MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jnurmine | 2025-10-30 14:17:05+00:00
Exactly.

In the current pension system (at least the ones in the Nordics), the new generation pays for the old generation. This mechanism is broken, as it expects (as you pointed out) an ever-growing population, which is of course unrealistic.

Fixing [*] the broken pension system in a sustainable way is politically unpalatable and seems to have been so for decades. Lifting the pension age is the only "innovative" action available that is even discussed nowadays anywhere in public, as if that were the only viable alternative, which of course it isn't.

I've pondered why. Hammering out the details of a new system and taking care of a transition period etc. cannot be unsurmountable problems. It probably has to do with pensioners being a large voter demographic, thus the reason is some form of political self-preservation on behalf of the traditionally large parties.

So, instead of changing things to the better, a broken system must be maintained. Since the system is not only broken, it's essentially untouchable, therefore political decision-taking has to accept possibly sub-optimal decisions in related areas to avoid disturbing anything. In a way, the brokenness leaks.

Then, a shrinking population only exacerbates the problems of the pension system, spreading the brokenness further into other societal systems and decisions. And that's a bad path to be in.

[*] In an example of a better-working alternative system, any pension contributions would be personal, kept in an account managed by the state. The money is (low risk) invested by the state, profits/dividends reinvested, etc. Once one becomes a pensioner, the money can be withdrawn in whole or parts. Add taxes somewhere, such as when withdrawing the money. The state guarantees the lowest level of pension, something like today. Simple enough, and not tied to "children pay for parents".

Edit: formatting
by andyjansson | 2025-10-30 14:17:06+00:00
Another interesting thing is that these seem to work:

base 16: 123456789ABCDEF~16 * (16-2) + 16 - 1 = FEDCBA987654321~16

base 10: 123456789~10 * (10-2) + 10 - 1 = 987654321~10

base 9: 12345678~9 * (9-2) + 9 - 1 = 87654321~9

base 8: 1234567~8 * (8-2) + 8 - 1 = 7654321~8

base 7: 123456~7 * (7-2) + 7 - 1 = 654321~7

base 6: 12345~6 * (6-2) + 6 - 1 = 54321~6

and so on..

or more generally:

base n: sequence * (n - 2) + n - 1
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-10-30 14:17:35+00:00
There's a ton of jargon here. Summarized...

Why EBS didn't work:

- EBS costs for allocation - EBS is slow at restores from snapshot (faster to spin up a database from a Postgres backup stored in S3 than from an EBS snapshot in S3) - EBS only lets you attach 24 volumes per instance - EBS only lets you resize once every 6–24 hours, you can't shrink or adjust continuously - Detaching and reattaching EBS volumes can take 10s for healthy volumes to 20m for failed ones, so failover takes longer

Why all this matters:

- their AI agents are all ephemeral snapshots; they constantly destroy and rebuild EBS volumes

What didn't work:

- local NVMe/bare metal: need 2-3x nodes for durability, too expensive; snapshot restores are too slow - custom page-server psql storage architecture: too complex/expensive to maintain

Their solution:

- block COWs - volume changes (new/snapshot/delete) are a metadata change - storage space is logical (effectively infinite) not bound to disk primitives - multi-tenant by default - versioned, replicated k/v transactions, horizontally scalable - independent service layer abstracts blocks into volumes, is the security/tenant boundary, enforces limits - user-space block device, pins i/o queues to cpus, supports zero-copy, resizing; depends on Linux primitives for performance limits

Performance stats (single volume):

- (latency/IOPS benchmarks: 4 KB blocks; throughput benchmarks: 512 KB blocks) - read: 110,000 IOPS and 1.375 GB/s (bottlenecked by network bandwidth - write: 40,000–67,000 IOPS and 500–700 MB/s, synchronousy replicated - single-block read latency ~1 ms, write latency ~5 ms
by redleader55 | 2025-10-30 14:17:43+00:00
Wrap curl to detect if /dev/stdout is a pipe and if the output is a script - this is fast because of the hash-bang. From there you can do a lot of fancy things: replace the output with echo "don't do this" ; exit 1", check the Url against a list of well known accepted scripts based on hash, run the unknown ones through an LLM to validate if they are potentially malicious, etc.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-30 14:18:28+00:00
That is the point, packages the Java programming language feature for the CS concept of modules.

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

> Languages that formally support the module concept include Ada, ALGOL, BlitzMax, C++, C#, Clojure, COBOL, Common Lisp, D, Dart, eC, Erlang, Elixir, Elm, F, F#, Fortran, Go, Haskell, IBM/360 Assembler, IBM System/38 and AS/400 Control Language (CL), IBM RPG, Java, Julia, MATLAB, ML, Modula, Modula-2, Modula-3, Morpho, NEWP, Oberon, Oberon-2, Objective-C, OCaml, several Pascal derivatives (Component Pascal, Object Pascal, Turbo Pascal, UCSD Pascal), Perl, PHP, PL/I, PureBasic, Python, R, Ruby,[4] Rust, JavaScript,[5] Visual Basic (.NET) and WebDNA.

If the whole complaint is that you cannot have a bare bones function outside of a class, Java is not alone.

Predating Java by several decades, Smalltalk, StrongTalk, SELF, Eiffel, Sather, BETA.

And naturally lets not forget C#, that came after Java.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-10-30 14:18:58+00:00
You can't judge someone for not liking a certain hobby. I spend a few hours gaming before bed each night after the bare necessity chores are done, but I have a nagging feeling in the back of my head that there are better things I could be doing with my time, and that's a healthy feeling. I've also had a time in my life where I spent almost all of my awake time trying "artistic" unique indie games, all very highly reviewed and well-made, and while yes, it is a unique and enjoyable art form, it still felt empty in a way. It's still all just pixels on a screen. Yet another Unity game. Yet another fetch side quest. Meanwhile I was unemployed and too depressed to make a good effort at applying for jobs, my self esteem so low that I felt nobody would hire me, living in a crappy old apartment in a crappy part of town, a major downgrade from how my life started.
by PopGreene | 2025-10-30 14:19:20+00:00
These two don't seem to agree:

> Banning mercury fillings is an easy and cost-effective way to cut pollution... said said Richard Benwell, chief executive of Wildlife and Countryside Link

> British Dental Association chair, Eddie Crouch, said: “Dental amalgam is tried and tested material and pulling the plug without a transition period would effectively bankrupt NHS dentistry.

Perhaps pulling the teeth with fillings before cremation would be just as environmentally friendly and less likely to bankrupt anyone.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-10-30 14:19:47+00:00
> that was actively encouraged by the design of the language.

Java hasn't changed that much since the "hellscape" 00s. Is it better now? Or what is specific to the language the encourages "the mess of DAOs and Factories"? You can make all of those same mistakes in Python, C# or C++. I have used Java for about 15 years now and I have never written any of that junky enterprise crap with a million layers of OO.

> I never use interfaces or the like.

This is the first that I heard any disdain towards interfaces. What is there not to like?
Show HN: Jv – A fast CLI tool to switch Java versions on Windows
by costabrosky | 2025-10-30 14:19:56+00:00
I've built jv (https://github.com/CostaBrosky/jv ), a simple and fast command-line tool designed specifically to switch Java versions on Windows with a single command.

Unlike manually editing environment variables or relying on complex batch scripts, jv provides a streamlined experience. It permanently modifies JAVA_HOME and PATH system-wide (requiring admin privileges for these commands), ensuring the change is picked up by all applications, including IDEs.

Key features include:

Beautiful Interactive UI: Navigate and select versions using arrow keys. One-Command Switching: jv use 17 or jv switch for interactive mode. Auto-Detection: Finds existing Java installations (Oracle, Adoptium, Zulu, etc.). Integrated Installer: Easily install new Java versions (currently Adoptium) via jv install. Diagnostics & Repair: jv doctor and jv repair help manage your environment. Shell Autocomplete: Tab completion for PowerShell. Zero Dependencies: Standalone Go executable.

While tools like sdkman exist for Unix-like systems, there wasn't a similarly focused and user-friendly solution for Windows. jv aims to fill that gap.

Feedback and contributions are welcome!
by madamelic | 2025-10-30 14:20:26+00:00
Total volume of the Great Lakes

Your estimate:

10,000 to 25,000 cubic miles

Correct answer:

22,684 cubic miles

Uhhhh... pretty sure I was right and it marked it wrong.

---

Also, I think that marking answers right or wrong is the incorrect way to measure this. By deeming it right or wrong, you are making it trivia rather than estimation.

For instance, I estimated that Alexander the Great was born between 300 BCE and 100 BCE, it was marked wrong but the right answer is 356 BCE. That is a fairly accurate estimation still.

You should get rid of the Buzzfeed-esque "number people got right" and move towards measuring mean percent off from the correct answer so you could say like "Most people are within 30% of the right answer" or something like that. You should also make it where you can't game it by doing something like 0 to 100,000,000,000,000,000 and being told you are right: https://i.imgur.com/Ysnz1gr.png ;)
by tianreyma | 2025-10-30 14:20:29+00:00
> Most states require financial literacy courses to graduate.

Prior to 2020 only 8 states required a standalone financial literacy class. So a good percentage of people from the US on here probably didn't have to.

There were also states that had it integrated with another course but I'd question if they were any good. My state was like that and all we did was a 2 week project where we pretended to trade stocks starting with $1k. Which didn't even include things like dividends, short vs long term capital gains tax, etc...

We weren't taught basic things like budgeting, planning for emergencies, how loans and interest work, how taxes work, how credit scores work and affect you, etc...
by nxor | 2025-10-30 14:21:02+00:00
Are you from the US? I went to a good high school and even that class was awful. No one wants to teach it and genuinely, you learn more about money in history, english, science, and math. Additionally, you can take it online and over the summer, which kids do so they can take nicer looking classes. Granted, students with a work ethic tend to learn these things on their own.
by mothballed | 2025-10-30 14:21:35+00:00
Capitalism is arrived at through two primary ways

One is utilitarianism. Capitalism, or possibly hybrid capitalism, depending on your viewpoint, has been correlated with the largest lift of people out of poverty in all of history.

The other is ethical. If you start with the tenant that each man owns himself, and therefore his labor, and therefore the fruits of his labor. And that he can mix his labor with unclaimed natural resources, and thereby claim that mixed labor. And also, consensually trade those fruits with others, unmolested by 3rd party violence. Then you will end up with an economic system based on private property and capital largely controlled by for profit enterprise, which should approximate capitalism.

I believe only in the utilitarian case might it be that it be intentionally arrived to as a method of making decisions, rather than the way decisions being made more as a byproduct.
by dahart | 2025-10-30 14:21:38+00:00
Modern printing uses dithering. When you’re going from a high bit rate down to 10 bits or 8 bits, it’s completely fine to use random dithering. Random might not be as fun to write about as Bayer dither patterns, or error diffusion, but for higher dynamic ranges, random is as effective.

Black and white digital dithering of course has it’s roots in halftoning, which printing has used for more than a century, and it continues to be used for newspapers, for example.

Photoshop dithers by default when converting from 16 bits per channel to 8 bits. Lots of other image software doesn’t do this, but you start paying attention quickly, I learned from experience, when you order a poster-sized print for $100 and it comes out with visible banding you couldn’t see on your monitor.
by lloeki | 2025-10-30 14:21:38+00:00
> both look up methods by name in a hash table and then call them.

Except Ruby doesn't? cue `method_missing`. If you take only trivial examples you're not going to see much difference, this starts to show when you involve more advanced situations e.g with inheritance, and then you're drilling into singleton classes.

> Ruby immediately calls the method once it's found, whereas Python (generally) doesn't - instead it returns a binding to be called later

Again incorrect, `foo.bar` in Ruby and Python are two very fundamentally different things.

Python returns a binding to a method because it's an attribute accessor; when you throw inheritance into the mix it ends up that that attribute is inherited from the parent class, bound to the instance (which really in python means pass `self` as first argument), and - schematically - adding `()` after that ends up calling that bound method. If there's no attribute that's a no method error. It's all very C-ish and make believe, barely a notch above Go structs and their functions. The closest parallel in Ruby would be `foo.method(:bar).call()`

By contrast Ruby is going to send the :bar message along the inheritance chain, and if someone can respond it's going to invoke the responder's code, and surprise surprise method_missing happens only if it has exhausted inheritance but it's itself a method-slash-message; Oh and by the way the message passing is naturally so lazy that you can actually modify the inheritance chain -in flight- and inject a parent responder right before calling `super`. The whole notion of `binding` is a very concrete construct, way more rich that simply "hey I'm passing self as first argument". It becomes even more strange to "C&al. folks" when you start to involve singleton classes and start to realise weird things like Ruby classes are merely instances of the class Class and it's all instance turtles all the way down and all stupidly simple but you gotta have to wrap your head around it.

I surmise that so many differences and surprises have with Ruby are because most languages have some ALGOL legacy and Ruby is a conceptual heir to Smalltalk (and LISP†); the whole concept of open classes being another one: nothing is ever "finished" in Ruby!

Most of the time you don't have to care about these differences, until you do.

† While code isn't quite S-expr data in Ruby, there are more than enough first-class facilities that you can create and inject code entirely dynamically without resorting to `eval`ing strings.
by labrador | 2025-10-30 14:21:55+00:00
Mapping the Psychogeography of New York City

“map the emotional terrain of the world’s most famous and influential urban center, New York City, and explore the effect of the city’s powerful moods on those who live and work here.”

https://urbanomnibus.net/2010/10/you-are-here-mapping-the-ps...

Psychogeography

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

Speed Levitch: The New York City "Grid Plan"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9awJCyjt550
by symbolicAGI | 2025-10-30 14:21:55+00:00
Very welcome for my work which is automatically generating Java code with JSON-compatible data types.

Codex CLI with the GPT-5-codex model is the current leader over Claude Code and Sonnet 4.5 in the current Java-oriented benchmarks.

The JetBrains contributed benchmarking harness will be soon available in a form that developers can use on their own.
Show HN: I made a heatmap diff viewer for code reviews
by lawrencechen | 2025-10-30 14:21:58+00:00
0github.com is a pull request viewer that color-codes every diff line/token by how much human attention it probably needs. Unlike PR-review bots, we try to flag not just by "is it a bug?" but by "is it worth a second look?" (examples: hard-coded secret, weird crypto mode, gnarly logic, ugly code).

To try it, replace github.com with 0github.com in any pull-request URL. Under the hood, we split the PR into individual files, and for each file, we ask an LLM to annotate each line with a data structure that we parse into a colored heatmap.

Examples:

https://0github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/pull/666

https://0github.com/stack-auth/stack-auth/pull/988

https://0github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/pull/12995

https://0github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2548

Notice how all the example links have a 0 prepended before github.com. This navigates you to our custom diff viewer where we handle the same URL path parameters as github.com. Darker yellows indicate that an area might require more investigation. Hover on the highlights to see the LLM's explanation. There's also a slider on the top left to adjust the "should review" threshold.

Repo (MIT license): https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux
Show HN: Music Mini Games v3 – an iOS app to improve your musicianship
by calflegal | 2025-10-30 14:22:31+00:00
Hi HN!

I previously launched the first version of this iOS app, but in particular, I think I made the singing game (strike a chord) too difficult.

Anyway, I started this app as a place for me to publish, well, music mini games. It's very early days still, but I'm hoping you'll find the games to be useful and entertaining.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-10-30 14:23:05+00:00
> if stripe were legally required to provide you with service unless your business were proven in court to be against the law, this problem would be solved without another bulky addition to the already bloated public sector.

It's not Stripe though (they do of course have their own policies, but) mostly it's the downstream financial institutions. Stripe is an API over the existing financial ecosystem, which is both incredibly regulated and somehow still the wild west.

So, you'd actually need to change the law for all financial institutions/payment processors (really it's Visa and MC that are the issues most of the time), and even then it's not that simple.

Consider, this law passes and is implemented. What do Visa/MC/Stripe/Paypal do when they identify a fraudster. Do they need to go to court to stop having them as a client? Who holds liability for any fraudulent transactions between identification and the court case.

Like, I completely agree in principle given how central internet transactions have become to all of our lives, but there's a bunch of complexity that would need to be dealt with to avoid creating a whole host of new problems.

Steve Yegge talks about this: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legal...

(funnily enough, he gives a financial system example in this blog post, which I'd entirely forgotten).
by throwaway2037 | 2025-10-30 14:23:08+00:00
> C++ uses reified generics

I was a C++ programmer for many years, but I never heard this claim. I asked Google AI and it disagees.

> does c++ have reified generics? > C++ templates do not provide reified generics in the same sense as languages like C# or Java (to a limited extent). Reified generics mean that the type information of generic parameters is available and accessible at runtime.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-30 14:23:17+00:00
All reports are that Apple isn’t really focusing on building their own server side models and is mostly just going to be a platform for other companies to fight over just like they said they don’t pay OpenAI anything for the current integration and Google pays them $20B+ a year to be the default search engine.

It makes no sense for Apple to waste money on having their own LLM when they are becoming commoditized - just chose the one that will give them the best deal.
by mdouglass | 2025-10-30 14:24:30+00:00
I am one of those DMs and I've thought before about trying to build a system like this. The main problem for me with the screen is that it is hard from my position to tell exactly what square any particular mini is in. It would be great for me if my laptop's view of the map showed where minis were and where they were moving to.

I agree that I wouldn't want new area of the map to be automatically revealed, but detecting where they were and giving me a one-click option to reveal X squares around the mini would definitely save me time at the time.

That being said, this screen is a non-starter for me because it is just too small. We use a 40+ inch screen and I'd love to go even bigger than that. Definitely not down to a (maybe) 23x13 square screen.
by iso1631 | 2025-10-30 14:25:33+00:00
My daily driver has been debian and ubuntu since Potato 25 years ago. My bank has been online only since 2006 and has worked with Konqueror and later Firefox all that time.

2FA is either a standard TOTP generator or an SMS.

Now I do have a smart phone, because I'm not a complete luddite, but I can't think of anything other than perhaps some forms of entertainment (apple tv, paramount, disney perhaps) which might not work on my laptop. I shun things like notifications of my bank balance, is that an essential thing? How did people in the 90s cope without a per-minute balance?
by nabla9 | 2025-10-30 14:26:56+00:00
Subcritical experiments are done in underground test sites. US does them 1,000 feet underground inside boreholes in Nevada test site because the explosion releases plutonium. Hiroshima has a Peace "Watch" Tower where they show number of days since last nuclear experiment and they count subcritical tests also.

There is psychological effect, but it's not that important. More important is keeping nuclear test ban in effect. If the US does test, Russia and China will follow.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-30 14:27:37+00:00
Yeah, seems like a no-brainer to react to something like that. Is there anyone in any circumstances that wouldn't want to move as far away from a company like Microsoft who acts on the whims like that? Even as a business strategy, it doesn't make any sense, but seems most companies are trying to kiss the ring of the king, rather than focusing on providing stable, robust and trustworthy services, so you reap what you sow.
by u8_ | 2025-10-30 14:27:49+00:00
tiu posted about the release first [0] With the recent news of Minecraft removing obfuscation from the Java client [1] I thought posting it again would be useful in the conversations of things like Minetest/Luanti [2] (Plus Cubyz is just a neat project IMO)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558137 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45748879 [2]: https://github.com/luanti-org/luanti
by meowface | 2025-10-30 14:27:55+00:00
Infotainment YouTube videos, and most YouTube videos in general, are just kind of mildly interesting or mildly entertaining content. Television shows are usually things production crews have toiled away at for years to complete an artistic vision. They're very different kinds of media.

It's like going to watch The Godfather in a movie theater and you scroll HN on your tablet the whole time during it.

I have severe ADHD as well and am distracted very easily and am constantly playing content while doing other things. But there's a difference between "content" and "art".
by symbolicAGI | 2025-10-30 14:28:29+00:00
Essentially: "if the AI bubble is a bubble, it’s more likely an infrastructure bubble."

Yep, Nvidia 2025 = Cisco Systems 1999.

AI tech itself is not a bubble, it will endure and achieve greatness.

But CSCO stock fell 90% from dot-com peak to crash bottom, and one can reasonably expect according to facts presented in this excellent article that NVDA stock price to likewise crash - whenever the last margin buyer is exhausted.