MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by XorNot | 2025-10-30 09:13:16+00:00
Not at a whole-population scale level to any real significance though. There are just an abnormally large number of baby boomers, exacerbated by the subsequent massive fall in birth rates following them.

It's a "law of large numbers" problem - if you have a big population, you'll just have more people who live longer within that population then a similar, but smaller population.

US life expectancy has actually been falling somewhat recently - the whole "people are living longer" thing has always been a massive over simplification of long term historical effects and pressures (i.e. life expectancy didn't change all that much with the discovery of medicine, but it changed a lot because infant mortality stopped dragging down the average).
by LauraMedia | 2025-10-30 09:13:18+00:00
Yeah I still remember when you had to manually patch your minecraft.jar with mods. Always remove the META-INF directory so it works. Back then, when you installed two mods that were incompatible with each other, you had to throw away the whole minecraft.jar and start again.

This already changed A LOT when Forge and later Fabric came out, with a simple patch system akin to BepinEx and a mods folder.
by Timsky | 2025-10-30 09:13:47+00:00
> demanding new —yes-destroy-my-computer-dangerously-and-step-on-my-face-daddy flags and crashing my automated scripts from last year.

Literally, my case. I recently had to compile an abandoned six-year-old scientific package written in C with Python bindings. I wasn’t aware that modern versions of pip handle builds differently than they did six years ago — specifically, that it now compiles wheels within an isolated environment. I was surprised to see a message indicating that %package_name% was not installed, yet I was still able to import it. By the second day, I eventually discovered the --no-build-isolation option of pip.
by aspenmayer | 2025-10-30 09:13:49+00:00
Proton also uses HTTPS for their onion site, and they used the same certificate provider as Facebook did for theirs, Digicert, per this page:

https://proton.me/blog/tor-encrypted-email

In the above blog post, they seem to imply that they made HTTPS mandatory for Proton Mail over Tor for security reasons.
by jorvi | 2025-10-30 09:14:24+00:00
I mean, I'm not advocating for snobbery or being a critic at all.

One time I was walking around Belgium in the rain, I was cold and every single restaurant or bar (some serve food) was packed and wouldn't let new patrons in.

After walking around for about 35 minutes we found a cozy bar, had a beer, and discovered that they had a big pot of spicy pasta in the back, where you could pay €1 to ladle full a plate. In my memory, that is still the best meal I've ever tasted. And I'm definitely a haute cuisine enjoyer, been to a fair bit of Michelin restaurants.
by galagawinkle489 | 2025-10-30 09:14:37+00:00
I think I have heard the same. People whose lives are hopeless are much more likely to get addicted. The addiction then makes their life worse which causes this downward spiral of despair.

People with physical addictions can choose not to use drugs etc. Smokers can take 12 hour flights and they don't involuntarily take out a lighter and cigarette and smoke half way through. It is about self control.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-30 09:15:53+00:00
Exactly, and this is why we use virtual environments. Which then get dumped on by other people. People can't have it both ways, but they already have all the choices in Python's ecosystem. They just complain, because they are not aware how they can do it their way and didn't invest the time to nail down the workflow they like, or their workflow idea is self-contradictory.
by voidUpdate | 2025-10-30 09:16:37+00:00
I like watching anime, as opposed to reading anime, and I don't know Japanese. Every dub I've watched has been fine for me, I haven't noticed it being bad. Sure, if I knew Japanese well enough to keep up with the dialog, and watched both versions, I'd probably notice a difference, but for me, it comes down to whether I want to listen to an anime in English, or read an anime in English. I also sometimes want to do something while watching anime that means I can't devote my entire time to looking at the screen, and I don't want to have to keep rewinding so I can read what I missed. With an English or dubbed show, I can do things like put it on a second monitor while I'm playing a game, but that doesn't work with a subbed show. Yes, I know the solution is just to learn Japanese, but I've always struggled with learning languages and I barely have time to watch anime these days, let alone learn another language
by vbezhenar | 2025-10-30 09:16:46+00:00
More interesting statistics question is: how many connections over the world are opened to the servers with and without public domain/IP?

I think that github alone makes a sizeable chunk of these connections. So if there was some better mechanism to establish trust before first handshake, that would benefit all of these connections.

One approach that I could envision is to simply host ssh public key on some well known path (github.com/.well-known/ssh.pub) and ssh client will grab it over https before first connection and when key suddenly changes.
by grumpy-de-sre | 2025-10-30 09:18:00+00:00
Yep, nationalism isn't something you can turn on and off at will.

For an example I'm reminded of the recent public backlash to the K visa scheme [1].

1. https://www.ft.com/content/01a0029c-9f7c-4b31-a120-d1652f198...
by timonoko | 2025-10-30 09:19:16+00:00
Hey @grok, there was something wrong with exec("a=1"), maybe the "a" turned into global or something?

Thought for 45s

Yes, you're spot on that there's a gotcha with exec("a=1")—it behaves unexpectedly (and frustratingly) when used inside a function, and it often feels like the assignment "disappears" or ends up in the wrong scope. This isn't a bug, but a deliberate (if quirky) design choice in Python tied to how local variables are optimized for speed. Let me break it down with examples, explain why it happens, and suggest workarounds.The Issue in a NutshellAt the global/module level (e.g., in a script or interactive shell outside a function), exec("a=1") works fine: it assigns a=1 to the global namespace, and you can access it directly. Inside a function, things go sideways:If a is already declared as a local (e.g., a = 0 before the exec), the assignment updates the locals() dictionary temporarily, but direct references to a in the function still see the old value. The change is "lost" for the rest of the function. If a hasn't been declared locally yet, exec("a=1") sets it in locals(), but trying to access a directly raises a NameError (Python treats it as a global lookup, which fails).

In neither case does it automatically become a global unless you explicitly tell it to (more on that below). Your hunch about "global or something" is close but not quite—it ends up in limbo in the locals() dict without affecting normal variable access.

This stems from Python's bytecode optimization: Local variables in functions are stored in fast-access "slots" compiled at function-definition time. exec runs dynamic code that doesn't know about those slots, so it can't update them. Instead, it fiddles with the locals() dict (a proxy/snapshot), which the interpreter ignores for direct access.
Show HN: Catalyst – A Declarative Build System for C/C++
by S-Spektrum-M | 2025-10-30 09:19:23+00:00
I've been frustrated with CMake/Autotools for years, so I built Catalyst - a declarative build system for C++ that uses YAML profiles instead of imperative scripts.

Key ideas: - Profile composition (debug + release = debug-release) - Per-target isolation with reproducible builds - Built-in dependency management (vcpkg, git, local, system)

This is still early/rough, but it works for me and my projects. Would love feedback and people to check it out.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-10-30 09:19:28+00:00
> I had a similar issue with "Geschwister", where I picked "das" (correct according to https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Geschwister)

The actual correct singular form of "[die (since plural)] Geschwister" is "das Geschwist" - a word that is rather obscure even for many native German speakers.
by close04 | 2025-10-30 09:20:14+00:00
> I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now.

I think the Romans were right to believe that, and so are we today.

But the ride wasn't sa clean, steady slope up. For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had.

Now we live in the first period in history where knowledge of history is accessible to almost any person. So as a regular guy you can have a good sense of where to place these times on the scale of civilization.
by boxed | 2025-10-30 09:20:41+00:00
I understand that gut feeling. I've worked with many such systems. iommi is not like that though, because we HATE systems that have a nice two line demo but then immediately falls apart.

We consider any failure to scale up customization a high priority bug.

How do we handle this in practice? Nice defaults, easy to do deep customization with zero boilerplate, AND escape hatches of various forms. So if you need to just render your own template for an entire table row of form input field or whatever, you can do that. Always.
by oblio | 2025-10-30 09:20:52+00:00
Please do insult my use of English, it's a learning experience and it might be the same for others reading these comments.

> PHP and node were not developed as general purpose scripting languages for use at the commandline and are very commonly used for specific purposes so there's no need for them to be like python.

Perl, Ruby, Lua, I can keep going. You're just nitpicking. Practically only Python uses the venv [1] approach from all the programming languages I've used.

[1] Manual activation needed, non portable pile of dependencies per project (by design, fairly sure the documentation mentions this is not a supported use case - even across quasi-identical machines !!!), etc. I stand by my decision to call venvs a "fractal of bad design".
by mnky9800n | 2025-10-30 09:21:57+00:00
Yes they have been applying for European Research Council grants in droves:

https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/applications-erc-syne...

https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/applications-erc-adva...

https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/starting-grants-2026-...

of course there are no demographics yet but my guess is that the increase is from americans.

I think that these researchers if they are used to american academic culture will find europe to be different. My guess is also that these applications will also not have as much success as people hope since these researchers will not have established research networks in europe and so proposal reviewers will kind of see through the desperation. That being said, it would be nice to have some american colleagues about, but also it would be nice if europe saw the gap that trump has created by cratering science funding and then increase such moneys.
by shawn_w | 2025-10-30 09:23:19+00:00
It has options to split up input into fields and loop over every line for one-liners, yeah. For a trivial example,

awk '{ print $2 }' foo.txt

becomes

perl -lane 'print $F[1]' foo.txt

I'm one of those people who out off learning awk for a decade+ because I knew perl, but when I finally picked it up I found it's often simpler and cleaner. I still switch to perl for complicated processing but awk can get a lot done.
by cess11 | 2025-10-30 09:23:24+00:00
No, there are many other political movements I also disagree with, for example the broader reactionary tendency, including conservatives and neo-liberal groups.

Commonly I also disagree with people on ethical or religious grounds. For example I vehemently disagree with most protestants on the issue of capitalism which they consider compatible with the teachings of the biblical Jesus, and I while I agree with many catholics on this same issue I disagree with church mediated caritas as the social solution.

Frankly, I think you're the one that mostly comes across as scared here.
by zimpenfish | 2025-10-30 09:23:57+00:00
The annoyance I have when considering a move away from Evernote is that none of the recommended alternatives have IFTTT support.

(Although having said that, I do drop most of my notes into iOS/macOS Drafts these days which also doesn't have IFTTT support. But I could probably lash something up with webhooks and SQLite if absolutely necessary.)
by foresterre | 2025-10-30 09:24:00+00:00
Here is an article in English:

https://nltimes.nl/2025/10/29/ns-hit-microsoft-cloud-outage-...

It should be noted that the article isn't complete: while the travel planner and ticket machines were the first to fail, trains were cancelled soon after; it took a few hours before everything restarted.

Based on what the conductors said, I would speculate that the train drivers digital schedule was not operative, so they didn't know where to go next.
by jFriedensreich | 2025-10-30 09:24:11+00:00
You say it as if criticizing a joke is obviously something not to do for some reason? It is not like the joke does not imply something the author tries to say, otherwise it would not be on the front page. That aside, you overstate the difference to what we have today dramatically. Your browser history is already that and look at what controls firefox built on top to let you manage it. You can pause it, limit it, exclude pages etc. An adversary can root your pc and enable key logger and screen recording if they can break into an encrypted database, the delta to what adversaries already have is not that big, but the unlock for users and agents is quite big.
by yanhangyhy | 2025-10-30 09:24:18+00:00
This question is actually quite interesting. It’s basically connected to almost every issue China faces today — the national confidence born out of a century of humiliation, population decline, the rise of Han nationalism, soaring unemployment, and so on. The overall domestic response has been quite negative, though I don’t have a clear personal view on it.

It’s somewhat like the Tang dynasty at its most prosperous — when envoys from all nations came to pay tribute, and many Japanese and Central Asians studied and worked in Chang’an. But interestingly, I’ve noticed that in recent years, public opinion toward the Tang dynasty has gradually become less positive, which might be related to this.
by rlkf | 2025-10-30 09:25:39+00:00
> To the nostalgics among us: what made OS/2 special?

I started out with OS/2 v1.1. It had threads, DLLs, multi-tasking, much larger memory space, and from v1.2 a somewhat decent filesystem. Coming from DOS 3.2/Win 2.0 this was an incredible leap, in particular the SDK was amazing compared to the ragtag assembly of info I was used to. The _delta_ between two systems haven't been this large ever since, and I think that is what contributes to the "magic" feeling.
by westpfelia | 2025-10-30 09:26:25+00:00
Hard disagree. I think the point is that as a nation and a world if something like this were to happen there are no good or easy answers. The movie doesnt have a concrete ending because it doesnt need one. Any single nation firing a nuclear missle at America (or any major nation) would change the world forever. Successful or not.

Real life isnt a Tom Clancy novel. Jack Ryan wont save the day.
by vbezhenar | 2025-10-30 09:27:18+00:00
That's why democracy is wrong path. Crowd is stupid and easy to manipulate.

There should be hierarchy. 100 men should vote for one who will rule over them. 100 level one rulers should vote for one who will rule over 10 000 men. And so on.

Imagine all Amazon workers to vote for Amazon CEO. It does not happen.
by kakacik | 2025-10-30 09:27:56+00:00
Old people all have massive long term health issues. That's where most of the healthcare costs in universal healthcares go. Change the balance way more towards old instead of young being generally still healthy and feeding the system financially, and it just doesn't work anymore and becomes unsustainable.

There are partial solutions, ie adding some small fees for each visit (since a lot of retirees are lonely and go for the doctor visit just to talk to somebody or complain, and as I said they all have various mix of long term issues). Where we live healthcare isn't fully free and you have to chip in a bit, and this ain't such an issue (apart from wealthy old people).
by quitit | 2025-10-30 09:28:02+00:00
I haven't played minecraft in a fair while, but started with the alpha builds back when the Seecret updates were the most exciting thing going for the game.

> I'd assume this means that any official modding support is now stone dead and will never happen.

I was a bit surprised to read this because talk of modding support had been on the radar since notch days, it's wild to me that this hasn't happened yet.
by chickensong | 2025-10-30 09:28:03+00:00
I'm glad it's working for you! It's worked for me in the past as well, but I've also felt the pain. As I mentioned before, it's often the case that things will work, but in some ways, you need to have an increased appetite for risk.

I suppose it depends on scale and requirements. A homelab isn't very relevant IMHO, because the sample size is small and the load is negligible. Push the hardware 24/7 and the cracks are more likely to appear.

A nice-to-have service can suffer some downtime, but if you're running a non-trivial/sizable business or have regulation requirements, downtime can be rough. Keeping spare compute servers is normal, but you'll be hard pressed to convince finance to spend big money on core services (db, storage, networking) that are sitting idle as backups.

Say you convinced finance to spend
by integralid | 2025-10-30 09:28:56+00:00
I recently started using IRC again (I joined a small channel because of a random event). Surprisingly the magic is still there for me.

>besides, those people are largely reachable on slightly more modern services these days

The thing is, people are NOT reachable on IRC in general. They join when they wake up (or return from school, or return from work). When they leave you can't contact them (and you can criticise/praise them freely if you want). Sometimes a new person joins and never returns again. Sometimes they join tomorrow, the day after, and become a regular. Other times someone starts joining less and less frequently, then one day leaves and never returns.

People say "hi" when joining and "bye" when leaving.

I'm general, I realized this is much more similar to talking with real people than modern groupchats. Of course this is just a protocol, and nowadays this behavior is just a choice (everyone can install a mobile client and stay always online. Even back then it was possible with a bouncer). But I'm surprised how invested I became in this micro-community, in a way i never would on a discord server.
by yanhangyhy | 2025-10-30 09:29:17+00:00
China’s rare earth strategy was formulated roughly 40 years ago — this in itself is an advantage of a one-party system. Almost all nations that experienced rapid economic takeoff were built on one-party rule, strongman leadership, or authoritarian governance — such as South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Singapore... Taiwan had Chiang Ching-kuo, South Korea had Park Chung-hee, and Singapore had Lee Kuan Yew. At least in Asia, this pattern seems to hold true.
by fingerlocks | 2025-10-30 09:30:06+00:00
Is Gemini the same thing that shows up in google search AI box? Because that thing is wrong all the time.

Just the other day I was searching for some details about the metal graphics api language, and something weird caught my eye as I scrolled past the AI stuff. Curious, I engaged, asking more basic questions and they were just.. wrong. Even right now, “what is the default vertex winding order in Metal?” is wrong. Or how about “does metal use a left or right handed coordinate system for the normalized device coordinates?”. I mean this is day one intro level stuff, and easily found on Apple’s dev site.

And the “citations” are ridiculous. It references some stack overflow commentary or a Reddit thread where someone asks a similar question. But the response is “I don’t know about Metal, but Vulcan/D3D use (something different)”. Seriously wtf.

GPT4 gives the same wrong answers with almost the same citations. GPT5 gets it right, for at least the examples above.

Either way, it’s hard to trust it for things you don’t know, when you can’t for things you do.
by bombcar | 2025-10-30 09:30:12+00:00
You can get way more 9s if you roll your own procedures - and each step has a way of handling failure of the other steps.

Old trains had paper tickets, the locomotive was its own power source, the conductor had a flashlight, and the conductor could sell tickets for cash.

And if everything else failed, the conductor would just let you ride for free.

Now everything's so interconnected that any one part failing brings everything to a halt.
by coldtea | 2025-10-30 09:30:26+00:00
>From me what you mention seems to be derivative of the retirement argument where you clearly state that those not being able to work as much and have higher maintainance needs are the ones at disadvantage.

I state the opposite: the younger people, who are being able to work as much, are the ones at a disadvantage.

That's regardless if the older people live off their wealth, have state services redistributed to them, or are just left to die. You could even confiscate their assets and kill those old people, it wont fix most problems associated with a shrinking demographics.

The economy has fewer productive people, so the (fewer) younger ones have to work more, while at the same time the economy contracts around them because of fewer consumers. Infrastracture built at X level of population also can't be maintained (due to cost, political justification, and capacity) as the population drops far below X.

The younger ones have to live in a staler society, which an increased average age (in some countries the average person is already over 45 - used to be the average person was merely over 20-25 in the same societies decades ago), more decisions taken by people on their way out and not to their benefit etc.
by immibis | 2025-10-30 09:31:04+00:00
Notice they're only doing this after the game is ensloppified (they make their money from merch and movies now, not from game sales) and after the game code suffers from so much inner-platform effect that modding it directly isn't as useful any more.

The inner platform effect is when, in an effort to make it so people don't have to use the original programming language because programming is complicated, you create a worse programming language and make people use that. In Minecraft, it's data and resource packs. The Java code isn't just a function on the block that renders it, any more - there's a bunch of indirection through resource packs, and they've gone abstraction hell with that too, adding unnecessary abstractions in the way of the actual abstraction they want.
by virtualritz | 2025-10-30 09:31:35+00:00
> Surely dithering is good enough to display 10-bit colour on a non-10-bit monitor with good colour.

Indeed, but most software does not do this. It's not on people's minds.

When people hear dithering they think of palette dithering.

People think 8bit/channel is enough; but it is not.

Because it is only 256 levels of any gradient. And because of gamma correction it's practically quite a bit fewer; about 14% (i.e. 220) on a full 256 step gradient that went through an sRGB OETF.

I maintain a Rust crate that solely concerns itself with dithering for such cases as the one you mention.

The readme has a gradient on top that should make it obvious why this matters.

https://crates.io/crates/dithereens