MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-07-15 16:27:05+00:00
> Because if we're making an argument purely based on the cost of a cycle on a battery, that's not reasonable. New batteries do not appear in the system for the cost of buying them. Old batteries do not disappear, perfectly recycled for free.

So lets include the costs for decommissioning nuclear plants, dealing with the waste and that the public is on the hook for essentially the entire accident insurance?

> Yes, and if we'd listened to me 25 years ago when I was making this same argument, we'd have more zero-carbon electricity on the grid today. ;)

You seem to not be caught up with what happened 25 years ago? Or are projecting because you can't accept reality?

There was a massive push to build nuclear power alongside a tiny one to build renewables.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 was a massive handout to the nuclear industry. That is the act that spawned Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer and another 15 now cancelled reactors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005

You can read about all the individually cancelled reactors here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_canceled_nuclear_react...

In the meantime Vogtle required handout after handout to get pushed over the finish line and we all know how Virgil C. Summer went. The ratepayers saddled with hiked bills for decades to pay for the boondoggle.

You seem to be living in some completely made up reality were we didn't subsidize the absolute shit out of nuclear power? Because that is what we did.

Everyone is against nuclear power and if only everyone hade listen to you had given even more subsidies 20 years ago it would have gotten built! We need trillions in subsidies!

> OK, and now we have reached another of the kind of comments that I find problematic, so I've stopped reading here.

Love the dodge. If you don't read it doesn't exist. Due to the well known costs of nuclear power what you propose will make us poorer for generations.

What you say is that it is fine to add multiples to our electricity costs because you can't let go of a dead-end technology.

Pure insanity.
by zebomon | 2025-07-15 16:27:17+00:00
Good read. I've been reflecting recently on the idea of demand-side economic growth as something that happens across two variables: consumption and reproduction. Until very recently in history, only the reproduction variable ever moved the big number much at all. It could be that as each of our own energy needs continues to increase, especially as compute-hungry AI proliferates and personalized medicine extends lifespans, it becomes culturally more normal for populations to fall.

Though as others have pointed out, nothing about our society seems to be set up to accommodate that at all, which makes it terrifying.
by ipaddr | 2025-07-15 16:27:26+00:00
The drivers license id doesn't solve anything but adds a layer of nonsense on top.

That doesn't stop cloudflares marketshare takeover. It doesn't stop CAPTCHA which will filter out bots using these ids. It provides an easy method for hackers to use. It filters out the curious kids.

In the end it solves nothing and creates more problems.
by SamuelAdams | 2025-07-15 16:27:52+00:00
As a new parent, it’s money. Daycare costs $400 USD per week in my area, from 7am-6pm, 5 days a week.

So for one child that is roughly 20,000 USD annually.

Once you hit the 3-5 kid mark, it usually does not make sense for the spouse to work, unless they are earning well above 6 figures.

So then you’re going down to one income supporting a family of 3-5. That’s risky for a variety of reasons.

If you want actual actions congress can take:

1. Expand limits on the dependent HSA account to allow more than 5,000 annually. Daycare alone is much more than 5,000 USD, it seems making that completely tax free will help.

2. Subsidize the entire cost of daycare. This will never happen but by golly it will work.
by AIPedant | 2025-07-15 16:28:30+00:00
The AI could not have possibly done that, but the blog says "through a combination of threat intelligence and Big Sleep."

I am not sure what "threat intelligence" precisely means here but it was definitely not just the AI system which stopped this - "imminently going to be used" could suggest old-fashioned human intelligence from a mole on the dark web, etc etc.
by hngaza | 2025-07-15 16:28:30+00:00
I see that this question was flagged. I understand that this is sensitive political topic, but my goal is not to start flame wars but truly engage in exploring potential solutions. HN is full of extremely intelligent and creative people, there's no other such place on the net, I think being able to tap into the "HN hive-mind" could yield some insights. I'd be curious for the reason of flagging this question. To dang/mods: feel free to change the title (I now can't) to e.g. "how to stop tragedy in Gaza" or something less controversial, if that's the issue. Thanks.
by caseysoftware | 2025-07-15 16:28:59+00:00
US Code appears to disagree:

8 U.S. Code § 1325 - Improper entry by alien

(a)Improper time or place; avoidance of examination or inspection; misrepresentation and concealment of facts

Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.

Ref: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1325
by hulitu | 2025-07-15 16:29:21+00:00
> far more customization, including the ability to take a photo, set it as your wallpaper,

Clearly the first OS version that has those features. /s

> Android has always been about enabling you to personalize and customize your device.

Aren't those people required to take a drug test, when they are hired ? Did he ever used an Android phone, or just heard about it from a friend ? Because even Win 3.1 is more customizable than Android.
by parpfish | 2025-07-15 16:29:44+00:00
one of my theories for why we specifically see highly-educated people waiting longer or opting out is that it's a consequence of tiger-mom/helicopter-parent upbringings

its a double-blow to deciding to have kids -- a) they were raised to pursue personal/career excellence which deprioritized becoming a parent, and b) when they look back at their parental role models they see an unsustainable level of over-involvement that they don't have the time/money to match and think that that's what's expected of being parents.

if we started normalizing more hands-off parenting styles where we let kids be kids and don't expect as much from parents, everybody wins.
by jandrese | 2025-07-15 16:29:44+00:00
I think a bigger factor is how the war broke up a lot of the old power structures and for a couple of decades it was really possible to get ahead even if you started off poor. There was an abundance of need for labor rebuilding the world and servicing the sudden boom in consumer goods that arose from all of the technologies being developed. Those power structures have reformed and now we are back in the neofeudalism model that arises when power is allowed to ossify.

There is no guarantee that a WW3 would even repeat this phenomenon.
by maxglute | 2025-07-15 16:30:01+00:00
PRC probably has more than OECD combined in STEM by now. Based on past 20 years of even declining births and tertiary + STEM enrollment %s, they're still on trend to add another 40+ million in next 20-25 years, i.e. it's demographically baked in. Many of whom will be in the workforce until the 2070/80s/90s - for most of our and our kids life times. +40m is more than US is expected to increase population (births + immigration) total - US would need every new baby and immigrant to be STEM to compete on talent. Meanwhile more PRC talent staying/harder to brain drain/even returning irrespective of western immigration policies. It's no exaggeration to say PRC is reaping the greatest high skill demographic dividend in recorded history.

All the current contesting across innovative sectors PRC doing today (well last 10 years) was while they were rapidly fumbling through building industrial chain and R&D processes... catching up with fraction of resources. Now it's increasingly obvious their R&D and industries arespinning towards escape velocity with the most brains and most complete manufacturing chain (PRC only country in the world whose manufacturing sector has every industrial category classified by the UN).

West going to be much more keen to protect these sectors domestically, but it's going to be hard to prop them up. I think study from 5 years ago, when a low cost PRC competitor enters market, western incumbent global market share erodes rapidly -> operating margins collapse by 50-100% -> run out of $$$ for R&D -> stops growing and become dividend zombies. 2nd China shock will be this industrial trap repeat across many sectors.
by BizarroLand | 2025-07-15 16:30:07+00:00
All of media, art, and majesty have been an attempt to stave off boredom, be it through glory, or splendor, or sex.

We have more boredom today than ever before in the past, and the richnesses of our lives are gutted with the continuous striving against the specter of boredom.

It's all been bread and circuses since before the fall of Rome. We only strive to make something happen until we reach the point where we have everything we ever wanted, and then we don't have the first clue what to do with it.
by BeetleB | 2025-07-15 16:31:10+00:00
Hey Simon and everyone else.

I was write to be downvoted. Apologies for getting it wrong. I started using Django in 2008, and Simon's influence was very apparent at that point - my comment was not meant to belittle his contributions (I also follow him on Mastodon - big fan of his comments on HN and there).

I guess my memory was just wrong. I knew Jacob was hired after Adrian - but I thought they both started Django after Jacob joined, and Simon was an early intern. I had the ordering totally wrong.
by Anamon | 2025-07-15 16:31:16+00:00
You can either keep it quiet, im which case it's useless to the rest of us because no ad blocker would've been using it, or share it with developers, in which case I'm not sure the time it would've taken to write the exploit would've been worth it, for it to work the one or two days Google would've taken to notice and patch it.

No other decision here would have made much of a difference.
by twc00 | 2025-07-15 16:31:27+00:00
Behind the scenes, Mezzie routes every prompt to a model you need for questions, code, analysis, or vision—and scrubs your identity so providers never know who asked. Persistent memory and an advanced reasoning agent travel with you across every model, while granular controls for context length and instant model switching give you pro‑level power in a single plan—no more juggling subscriptions.
by Retr0id | 2025-07-15 16:31:57+00:00
My preferred python wrapper for sqlite is apsw. The maintainer gives a good answer here for why not to use an async interface in most cases: https://github.com/rogerbinns/apsw/discussions/456#discussio...

It really depends on what your workload looks like, but I think synchronous will win most of the time.
by nilamo | 2025-07-15 16:32:08+00:00
> a movie for two is like a $75 experience with popcorn

A ticket is less than $15 during the expensive times, and $10 off peak. Where in the world are you seeing movies?

I get it, I don't go to the theater anywhere near what I used to, but the nice one near me with a bar and a player piano in the lobby is still nowhere near $75 for two tickets.
by alwa | 2025-07-15 16:32:23+00:00
Well. Certainly for people in the room here. One imagines regulators know that too, and will draw the line accordingly… that they may grudgingly tolerate validation systems that allow some degree of individual fraud, but stomp on the first of us here to vibe-code our way to a fraud-as-a-service site that gets any traction.

I’m reminded of all-around-good-guy @patio11’s evergreen The Optimal Amount Of Fraud Is Non-Zero…

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
by bee_rider | 2025-07-15 16:32:32+00:00
“SCP is the the serial numbers filed off” is sort of a funny concept. Conventionally each SCP story is considered to exist within its own canon and the author is able to pick-and-choose which other stories “exist” from its point of view, right? So there are n SCP continuities, and after the book is published there will be n+1, but that +1 is special for copyright reasons, haha.
by 0xEF | 2025-07-15 16:32:33+00:00
Correct.

It's the same conversation every year, well before Elon came along. The big players are TurboTax and H&R Block. TurboTax specifically has led the charge for over two decades to prevent you from ever filing your taxes for free. It's a racket, and an extremely profitable one for them, so there's no way they're going to willingly give that up without some new and enforceable laws being passed.
by ks2048 | 2025-07-15 16:32:38+00:00
> works with any language

Does it work in Tojolab'al (Mayan language spoken by 70,000 in Chiapas)?

I get mildly irked by apps saying they work in "all/any" language. Obviously, it works in whatever languages ChatGPT "knows". Although for marketing, I understand the former is easier to say.

fwiw - ChapGPT acts like it knows these kinds of low-resource languages, but it's difficult to tell how much of it is just hallucinating. (I am trying to do work in this area).
Show HN: Multi-Vector HNSW in Pure Java
by habedi0 | 2025-07-15 16:32:51+00:00
Hi everyone,

I created a Java library called Multi-Vector HNSW, which includes an implementation of the HNSW algorithm with support for multi-vector data. It’s written in Java 17 and uses the Java Vector API for fast distance calculations.

Project's GitHub repo, in case you want to have a look: https://github.com/habedi/multi-vector-hnsw
by BizarroLand | 2025-07-15 16:33:06+00:00
I think within the next 20 years we will see the rise of AI generated movies custom fit for your pleasure that will contain information to educate you, images to astound you, a story that will pluck at your heart strings and that you will be able to personally influence by your words and choices and reactions.

They'll end up being more like video games than traditional movies, and no two playthroughs will be exactly the same, and eventually you will be able to stay in the movie world and advance the story for days or weeks at a time.
by jdiff | 2025-07-15 16:33:13+00:00
> LLMs in their current state have integrated into the workflows for many, many IT roles. They'll never be niche, unless governing bodies come together to kill them.

Having a niche is different from being niche. I also strongly believe you overstate how integrated they are.

> Straw man argument - this is in no way a metric for validating the power of LLMs as a tool for IT roles. Can you not find open source code bases that leverage LLMS because you haven't looked, or because you can't tell the difference between human and LLM code?

As mentioned, I have looked. I told you what I found when I looked. And I've invited others to look. I also invited you. This is not a straw man argument, it's making a prediction to test a hypothesis and collecting evidence. I know I am not all seeing, which is why I welcome you to direct my eyes. With how strong your claims and convictions are, it should be easy.

Again: You claim that AI is such a productivity boost that it will rock the IT industry to its foundations. We cannot cast our gaze on closed source code, but there are many open source devs who are AI-friendly. If AI truly is a productivity boost, some of them should be maintaining widely-used production code in order to take advantage of that.

If you're too busy to do anything but discuss, I would instead invite you to point out where my reasoning goes so horrendously off track that such examples are apparently so difficult to locate, not just for me, but for others. If one existed, I would additionally expect that it would be held up as an example and become widely known for it with as often as this question gets asked. But the world's full of unexpected complexities, if there's something that's holding AI back from seeing adoption reflected in the way I predict, that's also interesting and worth discussion.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-15 16:33:32+00:00
This is an opportunity to see how to make it work. If it doesn’t, we’re all dead eventually. I find the idea of creating new life to keep a poorly functioning pyramid scheme going grotesque, ymmv.

Edit: If you want to have kids in this macro, good luck, you’re on your own (based on the evidence). And it’s only going to keep getting more expensive to exist in our lifetimes (shrinking labor supply, climate change, sovereign debt, etc).
by mikewarot | 2025-07-15 16:33:39+00:00
I've managed to live 61 years without learning what a Window Manager was until today... I've used the Microsoft Windows style floating window manager forever, and always thought of the tiling ones as some weird quirk, and a thing to quickly get disabled.

Thanks for prompting me to learn something new today. Usually I only have one application full screen at any time.
by stouset | 2025-07-15 16:33:39+00:00
You're the one that started things off here with framing things as "replacing police with a hippie circle". Further, you admit you can't speak credibly to San Francisco, but then you keep trying to speak credibly about San Francisco.

Now we've pivoted to New York. Great! That's presumably somewhere you do have more context on but it's not somewhere I can speak credibly about. You claim that police reform has been a driver of increased crime there. Police reforms there are something I don't have insight into. So I am simply asking you to tell me what police reforms have occurred and why you think they've resulted in an increase in nuisance crimes. I did some basic Googling and saw a 3% drop in police officers between—IIRC—2020 and 2022, the post-COVID time period I assume we're talking about. That doesn't seem to me like a large enough change to make the kind of impact you're talking about, but you haven't given me much to go on either, only vibes.

I don't need legal citations. I just need an actual claim to examine. "Police reforms caused an increase in crime, but also unrelated COVID stuff had an effect too" is more or less impossible to evaluate. "Police budgets dropped X%, overtime hours dropped Y% as a result, and over the following two years crimes A, B, and C increased by Z%" includes facts and an opinion of cause and effect that can be evaluated in the context of that fact.

This is what a good-faith argument is. Making a falsifiable claim and giving others an opportunity to assess that claim. Making generic statements and backing out when someone asks for more information is not.
by dkga | 2025-07-15 16:33:43+00:00
Interesting use case. By coincidence I am also learning Danish quite intensively. What I do (and that tends to work for me) is the following:

- I try to actively write something and when I hit a wall, I try in other languages: the important in this part is to get the text flowing from me. Eg, "du could har hjælpe mig, når jeg called du" (trying to write in Danish, "you could have helped me when I called you")

- I then paste it on ChatGPT and ask for a C2-level correction with explanations on vocabulary and grammar, and translations into a few other languages. Eg, my prompt would be """ "du could har hjælpe mig, når jeg called du"

correct to c2-level and explain grammar and vocabulary. give related examples. then translate to German, English, French and Italian. """

This is incredibly helpful to do everyday, especially if you are also learning passively by reading/studying by yourself. By the way, for those curious, here's how ChatGPT would correct the sentence: "Du kunne have hjulpet mig, da jeg ringede til dig." Interestingly, it assumed I meant "called" as in, "telephoned" (not my original intention). Translating into other languages helps you spot and get a sensibility for such cases.

As an aside, for me the most challenging part of learning Danish is the pronunciation. It's beautiful, but it doesn't map out too easily to written words :)
by pkdpic | 2025-07-15 16:33:48+00:00
Absolutely perfect blog post. You provoked some new thoughts, convinced me of your position, taught me something concrete and practical about debating, had a human narrative, gave me a good book recommendation, didn't feel manipulative or formulaic, wrote something that an employed person can read in a reasonable amount of time AND most importantly made a solid Matrix reference.

You're my blog hero, thank you for being cool and setting a good example. Also really important LLM hype reminder.
by aesh2Xa1 | 2025-07-15 16:33:49+00:00
I think you're ignoring the fact that China is, factually, the leading greenhouse gas emitter.

Your argument has now shifted to focus on consumer demand. Yet, even examination of this angle will reveal that China's state policies create the artificially low prices that fuel that consumption.

The issue isn't simply that "the West buys things." It's that China's government actively engineers this hyper-consumption as the Chinese economic policy.

The CSIS (link below) describes this as a system of "nonmarket policies" and "state-driven overproduction." This is accomplished through massive government subsidies that allow Chinese companies to operate at a loss and "dump" cheap goods onto the global market.

The "unsustainable consumption" you describe is, therefore, a direct response to a market deliberately distorted by China for the sake of its economic ambitions.

Furthermore, the CSIS article explicitly states that these dumping policies support China's "pollution-intensive" and "carbon-intensive" manufacturing.

All this is to show that the problem is not reducible to consumer choice, but more so a deliberate strategy by the Chinese state.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-steel-and-aluminum-tariffs-...
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-15 16:34:01+00:00
Sure, at a certain point, not replacing enough people means the species goes extinct over time.

That doesn't mean humanity going down to (random number) 1B people via gradual birthrate declines is automatically (nor rapidly) going to lead to that, if we have enough automation to handle it, and if we have a plan to stop the process at some point.
by Arnt | 2025-07-15 16:34:05+00:00
It makes sense to have a rule that the punishment for vandalism depends in part on the monetary value of the damaged/destroyed object. If you have such a rule, why should you make an exception for some objects, e.g. the most famous few? What's the justification for an exception?

"The estimated price is high and very imprecise" strikes me as poor. A famous object really is valuable (in a cultural sense) and if the monetary estimate is high, that seems much more appropriate to me than not having an estimate.
by ebiester | 2025-07-15 16:34:56+00:00
Consider the general research - in all, it doesn't eliminate people, but let's say it shakes out to speeding up developers 10% over all tasks. (That includes creating tickets, writing documentation, unblocking bugs, writing scripts, building proof of concepts, and more rote refactoring, but does not solve the harder problems or stop us from doing the hard work of software engineering that doesn't involve lines of code.)

That means that it's worth up to 10% of a developer's salary as a tool. And more importantly, smaller teams go faster, so it might be worth that full 10%.

Now, assume other domains end up similar - some less, some more. So, that's a large TAM.