MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2025-07-11 09:08:23+00:00
> The real question is why is your bar set so low?

Have I misunderstood? Did you list them because they're *bad* writers?

Because everything you've written gave me the impression you thought they were good. It totally changes things if you think this is a low bar that AI is failing to cross.

Regardless of how you rank those writers: being in the top 10k of living people today means being in the top 0.0001% of the population. It means being amongst the best 3 or 4 in the city I live in, which is the largest city in Europe. Now, I don't know where you live, but considering the nearest million people around you, do you know who amongst them is the best writer? Or best anything else? Because for writers, I don't. YouTubers perhaps (there I can at least name some), but I think they (a German language course) are mostly interviewing people and I'm not clear how much writing of scripts they do.

And I don't expect current AI to be as good as even the top percentile, let alone award winners.

If I googled for those people you suggested, what would I gain? To know the biography and bibliography of a writer someone else puts on a pedestal. Out of curiosity, I did in fact later search for these names, but that doesn't make them relevant or give me a sense of why their writing is something you hold in such esteem that they are your standard against which the AI is judged — though it does increase the sense that they're what I think you think is a high bar (so why be upset AI isn't there yet?) rather than a low bar (where it actually makes sense to say it's not worth it). I can see why of those four George Will wasn't familiar, as I'm not an American and therefore don't read The Washington Post. Very Americo-centric list.

Out of curiosity (I don't know how popular UK media is wherever you live), do you know Charles Moore, Theodore Dalrymple, David Starkey, Nigel Lawson, or Paul Dacre? Without Googling.
by AllegedAlec | 2025-07-11 09:08:26+00:00
> How do you determine the productivity of a doctor?

At the end of the road. Patient outcome and contentedness compared to others with similar indications. Patients seen and all that is that sort of short-term BS that you see everywhere that's giving metrics a bad name. It'd be like determining a mechanic's productivity by how many times he twisted a wrench.
by seec | 2025-07-11 09:09:09+00:00
Yep pretty much stupid.

The best interpretation you can give is that they are naive idealists, stuck in the mental state of a kid (even though their intelligence is fully developed).

But as I'm getting older, I'm more inclined to say that they are clearly stupid, some form of "intellectual yet idiot".

I always roll my eyes when I read that ultra optimistic report about renewables because it doesn't really match reality. Not only do they always grossly exaggerate the benefits but they also systematically bury the problems that have to be solved for it to be a long-term solution (manufacturing in a sovereign way, recycling and grid balancing are largely unsolved problems).

And then you have idiots who come in and propose some grandiose "solution" that would require multiple countries/culture to not only collaborate economically but also accept de facto power imbalance and stuff like that. It's almost like believing in Santa; but it's cute up to a 10-year-old, after that it's more hopeless than anything else.
by Y-bar | 2025-07-11 09:09:19+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.

> just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead

Temu is under active investigation for breaching these laws, anyone operating within EU is subject to those laws, not just European companies (e.g. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-ope...)
by SiempreViernes | 2025-07-11 09:09:25+00:00
Economics is a pretty strong driver of "life style" priorities, for example the amount of people working so they can afford housing is not insignificant.

Anyway, they say it's not just economics already in the abstract: > We refer to this phenomenon as “shifting priorities” and propose that it likely reflects a complex mix of changing norms, evolving economic opportunities and constraints, and broader social and cultural forces.
by djlameche | 2025-07-11 09:09:57+00:00
I'm not using anything YET. I am thinking about hosting a pepper variety database I am developing on a VPS for public use. I want to use Keycloak for authentication and also some other services alongside (eg. a headless CMS for writing some of the content).

The thing is, I don't have any prior experience with hosting at all. So I am wondering if I can reduce attack surface by making "management" services (Keycloak admin console, the headless CMS admin interface etc.) accessible only to me...
by 7sigma | 2025-07-11 09:10:43+00:00
Its incredible when you consider that they have operating what is essentially a fascist police state in the West Bank for decades where the population has essentially no right and are frequent targets of pogroms by settlers.

In Monty Python fashion: if you disregard the genocide, the occupation, the ethnic cleansing, the heavy handed police state, the torture, the rape of prisoners, the arbitrary detentions with charge, the corruption, the military prosecution of children, then yes its a democracy.
by LoganDark | 2025-07-11 09:10:50+00:00
> How is eg a Pixel 9 Pro running Android with GMS on a Tensor any less entirely Google-designed than an iPhone 16 is entirely Apple-designed?

Android is developed by the Open Handset Alliance[0], which is not just Google:

Its member firms included HTC, Sony, Dell, Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics(formerly), T-Mobile, Nvidia, and Wind River Systems.

Android is more of a collaboration than Apple's entirely in-house. (Technically Apple's current generation of operating systems traces back to NeXTSTEP, which itself traced from some other things, but it's still had much cleaner provenance and been much more tightly controlled than Google's continuous conglomeration.)

I will say though I'd never heard of the Tensor until now, that's very interesting. I guess I am out of date on Pixels.

Apple owns manufacturing and patents for most of the tech they use in their phones (e.g. batteries, biometric sensors, and so on). Google Pixels use third-party suppliers (e.g. their fingerprint sensors are usually from FPC, Goodix or Qualcomm), they follow the same sets of protocols as other Android devices, and they use many of the same drivers provided by the third-party component vendors. For this reason I also wouldn't say the Microsoft Surface is vertically integrated. At best it's designed to work well with the software that's on it, and the software has had some features added for the device. Maybe that's some measure of vertical integration, but not quite to the level of Apple.

Apple certainly doesn't own everything; for example the actual display panel in an iPhone usually is manufactured by Samsung or LG Display. In my opinion though they still own enough to be far more integrated than Pixels are.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Handset_Alliance
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-11 09:11:09+00:00
Part of that, may be what we measure “product” to be.

My entire life, I have written “ship” software. It’s been pretty easy to say what my “product” is.

But I have also worked at a fairly small scale, in very small teams (often, only me). I was paid to manage a team, but it was a fairly small team, with highly measurable output. Personally, I have been writing software as free, open-source stuff, and it was easy to measure.

Some time ago, someone posted a story about how most software engineers have hardly ever actually shipped anything. I can’t even imagine that. I would find that incredibly depressing.

It would also make productivity pretty hard to measure. If I spent six months, working on something that never made it out of the cręche, would that mean all my work was for nothing?

Also, really experienced engineers write a lot less code (that does a lot more). They may spend four hours, writing a highly efficient 20-line method, while a less-experienced engineer might write a passable 100-line method in a couple of hours. The experienced engineers’ work might be “one and done,” never needing revision, while the less-experienced engineer’s work is a slow bug farm (loaded with million-dollar security vulnerability tech debt), which means that the productivity is actually deferred, for the more experienced engineer. Their manager may like the less-experienced engineer's work, because they make a lot more noise, doing it, are "faster," and give MOAR LINES. The "down-the-road" tech debt is of no concern to the manager.

I worked for a company that held the engineer Accountable, even if the issue appears, two years after shipping. It encouraged engineers to do their homework, and each team had a dedicated testing section, to ensure that they didn't ship bugs.

When I ask ChatGPT (for example) for a code solution, I find that it’s usually quite “naive” (pretty prolix). I usually end up rewriting it. That doesn’t mean that’s a bad thing, though. It gives me a useful “starting point,” and can save me several hours of experimenting.
by pas | 2025-07-11 09:11:36+00:00
... where is it easy to do business anyway? sure, there are degrees, levels, grades of this, the size of the barriers to entry matters, there are metrics about how easy it is to start a business for example, but that's just one aspect, and I'd argue mostly an unimportant one (if it takes 2 hours or 2 days or 1 weeks it's fine, what matters is how much does it cost to do it and how much does it cost to maintain the legal entity, and to do the filings, etc.)
by neuroelectron | 2025-07-11 09:11:38+00:00
I basically stopped buying "apps" almost a decade ago when Apple unceremoniously removed an app i paid for with no refund because the in app browser defaulted to a certain website. Btw I have always hated their "app" branding. But the benefit of it, at least for me, is it's a strong reminder that it's a childish analog to an application.

The only exception to this is I bought the game, Vampire Survivors, no wait. It was free. (because of clones in the app store) Anyway.

The funny thing is I do actually have like 100 (free) apps installed. I just never use any of them except for Brave. I basically immediately forget about them the second I install them because just using them is so awkward. They know they have a usability problem but they can't really square it with their massive app ecosystem except in the most slowest, methodical way possible. In the meantime, more UI annoyances are popping up twice as fast.

iPhone used to compete well a decade ago in usability for things like copying text from a webpage into an email. Despite the phone being much larger, I find it much more difficult to do today, perhaps because selecting text is just so unpredictable with the way web standards have become a pile of cruft. Despite whose fault it is, ultimately it's much worse now. I would only bother trying that on a desktop today unless absolutely necessary.

Sometimes text just becomes impossible to edit in certain circumstances. There's like three different things that can happen on a tap and hold and none of them are consistent. It feels absolutely random which one it does. I used to be able to select text from images, now I have to go through two to three cycles of "hold tap menu" -> "select text from image" until it works. It actually still works fine on my old iPad. How is the regression this bad?
by YuukiRey | 2025-07-11 09:11:47+00:00
I don't think that's the implication.

So far I've only skimmed the paper, but here's an interesting quote:

> Among respondents of a 2018 survey conducted for the New York Times, the desire to “have more leisure time” is offered as the leading reason for not having children among adults who...

If your assumption is that economic reasons cause the decline in fertility rates, it's tempting (and natural!) to view every alternative explanation in the context of economics. In other words: all alternative explanations are symptoms of economic problems, so the root cause remains money.

But quotes like this can also be interpreted as people changing their priorities regardless of income and worries about housing. Maybe, freed of traditional role models, people would rather watch Netflix all day long in their single person household.
by starwatch | 2025-07-11 09:12:12+00:00
There's an interesting planet money podcast[0] about SawStop and why it's not a bigger thing in the world. TLDR: the big power tool companies didn't want to pay to licence the tech, so evidently came to some mutual agreement to ignore it as a feature to save customer fingers.

[0]:https://www.npr.org/2024/10/11/nx-s1-5135668/planet-money-wh...
by bzzzt | 2025-07-11 09:12:14+00:00
Because most people are not developers? Between ad-infested Google, enshittified Microsoft and still not ready for the desktop Linux the Apple ecosystem might be the most accessible and easy to use platform for most non-technical users. As a developer it's an annoyance but I have to admire the elegance in the way Apple uses their core software and hardware technologies over their entire stack. As a user I don't care about what developers feel about it. Apple's market share is big enough to draw lots of them.
by bajsejohannes | 2025-07-11 09:12:23+00:00
Another version that's useful is this ASCII version: https://gabmus.org/posts/raspberry_pi_pico_pinout_in_your_te...

I keep a slightly modified version of it as a top comment in my main C file in every pico project. Super handy for quick reference and you can annotate it with the actual uses in your project.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-11 09:12:26+00:00
Trading resources that one lacks inside the kingdom borders isn't the same as the planet scale globalisation since the end of 20th century.

Trade has always existed between settlements through mankind's history, and war as well, when trade alone doesn't make it.

Then there are the trade partners one trusts, and the ones we thought we could trust, and like the wind changes direction, no longer.

Agree with the stupidity of plastic straws, if one people actually left the beach clean as they do at home, or maybe that is exactly what they do at home, leaving garbage all over the place.
by diggan | 2025-07-11 09:12:33+00:00
My intuition was that most of the (transferred) 11MB would be images, but no! Of course it's JavaScript bundles: https://i.imgur.com/QoM0Mz5.png

I'm guessing most of that code is used for other things on the website/landing page (SPA without bundle splitting per page), and the same stuff is loaded for every page, since the code for building that would be trivial compared to the multiple large bundles like they're shipping right now.

Which kind of makes me think, what is the smallest amount of JS one could write to 100% replicate this page? Would <1KB be enough? Bonus points if it could be implemented with CSS only, under 1KB.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-11 09:12:38+00:00
Wouldn't this have been caught by an exhaustive unit test or even a fuzz test? I don't know what kind of testing practices are applied to projects like zfs, nor what kinds or amounts of tests functions like this are subject to, but I would imagine that especially for low-level functions like this, unit tests with all of the known edge cases would be written.

(yes this is very much an armchair opinion, I mostly do front-end JS for a living)
Ask HN: How do I get traffic and distribution for my app cheaply?
by notlemon | 2025-07-11 09:13:10+00:00
We built a SaaS. There are enough competition and people are making millions in our vertical. We confirmed demand and have sold subset of features and made probably $500.

However, our website and app have no almost traffic. The money we made was from single platform that has shutdown now. So we dont have distribution.

I am posting on LinkedIn and have started blogs. But, it will take time to capture traffic with blogs. I dont know but it could be 6-12 month game based on what I have read.

What can I do to bring much more traffic and increase distribution of our web app? I have tried Show HN but my app had no comments. HN is likely not a good audience anyway.

I can spend probably $300/month on Google Ads but that does not lead to massive traffic and often we get people from third world countries and freeloaders who never buy. I never made money from someone subscribing to our app using Google Ads in the past.

I reached out to some creators on X and got quoted $3k, $5k or $10k per post. I did not realize prices are these high when we are not even not sure whether X is mostly bots.

I have read $200 - $500 per mention from newtubers but again that is very expensive for someone like us who sells $20/month SaaS.

How are people who are not part of networks like YC or not funded by venture capital doing it?

Unfortunately I dont have much following on LinkedIn (all engineers who never buy) and our company, being new, also dont have much following on X (10-20 followers only).

What do you suggest that helps us bring traffic, distribution and ultimately leads to purchase?
by amluto | 2025-07-11 09:14:08+00:00
I would add some more factors along those lines:

- Many urban areas have even worse shortages of family housing. Availability of 2+ bedroom apartments is even worse than studios and 1-bedrooms. Many new multi family buildings have plenty of low-income units but no family units.

- Car seat laws are well intentioned but make it very annoying to transport children in car-dependent areas unless parents use their own car for everything.

- Childcare and education prices are very high. Of course, part of this cost is the cost of living of educators.

- Many industries are geared toward people with few or no children. Hotel rooms with capacity for more than two children are unusual, and most travel sites barely understand the idea of searching for such rooms. Even rooms with comfortable capacity for two children are a bit unusual — the common two-queen-bed configuration requires that kids share a bed.
by suspended_state | 2025-07-11 09:14:08+00:00
I don't know what to think about Systemd.

I think however that a lot of hate comes from:

- a very opaque structure: it's actually not that opaque, since configuration files are still plain text, and better yet with more structure, but it first appears as inscrutable, since the programs aren't shell scripts;

- a set of new tools to learn: Systemd doesn't make use of the existing Unix tool-set (sed, awk, etc), ie. the vocabulary most sysadmins are familiar with in this ecosystem.

It seems on the outset that Systemd is trying to get away from the traditional Unix "one program should do one and only one thing well" (which is colloquial phrasing for separation of concerns).

Still, one idea that occurred to me is that in the early days of Unix, system programs might have been quite simple, with very few options (that man pages were probably very short), but that's clearly not the case nowadays. So haven't we left the "one program should do one and only one thing well" paradigm a long time ago anyway?

Actually, I think that one crucial issue with systemd is its specialization: can it be used for anything else than service management? At first, this seems to clash with the Unix principle, but even awk and sed are meant to do one thing, yet their field of action is very general, not just confined to handle one style of files or perform one style of transformation.
by tucnak | 2025-07-11 09:14:25+00:00
I really hope it means that 2.5 models will be available for batching in Vertex, too. We had spent quite a bit of effort making it work with BigQuery, and it's really cool when it works. There's edge-case, though, where it doesn't work: in case the batch is also referring to cached prompt. We did report this a few months ago.
by hedora | 2025-07-11 09:14:31+00:00
Exactly. Why would a kid looking at wrong-think sign in, only to have their request rejected?

I usually don’t comment on downvotes, but geez. They even admit/brag that this is what they’re up to in the US!

Also, I don’t get the comments elsewhere on this article that hope Trump will block the policy in Australia, even though he’s pushing for identical stuff here.
by closewith | 2025-07-11 09:15:04+00:00
Rance and Sihwa Lake are different beasts as they require sea walls or dams, which are immensely more expensive and environmentally damaging, and have extremely limited suitable sites worldwide. They would never be built now (Sihwa is only 15 years old, but the seawall was built in 1994). They are essentially low head hydro installations fed by the tidal range.

The installation in the Pentland Firth is a fundamentally different category as it is installed in open water (albeit in a firth or channel) which is much less environmentally impactful and has 2-4 orders of magnitude more suitable sites globally.
by hackinthebochs | 2025-07-11 09:15:08+00:00
Social media is the largest single factor in collapsing birthrates. Social media made widely accessible depictions of lifestyles that glorify wealth, travel, living carefree lives. This increased the baseline expectations people have of their own lives. Children are just an impediment to that lifestyle. Social media also massively raises the expectation of the costs of raising kids. It's no longer enough to keep them fed and clothed. A child's existence must be maxxed in terms of attention, simulation, enrichment, etc. Anything less is deemed borderline abusive.
by Ekaros | 2025-07-11 09:15:16+00:00
Clearly no one stops and ask "Should we?". Which is sad.

I was just spending long weekend at place with less perfect connectivity, that is 2-3 Mbs LTE... And the 11MB would have taken quite many seconds... Not exactly good user experience.

Good to know that Slack is not company to choose for user experience and efficiency.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-11 09:15:23+00:00
Summary from ChatGPT

1. Fewer people ever have kids. In every rich country the share of women who remain childless at age 45 is climbing, and it is rising at all intermediate ages as well. This is not just postponement.

2. Total family size is shrinking. Even among parents, second- and third-birth rates are trending down, so completed fertility is falling toward or below 1.5 children per woman in most of the OECD.

3. Short-run economics don’t add up. Recessions, housing booms, or pandemic shocks temporarily nudge annual births, but they neither align in timing nor in magnitude with the long-run fall.

4. Money helps, but only a little. Large cash allowances or cheap housing can raise births, yet estimates show gains of only a few hundredths of a child per woman—far from the 0.5–0.7 needed to reach replacement fertility.

5. Attitudes have flipped. Surveys across Europe, North America, and East Asia reveal a marked decline in the share of young adults who view marriage and children as central life goals; career, leisure, and personal autonomy score higher.

TL:DR; it’s culture. People don’t want kids anymore. It is not housing costs, lack of support, etc…