MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hx8 | 2025-09-09 15:55:51+00:00
I don't want to come off as supporting the grandparent comment, but ultimately there is at least some degree of heritability of IQ [0]. US IQ also seemed to have peaked in the 1990s [1].

It's quite a leap to claim that immigration is the cause of the US IQ decline. The best explanations seem to be that it's environmental [2]. The general decline in IQ is impacting several countries.

0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

1 https://nchstats.com/average-iq-by-state-in-us/

2 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29891660/
by ch4s3 | 2025-09-09 15:56:07+00:00
You read a lot of books about economics, history, and political science and suddenly everything starts to look like it's complicated. The recent trend of commentators shouting "it's actually not complicated" is troubling. I try to present commentary with some nuance and humility. I have a perspective, but I endeavor to leave room for the possibility that I don't have a full understanding or that my model of the world doesn't fit every set of circumstances.
by DavidPeiffer | 2025-09-09 15:56:10+00:00
It's the best data that's available at the time. It's been collected in a consistent fashion for a significant duration of time. To understand how a new methodology would differ, we'd want to run a new process in parallel for a couple years.

A few notes from an interview on the Odd Lots podcast, interviewing Bill Beach, former head of the BLS:

* Response rates among surveyed employees are roughly:

Month 1 68%

Month 2 83%

Month 3 93-94%

* Large employers tend to respond sooner, and are staffed to handle these requests better.

--------

April 2025 interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...

August 2025 interview (after BLS head statistician was fired): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bill-beach-on-how-trum...

Some notes and a transcript: https://www.crisesnotes.com/bloomberg-odd-lots-podcast-trans...
by red-iron-pine | 2025-09-09 15:56:22+00:00
same experience. switches to an old school dumb phone. my neighbor joked that I was a drug dealer, lol.

but man did I miss maps. need to go somewhere? get in the car, start the engine, look it up on some map app, and then I'm off.

text messaging and being able to send simple photos was also a loss. definitely missed being able to text the wife a photo of something on sale in the grocery store ("hey, 10% off X, wanna give that a try for dinner?"), and I missed how good some of the auto-fill was after a while.

to a much lesser degree, a phone was nice during some downtime. waiting in line for something, killing time in a doctor's office waiting room, etc. 20 years ago they had magazines, now they don't...

eventually after getting lost a couple of times I just tapped out and went back to the Pixel 4
by MarkusQ | 2025-09-09 15:56:32+00:00
A lunar beanstalk? How is that supposed to work? (Answer: it won't; Lunar-stationary orbits do not exist, since they would have a radius on the order of the Earth-moon distance, and the Earth is much more massive than the moon).

https://explainingscience.org/2025/08/19/lunar-stationary-or...
by simplesagar | 2025-09-09 15:56:35+00:00
Hey HN, Sagar co-founder & CEO of Speakeasy here! We built Gram because we kept seeing the same problem: developers spinning up MCP servers that technically work but practically confuse agents.

We think the solution is good tool design and so we've created Gram to help. It uses existing APIs as starting point, and makes adding rich descriptions, and curating workflow-based tools easy. It handles the hosting, infra and authentication so that your team can stay focused on what's important.

This is our first big open source project, so we appreciate everyone taking a look. Please don't hesitate to drop feedback here, or email me directly at sagar@speakeasy.com if you have anything that you'd rather share privately!
by unethical_ban | 2025-09-09 15:56:38+00:00
One trick, even though it doesn't "lock it down" the same way, is to use a minimalist launcher. Check out OLauncher. It is a text-based launcher, it only has room for a few apps on the homepage, and it discourages fiddling with your phone.

https://github.com/tanujnotes/Olauncher?tab=readme-ov-file
by surfmike | 2025-09-09 15:56:54+00:00
If AI does actually lead to large economic gains but also high unemployment, then we should be able to invest most in social programs like this and let people make a good living providing them. (as well as all other workers, through wage subsidies)

That said, if you don’t have a job… do you need childcare? But I’m assuming there will still be enough demand from those employed
by danans | 2025-09-09 15:56:55+00:00
> I don't think Trump is anyone's idea of a textbook conservative, especially not economically

I'm just going off what you said above:

> The US is a very right wing country. > It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls.

I don't think he is a traditional conservative either, but rather a right-wing nationalist ethno-socialist.

However, the fact is that he has the near unanimous support of most "textbook conservatives", both in Congress and in the broader Republican party, as evidenced by their voting for and supporting a massive debt-exploding budget and their silence in the face of his ethno-nationalist executive actions.

If he isn't a textbook conservative, neither are they.
by bluGill | 2025-09-09 15:56:57+00:00
When someone links to a video I assuming that the video was heavily edited and cherry picked to show whatever point they want. I'm not wrong often enough to bother clicking on yours.

I find it interesting that James W Stigler doesn't even have a wikipedia page. I'm not sure what that means, but he somehow isn't very notable despite having written popular books and being a university professor. (or he is so controversial that they can't agree on one - which is a sign to not take him too seriously)
by Kon5ole | 2025-09-09 15:57:01+00:00
Solar benefits from storage yes but it's not at all worthless even without it.

If your solar panels generate 10 TWh per year, you have 10 TWh unused hydro, gas, even oil and coal that is stored instead of spent. You have saved the planet from megatons of CO2 emissions even if you have no new green storage.

Solar is already adding the equivalent of several nuclear power plants worth of new electricity every few months. Getting another month's worth of electricity delivered 10 years from now is not much of a bridge.

I think solar and storage just needs every other worse idea to stay out of the way and things will be fine.
by Delk | 2025-09-09 15:57:04+00:00
I somehow ended up with an interesting combination of medieval-tech cosmic enlightenment along with friendly iron age native neighbours.

https://www.johnayliff.com/games/seedship/index.html?bmmopfi...

I hadn't played the game in a while but I used to play it quite a bit some years ago. The game is rather RNG-heavy, and although you can usually pick your poison, luck is a large factor in how good a result you can get.

If you aim for the best possible result on each run individually, in a sense the game is about exploration vs. exploitation, or whether to settle with what you've got or try your luck for more.

(If you want to aim for record scores overall, it probably makes sense to take high risks and fail lots of runs.)
by cycomanic | 2025-09-09 15:57:06+00:00
In what way was the energiewwende disastrous, give actual numbers.

German electricity production is increasingly dominated by renewables, in the first quarter of 2025 (which had unfavourable weather conditions) 46.9% of electricity was produced by renewables (mostly wind). Coal and gas has been declining steadily and Germany regularly exports electricity to nuclear focused France. Currently on average Germany is a net importer from France, but that does mean little because of the way cross border trade is an integral part of the European grid (note that Germany also is a net importer from Denmark whos grid is largely wind based).

So to me that sounds like a success story.
by jjk166 | 2025-09-09 15:57:23+00:00
It's not misinformation. Reasonable people know that science determining something is true only means the current evidence strongly indicates its true, and that future results may call anything into question, but we should not expect any particular current finding to be false. It is misinformation to characterize the lack of absolute certainty, which is something science can never produce, as indicative that claims differing from the scientific consensus are equally supported by the evidence.

You don't need to worry about people losing trust in science because science does not require trust. Those who are unsatisfied with anything less than certainty need something other than science.
by tptacek | 2025-09-09 15:57:53+00:00
Wait, can you say more about how RAG solves this problem? What Kasey is referring to is things like compiling statically-typed code: there's a ground truth an agent is connected to there --- it can at least confidently assert "this code actually compiles" (and thus can't be using an entirely-hallucinated API. I don't see how RAG accomplishes something similar, but I don't think much about RAG.
by Muromec | 2025-09-09 15:57:59+00:00
>What’s frustrating about this is that conservatives are always warning about the decreasing child birth rate. But fight against policies that would help support families who have children.

That's what happens when party doesn't have an actual policy stance and min-maxes their pooling numbers based on target audience instead.

Another more cynical take is "childbirths" is just a code for racism and "pro-life" a code for religious types.
by aw1621107 | 2025-09-09 15:58:06+00:00
> The vast majority of C programmers will agree that they don't care for any of the new features, as is clearly evident by the fact that almost nobody elects to use the latest standards.

I think there might be some mix between "we don't want any of the new features" and "we want the new features but can't". Probably hard to get good data on the precise split.

> A standard that can't be implemented is worthless, and even the "3 high quality" implementations of C/C++ haven't fully implemented the latest 2 editions of either language.

This is a bit black-and-white. Just because a standard isn't fully implemented doesn't mean the parts that are implemented can't be useful, especially if the "haven't implemented this yet" is more due to a lack of manpower/attention/desire/etc. than actual impossibility (e.g., libc++ and parallel algorithms/<charconv> vs. export template).
by janalsncm | 2025-09-09 15:58:08+00:00
I’m 100% on board that GDP is increasingly becoming a poor proxy for well-being. That being said I can’t really think of many other things a state can do. The trends you are describing are national if not global.

Also “having the state raise your children” sounds dystopian until you realize the alternative was them not being taken care of in many cases. Handing a kid an iPad is not raising them.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-09-09 15:58:08+00:00
> That's not package manager problem that's registry problem

I do not think that the two are cleanly separable. They are client and server ends of the same system.

And I think my point is that I view it as more of a server (registry) and governance problem than the OP author does.

Despite the fact that my employer also has an internal package feed, the security of nuget.org and the central public feed is intrinsic to the security of the whole system.

Nuget was closer to the NPM end of the spectrum, but has tightened up considerably over time. Particularly the "Package ID Prefix Reservations" feature tells me that package names that start with certain words are owned by the relevant entity, be it "System." or "Azure." from Microsoft, or "AWS" from Amazon.

This is important as it's used to distribute SDKs and optional but standard library components and updates.

There is certainly junk on there, but not much load-bearing junk.
by mickdarling | 2025-09-09 15:58:12+00:00
Would that show up more with heavily cached data or less? Because I've been using very heavily cached data on the order of 30 to 1 cache versus not. And I haven't had much trouble with Claude Code at all in the last month. A few problems here and there, but they were sporadic. While I know other people have had massive issues, I wonder if the issues that occurred didn't effect cache as much and thus prevented me from seeing some of the worst aspects of it.
by ivape | 2025-09-09 15:58:28+00:00
Dat domain name.

Yeah, stop those cute domain names. I never got the memo on Youtu.be, I just had “learn” it was okay. Of course people started to let their guard down because dumbasses started to get cute.

We all did dodge a bullet because we’ve been installing stuff from NPM with reckless abandon for awhile.

Can anyone give me a reason why this wouldn’t happen in other ecosystems like Python, because I really don’t feel comfortable if I’m scared to download the most basic of packages. Everything is trust.
by gjm11 | 2025-09-09 15:59:02+00:00
> like the social media algorithms pushing child abuse content to potential pedophiles

There's something weird about this complaint, isn't there? I mean, it's horrifying if social media algorithms are pushing child abuse content to anyone, but so far as I can see it isn't worse if the people they're showing it to are paedophiles. Maybe it's even a bit less bad since they're less likely to be distressed by it.

I think there's something deformed about a lot of the moral discourse around this stuff -- as if what matters is making sure that Those Awful People don't get anything they want rather than making sure bad things don't happen. (Far and away the most important bad thing associated with child abuse is the actual child abuse but somehow that's not where everyone's attention goes.)
by mock-possum | 2025-09-09 15:59:08+00:00
> it's just very hard for me to argue this is not the best metroidvania ever released

Which is exactly how I felt about HK - I never thought I’d see Super Metroid and Castlevania Symphony of the Night shuffle aside to make room at the top, but the genre definition is now a triumvirate, and the newcomer is hybridized with soulslike elements. It’s been a fantastic renaissance for the genre imo.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-09 15:59:20+00:00
"Anecdata" is notoriously unreliable when it comes to estimating AI performance over time.

Sure, people complain about Anthropic's AI models getting worse over time. As well as OpenAI's models getting worse over time. But guess what? If you serve them open weights models, they also complain about models getting worse over time. Same exact checkpoint, same exact settings, same exact hardware.

Relative LMArena metrics, however, are fairly consistent across time.

The takeaway is that users are not reliable LLM evaluators.

My hypothesis is that users have a "learning curve", and get better at spotting LLM mistakes over time - both overall and for a specific model checkpoint. Resulting in increasingly critical evaluations over time.
Show HN: Email capture for Bolt.new/V0/Lovable apps (with follow-up emails)
by chris-bzst | 2025-09-09 15:59:20+00:00
Hi HN!

I keep building apps with Bolt.new, Lovable and V0, getting decent traffic from launches here, but then... crickets. People try it once and I never hear from them again. The problem isn't the apps - these tools are amazing for rapid prototyping. The problem is I have no way to stay in touch with people who seemed interested but didn't convert immediately.

I tried Mailchimp and ConvertKit, but integrating them into my fast iteration cycle was a pain. Plus they're overkill for simple "hey, I fixed that bug you mentioned" updates.

What I built

So I made Writaia - basically email capture designed for indie makers who build with Vibe Coding tools. The integration is stupidly simple: click "Copy for AI" in the dashboard, paste it into Bolt.new/V0/Lovable chat, and you're done. Takes maybe 30 seconds.

Then when you want to email your users (like when you ship that feature someone requested), you just type what you want to say and it helps you write a proper email. No templates, no complex automation - just "turn my casual update into something professional."

Why it's working

I've been using it on my own projects for a few months. What I noticed:

People actually do want updates, they just forget to check back

A simple "hey, remember that app you tried? I fixed the loading issue" gets surprising engagement Having email addresses makes you feel more accountable to actually improve the app

It's not revolutionary, but it solves my specific problem: staying connected with people without becoming a marketing person.

Questions for HN

Do you have this same problem with your side projects?

How do you currently handle user communication?

Other Vibe Coding tools I should support?

Happy to answer questions about the technical implementation too. The "Copy for AI" approach was trickier than expected - had to figure out how to generate platform-specific code on the fly.

Try it if you want: https://writaia.com
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-09-09 15:59:39+00:00
Requiring signed packages isn't enough, you have to enforce that signing can only be done with the approval of a trusted person.

People will inevitably set up their CI system to sign packages, no human intervention needed. If they're smart & the CI system is capable of it they'll set it up to only build when a tag signed by someone approved to make releases is pushed, but far too often they'll just build if a tag is pushed without enforcing signature verification or even checking which contributors can make releases. Someone with access to an approved contributor's GitHub account can very often trigger the CI system to make a signed release, even without access to that contributor's commit signing key.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-09 16:00:08+00:00
The fact you need to compare companies that are 50+ years old, because Europe doesn't have a single competitive modern age company should be enough for me to rest my case, and enough for Europeans to do so serious reflecting.

Americas golden child of 1960 now sucks, oh well. In other news Nvidia has a market cap that nearly eclipses the GDP of Germany. Ah! ASML makes the machines for those chips! But then why isn't the EU reaping the fruit...
by franktankbank | 2025-09-09 16:00:09+00:00
How long were supply chains back then? 2-5 nodes in a typical case?

I'm not saying publishing of statistics is what caused this shit to happen dingus. I'm saying focusing on it exclusively is dumb and it is wiser to look at a granular level. We can't look at this level because once you have a 150 node supply chain how trustworthy are the receipts?

What if your body had a metric as dumb as our high level economic metrics. We'd all be doing our best to get fat as fuck.
by joshcaughtfire | 2025-09-09 16:00:19+00:00
good point. the reality is conflicts should often be handled in the business logic, not in the consensus logic, but not universally. For the former, having the conflict state be the consensus state is ideal, but you do risk polluting your upstream application with a bunch of unnecessary conflict handling for trivial state diffs.

With CRDT, you have local consistency and strong convergence, but no guarantee of semantic convergence (i.e. user intent). I would still hire OP, but I would definitely keep him in the backend and away from UX
by data-ottawa | 2025-09-09 16:00:24+00:00
I don’t think you’re crazy, something is off in their models.

As an example I’ve been using an MCP tool to provide table schemas to Claude for months.

There was a point where it stopped recognizing the tool unless mentioned in early August. Maybe that’s related to their degraded quality issue.

This morning after pulling the correct schema info Sonnet started hallucinating columns (from Shopify’s API docs) and added them to my query.

That’s a use case I’ve been doing daily for months and in the last few weeks has gone from consistent low supervision to flaky and low quality.

I don’t know what’s going on, Sonnet has definitely felt worse, and the timeline matches their status page incident, but it’s definitely not resolved.

Opus 4.1 also feels flaky, it feels like it’s less consistent about recalling earlier prompt details than 4.0.

I personally am frustrated that there’s no refund or anything after a month of degraded performance, and they’ve had a lot of downtime.
by pepoluan | 2025-09-09 16:00:51+00:00
It's unfair that you cut off the quote there. Because in the next paragraphs:

> And yet.

> I have played this game obsessively since it came out. I cannot put it down... This game is incredible, I say to myself as a small grub brutally murders me for the mistake of touching its seemingly soft and cuddly body.
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-09 16:00:59+00:00
Worse. Not just a "stranger" but a subset of strangers running "real businesses".

I would rather my kid be raised by a) spouse b) grandparents c) no-habla cash only daycare (who are catering to customers who's average values are much closer to mine than an above the table business). Only after all those options are exhausted do I look toward a "real business".

So basically this is a subsidy of the 4th place option.
by SparkyMcUnicorn | 2025-09-09 16:01:08+00:00
I'd believe a lot of other claims before believing model degradation was happening.

- They admittedly go off of "vibes" for system prompt updates[0]

- I've seen my coworkers making a lot of bad config and CLAUDE.md updates, MCP server span, etc. and claiming the model got worse. After running it with a clean slate, they redacted their claims.

[0] https://youtu.be/iF9iV4xponk?t=459
by DavidPeiffer | 2025-09-09 16:01:30+00:00
Here are links to the episodes, for anyone interested.

April 2025 interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...

August 2025 interview (after BLS head statistician was fired): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bill-beach-on-how-trum...

Some notes and a transcript: https://www.crisesnotes.com/bloomberg-odd-lots-podcast-trans...
by diggan | 2025-09-09 16:01:41+00:00
As also mentioned elsewhere in this submission, it doesn't matter how often autofill breaks/works. There are two cases where it breaks: The accounts not showing up in the password manager modal, and the website autofill not working. The first is what prevents phishing, the second doesn't really matter to prevent phishing or not.

The idea is that if your password manager doesn't show the usual list of accounts (regardless if the actual autofill after clicking the account works or not), you double-check the domain.
by jasonmorganson | 2025-09-09 16:01:55+00:00
This is still an early preview. A UI is on the roadmap [0]. It is API access only for now [1].

[0] https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry/blob/main/d... [1] https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry/blob/main/d...
by clickety_clack | 2025-09-09 16:02:59+00:00
I totally get the reasoning behind that, but the majority of women are not stay at home moms, and most families don’t have the resources to make it happen. Society is just not oriented to family creation, and both women and men (to a lesser extent) take a hit when they decide to start a family. The entire world is in a fertility crisis now that could easily endanger the very society we live in, with all the ideals and principles we take for granted, and that calls for solutions that may not end up being absolutely fair to everyone in it. If the tradeoff is between childcare that actually works versus a watered down version because we are also paying people who don’t avail of it, I think the former option will do most to support families.