MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-07-10 19:18:11+00:00
When we say reproductive value, we’re applying a supply demand metaphor from economics to each sex, then comparing their values in a hypothetical underlying currency. Supply and demand fluctuate but, as you said, we are born in about a 50/50 ratio, so absent major upsets to the ratio post-birth like wars, we should expect there to be roughly one man for each woman. Then demand (for men) is the thing that must be low to reduce their value. But it would be a bit silly to say women just aren’t interested in men in general, so I have to assume your complaint is that women in aggregate don’t have equal demand for all men. We’re not talking about the reproductive value of men in general, nor about a biological process removed from society, but a social phenomenon wherein demand for men by women is distributed unevenly among them. An undesirable man might be said to have a low reproductive value and a desirable man a high one. In aggregate, it wouldn’t make sense to say men have a low reproductive value.
by Terr_ | 2025-07-10 19:18:45+00:00
> people consistently predict and self-report in the wrong direction

I recall an adage about work-estimation: As chunks get too big, people unconsciously substitute "how possible does the final outcome feel" with "how long will the work take to do."

People asked "how long did it take" could be substituting something else, such as "how alone did I feel while working on it."
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-10 19:18:59+00:00
I'm guessing that due to regulations, the only AIs you'll be allowed to use in the EU will be the EU developed ones that fulfill the requirements, so there's a captive market right there for local companies.

Granted, they'll probably end up performing worse than US or Chinese ones operating without restrictions and being uncompetitive on the global free market, but when did EU leaders ever think about long term consequences? Certainly not when they tied their economy to Russian gas and banned nuclear, certainly not when they prioritized toxic diesel engines over gasoline, certainly not when they demilitarized or when they ceded tech innovation to US and China, but for once this will be the right call, I can feel it, this will bring EU to the forefront of tech supremacy.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-10 19:19:54+00:00
I disagree, cookie banners are not the bane people make them out to be.

The alternative is much worse, which is having zero say in tracking cookies. I'll take a banner on every single website to have more control of that.

I really don't see the issue. If you really find them annoying, use ublock with a proper cookie banner filter or something like that
by kurthr | 2025-07-10 19:20:02+00:00
I suspect we'll never know, but it's somewhat typical of blithe idealists who would rather hear supportive platitudes than confront hard decisions or tradeoffs. Painting complex individuals who are a product of their time (pretty much everyone) with a broad reductive brush makes life decisions easy and forces others to deal with reality. It was a fairly effective trope from the 60s to the 2010s (the end of history), and even Chomsky failed to really spot the turning point for the Manufacture of Discontent until 2020, a solid 4 years too late. Now they seem lost in the old narrative, fighting old inconsequential battles in a new world.
Show HN: Cactus – Ollama for Smartphones
by HenryNdubuaku | 2025-07-10 19:20:59+00:00
Hey HN, Henry and Roman here - we've been building a cross-platform framework for deploying LLMs, VLMs, Embedding Models and TTS models locally on smartphones.

Ollama enables deploying LLMs models locally on laptops and edge severs, Cactus enables deploying on phones. Deploying directly on phones facilitates building AI apps and agents capable of phone use without breaking privacy, supports real-time inference with no latency, we have seen personalised RAG pipelines for users and more.

Apple and Google actively went into local AI models recently with the launch of Apple Foundation Frameworks and Google AI Edge respectively. However, both are platform-specific and only support specific models from the company. To this end, Cactus:

- Is available in Flutter, React-Native & Kotlin Multi-platform for cross-platform developers, since most apps are built with these today.

- Supports any GGUF model you can find on Huggingface; Qwen, Gemma, Llama, DeepSeek, Phi, Mistral, SmolLM, SmolVLM, InternVLM, Jan Nano etc.

- Accommodates from FP32 to as low as 2-bit quantized models, for better efficiency and less device strain.

- Have MCP tool-calls to make them performant, truly helpful (set reminder, gallery search, reply messages) and more.

- Fallback to big cloud models for complex, constrained or large-context tasks, ensuring robustness and high availability.

It's completely open source. Would love to have more people try it out and tell us how to make it great!

Repo: https://github.com/cactus-compute/cactus
by maxglute | 2025-07-10 19:21:38+00:00
IMO there's no replacement TFR fix without mass immigration or some state system to figure out state surrogacy and state orphanage - queue "imperical kinderblock". All the pronatalist policies seem to bring TFR to ~1.6 (but declining), I surmise mix in some punitive policies (i.e. high income / wealth transfer tax for childless) can bring it up slightly higher. But seems like modern life just paradoxically too comfy or stressful to incentivize raising 2.1 TFR kids. Go look at rich middle east countries, every incentive from resources, to religion, to culture to cheap "help" is there, but all those countries gradually going under TFR2. Every 0.1 TFR is about 5% new birth shortfall from stabilizing population, i.e. population will continue to decline. Can kind of TFR "hack" by engineering population sex ratio to be more female, i.e. 60:40 female:male brings replacement TFR to ~1.7, so maybe future is just all female. But all of htis is just a lot of work to... not let the blacks/browns in.
by steveklabnik | 2025-07-10 19:21:50+00:00
> Current LLMs

One thing that happened here is that they aren't using current LLMs:

> Most issues were completed in February and March 2025, before models like Claude 4 Opus or Gemini 2.5 Pro were released.

That doesn't mean this study is bad! In fact, I'd be very curious to see it done again, but with newer models, to see if that has an impact.
by gambiting | 2025-07-10 19:22:18+00:00
Do they? Here in the UK it's been a huge problem for years now that residential rates have been locked to basically ~25p/kWh, but businesses have been paying 3 or 4 times that, it bankrupted so many places when their monthly bills literally went from like 2k a month to 8k a month. It's the reason why charging a car at home is so much cheaper than at public charging stations, they just cannot get the same rates since they are classed as businesses.
by Gracana | 2025-07-10 19:22:22+00:00
I got the feeling that it was dead long ago. Sure there's plenty of readers and lots of sites "support" it, but what they tend to give you is a headline and article blurb feed with links to click through to see the ads. They don't want you consuming their articles through a reader. That's what makes it "dead" to me and a lot of others.
by amirhirsch | 2025-07-10 19:22:47+00:00
Figure 6 which breaks-down the time spent doing different tasks is very informative -- it suggest: 15% less active coding 5% less testing, 8% less research and reading

4% more idle time 20% more AI interaction time

The 28% less coding/testing/research is why developers reported 20% less work. You might be spending 20% more time overall "working" while you are really idle 5% more time and feel like you've worked less because you were drinking coffee and eating a sandwich between waiting for the AI and reading AI output.

I think the AI skill-boost comes from having work flows that let you shave half that git-ops time, cut an extra 5% off coding, but cut the idle/waiting and do more prompting of parallel agents and a bit more testing then you really are a 2x dev.
by godelski | 2025-07-10 19:22:47+00:00
> you'd think there would be some additional safety checks they could add that would at least let it fail with an error message instead of actual data loss.

My guess is that these would exist, and do.

I think you've just made an assumption about a bug that was reported 17 years ago. Assuming nothing has been done since. It looks like they can't reproduce it, *making it impossible to mark as fixed* even if it was. But I wouldn't assume nothing was done.

Also remember that Gmail, Outlook, and others are in play here. They also maintain trashed items for 30 days, making it easy to recover. As the provider, they shouldn't make it easy to mass delete things either, right? TB is just the interface, frankly, I'm not sure I know how to permanently delete emails with it. I'm not sure I can. But the interaction here should result in multiple lines of defense.
by dmezzetti | 2025-07-10 19:22:52+00:00
I'm the developer of txtai, a fairly popular open-source project. I don't use any AI-generated code and it's not integrated into my workflows at the moment.

AI has a lot of potential but it's way over-hyped right now. Listen to the people on the ground who are doing real work and building real projects, none of them are over-hyping it. It's mostly those who have tangentially used LLMs.

It's also not surprising that many in this thread are clinging to a basic premise that it's 3 steps backwards to go 5 steps forward. Perhaps that is true but I'll take the study at face value, it seems very plausible to me.
by kragen | 2025-07-10 19:23:47+00:00
Yes, safety is a significant disadvantage of the use of magnesium as portable stored energy, but if your ship's payload is already on fire, in most cases the shipment will not be very successful anyway, and loss of the ship is a serious possibility.

If a hypothetical ship full of magnesium sinks without catching the magnesium on fire first, the magnesium will probably not catch fire from exposure to water. Perhaps if it's sufficiently finely divided, which seems like a bad idea.
by olddustytrail | 2025-07-10 19:24:01+00:00
Bertrand Russell published a collection of essays in 1935 titled _In Praise Of Idleness_ which are well worth reading.

One of the essays is called _Between Scylla and Charybdis_ (the original rock and a hard place!) which explains why he rejects the commonly accepted idea that an intellectual should naturally be politically either a Communist or a Fascist. Remember Fascism was not a dirty word at this point; the Nazis destroyed it's legitimacy through their actions.

Anyway, if you want a better understanding read that. And the rest because they're very interesting.
by nradov | 2025-07-10 19:24:43+00:00
Grandma's AC doesn't run 24×7. Most utility districts have some sort of subsidy or rate limit program for low income customers.

Ultimately the only way to supply the constant power consumption demanded by data centers and keep consumer prices reasonable will be to build more fission power plants. This approach has several serious cost and safety issues but it's the only thing we're certain will work.
by Bender | 2025-07-10 19:25:17+00:00
It seems there are ways to make this legal. [1] It's not really editing so to speak but one could define the genes at creation. Will this set the foundation for making many science fiction movies come true? Pre-defining a persons role in society, predispositions, etc... Superman Man of Steel, or making super-soldiers (fast growing and disposable?) and so on?

Artificial sperm and eggs means no legal record of birth and no parents that are aware of conception. How does HN feel about disposable humans? One has to think like a psychopath in other words all corporations to understand why I asked.

[1] - https://crispr-gene-editing-regs-tracker.geneticliteracyproj...
by marcosdumay | 2025-07-10 19:25:24+00:00
No, that's not the behavior of big companies in "The Innovators Dilemma".

Those companies optimize for corporation profit. If the US was optimizing for societal wealth or government revenue they would be pushing the country into renewables.

On reality many big corporations get corrupt management that destroy corporate profit and optimize for the managers personal wealth. Those ones act like the US is acting. But that's not the behavior that book is about.
by _jayhack_ | 2025-07-10 19:25:57+00:00
This does not take into account the fact that experienced developers working with AI have shifted into roles of management and triage, working on several tasks simultaneously.

Would be interesting (and in fact necessary to derive conclusions from this study) to see aggregate number of tasks completed per developer with AI augmentation. That is, if time per task has gone up by 20% but we clear 2x as many tasks, that is a pretty important caveat to the results published here
by tehryanx | 2025-07-10 19:26:03+00:00
I appreciate your responses here. The thing that still really stands out to me as a completely novel risk in this framework is that the extension is automatically seeking out and attaching to these servers as soon as a page gets loaded.

This seems really bad to me. There are so many ways for a website to end up in one of my browser tabs without me wanting it there, or even knowing it's there.

If that happens, and that tab just so happens to be a malicious MCP-B enabled page, it could steal all kinds of data from all kinds of different web apps I'm interacting with. I think it should be seen as the responsibility of the framework to enforce some level of data isolation, or at the least opt-in consent mechanisms.
by bicx | 2025-07-10 19:26:14+00:00
I think it depends on the kind of work you're doing, but I use it on mature codebases where I am the expert, and I heavily delegate to Claude Code. By being knowledgeable of the codebase, I know exactly how to specify a task I need performed. I set it to work on one task, then I monitor it while personally starting on other work.

I think LLMs shine when you need to write a higher volume of code that extends a proven pattern, quickly explore experiments that require a lot of boilerplate, or have multiple smaller tasks that you can set multiple agents upon to parallelize. I've also had success in using LLMs to do a lot of external documentation research in order to integrate findings into code.

If you are fine-tuning an algorithm or doing domain-expert-level tweaks that require a lot of contextual input-output expert analysis, then you're probably better off just coding on your own.

Context engineering has been mentioned a lot lately, but it's not a meme. It's the real trick to successful LLM agent usage. Good context documentation, guides, and well-defined processes (just like with a human intern) will mean the difference between success and failure.
by worik | 2025-07-10 19:26:35+00:00
> * Tidal energy is valuable but geographically constrained

Yes, of course. I do not get the point, this is not a solution to every electricity generation problem

> * Only a few countries have suitable locations for it (UK, Canada, France, South Korea)

There are more than that. I have a seven knot tidle current 5km from my house, not mentioned in your list. I know of others. The costal conditions are quite common for this. The same technology will be useful in rivers too
by yndoendo | 2025-07-10 19:26:48+00:00
Was talking with a bartender at a restaurant, also a teacher. She would get home around 23:00 and have to wake up around 5:00 while tendering during week days. Her daughter just turning 16 and is signed up for all basketball teams she can be in a hour drive radius. Her daughter was going to be working as a cleaner at the local hotel this summer. As she said, "Basketball is her daughter's job and volleyball is her outlet where she can be a kid."

Most likely is she living vicariously through her daughter's basketball experience or it is seen as an economic improvement, for her daughter or both. Her daughter likely sees that being a teacher doesn't pay well and multiple jobs are needed. This helps push for this "sports is a job" mentality.

Tiger Woods a the Williams sisters promote the idea of making it big if your just work at the same sport over and over at a young age. This is often a case of Law of Small Numbers.

Others might have the worst kind of parent. One that only loves their child if their good at sports.
by Hilift | 2025-07-10 19:27:16+00:00
Reminds me of Maersk. They had poor endpoint hygiene and no EDR. In 2017 about 90% of their infrastructure was wiped in less than one minute. They had to reinstall a lot of things due to backups weren't up to par. Usually level 1 merchants (> 6 million transactions per year) are put on an audit and improvement plan if this occurs. In the UK, there could be an investigation and penalty from the ICO for the data breach.
by jorkadeen | 2025-07-10 19:27:18+00:00
The parent poster is correct. We do monomorphization, hence Flix types are unboxed. For example, a `List[Int32]` is a list of primitive integers. There is no boxing and no overhead. The upshot is that sometimes we are faster than Java (which has to do boxing). The downside is larger bytecode size-- which is less of a factor these days.

Caveat: Flix sometimes has to box values on the boundary between Flix and Java code -- e.g. when calling a Java library methods that requires a java.lang.Object due to erasure in Java.
by AuryGlenz | 2025-07-10 19:27:42+00:00
Apparently in our school you straight up won't be able to play in the regular school teams unless you do the travel teams starting in elementary school, because everyone else does it. Therefore, your child won't be as good as them unless they're an absolute savant at the sport.

They'll still get to be on the team, but actually playing? Probably not.
by standardUser | 2025-07-10 19:27:51+00:00
A an older millennial, I have been pleasantly surprised by how vibrant my social life can be as long as I put in some effort. One key is living in a reasonably dense urban area. I have friends who make art and music, fiends who do standup comedy, friends on municipal sports teams - the ways to connect with people are expansive. And people in my age group (early 40's) seem only a little less inclined to make plans and go out compared to my friends in their 30's.

Even with my oldest friends, all of whom are busy with their kids, mortgages and spouses, we still prioritize taking trips to see each other and for everyone to get to know each other's kids.

So if you're anything like me (grown, mostly single, living alone in a dense urban center) I refuse to believe any social or technological developments have ruined our chances at human companionship.

But that's millennials. I have absolutely no idea how Gen Z will navigate this world. The fact that they seem to be choosing the least useful, social or pleasurable vice in the world (vaping), which also happens to be among the most viciously addictive vices (for many people) does not bode well in my opinion, no matter how enlightened the anti-alcohol stance may appear.
by meatmanek | 2025-07-10 19:27:55+00:00
Tides happen everywhere, but not to the same extent and not always at useful times. If your peak production times don't line up with peak demand times, then you need expensive energy storage. (This would change with the phase of the moon, so sometimes you'll get lucky and sometimes you won't.)

One thing that's relatively unique about the UK is that different parts of their coastline experience tides at different phases -- meaning with carefully chosen placement of different tidal energy plants, you can always have some of them operating near peak production. Click around https://www.tidetimes.org.uk and you can find places with high tide times happening at just about any time of day.

If you look at a map like http://www.bidstonobservatory.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016..., the best places to use tidal energy would be red areas with lots of white lines hitting the coast -- these would give you the highest-amplitude tides with the most opportunity for phasing. The UK has both.
by bauruine | 2025-07-10 19:28:01+00:00
I could ask for access I assume it's just a mail but I don't want to bother them because I can find a solution one or two results down from the redhat site anyway. I've worked with Linux and without a support contract for long enough that I know how debug and fix things. I wouldn't get direct access to support cases anyway. Our Linux guys provide a bash script to auto enroll.

It's not a login. It's a login with an active subscription. Are those article that valuable that they can't provide it for everyone with a @company.com address that has >n licences?
by discoutdynamite | 2025-07-10 19:28:03+00:00
well, from just a bit of research, its a wireless induction ammeter. for testing electrical validity of tiny surface mount parts. I imagine its specific to one type of component, such as inductors, and not general purpose. it would work by passing a controlled, stable microcurrent along its bridgewire, and measuring how much interference or flyback is generated. SMD inductors have a predictable design and method of operation, so its probably straightforward to detect their correct operation by induction. it may need the circuit to be powered or active, it may not, cant tell.
by Veedrac | 2025-07-10 19:28:14+00:00
This is basically just not true. Energy is fungible and the grid is demand driven. Every watt of solar displaces a watt of something else. In many places like the US we've basically stopped building nonrenewable energy generation as it's no longer economically competitive. China has to date still built a lot of coal powered generation even as most of the richer world shut theirs for greener sources, since China rightly and justly prioritized bringing a billion people out of severe poverty, but even in China the tides are turning, and we're seeing indications that 2025 could be their peak coal.

Things are getting better.
by frollogaston | 2025-07-10 19:28:15+00:00
I grew up in the 90s-2000s in a place were people were very serious about school. Very few kids were getting drunk etc, there were very few couples and 0 teen pregnancies, but there was still a healthy amount of socializing. That chart showing going out with 2+ friends was still a high % then, and it matched my experience.

This completely changed after iPhones and Facebook became popular enough. It ruined even the regular socializing. Even the few boy bullies started doing this lame-ass cyberbullying instead. Sometimes I wondered where the cool kids were on weekdays, then I checked my Minecraft server logs.
by kragen | 2025-07-10 19:28:55+00:00
This is currently more or less true, but historically speaking, sovereign default has often been used as a casus belli for invasion; that's where the Monroe doctrine comes from, after all. The collapsing Pax Americana is arguably the reason we haven't seen it happen in decades, so it would be unsurprising to see it start to happen again.

And of course financial considerations are often a first-order consideration in military conflict even today.
by resource_waste | 2025-07-10 19:29:06+00:00
Uh... you know that there are offline models that are already downloadable?

LLM regulation is too late, models are already at chatGPT3.5 or 4 levels, which is enough to do basically anything.

You are confusing intent for ground reality. Its like saying 'we banned drugs' but we still have a drug problem.