MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by getnormality | 2025-08-30 17:40:02+00:00
Edit: nevermind, I agree I misunderstood the parent comment.

It's a common response to any interest in the destiny of humanity: "what's so special about humanity? What about bacteria, huh?"

I don't know, I'm human and humans tend to be social and interested in their own species? Is that weird? Does that not apply to you? Do you consider it petty and parochial to be more interested in one's own species? Are you "above" that?

If any bacteria or humans are interested in projecting the future of bacteria and their probability of surviving humanity, they should absolutely go for it.
by harundu | 2025-08-30 17:41:04+00:00
Building and growing a toolkit that simplifies growth for startups. All while being super simple to integrate and use, without juggling several disconnected tools.

As one of the users describes it: "Overcentric is like Google Analytics + Mixpanel + Hotjar + Intercom, in a single, cohesive, clutter-free package."

Overcentric makes it easier to understand traffic and user acquisition, product usage, spot friction and issues and provide customer support - all in one place.

Currently we are shaping the product with the group of companies in early access phase, and slowly adding more companies to the group.

We will be expanding the toolkit to cover more functionality and do deeper AI integrations and automations - to make the toolkit run on autopilot, so you get all the tools with a few lines of code, working automatically together to understand, support and empower your users.

https://overcentric.com/
by jerf | 2025-08-30 17:41:28+00:00
I'm not sure what point you intend, since Factor has never been popular. No offense intended to the authors and no shade intended, but I think that's pretty clearly the case.

There are other not-popular languages that build up from scratch. I'd hesitate to go too crazy in assigning causality to this particular characteristic. Being stuck to an existing ecosystem has disadvantages too. But it's not a counterexample to the statement you quoted.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-08-30 17:42:34+00:00
But you should be aware that russian foreign policy is not decided in the television. TV propaganda serves internal purposes. And there is a policy and strategy on Kremlin, not just crazy evil Putin trying to destroy the world of Good.

Contrary to hysteric media narrative, decision makers in Kremlin are not mad, crazy or whatever, and believing this brings more harm than good. Russia isn't strong enough to seriously threaten Western Europe, and they are aware of it. Moreover, they have not much to gain by trying to conquer Lisbon versus monstrous costs they would need to bear, even if we ignore the fact they wouldn't be able to not only reach Lisbon, but Berlin as well. Europe is no longer a center of the world, regardless if we like it or not.

That doesn't mean Russia cannot harm interests of countries of Western Europe, carry out sabotage acts, sow and fuel internal strife etc. They can, and they do. But it is not an existential threat.
by ancillary | 2025-08-30 17:42:38+00:00
> The rest of the decline is (in my evaluation) best explained with the increase in average age of the 18-64 year old demographic.

I wondered about this before reading the article, but there's a chart in the article comparing narrow ~10 year age ranges to their past levels, and the decline is persistent in each group, so I don't think it can be explained by the overall population being older.
by lazide | 2025-08-30 17:42:55+00:00
Fair point - the population numbers are largely due to the (most common) marital structure, and societal expectations around having kids.

The amount of sex though definitely includes hookups and a lot of sex outside of the acknowledged marital structure. A large number of those kids may well be illegitimate, I suspect no one wants to look too hard.

I also suspect what is happening in the US is a combination of defacto ‘strikes’ from both sides of the equation, combined with general confusion as to what to do or why. Essentially a ‘why would I want to engage with this mess? What’s even in it for me?’.
by czhu12 | 2025-08-30 17:43:12+00:00
I don’t want to be that guy but isn’t this kind of an obvious result? The main claim is that life expectancy improvements in the past century are mostly due to decreases in childhood mortality.

During the Roman period, the average life expectancy was only 22-25 years old because so many babies were dying prematurely.

If you could make it past the age of 10, then you were expected to make it to about 50, which almost doubles life expectancy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empi...
by weiliddat | 2025-08-30 17:44:05+00:00
If Grey Beard doesn't relent

Project Manager: "Can we ship an order to multiple addresses? We need it in 2 weeks and Grey Beard didn't want to do it"

Eager Beaver: "Sure"

if (order && items.length > 1 && ...) { try { const shipmentInformation = callNewModule(order, items, ...) return shipmentInformation } catch (err) { // don't fail don't know if error is handled elsewhere logger.error(err) } } else { // old code by Grey Beard }
by estearum | 2025-08-30 17:44:05+00:00
Well obviously the answer here is “we don’t know.” But this is not the only piece of evidence pointing toward a viral theory of Alzheimer’s. There’s also higher prevalence of viral DNA in AD patients’ brains, especially near the amyloid plaques, people with severe HSV infections have much higher rates of AD, we know of many viruses that cause similar neurological issues as AD, VZV (chicken pox) can cause proliferation of AD-linked proteins, and we see evidence that antiretrovirals might have some preventative power against AD.

It’s certainly not conclusive, but this is not nearly as crazy a hypothesis as people (for some reason) reflexively assume it to be.
by mrandish | 2025-08-30 17:44:28+00:00
They also tend to be better written and edited than tech writing in recent decades - and I'm not even talking about the rise of AI slop and search engine bait in recent years. When tech publications entered the hybrid era where every article was dual purpose for both the print magazine and the web site, things started to change, usually for the worse.

As a startup founder back then I got to know a lot of the editors, staff writers and regular columnists at many of the bigger magazines because I'd meet with them regularly during trade shows and editorial visits and sometimes hang out after hours. Outside of a few exceptions like Byte, very early computer pubs were mostly zines written by computer enthusiasts. Due to the success of those early leaders a real publishing industry emerged which attracted writers with journalism degrees (or at least serious writing skills) who also loved tech. A surprising number of them were really insightful about tech trends and where the industry was going. I learned stuff and gained useful perspective that helped me be a better startup guy. While industry scuttlebutt and first-hand stories of Gates, Jobs and Grove could be interesting, I also picked up more subtly valuable things like ways of thinking through evolving tech trends and emerging market analysis.

I got the feeling some of them understood we were living through a revolutionary period that would be historically Important. By the mid and late 90s the tech publishing industry was finally losing the last vestiges of the computer enthusiast era and becoming an IT focused 'Big Industry'. The major magazines were being bought and rolled into New Media conglomerates like IDG and Ziff Davis. Articles were re-imagined as "Content" able to attract page views and ad clicks with web-inflated valuations. At one 90s Comdex, IDG threw a massive party that occupied an entire 15,000 seat sports arena and the top of the arena was lined with 90 six-foot tall blow-ups of magazine covers - one from each of IDG's 90+ IDG tech magazines around the world. The Temptations (I think) performed live and during a break, the founder of IDG was presented with a white stallion horse on stage. I was sitting with an IDG group publisher I'd known since he was the lowly publisher of a pre-IDG backwater magazine. As the white stallion exited the stage, he leaned over to me and whispered "Remember this moment... because it has to be the peak." And he was right. I also fondly recall several 90s Comdex dinners in Vegas with John Dvorak (PC Magazine's long-time top columnist) which often turned into all-night bar crawls. Great guy, good times.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-08-30 17:45:34+00:00
There are things I also do like removing sponsored links on the about page and url bar. Also disable type-ahead to search engine.

My understanding is that Privacy Badger no longer learns by default. I never wanted that, just block known things, like search engine click hijacks.

I’m not sure what to do about the user agent header. Changing or simplifying it tends to break sites. Also I’d like to promote Linux there but that’s at odds with privacy.
by huydotnet | 2025-08-30 17:45:40+00:00
Not Asahi but I recently revived a 10-year-old MacBook Pro (MBP 2015) that had been sitting in my closet for many years by installing Fedora on it. To my surprise, it's fast and sleek, just like a brand new computer. All of the drivers worked!

The laptop now serves as a desktop when I'm at home and as an SSH server when I'm at work. And my 5-year-old M1 MacBook is now sitting in the closet, waiting for its turn in the next 10 years.
by dehrmann | 2025-08-30 17:46:02+00:00
AR/VR was always a side project for Zuck (like the Aquila airplane or the Libra cryptocurrency or AGI) that he works on because he's bored. It was pretty clear from the product's popularity and Metaverse experience that it didn't have any legs. Carmack had little to do with that one way or the other, and the Apple Vision pro shows that it's not an execution or quality issue, it's product-market fit.
by xmprt | 2025-08-30 17:46:18+00:00
This is one of the reasons I fear AI will harm the software engineering industry. AI doesn't have any of these limitation so it can write extremely complex and unreadable code that works... until it doesn't. And then no one can fix it.

It's also why I urge junior engineers to not rely on AI so much because even though it makes writing code so much faster, it prevents them from learning the quirks of the codebase and eventually they'll lose the ability to write code on their own.
by LeoPanthera | 2025-08-30 17:46:49+00:00
It's sort of insane to switch to an almost completely unrelated operating system because of such a trivial feature as a screensaver.

It doesn't download those screensavers unprompted, you have to actually select them in the System Settings.

It's hard to believe that anyone who thought that a Mac was the right computer for them could so easily switch to Linux on hardware which has a great number of unsupported features.

I know that Hacker News is not representative of the real world, but gosh, stories like this are crazy.
by thechao | 2025-08-30 17:48:09+00:00
I've had plans for a sci-fi book I plan to never write that takes place in the ultra far future. The chapters' numbers would be the time dilation scale in a base 10 logarithm. The book would be made up of a series of short stories told from the point of view of a "time coast guard" rescuing idiots who refuse to time dilate from their creaking space hulks.

A later (set?) of chapters might just be in the 90+ scale; at that regime the characters can flit around the universe in the notional blink of an eye, even though their nanoships' velocity is only a few km/s. In my mind it'd be just a nuts-and-bolts 30's-style hard boiled detective story; but, set in the year 10^110.

Oh! Oh! And Charlie Stross would write this book for me, and it'd be a series.
by conradev | 2025-08-30 17:48:10+00:00
Yes, only some things for now! I hope it stays that way or decreases, but that’s not the way the arrow is pointing.

Providers still implement it where they can, like for blackout restrictions for US sports games: impossible to enforce on the web because I can spoof location. Very possible to enforce on iOS because jailbreaking is not possible. Possible to enforce on Android because you can check if spoofing was made possible.

It’s currently the primary reason I can’t play games online on Linux.
by infecto | 2025-08-30 17:48:25+00:00
But you replied to my post saying your job is most definitely useful and my argument is that it’s not.

I don’t disagree there are certainly things each of us on this planet think is good or useful but in my opinion that’s the problem. How do you get a collective group of different humans to agree what that is. Capitalism with all its faults solves this problem pretty nicely. It’s not perfect but as far as I know it has been the best system so far.
by gertlex | 2025-08-30 17:49:03+00:00
I'm not a font person, but the font on the article site makes the zeros look like lower case o; feels like a decision trolling those with a peeve about fonts where 0O look the same. (this was particularly noticeable in the comments where folks talk about e.g. the Nokia N900) At the same time, I don't object to the font's style of having numbers that go below "the line".
by chamomeal | 2025-08-30 17:49:17+00:00
I don’t think that’s that delichon is saying. It’s absurd to compare the lifetime of ANY species with the lifetime of the universe. The heat death of the universe is like 10^80 years away or something insane. Humans have been around for like… 10^5 years?

Even if something from earth lived that long, it wouldn’t be human. It probably wouldn’t be remotely recognizable!
by msk-lywenn | 2025-08-30 17:49:30+00:00
It's rather easy to change the password provider from Apple's to something else, like bitwarden, on an iPad or an iPhone. I assume it's possible on Apple TV too.

I tried syncing notes with IMAP but I never managed to get it to work.

For the Apple Watch, I don't have one or any "smart" watch so I can't say anything.
by betaby | 2025-08-30 17:49:43+00:00
The sad part, that despite the years of the development BTRS never reached the parity with ZFS. And yesterday's news "Josef Bacik who is a long-time Btrfs developer and active co-maintainer alongside David Sterba is leaving Meta. Additionally, he's also stepping back from Linux kernel development as his primary job." see https://www.phoronix.com/news/Josef-Bacik-Leaves-Meta

There is no 'modern' ZFS-like fs in Linux nowadays.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-30 17:50:12+00:00
I find this point of view somewhat difficult to support. It was the whole motivation behind the cultural shift towards 'everybody's a winner' - participation trophies, expanding honor roll with 'merit roll', character awards, personal achievement awards, and so on. But far from driving excellence across the rather vast number of fields where it was trialed, it only seems to correlate with the period of overall decline in educational performance.

And from a practical point of view, let's consider this. The mindset one is indulging with this is that it's okay to quit if something is hard. But how does indulging that mindset, change it? What happens when the easy successes end and things not only get hard, but very hard? Are you not simply creating false expectations?
by TUSF | 2025-08-30 17:50:22+00:00
I'm not who you were asking, but my only experiences with vlang was years ago when its marketing was making false claims about what its capabilities were, while pretending to be an already production-ready language. This in turn harbored tons of distrust about any of its promises of future capabilities too.

At this point, I don't think it matters if the V programming language has actually fixed all of those issues and its marketing is completely truthful now. The language's perception is tainted, and it'll take a herculean effort to fix that.
by estearum | 2025-08-30 17:50:39+00:00
What’s the counterfactual?

Neither of us have any clue how divided we’d be sans FSB information ops. We know for a fact these ops are happening and have infiltrated at least up to the White House’s shortlist of media personalities.

IMO it’s extremely naive to believe that information ops for some reason wouldn’t be effective in our own country. This stuff is based on some pretty basic psychological understanding (some of the most highly replicated) and our information infrastructure is especially fertile ground for it.
by bigmattystyles | 2025-08-30 17:50:41+00:00
I wonder if as a species we can ever get more comfortable with death. We’re built not to be I realize, and we should never be for those that are young but I feel like we should be ok with living 80ish or more years and then clocking out. That being said, I’m not cool with the idea of dying when good, but when I’m in a major depressive episode, the idea of immortality is terrifying.
by lexokoh | 2025-08-30 17:50:51+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with AI agents lately, and one problem kept coming up: they either get a raw API key with full access or nothing at all. That’s risky, especially if you’re testing agents that can make arbitrary calls.

So I hacked this together.

It lets you wrap agent actions with scoped, short-lived tokens instead of handing over your real API keys.

Right now it:

- Generates scoped, expiring tokens (default 10s)

- Logs every action to kage-keys.log

- Works as a drop-in wrapper for async functions

It’s just an MVP (tokens are fake UUIDs), but I want to see if developers find this helpful before building the production version with real crypto + proxy enforcement.
by Atheros | 2025-08-30 17:51:13+00:00
Video games weren't as widespread, personalized, or diverse than they are now. That people who played video games in 2010 said that those were better is immaterial. This graph goes up through 2022: https://i.redd.it/tnrs4wl1ibkb1.png

Same with smartphones. Smartphone apps existed but weren't as personalized and didn't serve nearly as diverse of content as they do now. It's night and day. Surely I don't need to pull up a graph of smartphone usage per day.
by LeoPanthera | 2025-08-30 17:52:01+00:00
It's sort of frustrating that this constantly comes up. It's true that btrfs does have issues with RAID-5 and RAID-6 configurations, but this is frequently used (not necessarily by you) as some kind of gotcha as to why you shouldn't use it at all. That's insane. I promise that disk spanning issues won't affect your use of it on your tiny ThinkPad SSD.

It's important to note that striping and mirroring works just fine. It's only the 5/6 modes that are unstable: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/Status.html#block-gro...
by Zarathruster | 2025-08-30 17:52:05+00:00
I'll leave it to others to make the argument for why Jungian psychology (and by extension, MBTI) is/isn't bullshit.

But since nobody has mentioned the alternative yet, the framework used by anyone in any scientific capacity is the Big Five: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

The link between programming and conscientiousness seems fairly straightforward. To fully translate Mort/Elvis/Einstein into some kind of OCEAN vector would take a little more effort.
by pessimizer | 2025-08-30 17:52:30+00:00
Thus far, and granted I don't have as much experience as others, I just demand that AI simplify the code until I understand everything that it is doing. If I see it doing something in a convoluted way, I demand that it does it in the obvious way. If it's adding too many dependencies, I tell it to remove the goofy ones and write it the long way with the less capable stdlib function or helped by something that I already have a dependency on.

It's writing something for me, not for itself.
by thisisit | 2025-08-30 17:52:54+00:00
One of my job postings, I got over 100 applications. Most people weren't even tangentially related. They were spraying and praying. Worse yet, I had to screen everything by hand. A rather tedious job and made worse by Taleo. And as much I understand why people don't want AI screening and my company strictly prohibits it - by the end I was begging for one.

Finally, not even one application was matching the job profile and many had used AI to misrepresent their skill.

My company has a policy that once a position has to be opened, I need to fill it within 6 months. So, fed up I had to work with HR to message people on Linkedin.

This has basically dissuaded me using the spray and pray or AI generated resumes, if and when I start my job hunt.
by airstrike | 2025-08-30 17:53:06+00:00
I think you don't understand how primary research works. Pointing out flaws helps others think about those flaws.

It's not a linear process so I'm not sure the "bottleneck" analogy holds here.

We're not limited to only talking about "the bottleneck". I think the argument is more that we're very close to optimal results for the current approach/architecture, so getting superior outcomes from AI will actually require meaningfully different approaches.
by mathiaspoint | 2025-08-30 17:53:06+00:00
I specifically said things are going to have to be less fair than they are now if we want them to work. So there's no contradiction there and what you wrote is not a counter argument.

I also didn't bring race into it but if you'd like to continue making the argument that black people are an existential problem for everyone else: Seig hiel I guess.
by Lalabadie | 2025-08-30 17:53:07+00:00
That folder is 5gb on my Air, at 300-400mb per video.

I have a category selected that says it's 22 possible videos, and out of those only 18 are currently cached on my machine. It looks like that directory is kept pruned at least occasionally.

Nonetheless, just an indication of the potential size on disk would keep users aware when they pick these screensavers. An explicit "Screensaver videos" category in the disk usage graph is also a good solution.
by keiferski | 2025-08-30 17:53:30+00:00
It is ironic that many of the people obsessed with life extension are also those deeply involved in creating systems that deliberately waste the time we already do have, via addictive algorithms, clickbait content, unnecessary consumerism, etc.

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”

- Seneca
by MrJohz | 2025-08-30 17:54:20+00:00
The interface ideally doesn't change, but the implementation probably will. And most of the units you're writing are probably internal-facing, which means that even if the interface does change, fixing that is just an internal refactoring change - with types and a good IDE, it's often just a couple of key presses away.

I think this is what you're saying about moving useful units out into their own library. I agree, and I think it sounds like we'd draw the testing boundaries in similar places, but I don't think it's necessary to move these sorts of units into separate libraries for them to be isolated modules that can be usefully tested.

The sort function is one of the edge cases where how I'd test it would probably depend a lot on the context, but in theory a generic sort function has a very standard interface that I wouldn't expect to change much, if at all. So I'd be quite happy treating it as a unit in its own right and writing a bunch of tests for it. But if it's something really implementation-specific that depends on the exact structure of the thing it's sorting, then it's probably better tested in context. But I'm quite willing to write tests for little helper functions that I'm sure will be quite stable.