kids, mortgage, healthcare, and live in a no-drug ridden neighborhood?

Decades of mistakes and yet you come here with sexism talk. Words are cheap. Life is hard.
by swat535 | 2025-07-15 23:54:44+00:00
I think the uncomfortable truth that many are reluctant to admit is that religion and societal norms (as you highlighted above) played a major role in this.

I'm not discounting other facts such as the housing crisis or cost of living but I fear that while those are important, they are secondary.

Women were often forced to carry a child due to outside pressure and had no recourse. However since the introduction of safe abortions and readily accessible birth control methods, they have regained their bodily autonomy which allows them to skip unwanted pregnancies.

I think that ultimately, liberating women is a _good_ thing because child bearing is difficult and no one women should be forced to go through it.

With all that said, having children can be wonderful. Perhaps a better solution is to both celebrate and encourage families while keeping abortion and birth control accessible. It doesn't have to be a binary choice.
by hansvm | 2025-07-15 23:54:50+00:00
I think we're still at the stage of "this team lead makes shit happen" rather than "this strategy makes shit happen," with a lot of the nuances being fuzzy and/or wrong.

Tossing out a few observations:

1. People make mistakes. Your strategy needs to account for that (resilient runtime, heavy type-checking, convenient and often-used REPL, etc).

2. Above a certain project size, nobody remembers everything. Your strategy needs to account for that (excellent multifaceted documentation, disallow long-range interactions in your code, etc).

3. Dependencies have a vastly higher cost than you expect, even in the short term. Plan for that (vendor more things, in-house more things, allocate resources to dependency management, cut scope, etc).

I could go on. The core point is that certain properties of projects are "plainly" true to most people who have been around any length of time. I don't think we're yet at a point where we can often predict anything meaningful about some specific new technology, but a mental framework of "this succeeded/failed _because_ of {xyz}" helps tremendously in figuring out if/how that new idea will fit into your current workplace.
by Centigonal | 2025-07-15 23:55:03+00:00
oh, I 100% agree with this. The way the social web was monetized is the root of a lot of evil. With AI, we have an opportunity to learn from the past. I think a lesson here is "don't wait to think critically about the societal consequences of the next Big Tech Thing's business model because you have doubts about its profitability or unit economics."
by jpgvm | 2025-07-15 23:55:33+00:00
I think going as far as assembly up front is probably not worth it, also it's hard to keep people engaged at that level as it's difficult to make the computer do exciting things with assembler.

However I strongly believe it's good to start with C. You can still rather quickly do interesting stuff, C is a small language so learning the language itself isn't a huge barrier.

A big benefit of the small language is that it leaves more time available to explore important concepts, not just the super low level ones (memory/pointers, etc) but really important parts of the stack that are infectious to everything else. Specifically things like syscalls and the libc interface that most other languages are essentially built on top of. Working with building blocks like pthreads directly is also very important IMO, both to get a handle on parallelism and concurrency primitives but also to learn why high level languages are so valuable. Similarly for stuff like important socket APIs ala select/epoll and implementing your own event loop.

I was lucky enough to learn all of this early in my career and luckier still to have been able to pass on this knowledge to many mentees over the years.

If there are any aspiring programmers here that want to build from a solid foundation then yeah, ignore the haters, write some C.

man pages and ironically ChatGPT are your friend, use them to explore the foundations of (most) modern code so when you start writing modern code in earnest/for money you will be substantially ahead of your peers in actual understanding.
by HocusLocus | 2025-07-15 23:56:16+00:00
Radars uniformly set on high sensitivity. You're looking at the noise floor within [x] miles of the radar. The sudden smaller size of a couple was a manual dbm adjustment. They seem more common these days, I think because when you saw sharp cutoffs it was usually a threshold cutoff setting some human had to twiddle and humans don't bother anymore. This stuff drives some Boomers crazy and sets them to babbling about HAARP, especially the pacman shapes that represent a metallic obstruction near the center of the radar.
by loeg | 2025-07-15 23:57:05+00:00
I mean, the comment I'm replying to by mlinhares is explicitly claiming crime did not rise during ~that specific period in response to a comment by JumpCrisscross claiming it did during ~that specific period. mlinhares is just wrong here.

I'm glad the broader trend is that crime is improving, but there was actually a blip upwards in ~covid times, and JumpCrisscross is correct that Dems in charge during that time were punished for it.
by fasbiner | 2025-07-15 23:57:13+00:00
I think it's more precise to paraphrase that he, William Gibson cannot imagine the past as it was. He is interested in fashion, surfaces, narrative, velocity, and futurism as such. But there's a reason he emerged in California with its active obliteration of history and not say, Switzerland.

The Swiss would find it absurd to imagine that their past is inaccessible when they have all the written records, the buildings, the family letters and a rich progressive regional literature that would be of little interest to the outside world.

They would've found it hard to imagine the impersonal (and predictive) dystopian cyberpunk since they have a degree of effective devolutionary democracy unimaginable to most americans. But as it turns out, California and east asia seem to be more representative of the future.
by ghushn3 | 2025-07-15 23:57:45+00:00
In fact, 70% of jail population is not convicted of a crime. Seven-Zero.

Roughly half a million people are in jail despite not being convicted of anything. That's roughly 25% of the incarcerated population in the US. 1/4 people behind bars are (presumed) innocent right now, even if they may later be found guilty.

That's a problem. Being in jail for a few weeks or even a few days can totally fuck someone's life over, costing them a job, a relationship, their health, or worse.
by alganet | 2025-07-15 23:57:52+00:00
Real programmers use butterflies.

https://xkcd.com/378/

---

Let me elaborate: there is a huge history of dubious allegations of what constitutes "a real programmer" or stuff that makes you "a better programmer".

Combobulation and descombobulation of McGuffins is often the best analogy though. Not to dismerit other kinds of thinkings, but already dismeriting them, that's what this is all about. When in doubt, showing the code is often what works.
by simonw | 2025-07-15 23:58:00+00:00
Not at all. I think you misunderstood the point I was making here.

I think the idea of splitting Hacker News into AI and not AI is honestly a little absurd.

If you don't want to engage with LLM and AI content on Hacker News, don't engage with it! Scroll right on past. Don't click it.

If you're not going to do that, then since we are hackers here and we solve things by building tools, building a tool that filters out the stuff you don't want to see is trivial. So trivial I could get o3 to solve it for me in literally minutes.

(This is a pointed knock at the "AI isn't even useful crowd", just in case any of them are still holding out.)

There's a solid meta-joke here too, which is that filtering on keywords is a bad way to solve this problem. The better way to solve this profile... is to use AI!

So yeah, I'm not embarrassed at all. I think my joke and meta joke were pretty great.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-07-15 23:58:06+00:00
> (this is the part where somebody stumbles in to say "dOn'T hUmAnS dO ThE sAmE tHiNg????")

As a frequent "your stated reasoning for why llms can't/don't/will-never <X> applies to humans because they do the same thing" annoying commentor, I usually invoke it to point out that

a) the differences are ones of degree/magnitude rather than ones of category (i.e. is still likely to be improved by scaling, even if there are diminishing returns - so you can't assume LLMs are fundamentally unable to <X> because their architecture) or

b) the difference is primarily just in the poster's perception, because the poster is unconsciously arguing from a place of human exceptionalism (that all cognitive behaviors must somehow require the circumstances of our wetware).

I wouldn't presume to know how to scale furbies, but the second point is both irrelevant and extra relevant because the thing in question is human perception. Furbies don't seem alive because they have a simple enough stimuli-behavior map for us to fully model. Shoggoth mini seems alive since you can't immediately model it, but is simple enough that you can eventually construct that full stimuli-behavior map. Presumably, with a complex enough internal state, you could actually pass that threshold pretty quickly.
by squigz | 2025-07-15 23:59:26+00:00
People are choosing not to have kids so they can live their own lives, or because they don't want to bring more children into this crazy world, or any number of various other perfectly legitimate reasons, such as economic worries.

While I agree this might indicate a culture of "selfishness," I have to disagree that it's a bad thing. It seems to me a good thing that people can choose whether or not to have kids, as opposed to being forced into it because lack of education or access to healthcare. It seems to me that society has to adjust to this, not individuals.
by ASalazarMX | 2025-07-16 00:01:07+00:00
Which link? Because the one I posted works, and it says:

> Suggested reading order is from top to bottom. For those wishing to read the book There Is No Antimemetics Division, begin with "SCP-055" and finish with "Champions of Nothing."

Checked every one of those links, which also work. I can't understand why are you... wait, what were we talking about?
by wahern | 2025-07-16 00:01:26+00:00
Teenage births peaked in the late 1950s, by a significant margin. See https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-th...

It's difficult to find teenage pregnancy rates before 1972, let alone multiple sources, but if you look at Guttmacher's numbers both teenage pregnancy and abortion rates ramped up significantly between the late 1970s and early 1990s. See https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/UST... Teenage abortions rates are even more difficult to find before 1972, but abortion certainly existed in the 1950s, and given the birth rate it's possible teenage pregnancy rates were also higher in the 1950s and 60s.

Also, notwithstanding that the data does coincide with the given narrative, one must also consider socio-economic and cultural factors--pregnancy, birth, and abortion rates aren't homogenous across groups. For example, the OP (or their girlfriend) could have been from a segment of society at the trailing edge of a trend.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-16 00:02:14+00:00
> I clicked to the Wikipedia article, I did not see this quote.

No need to go to that much effort; I pulled that quote in my comment.

>> This is an alternative to the concept of instantaneous, or "non-local" action at a distance.

> My hand is made of mass collected on earth. Those atoms have been rearranged into the shape of my hand, but their gravity has existed since the beginning of the universe, just in difference shapes.

So, as you acknowledge, zero information about your hand has gone much distance from the earth. Someone 1000 light years away who could resolve gravitational information into an image with perfect detail wouldn't be able to perceive your hand, you, or anything related.

Because gravity isn't a non-local force.
by xattt | 2025-07-16 00:02:38+00:00
Commenter is either:

(a) early in their radar-watching journey, and starting to notice the finer details in radar products, or;

(b) looking to stir unfounded panic by exaggerating a pattern that’s filtered out or not noticed by others, in light of current events.

Unlike the NEXRAD images in question, the noise floor on the Internet this is quite high and hard to differentiate between the two.
by moomoo11 | 2025-07-16 00:02:47+00:00
What do you mean by stay on top of it?

I’m more on the applied/practical side, not really qualified nor interested in the theoretical side (I’m not a AI PhD). Beyond a high level understanding of how these tools work, there’s not much for me in this arena.

As such I just read articles here or in my everyday workflow I’ll see some new thing AWS added and try it out, and so on.

Or if I’m facing a problem that requires some tools to solve, I see what’s out there to fill my toolbox.

Otherwise it is just a ton of noise and most of it is not relevant to me.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-16 00:03:14+00:00
I mean, techno is a sub-genre, so you meant sub-sub-genre??<ducks>

If you can't distinguish the differences that other people can, it's not their fault. You can be dismissive and flippant about it, but there is nothing wrong* with people that can. It's right up there with the people that can tell you all of the differences about each of the lures in their tackle box. They are really into while you are not. Stop judging.

*Unless it's about fonts as I just made the opposite argument about fonts.
by asa400 | 2025-07-16 00:03:55+00:00
This is correct, and one of the things I tell anybody who is considering using SQLite to watch out for. The busy timeout and deferred write transactions interact in a really non intuitive way, and you have to use BEGIN IMMEDIATE for any transaction that performs any writes at all, otherwise SQLite gives up and throws an error without waiting if another traction is writing when your traction attempts to upgrade from a read to a write.
by NamTaf | 2025-07-16 00:05:12+00:00
Conversely, emergency brake from the rear is better in an empty train since otherwise braking propagating from the front can cause run-in which can lift up empty wagons and derail them. Not good on curves.

The right attack could probably cause both the lead and rear to trigger a brake application.

Also, this assumes a pure air brake train - throw ECP in there and it will propagate the brake signal functionally instantly.

I do also wonder whether you could DoS it until the lead loco registers a comms loss and brakes thinking it's lost the last wagon.

If they want to cause real chaos, they should find a way to poke at the distributed power comms protocol. I've no idea whether that's similarly security-through-obscurity.