MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abstractbeliefs | 2025-08-10 21:35:55+00:00
for what it's worth, I strongly disagree with the various right wing theories about the _cause_ and specifically the idea that there is intentional exploitation of the demographic shift, but it's not controversial that falling birthrates are leading to demographic change.

I'm not German and won't presume to say who is or isn't (or should be) "German", but this is absolutely something that needs to be grappled with by governments. A shift in population being "supplied" by birth vs. migration is recognised in many Western/more economically developed countries, and that also includes naturalised immigrants (and their descendants).

My personal belief is that the modern school of business thought is a form of tragedy of the commons: with every business optimising their extraction of wealth from people in isolation, individuals in the whole find the cost of living unsustainable and are increasingly living hand to mouth and feel they cannot afford or have the time to raise children. In this way, falling birthrates are an externality of modern economic doctrine. This is also true for immigrants, who are exploited for cheaper work, and as they naturalise fall into the same trap as being exploited for extracted wealth.

In my eyes, the resolution to falling birthrates is that governments need to reach for social and economic levers to reduce the predation of companies on individuals, as well as to increase the amount of flexible wealth that individuals have so they can choose to raise kids if they want.

I think that the idea that this is actually some kind of coordinated "great replacement" is deeply untrue and instead is a fulcrum to further distract, divide, and exploit people. If my belief on the root causes is true, however, governments must have the guts to reign in business, which does not prove to be popular in political circles. Instead, it is easy for governments to allow the political fringes to continue this narrative to "immigrant wash" discontent with life - rather than address the root of the problem (optimising for growth), they can announce "tough on immigration" measures that demonise marginalised groups who are politically inert themselves (immigrants, legal or otherwise, being much more restricted in their ability to vote and influence politics than established capital).
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-08-10 21:36:05+00:00
If you have children, I am often surprised how they seem to think that the previous generation was stone age. Particular example is that my daughter was surprised I would give orders to my broker via fax, and that the latency was practically the same they get on the free tiers of their online 2020s bank (this is France). My trusty old ThinkPad, which still boots as if 30 years hadn't passed, still has all such digitalized sent/received faxes I did in the 90s..
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-10 21:36:36+00:00
I am a Czech myself, and old enough to remember that period.

We were all happy to escape the Russian yoke, but the transformation was really challenging, not to mention the potential threat of wars as various ancient ethnic hatreds, suppressed by the defunct empire, reappeared.

A lot of people lost their jobs, a lot of currencies collapsed and took people's life savings with them... There was a wave of crime and various oligarchs tried to lift themselves above the law.

And your healthcare quip is way off. In many places further East, basic healthcare structure collapsed, and diseases like tuberculosis or HIV either returned or spread anew massively.

The situation began improving by re-attachment of the newly free countries to another, more benign empire, which was the EU.
by h4ch1 | 2025-08-10 21:37:00+00:00
Using Svelte and building global state classes with $state(), $effect() has really helped with managing side-effects and surgical updates without building a custom event system which has historically added unnecessary boilerplate to many of my projects with a frontend.

Having components bound to or using any of the $states or $derived update automatically without having to manually register event listeners, firing events, etc.

Used to dislike runes so much initially, but working a bit more deeply with them has really made me appreciate the API changes.
by toastercat | 2025-08-10 21:37:02+00:00
> “It is difficult to find the motivation to keep applying,” said Mr. Taylor, adding that he was now building personal software projects to show prospective employers.

I know it's common advice for students and newly grads to do this, but in my experience, employers do not care about personal software projects or open-source contributions unless the work is aligned with their product. That, or you built something that is easily lucrative. Otherwise, they do not care, they do not care, they do not care.

If your goal is personal enrichment, by all means, but don't kill yourself on a personal project with the intention of impressing an employer.
by lucb1e | 2025-08-10 21:37:13+00:00
Similar with phones and tablets: yes, people do that, but it's not the common case. I've only ever sold computing devices within the first month of ownership, after realising I made a mistake in purchasing it (not a broken device, but just not meeting my needs), but on second-hand sites you can also see various people offering them up after 1 or 2 years because they want something shinier and the old system still has value. I've bought my current phone from someone like that, and as a student I also bought such a laptop
by helph67 | 2025-08-10 21:37:55+00:00
“We have shown that vitamin D3 appears to stimulate the type I interferon signaling system in the body – a key part of the immune system that provides a first line of defense against bacteria and viruses. Thus, a healthy vitamin D3 status may help prevent viruses and bacteria from gaining a foothold in the body". https://scitechdaily.com/study-finds-vitamin-d3-important-fo...
by jleyank | 2025-08-10 21:39:19+00:00
Not sure what countries need with a small number of (very expensive) stealth fighters. They're not needed to enforce one's airspace or check out wayward airliners. They're too few in number to stand up to a serious invasion... Isn't this why the F-5 and F-16 and their Euro counterparts were created, so as to have a larger number of effective fighters?

Stealth can be dealt with, particularly in small countries like Switzerland, by advances in multi-frequency radar (or other spectral areas). Defensive missiles and drones are way cheaper and there's still a lot other be said filling regions of space with chunks of metal.
by linguae | 2025-08-10 21:39:41+00:00
Disclaimer: I’m a tenure-track community college instructor in computer science in Silicon Valley.

Assuming your son is in the United States since you mentioned “state university,” an option for reducing costs is attending a community college to get the lower-division courses in CS, math, physics, and liberal arts finished at a considerably lower cost. This also allows your son to buy some time and assess the state of the market two years from now. Two years of community college tuition is much lower than two years of university tuition, and depending on the state it might even be tuition-free.

If your son is still in high school, I also highly recommend he take Advanced Placement tests and score sufficiently well on them so that way he will get college credit for those courses. This could potentially save time in college, thus reducing costs.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-10 21:39:45+00:00
Because we've said x is a constant we're obliged to specify its type. For variables we're allowed to use inference and in most cases the type can be correctly inferred, but for constants or function signatures inference is deliberately prohibited.

const x: Rect = ....

[Note that in Zig what you've written isn't a constant, Zig takes the same attitude as C and C++ of using const to indicate an immutable rather than a constant]
by josh2600 | 2025-08-10 21:40:19+00:00
This is actually one of the major fights of our generation.

If signal/whatsapp/e2ee are desecrated, only criminals will have encryption for a short period of time until we all come to our senses and realize that some semblance of personal privacy is a human right.

IMHO, we should fight for the maximum amount of privacy possible within the context of a civil society.

In every generation there is a battle, sometimes quiet, other times a dull roar, and occasionally a bombastic. This battle is who can oversee who.

Surveillance should be the last resort of a free society.
by brandonb | 2025-08-10 21:41:37+00:00
In a study of 200,000 people, apolipoprotein B (apoB) and lipoprotein(a) [Lp(a)] give a much earlier and more accurate read on heart disease risk than the usual cholesterol tests.

People with the same cholesterol level could have totally different risk profiles depending on their apoB and Lp(a) counts. This shift could lead to these tests the new gold standard, replacing the standard cholesterol test.
by tough | 2025-08-10 21:41:51+00:00
The key insight here is that `comptime unreachable` isn't relying on optimizations at all—it's a fundamental part of Zig's lazy evaluation semantics.

Unlike dead code elimination (which is an optimization pass that removes provably unused code), Zig's compile-time evaluation is deterministic and mandatory. When you use `inline .a, .b`, the compiler must generate separate instantiations for each enum variant. Within each instantiation, `ab` becomes a comptime-known value, making the inner switch deterministic at compile time.

This is similar to how C++ template instantiation works: the compiler doesn't "optimize away" unused template specializations—it simply never instantiates them in the first place. Zig's `comptime unreachable` works the same way: unreachable branches are never even considered for compilation because the control flow is resolved at compile time.

The difference matters because optimization-based approaches can vary between compiler versions or optimization levels, while Zig's semantic guarantees remain consistent. This makes `comptime unreachable` suitable for expressing static invariants that must hold regardless of compilation flags.
by joesmock | 2025-08-10 21:42:29+00:00
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by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-10 21:42:41+00:00
Is there some way we can get people to abandon this entire premise?

You have a law that requires age verification. Does the right oppose this because they oppose government regulation? You have a law that spends more tax dollars on law enforcement, lobbied for by the police unions. Does the left support this because they support government spending and unions?

There is no consistency in their positions, it's all just whatever happens to be in their coalition right now and it changes over time.
by lolc | 2025-08-10 21:43:03+00:00
It's interesting that measuring speech vibration is possible, but on the whole I don't see this as viable attack. One would need to get real close to a target, the cited 60% accuracy is at 50 cm distance. At 300 cm they report 2% which seems on the level of guessing words randomly.

The "remotely" in the title is no warranted in my view. Of course there may be ways to improve on their results. But so far it seems to me that a highly directional microphone would outperform the radar at any distance. One interesting aspect here is how sensitive the attack is to ambient noise. So maybe sitting close to a target with a radar hidden in headphones, one could glean some words even in a noisy environment like a subway. But I'd still put my money on a microphone performing better in that environment.

Now I wonder whether the attack would work better on headphones. They are smaller and should vibrate more. On the other hand the surface is smaller, so on the whole they might not provide more signal to a radar.
by al_borland | 2025-08-10 21:43:51+00:00
Quotes like that were an issue long before AI. Classically, it was a sign that something was copied from Word or Outlook. I used to run into it constantly 15 years ago, I had a co-worker run into it a couple weeks ago, no AI involved.

As much as I’ve seen this, I’ve never seen anyone get fired for it, this includes times where it broke production.
by lucb1e | 2025-08-10 21:44:04+00:00
A device with no moving parts, only 5 years of expected life?!

I understand if you say that high-performance users will want a newer system after 5 years, but I'd be very surprised if this 64GB RAM machine doesn't suffice for 98% of people, including those who want to play then-common games at default settings

Good to have some concrete figures nonetheless of course, it's always useful as a starting point
by cobbzilla | 2025-08-10 21:44:38+00:00
You might not like this example, but the relatively recent evolution of 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, significantly strengthening gun rights, is the result of many impassioned, dedicated groups, lobbying the public and the government for decades.

The lesson is: stay active, stay vocal, stay in the media, and prepare for a very long haul. And file lots of lawsuits challenging everything!
by IshKebab | 2025-08-10 21:44:51+00:00
For those of us that haven't used Java for a decade...

> In text blocks, the leftmost non-whitespace character on any of the lines or the leftmost closing delimiter defines where meaningful white space begins.

From https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/text-blocks-come-...

It's not a bad option but it does mean you can't have text where every line is indented. This isn't uncommon - e.g. think about code generation of a function body.
by jadamson | 2025-08-10 21:44:54+00:00
I didn't misread anything. refulgentis edited his comment after I replied, and the issue seems to stem from his failure to understand the comment I replied to. Without that context, my reply obviously won't make sense either.

The comment I replied to is pretty standard feminist dreck, and if you can't understand it, maybe interlocute them first? Debate is one thing, spoon-feeding you explanations of someone else's comment is another.

Still, I'll give you a hint: both pessimizer and I agree that men and women are physically different - again, I did not misread them in that regard. The difference is that I take that to a logical conclusion, while they are bound by ideology to stop short.
by bgwalter | 2025-08-10 21:45:03+00:00
In other news, radioactivity was embraced to the point that radium was used everywhere (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls) and shoe stores were offering x-rays.

Today, even the Internet's positive impact is wildly debated, the LLM copyright issues are wildly debated and no data exists for the long term impact of LLM usage on the reasoning faculties (if you tell me that the article was not posted to discredit LLM skeptics, I have a bridge to sell you).
by spankibalt | 2025-08-10 21:45:24+00:00
> "My dream productivity device is a modern take on a Psion 5MX."

Adapt it out of the conventions of the inferior form factor by making it a detachable, i. e. a UMPC in a smartphone-like form factor, and you might have a winner... if you don't skimp on all the other good stuff that makes a great ultra-portable general-purpose computing platform.

> "Thinking about it as I type this, perhaps a psion-style keyboard for an iPhone might hit the spot [...]."

The problem with the iPhone is that it's not a UMPC, but locked-down crap.
by Zealotux | 2025-08-10 21:46:09+00:00
It's pretty clever optimization, it actually only shows a few dozens images at all times and only update the groups as you zoom in, for example https://tiles.onemillionscreenshots.com/2024-05-01/tiles/-1/...

You don't even need something fancy like WebGPU/WebGL, just the CSS transition property will do the job there.
by 1659447091 | 2025-08-10 21:47:18+00:00
Yes, but not in intent. Semantic Web (which was web 3.0 before it got meshed into web3 apparently) was meant to open up internet data for new/novel applications and uses. The article appears to be alluding to that very thing via MCP.

While it does fall short of the implementation of the Semantic Web, in a way it makes it a possibility to fulfill its intent without the full buy-in of site owners. There still has to be some buy-in or allowance, otherwise it will be locked down in the near future as some comments are expecting.
by rcfox | 2025-08-10 21:47:30+00:00
I graduated 15 years ago, so who know if my advice is worth anything anymore...

I think the best part of my computer engineering program at the University of Waterloo was the integrated co-op system. (Basically, internships.) It meant my degree was 5 years instead of 4, but I got work experience and professional connections at several companies and came out with a slight profit instead of a ton of debt. I even turned my last internship into a full-time job after I graduated.
by quesera | 2025-08-10 21:48:47+00:00
I think in the 90's it was just people repeating a pattern they learned from Windows/DOS.

It used to grate on my nerves to hear people say, e.g. "H T T P colon backslash backslash yahoo dot com".

But I think they always typed forward slash, like they knew the correct slash to use based on the context, but somehow always spoke it in DOSish.
by mdp2021 | 2025-08-10 21:48:55+00:00
> given a token history and patterns in their training data. If you want to describe that as fully intelligent

No, I would call (an easy interpretation of) that an implementation of unintelligence. Following patterns is what an hearsay machine does.

The architecture you describe at the "token prediction" level collides with an architecture in which ideas get related with better justifications than frequent co-occurrance. Given that the outputs will be similar in form, and that "dubious guessers" are now in place, we are now bound to hurry towards the "certified guessers".
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-10 21:49:00+00:00
Historic sources indicate massive workforce (and military force) shortages where once were none, which means that the total population must have dropped significantly.

Rome was able to field huge armies by the 3rd century BC already, originally sourced from the Italian peninsula alone. In contrast, when the Eastern Roman forces finally defeated the Goths in the 540s, they were unable to hold Italy against a relatively minor Langobard invasion in 568, which is estimated to some 20 000 warriors. Why? For the lack of soldiers. They just couldn't put together the necessary garrisons and feed them from local sources.

That would have been unthinkable in 168. Anyone who would seriously want to conquer Italy at that time would have to field at least ten times as many soldiers.

In contrast, the Eastern Roman Empire at home was still able to field massive armies and even send some expeditions overseas, because the more developed civilizational structure was still present there, and with it, much higher population density.
by ivanjermakov | 2025-08-10 21:49:29+00:00
> Almost always there is an up-front bound for the number of iterations until the break, and its worth asserting this bound, because debugging crashes is easier than debugging hangs.

Perhaps in database systems domain yes, but in everything else unconditional loop is meant to loop indefinitely. Think event loops, web servers, dynamic length iterations. And in many cases `while` loop reads nicer when it has a break condition instead of a condition variable defined outside of the loop.
by Waterluvian | 2025-08-10 21:50:20+00:00
Something I’ve noticed in a few friends and family members is that there’s this whole hobby of setting up to be productive but not actually being productive. One person has a brilliantly laid out workshop with so many custom built shelves and cleats and jigs and tables, but about 90% of the woodworking they’ve done is the workshop itself. Another spends ton of time figuring out the absolute best way to organize her recipes and todo lists and desk and organizers and pens and finding the right foot rest, but that’s about it.

And I can see her being really into this device as an idea, but I would bet all the money in my pockets that she’d never actually use it.

None of this is a critique on these individuals, or how well this PDA performs at being a productivity device. It’s just this meta layer of productivity I’m noticing around me more and more.
by rpcope1 | 2025-08-10 21:50:22+00:00
That's basically a full out sprint for a relatively fast horse. Most can't sustain that for long and definitely not with a lot of load. Steam, gas, and diesel engines were and are capable of sustaining that for long durations with greater load, hence why it seems so jarring. Especially for large loads, even the earliest trucks were probably moving must faster than draft horses.
by lupusreal | 2025-08-10 21:50:35+00:00
Right. They also fail to understand that many low end jobs only provide very marginal value to companies and could easily be eliminated if the minimum wage exceeds that value. For instance, baggers at grocery stores hired as a convienence to shoppers and to speed up checkouts. But this is only very marginal value; customers and cashiers can do the bagging themselves and the negative side of that is only very slight to the business. It's an easy job to eliminate first, many stores these days don't have one. Low minimum wages create more jobs like this, which are good jobs for teenagers or people with intellectual disabilities.

Lowering the minimum wage for people with disabilities creates more jobs for people with disabilities, demonstrating the whole point. Higher minimum wage price less capable labor out of jobs.
by leeoniya | 2025-08-10 21:51:04+00:00
> “Automobilism is an illness, a mental illness. This illness has a pretty name: speed... [Man] can no longer stand still, he shivers, his nerves tense like springs, impatient to get going once he has arrived somewhere because it is not somewhere else, somewhere else, always somewhere else.”

Previously:

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

-- Blaise Pascal (~1650)
by latchkey | 2025-08-10 21:51:33+00:00
The tone of the article sounds like an attempt to make news out of nothing, while ETH is nearing ATH's.

Years ago, we went through a DeFi summer where a ton of protocols were built. Then, multiple years of nothing as the summer ended.

Since then, many of the protocols condensed into a few very very active protocols. Turtle has $1.1B deployed in only two campaigns. AAVE has $55B. Morpho has $10B. There are tons more protocols doing just fine.