MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp | 2025-08-11 19:12:48+00:00
Crime counts are normalized to crime rates with respect to population, not land area.

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

And you'll see that Washington D.C. doesn't make the top ten for rates of any of the major violent crimes (murder, rape, etc.) nor for the "Total" violent crime.
by Hizonner | 2025-08-11 19:13:44+00:00
> Historically health in economics is associated with growth and Population growth is part of economic growth.

If you measure "health" by growth, then you'll get an association between "health" and growth. This means nothing.

You haven't even tried to give any other definition of "health".

> Additionally the trendline of negative population growth is 0 population.

... and any positive growth tends toward infinity. Furthermore any fixed positive growth rate ends with a spherical mass of flesh expanding at the speed of light, and that happens in finite time. After that you have to slow your growth to cubic, though.

Neither projection will actually come true. Neither prediction will come close to coming true.

You can't extrapolate anything forever. Furthermore there are obvious mechanistic reasons to expect the "demographic transaction" to be a bobble that will last at most a few centuries. Suggesting that it'll lead to human extinction is, um, loony.

And you haven't said why zero population would even be a problem. If everybody at every step along the way chooses not to reproduce, that means everybody got what they wanted. Well, OK, you may have not gotten what you want with respect to other people's reproduction, but you know what? That's none of your business.

> I'm not sure you're aware of the criticality of negative population growth that japan/china/korea are all facing.

I'm aware of all the people who think it's critical. I do not find their claims very compelling.

The best they seem to be able to come up with is that there aren't, or won't be, enough young people to do the work to support all the old people. That probably isn't even true, given that it's a global economy, and we're also on track to replace all human labor, long before there's a global population "shortage".

But if it is true, well, who are they that other people should exist to work for them?

Most of the the other reasons for claiming things like that are "critical" tend to come down to nationalism, which is anti-compelling.

> Can you not call anyone a loonie? It’s this type of attack and personalization that adds barriers to actual critical debate.

This was a thread about privacy issues in a phone app. When you drag in your personal obsessions in the context of something totally unrelated, people are going to call you a loony.
by scoofy | 2025-08-11 19:14:27+00:00
Essentially, the argument is that the critic merely serves as an effectively plain data series of opinion, for which consumers try to find one with low variance with their opinion, but that ultimately there's no accounting for taste.

When aesthetic theories try to argue that there is a "correct opinion," one that would justify a kind of professionalism and training, then there are myriad philosophical problems that fall out the other side. This is effectively the basis for Howard Moskowitz's success in data-first food/flavor design.

It's certainly true that critic education can help map those opinions onto audience opinions (getting references, understanding the historical background, etc), but those frames aren't necessary for enjoyment if the audience following your critiques doesn't also have that information. Many will, which will increase the correlation of opinion.
by kevstev | 2025-08-11 19:14:34+00:00
DC'a murder _rate_ is 19th in the country per Wikipedia, and 1/4 of #1 St. Louis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

The pace of muders in DC this year should put it somewhere around the mid 1960's numbers of around 150: https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/dccrime.htm

So... there are the raw numbers. Want to adjust your position on that "disinfo campaign?"
by wenc | 2025-08-11 19:14:49+00:00
I subscribe to all 3: ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

In terms of humanity, Claude is the best and probably the best fit for Apple audiences. It’s the emotionally friend who is level headed. The NYTimes did an article on Claude which captures this sentiment.

ChatGPT is like the exuberant nerd who wants to talk shop.

Gemini is a the brainy but less emotionally intelligent friend.
by n8cpdx | 2025-08-11 19:15:08+00:00
Delusional take. Rosetta is for maintaining compatibility during the transition. Efficiency is fine with Rosetta. But it doesn’t matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done. Not true, unfortunately, for Windows.

Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.
by theptip | 2025-08-11 19:15:40+00:00
> Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive.

NotebookLM is a genuinely novel AI-first product.

YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.

Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example.

I think folks sleep on Google around here. They are slow but they have so many compelling iterative AI usecases that even a BigTech org can manage it eventually.

Apple and Microsoft are rightly getting panned, Apple in particular is inexcusable (but I think they will have a unique offering when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for).
by daft_pink | 2025-08-11 19:16:01+00:00
Reality is that EV vehicle costs are heavily dependent on battery material prices and any breakthrough process would either use cheaper minerals or reduce the price of existing minerals. ICE engines are made from widely available steel and aluminum and lots of labor and factories that build the complex mechanisms involved. EV’s require much less labor but the cost is mostly driven by the cost of minerals in the battery packs that is very expensive.

Maybe we should have expanding mining and made the underlying minerals much cheaper as opposed to subsidizing each individual vehicle.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-08-11 19:16:49+00:00
The market for Boom is not commercial passenger flights. So much time is wasted with security, boarding, taxi-ing, waiting at the destination for a gate to unload, etc. that the flight speed is not a big deal. Existing commercial passenger jets could already go faster without going supersonic and save some time, but it doesn't matter. Even if you fly commercial passenger jets at the absolutely face-melting Mach 3.3 of the SR-71, you don't really save enough time to matter. The maximum speed in flight doesn't do anything to address ground delays.
by NoobSaibot135 | 2025-08-11 19:17:08+00:00
Not sure how accurate this is but there’s a book on how Adolf/Nazi’s were experimenting with hard drugs at that time.

https://www.amazon.ca/Blitzed-Norman-Whiteside-Shaun-Ohler/d...

They say Hitler was very charismatic, inspiring and a great public speaker. I seriously wonder how much drugs he was on at the time and how much that boosted and projected his own confidence (and then subsequently inspired all of his fellow countrymen Germans)?
by cogman10 | 2025-08-11 19:17:10+00:00
Yup, the ASM dependency is one that would constantly cause us headaches. A load of frameworks have a path to ASM for one reason or another and it requires an update every time you move up JVM runtimes.

It's usually not painful to update (just bump the version) but it's an annoyance.

In fact, Byte buddy has a dep on ASM.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-08-11 19:17:10+00:00
Discussions like these show that some people really block out anything beyond their specific interests.

I don't care about superhero movies, so I haven't seen any of the Marvel or DC movies, yet I still know they exist and sometimes I know which one is being promoted right now. If I got stuck at a table somewhere with someone who is a big fan of them, we could have a conversation. It'd mostly consist of me asking questions, but that'd work fine, because as a fan he'd have opinions to share. Same thing with sports or anything, really.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-11 19:18:40+00:00
> And if it's magic you better be careful because who knows what'll happen.

In terms of risk-taking (rather than knowledge) IMO the opposite has happened: Older generations had to worry about voiding the warranty because you held down the two buttons at the same time that the manual clearly told you never to do on page 37.

In contrast, younger folks have grown up with cheaper devices with much-improved idiot-proofing. That makes the strategy of "try shit until it seems to work" a lot more viable.

Meanwhile, older folks look on, seeing confident action and misinterpreting it as competent understanding, woefully concluding that "Unlike myself, kids these days just know computers."
by Hrun0 | 2025-08-11 19:18:44+00:00
> "ai is pretty good at design" its really cool thats its functional but am I going crazy or does all this stuff look really bad?

I agree that it's bad. What I noticed using AI was that it tends to introduce gradients whenever you want to make something look nice. Whenever I see a gradient now I immediately assume that it was designed with AI
by golddust-gecko | 2025-08-11 19:18:53+00:00
Perhaps it's nothing, but:

> “GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon,” says Dohmke in a memo to GitHub employees today. “I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world.”

Is interesting to me. There is quite a number of rumors that MSFT will be Returning to Office next year. The prominence of 'remote first' in this quote may indicate that such concerns are playing a role here...
by incomingpain | 2025-08-11 19:18:56+00:00
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...

It has been declining for decades.

No trust in journalism taking 1st place in 2021 before AI ever arrived.

There seems to be lots of focus on AI producing misinformation and sure it can; but not much focus on journalists having been caught red handed with misinformation for decades.

More importantly, in this new AI era. these misinformation journalists are now the ones using AI for better misinformation.
by throwanem | 2025-08-11 19:18:58+00:00
Eh. The implicit claim is the same as everywhere, namely that that $100k/dev/year of AI opex is an enormous bargain over going up two orders of magnitude in capex to pay for the same output from a year's worth of a team. But now that Section 174's back and clearly set to stay for a good long while, it makes sense to see this line of discourse come along.
by JohnBooty | 2025-08-11 19:19:02+00:00
I'm glad to hear somebody say that. I never dug very deeply into the PUA stuff as the community seemed like quite a toxic dump.

But, a lot of the actual material I did see actually seemed like it was universally applicable in non-toxic and non-exploitative ways.

I think a lot of the basic skills and concepts are the same, whether using them for positive goals or for selfishly manipulative goals.
by codingdave | 2025-08-11 19:19:34+00:00
Yep, they want it tomorrow, and so does everyone else who has requested a feature.

This is why product teams have cadences of triaging and prioritizing the work. You need a PM (or someone who fulfills that role) who will listen to engineering as much as the business and allow for the time to get the right solutions in place. That way, it is not an additional burden on the dev team, it is part of the standard work process. Then it is not a tough sell, it is day-to-day communication with whomever prioritizes the work, which should already be happening.

Now, that being said, I fully recognize that many PMs are not good at this part of the job. But then your focus needs to be on working better with the PM. Because a good PM will push back and establish boundaries with the business to prevent last-minute, urgent "wants" from disrupting the actual development of the product.

This also brings us back full-circle to how performance goes down in the first place. Devs get sick of all this, PMs cave in, and just put in Google Analytics or some other tool in place. Once that hook is live, marketing can add all kinds of crap to the site. Look, they got their instant gratification on analytics! And took down the site performance in the process.

"We can get an instant solution" is a red flag to me as a PM, not a selling point.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-08-11 19:19:36+00:00
And that really shows the difference in how the EU operates Vs the UK.

They see a general need which the market cannot easily satisfy on its own - it needs standardisation to be cheap and interoperable, and it needs an identity backed by a trusted authority. So they establish a framework and legislation to make that possible.

The UK instead just states it's illegal not to do it, but without any private and not-trivially bypassed services available.

Proactive vs reactive.

It is often said that legislation tends to lag behind technology. At last, the UK is beating the world by legislating ahead of it!
by highfrequency | 2025-08-11 19:19:45+00:00
> We can literally define an airplane parametrically in a configuration file and press a button. In a matter of minutes we have a complete quick-and-dirty analysis of how the whole aircraft performs—as mkBoom flies the aircraft through a full simulated mission (takeoff, climbout, acceleration, cruise, descent, landing). Overnight, mkBoom can run higher-fidelity simulations for a more exact understanding of performance.

Awesome stuff! Allows large scale exploration across all dimensions of plane design to jointly optimize all components and their interactions.
by tetha | 2025-08-11 19:19:45+00:00
Mh, I'm not the most experienced guy with .NET.

We have a few .NET applications running on the infrastructure on Linux hosts and it's just like every other thing.

But in some contexts, e.g. PowerBI, it pulls in a dependency and BOOM it's Windows Only to the point that not even Wine or Proton can help you. For something, that should be, mind you, a dumb SQL proxy like the PowerBI Embedded Gateway.
by rawling | 2025-08-11 19:20:01+00:00
I've just been shunted from TFS Git (Azure DevOps?) to GitHub.

The PR UI is taking some getting used to.

Dev changes code near a comment I made? Comment is marked "Outdated" and hidden. If I open it, can I see what change they made next to the comment? Nope, I have to go find it manually!

It sorts X.Y below X.Y.A, X.Y.B etc. in the file listing.

When I select a file in the listing I'd like to just have that file open, not scroll to it in a list of all the changes.

The first PR I did showed a ton of changes that had already been merged from common history. I can see the merge commit you made, GitHub, I know you know none of these changes are actually being made.

Not caring if a required action hasn't run automatically. No "run" option, not even a "this isn't ever going to run", just "waiting for result".

Weirdly, showing the result of an action on the source branch, when it needs to pass on the merge commit.

I've not yet figured out how to require different approvers for different branches, although that one might be on my org settings. It's either the people in the codeowners file or any contributor?

No way to allow a ruleset to be bypassable while making the approvers still manually bypass it themselves. I want to know if I'm getting it wrong as much as I want to stop my junior devs messing up.
by o_nate | 2025-08-11 19:20:07+00:00
What with this and your previous post about why sometimes incompetent management leads to better outcomes, you are quickly becoming one of my favorite tech bloggers. Perhaps I enjoyed the piece so much because your conclusions basically track mine. (I'm a software developer who has dabbled with LLMs, and has some hand-wavey background on how they work, but otherwise can claim no special knowledge.) Also your writing style really pops. No one would accuse your post of having been generated by an LLM.
by debug_forever | 2025-08-11 19:20:08+00:00
The complexity in our team's code bases have only gotten worse with AI-integrated agents. Maybe it's the prompts we're using, but it's an ironic twist that these tools that promise so much productivity today ends up dumping more tech debt into our code.

It's funny reading the "key contributors to dependency-complexity" -- Duplication, Exceptions, Inheritance, Temporal Decomposition -- because those qualities seem like the standard for AI-generated code.
by bluGill | 2025-08-11 19:20:18+00:00
The phhsical copy served an important purpose: it forces you to admit you will never do something and so give up on is. until I die it is safe to assume I will eat 3 meals per day. (It won't be 100% because of sickness but close enough) thus if I'm out of some food I will need a todo list to replace it. However if I never finish the ukuele I've started it won't matter and it is reasonable for me to give up on it.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-11 19:20:22+00:00
> Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies.

They are very different companies in very different businesses. Apple is a hardware company, Microsoft is a software company. That affects everything (and is why the two are not fundamentally competitors).

I don't think one has ever been better behaved than the other at all, though. The main difference is that for most of their time, Microsoft was just in a position where it could do more harm than Apple.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-11 19:20:42+00:00
It's the foundation who are involved in this court action and who is the topic of this thread. The code uploaded to GitHub wouldn't change the geographic basis of Microsoft either...

But that said I want to be clear that I have no issue with the Foundation's current actions or position in the court system. I was responding only very specifically to the suggestion above that they "should" block Wikipedia access immediately in order to force the hand off the British government.
by obeavs | 2025-08-11 19:20:43+00:00
Thank you for bringing this up. This is profoundly true for big projects (toll roads/transport) and small infra projects (e.g. community solar). The length of time that it takes to develop things like this, combined with the turnover and the sheer amount of context that single developer has to have to be successful with it, is one of the driving forces in why development is such a difficult/risky business.

It's one of the most consequential problems imaginable to solve, particularly as the US begins to realize that we need to compete with decades of China's subsidized energy and industrialization/manufacturing capacity.

Taking it a level deeper, what most don't realize is that infrastructure is an asset class: before someone funds the construction of $100M of solar technology, a developer will spend 2-5 years developing 15 or so major commercial agreements that enable a lender/financier to take comfort that when they deploy such a large amount of cash, they'll achieve a target yield over 20+ years. Orchestrating these negotiations (with multiple "adversaries") into a single, successfully bankable project is remarkably difficult and compared to the talent needed, very few have the slightest clue how to do this successfully.

Our bet at Phosphor is that this is actually solvable by combining natural language interfaces with really sophisticated version control and programming languages that read like english for financial models and legal agreements, which enables program verification. This is a really hard technical challenge because version control like Git really doesn't work: you need to be able to synchronize multiple lenses of change sets where each lens/branch is a dynamic document that gets negotiated. Dynamically composable change sets all the way down.

We are definitely solving this at Phosphor (phosphor.co) and we're actively hiring for whoever is interested in working at the intersection of HCI, program verification, natural language interfaces and distributed systems.
by zemo | 2025-08-11 19:20:57+00:00
> Apple has nothing

I always hear this but people use Siri all the time, and I think outside of talking to programmers, a lot of consumers probably consider that the level of AI they care about using. "is Siri really AI" seems like a real "is a hotdog a sandwich" question. Who cares? People eat hot dogs and talk to Siri.

It seems what Apple has less of is LLM products that cost enormous sums of money to make that people don't like using. Sure, they have a little of it, they fell flat on their faces with their news summaries thing last year and AppleVision was a nothingburger, but when it comes to "sinking huge amounts of money into deeply unpopular ventures", it seems to me that Apple's reluctance to deploy its largess here might be prudent. It seems like they're less exposed on the hype.
by gf000 | 2025-08-11 19:21:06+00:00
There is probably a significant factor of what domain you work in, that might be part of the reason why you have different experiences.

I don't know your current domain, but stuff like Loom requires very complex reasoning capabilities, most of which lives outside the actual codebase itself. Business code on the other hand often has a more direct mapping from idea to code, so LLMs might show more promise there.
Show HN: VAC — AI with Human-Like Hierarchical Memory that Learns and Improves
by VAC-AGI | 2025-08-11 19:21:17+00:00
I’m Victor Kuznetsov. For the last ~6 weeks I’ve been building ViktorADAM Core (VAC) — an AI system with a human-like memory stack (working, episodic, semantic, procedural, meta) used directly for reasoning. Unlike typical RAG, VAC runs entirely offline and adapts over time to the user.

Why it’s interesting

Human-like memory: consolidates context across sessions; periodic cleanup keeps long-term state sane.

Self-learning (Q-utility): prioritizes what to remember/retrieve based on usefulness.

Self-reflection: validates and corrects its own reasoning traces.

Languages: English + Russian today; CN/ES planned.

Real-world test Ran in an air-gapped setup processing 15–20 MB PDFs (policies/protocols) and answering multi-hour dialogue queries without any external APIs.

Tech notes

FAISS for ms-level semantic search

SQLite for offline storage

Async pipeline; streaming responses

Rule/logic parser for “if A and B then C” style queries

Web UI + REST API (/api/chat, /api/upload); modular LLM backend (currently Ollama)

Repo (public marketing repo; core code abstracted for privacy): https://github.com/vac-architect/vac-agi
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-11 19:21:36+00:00
If you want to make a better version control service, then you might consider:

- Free public repositories and free API access.

- Mutual TLS authentication. Use X.509 extensions for partial delegation of authorization, so that someone can issue a certificate to themself or others with a limited set of permissions.

- Mirroring on multiple independent services.

- Allow SHA-1 (for compatibility with a lot of existing repositories that use it, and anyone using software that does not support other hashing algorithms) but also allow other more secure hashing algorithms to be used in case you do not want to use SHA-1.

- Make the HTML to work without CSS and JavaScripts (even if they can provide enhancements, do not make them required).

- Support some parts of the GitHub API, in order that existing software which uses GitHub API will be able to work with it.

- If you are making a new API as well, then it might use DER, that can use binary data, non-Unicode text data, etc better.

- Do not require TLS for read-only access to public data (but still allow using TLS even in this case).