MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-07-11 09:24:35+00:00
I mostly only have anecdata, but I don't agree that the main reason are "priority changes". My son's classroom is full of parents that wanted to have two or three children but stuck with one due to already having a very hard time to achieve work–family balance with one (in fact, we are in that set). The desire to have more children is still there, but unfulfilled. There are many polls about this, see for example https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-want-more-kids-why... for the US (figure "How many kids Americans have vs. how many they think are ideal"). In my country, Spain, polls about this give very similar results, most people want 2 or even 3 kids and end up not having them.

Really rich people, on the other hand, very often have 3+ kids (as poor people do, but for different reasons). In the US, Bill Gates has 3, Bezos has 4, Zuckerberg has 3, Musk, well, I've lost count :)

The thing is that, of course, typical measures like giving some small economic aid to parents, slight improvements of a few weeks in maternity/paternity leave, etc., which are the kind of things the article focuses on, just don't move the needle. This is hardly surprising. None of those things significantly improve work-family balance. Much more radical measures would be needed, like multi-year maternal/paternal leaves with measures to guarantee that there is no or small impact on career, or a significant reduction of standard full-time working hours to, say, 30 or so a week (be it for parents or for everyone). But for all the talk about fertility being a problem that needs fixing, no country seems to be willing to do anything even remotely close to that.

Note that the measures I'm proposing are focusing on time, not money, because time is really the limiting resource for raising a child in a high-income country. Of course, with money you can buy time (daycare, caregivers, etc.) - so I'm sure things like massive building of public housing to bring down prices can also help. But it should be more efficient to focus directly on time - and more fulfilling for the parents to actually, well, have time to raise the kids themselves.
by philbo | 2025-07-11 09:24:36+00:00
I have an extremist take on this:

All source code is technical debt. If you increase the amount of code, you increase the amount of debt. It's impossible to reduce debt with more code. The only way to reduce debt is by reducing code.

(and note that I'm not measuring code in bytes here; switching to single-character variable names would not reduce debt. I'm measuring it in statements, expressions, instructions; reducing those without reducing functionality decreases debt)
by mattlondon | 2025-07-11 09:24:41+00:00
I suspect it goes a lot deeper than just a single if-statement somewhere, and hundreds of thousands of lines of code and various interfaces and all the rest are built on the core assumption of the signatures being there and the packages etc being signed.

These sort of things can be tricky to refactor and more complex than they first seem. For example I recently spent the past 12 weeks or so just moving some fields around on a CRUD app (not adding or removing - just changing their order!) because there were assumptions built on assumptions built on assumptions about what order things are in and what comes first and what has already been done or not and so on. What ostensibly seemed trivial, actually required almost a complete rewrite of whole parts of the CRUD app to overcome the assumptions and implied behavior of what happens when and how.
by thyristan | 2025-07-11 09:24:44+00:00
Afaik those 5 million Palestinians are not Israeli citizens because they don't want to be, and rather would have their refugee and Palestinian citizen status. There are also Palestinians who have chosen to be Israeli citizens, with the usual democratic rights and representation, with their own people in the Knesset, etc.

And shooting enemies in a war is unfortunately not something you would investigate, it isn't even murder, it is just a consequence of war under the articles of war. In cases where civilians are shot (what Israel defines to be civilians), there are investigations and sometimes even punishments for the perpetrators. Now you may (sometimes rightfully) claim that those investigations and punishments are too few, one-sided and not done by a neutral party. But those do happen, which by far isn't "nothing".
by topspin | 2025-07-11 09:25:31+00:00
I found it. All that tells you is that it's a simple problem. Had I not been told it was broken I likely would not have.

It's the kind of bug that makes you stop breathing for a brief moment. So I ran this function through Gemini 2.5 Pro, ChatGPT o3 and Grok 3. No context other than the source code fragment was provided. All three also clearly identified the problem.

There is no longer a reason for trivial flaws such as this surviving to release code. We're past that now, and that's an astonishing thing.

These are the questions I ponder: Should we consider the possibility that the ongoing, incomplete and decades long pursuit of "better" languages is now misguided? Or, that perhaps "better" might now mean whatever properties make code easier for LLMs to analyze and validate against specifications, as opposed to merely preventing the flaws humans are prone to make?
by apple1417 | 2025-07-11 09:26:08+00:00
Having run into similar problems several times, I've also never really been satisfied with the solutions. You have to have different types to cause compile errors, but then you have throw those types away whenever you perform any actual operations on them.

struct TypeA { int inner; }; struct TypeB { int inner; }; struct TypeA a1, a2; // whoops TypeB result = {.inner = a1.inner + a2.inner};

Don't get me wrong, where I've used this sort of pattern it's definitely caught issues, and it definitely massively lowers the surface area for this type of bug. But I still feel like it's quite fragile.

The use case I felt worked best was seperating out UTC datetime vs localised datetime structs - mainly since it's something you already had to use function calls to add/subtract from, you couldn't play with raw values.
by YuukiRey | 2025-07-11 09:26:42+00:00
I suggest taking a closer look at section 5 ("V. Shifting Priorities and Social Influences"), which starts on page 24 for alternative explanations.

The preceding section does mention studies that show a cause and effect relationship between e.g., income and fertility, but the effect is surprisingly small. The authors conclude the section with:

> “Pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies… But it takes a lot of money. Truth be told, trying to boost birth rates to replacement rate purely through cash incentives is prohibitively costly.”
Show HN: I built AI Email Writer – Let AI help you write better Emails
by funcin | 2025-07-11 09:27:45+00:00
Hi Hacker Family,

I’d love to share a project I’ve been building independently: AI Email Writer – WriteMail.app

The inspiration came from a personal experience. I was applying for a part-time role at a company overseas, but I wasn’t confident about how to write a proper email. Sure, there are many AI tools out there, but I found it frustrating to constantly craft the right prompts just to get a decent draft.

That got me thinking — maybe others face the same challenge.

So I created WriteMail.app – an AI-powered email writing lab focused on helping you write better emails, not just faster ones.

Unlike typical “email generators,” WriteMail is a guided and interactive platform that blends writing purpose, tone control, and message structure — so your emails sound more professional, effective, and human.

What you can do with WriteMail.app:

1. Quickly write business emails, requests, rejections, thank-you notes, and more

2. Define your intent, and let the AI choose the right tone and phrasing

3. Instantly adjust the tone – make it more polite, assertive, concise, etc.

4. Need to reply to a message? Paste it in — and get a thoughtful response

5. Multilingual support is built-in – write or reply in the language you prefer

We’re currently powered by GPT-4, and I’m actively optimizing the system to fine-tune prompts and outputs for even more accurate and polished results.

It’s still an early-stage project, but I’d be thrilled if you give it a try and share your feedback. I’m building this to make thoughtful email writing more accessible for everyone.

Really appreciate your time, and I’m excited to hear any feedback or suggestions you may have.
by EGKW | 2025-07-11 09:27:59+00:00
Well, that didn’t quite go as you predicted. Claude (Sonnet 4) and Copilot (Think Deeper) both came up with 27. Deepseek (Deepthink R1) claimed it used a random number generator and came up with 17, same as Mistral/LeChat. Then there’s Grok3 (DeepSearch), who suggested 42; the meaning of life. I’m not surprised — Grok’s still in full puberty.
by bzzzt | 2025-07-11 09:28:05+00:00
First they have to enable competition, you're saying they have to support it but seemingly you want to enforce it. Where does it stop? Should Apple just pay out a part of their profits to their competitors?

If a competitor wants market share they have to build a better service. Forcing users to go with a bad deal gets the incentives all wrong and is actually bad for consumer choice.
by bob1029 | 2025-07-11 09:28:21+00:00
> In reality, balance calculations may be taking place at the same time as INSERT operations, and the result could depend on your database’s transaction isolation level, so if you want no mutations to get added when querying balance - locking will be on you.

Welcome to why core banking platforms still have batch and nightly processing aspects. It's not because of a technological deficit. It's because this business is actually really hard to do in a real-time/continuous manner. Operating on a T+1 basis in many areas dramatically reduces the opportunity for mistakes. It's also fantastic for throughput.

Imagine a use case like fraud detection on checking accounts. You can go about a million times faster if you just suck down some flat files dumped out of the core every night and make a decision the following day. Forcing everything into a synchronous context is not essential to provide the illusion of real time banking to the consumer.
by disillusioned | 2025-07-11 09:28:32+00:00
I was profiling an ecommerce site we're responsible for and noticed that the app.js package felt a bit big: nearly 4MB unzipped. Most of it was the standard SPA/React attendant stuff with modern development, but within it was a 180 kB SVG of an old version of the company logo that wasn't being used anywhere on the site, but which had made it into a dev and then production branch and was shipped live. The zipped version was 175 kB total, but this SVG ended up being a decent portion of that size, and we do about 6M uniques per month, so it adds up, though we're now caching through CloudFlare instead of AWS/CloudFront, so that helps.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-11 09:28:51+00:00
Secondarily, both contains oxalate in proportions of 1% of black pepper and 2% of turmeric by mass, which leads to the formation of kidney stones.

It's worse in the US because the FDA effectively "washes its hands" of anything deemed a "supplement". In general, the precautionary principle is difficult to find in America outside of FDA-approved procedures, medical devices, and medications. Food and supplements are desperately under-regulated.
by tossandthrow | 2025-07-11 09:28:54+00:00
Yep, it is a SPA - but there is still a category of old grumpy devs who insist that the real web is a single hand crafted HTML file sprinkled with a bit of CSS.

Yes, a 6MB (compressed) bundle is big. But it is not clear that the alternatives are better. The bundle would need to be split increasing complexity of building the application.

It is likely judged that splitting the bundle only has minimal positives compared to the negatives - which also align with my experiecne developing software for roughly the same target segment.
by fjfaase | 2025-07-11 09:29:54+00:00
In the Netherlands, higher education used to be free and supported with a reasonable stipend, but in the past decades, students have to pay a few thousands of Euro to attend education and the stipend are no longer sufficient to cover costs of living. So, instead of earning an income sufficient to start a family they have to make extra costs for about half of that. If they do not have rich parents that can support them, they have to have jobs (often causing extra delays) or borrow money. Both of the latter causes delays in when they can start a family. I have some colleagues who are not able to buy a house due to the debts they have. Although the interest rates for these debts are low and rules with respect to paying the debs are relaxed, the banks still take them into account when applying for a mortgage.
by guappa | 2025-07-11 09:30:40+00:00
My org hasn't moved away but I use localslackirc to connect via my preferred IRC client.

I get perks like not seeing reaction emojis, gifs, and being able to mute the constant flow of @channel notifications by configuring a list of people or channels from which I am not interested in getting these generic notifications.

Also most importantly, since my company recently shifted from treating us like adults to telling us we must only work on the assigned tasks and for no reason go out of task, I configured it to not join general discussions channels where people ask for help and such things. In theory I'm on them, but from the point of view of my IRC client I'm not.

It re-joins automatically if someone mentions me specifically. Unfortunately it won't fetch the history when this happens so I might need to open the real slack to get the context before I can answer.

Anyway, it has worked mostly fine for me… I can have decent battery life and I don't get most of the useless notifications.
by gapostolov | 2025-07-11 09:30:51+00:00
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by planb | 2025-07-11 09:32:13+00:00
Wow, I did not know that, thanks for making me aware of this. I guess the tech press only covers the big cases? I didn't even know there were so many cases already.

edit: I looked it up - you are talking about the DSA (digital services act) while I was talking about the DMA (the one including the gatekeeper specification) - so that's not really what I meant....
by perihelions | 2025-07-11 09:33:52+00:00
If a synthetic food additive were that hazardous at that small a multiple of the amounts used in food, it'd have been banned. This (curcumin) is an exemplar of that pervasive magical thinking in modern society, the naturalistic fallacy: the prior that there's some inherent qualitative difference between the class of things occurring naturally and the technological/synthetic.

It's perfectly legal to dye food yellow with turmeric.

Many synthetic dyes are illegal for food, dyes which (unlike turmeric) have never been shown to have caused actual harm. But which (like turmeric) are known to be toxic at some dose not used in any food product, some 10x or 100x or whatever high multiple.

Curcumin is known to be pharmacologically active; has lots of (poorly understood) biochemical effects, hits lots of targets. It's never been demonstrated to be medically useful. The unjustified assumption—the magical thinking—is that, being a natural plant substance, maybe some of these random effects, randomly twiddling with the biochemistry of a human body without understanding what you're doing, might be beneficial—so people deliberately ingest it. That's accepted. It's the opposite with synthetic chemicals: if one's biochemically active in some poorly-understood way, you assume that mystery activity is toxic—not beneficial.

(Tangentially, you should probably avoid turmeric regardless of any of this, because the modern supply chain is contaminated with heavy metals, which cause poisonings[0]).

[0] https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb... ("Your Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead")
by luke-stanley | 2025-07-11 09:33:53+00:00
The behaviour is problematic, also Grok 4 might be relating "one word" answers to Elon's critique of ChatGPT, and might be seeking related context to that. Others demonstrated that slightly prompt wording changes can cause quite different behaviour. Access to the base model would be required to implicate fine-tuning Vs pre-training. Hopefully xAI will be checking the cause, fixing it, and reporting on it, unless it really is desired behaviour, like Commander Data learning from his Daddy, but I don't think users should have to put up with an arbitrary bias!
by diggan | 2025-07-11 09:34:27+00:00
> I don't know where you've met all those programmers who are good at their job

Most of my professional experience is from working in smaller startups, grown into medium-sized ones, that I've picked to approach for work because I liked the programmers who already worked there, I'm guessing that's why :)

Consulting for various IT and IT-adjacent companies of all types of sizes, I certainly understand where you coming from, they tend to already be burned out (or something) enough to not ask questions anymore.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-07-11 09:34:38+00:00
> The EU has basically said that it's better to have a handful medium-sized companies in competition for customers than one or two mega-corps owning and dictating the market. And to resolve that they employ two things, one is the DMA/DSA and similar laws which mostly takes effect when your company reaches a certain large market penetration, the other is standardisations such as the Radio Equipment Directive (think "USB-C law" and similar ones) that make it easier for consumers to avoid vendor lock-in.

Then show me the handful of European, medium-sized companies competing for customers. The problem is that you pass DMA, DSA, GDPR, etc. which Google, Apple etc. can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it.

Instead what's happening is that European alternatives (the kind that's actually good, not the kind that's European and half as good) don't exist and the incentives to build one shrink because any scaling company is instantly hamstrung.
by RobertChin | 2025-07-11 09:34:39+00:00
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by inejge | 2025-07-11 09:34:49+00:00
> But on the other, the fact that each pilot can see and feel immediately what inputs the other is applying is such a huge advantage compared to airbus’ fly by wire.

Confusion is still possible on Boeing aircraft[1] (the incident happened with an Air France 777 in 2022. AvHerald has more direct quotes from the official report.)

[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/opposing-dual-inputs-con...
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-11 09:35:18+00:00
I always wonder about what sort of js engine such projects use since at the end of the day imo, it is all just a dance b/w js engine, html and css. Html & Css feels a little solved problem but the problem is of the js engine.

Sciter uses quickjs and I just checked and its like 35-36x times slower than V8 JIT

Also another interesting rabbit hole is that I found Duktape in the quickjs benchmarks and I saw https://blogcpp.org/ as one of the projects within Duktape but I can't even see the project on github. We really need some better way of preserving open source stuff I guess
by piltdownman | 2025-07-11 09:35:39+00:00
We had a number of somewhat stilted rainbow coalitions due to our electoral system based on proportional representation with a single transferrable vote - in fact its where most of the significant policy change on e.g. Education and the Environment came from since the IMF bailout via Labour and the Greens. Previously you had the PDs as well in the McDowell era.

The problem is that the election before last was a protest vote to keep the incumbents out at the expense of actual Governance - with thoroughly unsuitable Sinn Fein candidates elected as protest votes for 1st preferences, and by transfers in marginal rural constituencies thereafter.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/09/irish-voters-h...

Note that Sinn Fein is the political wing of the IRA and would be almost unheard of to hold any sort of meaningful majority in the Republic - but have garnered young peoples support in recent years based on fiscal fantasies of free housing and taxing high-earners even more.

This protest vote was aimed almost entirely at (rightly) destroying the influence of the Labour Party and the Greens due to successive unpopular taxes and DIE initiatives seen as self-aggrandizing and out of touch with their voting base. It saw first-timers, students, and even people on Holiday during the election get elected for Sinn Fein.

Fast-forward to today, and it quickly became evident what a disaster this was. Taking away those seats from Sinn Fein meant redistributing them elsewhere - and given the choices are basically AntiAusterityAlliance/PeopleBeforeProfit on the far-left, and a number of wildly racist and ethnonationalists like the NationalParty on the far-right, the electorate voted in force to bring in both 'moderate' incumbents on a damage-limitation basis.

https://www.politico.eu/article/irelands-elections-european-...
by esperent | 2025-07-11 09:35:50+00:00
Presumably you're getting the whole Slack app, and if you're landing on their 404 page (for reasons other than this thread), then presumably you're using Slack. Which means you would have downloaded and cached that already.

There's a discussion to be had as to whether the Slack app should be 48mb, but that's a different discussion. Focusing on the 404 page feels like outrage bait for web devs.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-07-11 09:36:04+00:00
Those billions won't raise themselves, you know.

More generally, these execs are talking their book as they're in a low margin capital intensive businesses whose future is entirely dependent on raising a bunch more money, so hype and insane claims are necessary for funding.

Now, maybe they do sortof believe it, but if so, why do they keep hiring software engineers and other staff?
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-11 09:36:33+00:00
I'm not defending Israel, but just because it commits genocide doesn't mean it's not a good democracy - worse, if it ranks highly on a democracy index, it implies the population approves of the genocide.

But that's more difficult to swallow than it being the responsibility of one person or "the elite", and that the population is itself a victim.

Same with the US, I feel sorry for the population, but ultimately a significant enough amount of people voted in favor of totalitarianism. Sure, they were lied to, they've been exposed to propaganda for years / decades, and there's suspicions of voter fraud now, but the US population also has unlimited access to information and a semblance of democracy.

It's difficult to correlate democracy with immoral decisions, but that's one of the possible outcomes.