MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-01 00:38:43+00:00
Families in the U.S. and around the world are having fewer children as people make profoundly different decisions about their lives. NPR's series "Population Shift: How Smaller Families Are Changing the World" explores the causes and implications of this trend.

https://www.npr.org/series/g-s1-94348/population-shift
by layer8 | 2025-11-01 00:38:44+00:00
I disagree with the comparison to / characterization of “office suite software”. At least the desktop class of office suites have a lot of power features and power users.

It’s not that power users aren’t a market, it’s that casual users are now the larger market and cheaper to serve, and software companies have been catching on to that, to the detriment of power users.
by NobodyNada | 2025-11-01 00:39:46+00:00
> if tokio::select!() only accepted tasks (or implicitly turned any futures it receives into tasks, like Python's asyncio.gather() does) then it wouldn't have this problem?

Yes, this is correct. However, many of the use cases for select rely on the fact that it doesn't run all the tasks to completion. I've written many a select! statement to implements timeouts or other forms of intentionally preempting a task. Sometimes I want to cancel the task and sometimes I want to resume it after dealing with the condition that caused the preemption -- so the behavior in the article is very much an intentional feature.

> even if the async runtime is careful, is it still possible to create and fail to poll a raw Future by accident?

This is also the case. There's nothing magic about a future; it's just an ordinary object with a poll function. Any code can create a future and do whatever it likes with it; including polling it a few times and then stopping.

Despite being included as part of Tokio, select! does not interact with the runtime or need any kind of runtime support at all. It's an ordinary function that creates a future which waits for the first of several "child" futures to complete; similar functions are also provided in other prominent ecosystem crates besides Tokio and can be implemented in user code as well.
by userbinator | 2025-11-01 00:40:23+00:00
Or you could just tell everyone out there that there are already tons of older Android devices which will never get any of these hostile updates, and if you're a developer, make sure your app runs on those older versions. Spread the word about how hostile the newer devices are, and let the lazy masses do what they're best at doing. Of course there will always be rabid bootlickers who will gladly pay to put Google's noose around their necks, but if they become the minority, and the majority just stops upgrading, it could very effectively pull control of Android away from Google. Giving everyone yet another reason to not upgrade, especially given the huge Android marketshare in poorer countries, could become a powerful force.
by pstuart | 2025-11-01 00:40:36+00:00
I'm a fan of Andrew and am impressed by how he's evolved from documenting stupid kids to actually reporting on issues of interest.

I agree that one catches more flies with honey rather than vinegar, but many times it doesn't matter what you say or how you say it -- they're gonna stick to their guns. A prime example of this is in Jordan Klepper interviews where he asks Trump supporters how they feel about something horrible that Biden did, to which they express their indignation; then he reveals that it was actually Trump and they dismiss it because it "doesn't matter".
by watersb | 2025-11-01 00:41:00+00:00
Over the past year, Intel has pulled back from Linux development.

Intel has reduced its number of employees, and has lost lots of software developers.

So we lost Clear Linux, their Linux distribution that often showcased performance improvements due to careful optimization and utilization of microarchitectural enhancements.

I believe you can still use the Intel compiler, icc, and maybe see some improvements in performance-sensitive code.

https://clearlinux.org/

"It was actively developed from 2/6/2015-7/18/2025."
by AJ007 | 2025-11-01 00:41:50+00:00
It wouldn't be the first honeypot phone, haha.

What bothers me is that when phones are stolen, they end up in other countries. Maybe you are a nobody, but if it is trivial to extract the information on a phone then there is more than an identity theft issue. Generative AI makes all of this shit way worse than it was even a year ago.
by riku_iki | 2025-11-01 00:42:00+00:00
> reinforcement learning, which is what most people mean when they talk about reasoning LLMs

popularity contest has no place in tech discussion, and even then not clear on which evidence you make such statement.

imo, reasoning model is model trained on lots of reasoning steps, so it is strong in producing those.

rl is used in niches where there is no much training data, so data is synthetically generated, which produces lots of garbage and model need feedback to adjust. And multiplication is not such niche.

> This shows that o3-mini has >90% accuracy at multiplying numbers up to 8-digits, and it is capable of multiplying numbers much larger than that. Whereas, gpt-4o could only multiply 2-digit numbers reliably.

it could be just a matter that one model has training data for this and another doesn't, you can't come to any conclusion without inspecting oai data.

Also, your examples actually demonstrate that frontier LLMs can't learn and reproduce trivial algorithm reliably, and results actually in a quality range of stochastic parrot.
by willis936 | 2025-11-01 00:42:24+00:00
Thinking the last part is happening or will happen anytime soon feels very naive. Advantaged companies have the means to not pay their fair share and they never will.

Corporate tax rates were insanely higher many decades ago. Both industry and the public thrived despite it. Corporate tax rate slashed, public flounders, corporations act in ungrounded and bizarre ways. This is not a healthy system.
by rtpg | 2025-11-01 00:42:55+00:00
I guess one big question here is whether there's a higher layer abstraction that is available to wrap around patterns to avoid this.

It does feel like there's still generally possibilities of deadlocks in Rust concurrency right? I understand the feeling here that it feels like ... uhh... RAII-style _something_ should be preventing this, because it feels like statically we should be able to identify this issue in this simple case.

I still have a hard time understanding how much of this is incidental and how much of this is just downstream of the Rust/Tokio model not having enough to work on here.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-01 00:43:22+00:00
It's just that this isn't like raw resources like oil. there is no "good" or "superior" oil. it's just oil. and there are some differences, but there is no "american refined gas" that is superior.

But with tech, there is a question of quality and superiority. People that use M365 suite can work and collaborate more effectively, if not for actual superiority of the product and its OS integration, then simply because it is so well known and users prefer it the most (it does not repel talent as much).

Why give talented european skilled people more reasons to leave the EU for US, as if existing issues aren't enough? Why not instead directly compete with Microsoft and Google. Why isn't the EU investing in that? They're caught in the "open source" trap. I hate to say it, but they need to make closed source proprietary software that is commercially competitive.
by magtux | 2025-11-01 00:43:24+00:00
> the founders and Eric Schmidt

Still have huge influence as demonstrated by them stepping in to lead parts of the AI push. Ezra Klein actually has an interesting perspective that the owner class of Silicon Valley has moved right a lot more and the workers are still the same politically causing companies to behave differently. My experience in Tech largely tracks. I would say the middle management and manager class are largely good people and try to navigate the world as best they can although they will choose to not rock the boat whenever possible. The tolerance for activism has just evaporated so we don't hear as much about it anymore.
by tavavex | 2025-11-01 00:43:48+00:00
It can be more secure, but it also feels like the kind of "improvement" that's ripe for exploitation. When you put in a step where you have to ask your service provider for permission to swap the SIM, buckle up for the inevitable development of them asking for a $5, $50 or $100 "service fee" so they consider allowing it.
by Intralexical | 2025-11-01 00:43:56+00:00
You should probably put some quotes around `$PWD`:

alias npm='docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD:$PWD" --net=host --workdir="$PWD" node:25-bookworm-slim npm'

...Does this always work? I don't use much JS. Doesn't NPM sometimes build against system libs, which could be different in the container?
by Nursie | 2025-11-01 00:46:15+00:00
The hereditary peers are now a much smaller bunch, apparently there are 92, elected from the larger number of 800ish who are theoretically eligible.

Before 1993 all of them could hold seats.

The majority of the house these days is made up of life-appointed peers, who are nominated to the house by the commons. There are also 24 bishops.

There are moves afoot to remove the last hereditary peers, though I’m not sure of the current status of that bill.

If Labour get re-elected in a few years, they have made muttering about further second-house reform, but no plans or commitments at present
by travisjungroth | 2025-11-01 00:46:33+00:00
I don’t want to derail the conversation, but I do want to make an analogy. I’m vegan, and I mostly go to non-vegan restaurants. I’m giving my money to businesses that mostly do something I don’t support.

The way I resolve this is “What if everyone did what I did?”. The restaurants would obviously have to change. I figure the type of demand I create is more powerful than how they might use the profit.

I think the same thing applies here. If everyone only gambled responsibly, these companies would all be in the responsible gambling business.

At the same time, I think sports gambling has completely gotten out of control and needs to be more regulated. More advertising regulation seems like a good place to start.
by SllX | 2025-11-01 00:47:02+00:00
If anything, they're the iPhone company and they are massively understating how much of their revenue is directly attributable to the iPhone.

Take "Services" for example: most of their services are things like App Store revenue and Google Search revenue, something they technically have on all of their platforms, but the lion's share of that revenue comes directly from iPhone users subscribed to iPhone apps, playing iPhone gacha games or using Google (or any of the other officially supported search engines) in the iPhone version of Safari. The reason to have iCloud+ is to be able to backup your phone, and the photos you take on your phone, and store the emails and iMessages and other data you create on your phone. It's all there accessible on the Mac and iPad too, but they have far more iPhone customers than Mac or iPad customers.

Even the smaller services are mostly supported by iPhone users: most AppleCare users, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, arguably you could make a case that Apple TV+ (a.k.a. just Apple TV now for some reason) is the one service that isn't directly attributable to the iPhone, but that is also like the one part of their services division that has had prior reports that it isn't exactly turning a profit, and I don't think you can even apply for an Apple Card unless you own an iPhone.

It's the same with most of the other divisions: the reason to have an Apple Watch or AirPods is they go great with your iPhone. They have their individual appeal, and at least with the AirPods, you don't technically need an iPhone to use them, but these are at the end of the day iPhone accessories, the same as their Magic Keyboard, Trackpad and Mouse lines or displays are Mac accessories even though technically, any iPad could also take advantage of them now, or you could plug a Magic Keyboard into a Windows PC or something. The math on that doesn't change just because of technicalities like that.

So yeah, Apple is the iPhone company and has been for a very long time now. Macs & iPads, the tens of billions of dollar businesses that they are, are just side gigs for them and Services/Wearables et al. is just obfuscating the degree to which they are the iPhone company.
by rtpg | 2025-11-01 00:47:02+00:00
A meta-idea I have: look at all usages of `select!` with `&mut future`s in the code, and see if there are maybe 4 or 5 patterns that emerge. With that it might be possible to say "instead of `select!` use `poll_continuing!` or `poll_first_up!` or `poll_some_other_common_pattern!`".

It feels like a lot of the way Rust untangles these tricky problems is by identifying slightly more contextful abstractions, though at the cost of needing more scratch space in the mind for various methods
by smitty1e | 2025-11-01 00:47:06+00:00
> The Wikipedia process is created to manage bias. LLMs are created to repeat the input data, and will therefore be quite biased towards the training data.

The perception of bias in Wikipedia remains, and if LLMs can detect and correct for bias, then Grokipedia seems at least a theoretical win.

I'm happy with at least a set of links for further research on a topic of interest.
by wtallis | 2025-11-01 00:47:30+00:00
Even at ~100 dpi, the grainy character of matte coatings from that era was noticeable; my 2006 iMac and a Dell Ultrasharp from a few years later were both unmistakably grainy in a way that glossy displays are not. At the time, the matte coatings were an acceptable tradeoff and the best overall choice for many users and usage scenarios. But I can imagine they would have been quite problematic when we jumped to 200+ dpi.
by ux266478 | 2025-11-01 00:48:17+00:00
I'd rather we actually deal with the issues causing these things than sweep them under the rug and pretend like it's an actual solution.

> Build houses.

That doesn't solve homelessness, as we build many houses in America but they aren't being filled with the homeless. You need to apply social services in a complex systematic approach to provide housing that people can afford sustainably, and rehabilitate and integrate people into society. You might think that is a bit of a bad faith "gotcha" like, of course you have to make the housing free and ensure homeless people know it's available. But it's not a small detail to elide, even in context, and doing so is exactly why your thinking is off-base. You haven't even begun to unpack it properly, putting aside the falsehoods. Think about it, what do you do if someone doesn't want to accept the housing for complex reasons like pride or embarrassment? What if it's some crust punk kid riding suicide as a rite of passage? You have to deal with a lot of that! You can't just ignore it!

> Get people clean, harsh sentences for dealing.

Punitive measures have proven to be a complete and total failure globally. Even in Asia, where penalties on all sides of the drug trade are high, drug usage is very easy to find and rising. I say this as someone connected to Asia and with a fair amount of "street smarts" that some seem to lack. Japan and Korea don't even try to hide it anymore. Chinese cities are kept clean through a complex system of travel controls and consistent policing to sweep things under the rug. It's easy to score if you pass as Chinese outside of the tier 1 and 2 cities though. Even Saudi Arabia is flooded with black market drugs if you know where to look. Punitive measures empirically do not work.

> Violent extremism? Jail

Where is that not the case? Like what are you talking about? Do you know how common attempted domestic terrorism was against the US power grid and cell towers in 2020/2021? No, you don't. Almost nobody does, and certainly nobody has an exact number. That's because it was kept very quiet and the thousands of incidents were suppressed from the media cycle while the people involved were quietly thrown into the maximum security incarceration hole never to be seen again.

The person you're replying to is right. These issues are solved, and it means looking at why people want to do any of this to begin with and addressing that. You cut it off at the behavioral source. Think of it like this, do you check every pointer before you dereference it? No. You avoid bad pointer dereferences primarily through proper structure of your code.

You almost tap into this with being cognizant of the fact that it's not universal. It depends greatly on the country and culture. Because some countries and cultures have done a much better job at building worthwhile, healthy societies than others.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-11-01 00:49:42+00:00
I use adblock myself, and don't feel bad for using it (it's a security and privacy tool). But i don't blame websites that kick me out for it; hosting costs money.

Server owners should have all the right to set the terms of their server access. Better tools to control LLMs and scrapers are all good in my book.

I really wish ad platforms were better at managing malware, trackers and fraud through. It is rather difficult to fully argue for website owner authority with how bad ads actually are for the user.
by tomcam | 2025-11-01 00:50:00+00:00
My intuition is that we would adapt just fine. Maybe we'd have to drop to assembly more often, read the chip docs closely, etc. Unheard-of performance benefits are still being found from Commodore 64s and first-gen IBM PCs, for crying out loud. What if we wrung every last cycle out of the Samsung or Intel chips?
by cableclasper | 2025-11-01 00:50:11+00:00
Visualizations like this truly highlight how much there is to be gained from viewing the 3D phase space, but also how much richness we miss in >3D!

(I wonder if there are slick ways to visualise the >3D case. Like, we can view 3D cross sections surely.

Or maybe could we follow a Lagrangian particle and have it change colour according to the D (or combination of D) it is traversing? And do this for lots of particles? And plot their distributions to get a feeling for how much of phase space is being traversed?)

This visualization also reminds me of the early debates in the history of statistical mechanics: How Boltzmann, Gibbs, Ehrenfest, Loschmidt and that entire conference of Geniuses must have all grappled with phase space and how macroscopic systems reach equilibrium.

Great work Shashank!
by Jensson | 2025-11-01 00:50:34+00:00
> Part of that is one of the pillars of conservatism, that humans are imperfect beings and thus need institutions to guide them

Who made this definition, left wing scholars? I doubt many conservative persons would say this.

You could just as well say that this is the central pillar of communism, that people need to be controlled since they are too evil if they are free to form companies and structure themselves. Or that this is the central pillar of social democracy, that without big taxes and central institutions to spend peoples money on things that benefits them they will make bad choices and not get the things they need.

Every government is about taking control from the people, I don't get what you mean that conservatives would do this more than any other group.
by bitwize | 2025-11-01 00:52:30+00:00
Spoken like someone who's never had to interact with a designer. A designer will tell you the exact ratio the radius of the rounded buttons needs to be with respect to the height, and explain that this channels energy from the Earth's ley lines that resonates with the frequency of the vibrations of human brain waves, creating positive associations with your brand. And after hearing all that, the client will NOT be satisfied just bunging in Mozilla's standard gray buttons from the Windows 3.x era.
by precommunicator | 2025-11-01 00:52:38+00:00
And on the other hand, you enter Montenegro by car outside of touristy season and no petrol stations carry sim card then, and you have to find some kiosk in city center that does, wasting so much time in the process, relying on offline maps or spotty wi-fi.

You enter Serbia or Faroe Islands, and to get a SIM you have to find the operator booth, hope it's not in city center where parking is close to impossible, wait in a queue, they don't accept card, go find an ATM, pay extra for foreign withdrawal, pay extra ATM fees...

e-SIM just solves that, you simply buy it online before. And if you forget, I have a bit more expensive "any country" e-SIM that will allow me to do so.

Before e-SIM was a thing mobile roaming outside of EU was on the extreme expensive end. Now, I don't even get to use my e-SIM capabilities, as my network operators have pretty cheap package rates to just roam outside of EU. I wonder if widespread of e-SIM has anything to do with that.
by msi-ram | 2025-11-01 00:52:43+00:00
Hello Ishan, Completely relatable. 20+ exp engineer here, I enrolled for the course and I had similar a similar degree of difficulty as well. The whole point of the course was not a "IIT" tag, but the intellectual fun sheer grind of having to learn. It definitely is not a "rote" learning course where you learn and spit something out.

Democratising education is the only way this place will improve. The remote learner in a remote village should have the same "right-for-education" as a candidate in an urban centre.

I really do believe that you can connect the dots only looking backward, so here is hoping that what is learnt will come to fruition someday. 22^f-300-1.689 in case you know what I am saying
by pornel | 2025-11-01 00:53:20+00:00
Either is another name for a Result type.

Either works, but now you have two ways of returning errors, and they aren't even mutually exclusive (Either-retuning function can still throw).

Catch-and-wrap doesn't compose in generic code. When every call may throw, it isn't returning its return type T, but actually an Either<T, Exception>, but you lack type system capable of reasoning about that explicitly. You get an incomplete return type, because the missing information is in function signatures and control flow, not the types they return. It's not immediately obvious how this breaks type systems if you keep throwing, but throwing stops being an option when you want to separate returning errors from the immediate act of changing control flow, like when you collect multiple results without stopping on the first error. Then you need a type for capturing the full result type of a call.

If you write a generic map() function that takes T and returns U, it composes well only if exceptions don't alter the types. If you map A->B, B->C, C->D, it trivially chains to A->D without exceptions. An identity function naturally gives you A->A mapping. This works with Results without special-casing them. It can handle int->Result, Result->int, Result->Result, it's all the same, universally. It works the same whether you map over a single element, or an array of elements.

But if every map callback could throw, then you don't get a clean T->U mapping, only T -> Either<U, Exception>. You don't have an identity function! You end up with Either<Either<Either<... when you chain them, unless you special-case collapsing of Eithers in your map function. The difference is that with Result, any transformation of Result<T, E1> to Result<U, E2> (or any other combo) is done inside the concrete functions, abstracted away from callers. But if a function call throws, the type change and transformation of the type is forced upon the caller. It can't be abstracted away from the caller. The map() needs to know about Either, and have a strategy for wrapping and unwrapping them.

catch lets you convert exceptions to values, and throw convert values to exceptions, so in the end you can make it work for any specific use-case, but it's just this extra clunky conversion step you have to keep doing, and you juggle between two competing designs that don't compose well. With Result, you have one way of returning errors that is more general, more composable, and doesn't have a second incomplete less flexible way to be converted to/from.