MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kasey_junk | 2025-11-23 14:11:17+00:00
“ the husband was the sole bread winner, kept his job for most of his life, and could afford the house, car, 4 children and a few pets.”

We don’t _forget_ this. We refute it. It’s not true. It’s a dream that real estate developers _sold_ that wasn’t real.

In 1975 the women’s labor participation rate stood right around 50% its around 55% now [0].

In 1975 the US home ownership rate was 65%, its 65% now [1].

There were more families with no cars in the 70s than now. 1 and 2 car families were about the same rate (with more 2 car families now) but the big difference is how many more families have more than 2 cars now than then [2].

More stats for you: - food as a percentage of family budget is lower now than then (and the only reason its close is that we eat out way more now)[3] - houses are bigger now than then[4] - data on employee tenure doesn’t go back that far, but the data we do have to the 80s shows employee tenure hasn’t changed [5]

There are lots of interesting economic challenges now, but _generally_ more people now are living better lives than then past economically. Anyone that sells you some story about some glorious past is lying to you for some reason.

Home ownership rates are always the tell. The US had very stable home ownership rates in the 45% range until the New Deal efforts that started subsidizing like crazy home ownership. They rose in the post war era until about 1960 when they reached the mid 60s. They have fluctuated in a tight curve in that band since then. The home ownership rate is tightly correlated to mortgage rates, not generational values, and spikes in 2005 (right before the bubble burst) not in the dim past [6].

[0] https://blog.dol.gov/2023/03/15/working-women-data-from-the-... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N [2] https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/passenger_travel_20... [3] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic... [4] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/programs-surveys/a... [5] https://www.ebri.org/content/trends-in-employee-tenure-1983-... [6] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/research/fi...
by djohnston | 2025-11-23 14:11:27+00:00
That isn’t true at all so don’t speak to my experience. I grew up in an abusive household with an alcoholic who wasn’t an adulterer. It was total shit. If he had instead been closeted and cheating without ever disclosing it, as seems to be the case here, it would have been vastly preferable to have a distant father than what I actually lived with.

So respectfully stfu because you have no idea what you’re talking about.
by immibis | 2025-11-23 14:13:37+00:00
You can do some pretty impressive things: https://shadertoy.com/

I skimmed it but didn't see any mention of "ray marching", which is raytracing done in a shader. GPUs are pretty fast now. You can just do that. However you do have to encode the scene geometry analytically in the shader - if you try to raytrace a big bag of triangles, it's still too slow. There's more info on this and other techniques at https://iquilezles.org/articles/
by jvanderbot | 2025-11-23 14:14:09+00:00
Kissing is so weird. You can make up a thousand just-so stories. You can imagine it meant totally different things through time and across cultures.

For me it just seems like yet another culturally-defined signal of intimacy. Like showing ankles or chests or saying this or that. Seems to me trying to make everything some hard wired evolutionary thing is a dead end.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-11-23 14:14:33+00:00
> You need to be careful with those arguments because you can fall into the trap of "think of the children" for everything

In a text message in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.” Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Clegg to better fund child safety work.

Fair point, but the fuller context is absurd—the OP's rendering is correct in tone and emphasis.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-11-23 14:14:53+00:00
I agree false demand effects exist. But sometimes ads tell you about products which genuinely improve your life. Or just tell you "this company is willing to spend a lot on ads, they're not just a fly-by-night operation".

One hypothesis for why Africa is underdeveloped is they have too many inefficient mom-and-pop businesses selling uneven-quality products, and not enough major brands working to build strong reputations and exploit economies of scale.
by FrankWilhoit | 2025-11-23 14:14:55+00:00
The reason why space flight started off as a government monopoly is not because of the ability to allocate resources, not yet even the overlap with military applications. It is because no private entity can possibly have the standing to take responsibility when things go wrong. Suppose Columbia had been a Musk project: think of the sheer corrosiveness of the ensuing fingerpointing.
by cs702 | 2025-11-23 14:15:56+00:00
No entity can police itself. Not even the police.

Companies, non-profits, regulators, legislative branches of government, courts, presidential administrations, corporate bureaucrats, government bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, regular citizens. They cannot self-police.

That's the motivation for having a system of _checks and balances_[a]: We want power, including the power to police, to be distributed in a society.

---

[a] https://www.britannica.com/topic/checks-and-balances
by da_chicken | 2025-11-23 14:16:33+00:00
I don't agree, and this feels like something written by someone who has never managed actual systems running actual business operations.

Operating systems in particular need to manage the hardware, manage memory, manage security, and otherwise absolutely need to shut up and stay out of the fucking way. Established software changes SLOWLY. It doesn't need to reinvent itself with a brand new dichotomy every 3 years.

Nobody builds a server because they want to run the latest version of Python. They built it to run the software they bought 10 years ago for $5m and for which they're paying annual support contracts of $50k. They run what the support contracts require them to run, and they don't want to waste time with an OS upgrade because the cost of the downtime is too high and none of the software they use is going to utilize any of the newly available features. All it does is introduce a new way for the system to fail in ways you're not yet familiar with. It adds ZERO value because all we actually want and need is the same shit but with security patches.

Genuinely I want HN to understand that not everyone is running a 25 person startup running a microservice they hope to scale to Twitter proportions. Very few people in IT are working in the tech industry. Most IT departments are understaffed and underfunded. If we can save three weeks of time over 10 years by not having to rebuild an entire system every 3 years, it's very much worth it.
by sofixa | 2025-11-23 14:16:48+00:00
> Meta (and social media more broadly) are the only case where we have (in my opinion) substantiated allegations of a company being aware of a large, negative impact on society (mental wellness, of teens no less), and still prioritizing growth and profit

Them doing nothing about hate speech that fanned the flames for a full blown genocide is pretty terrible too. They knew the risks, were warned, yet still didn't do anything. It would be unfair to say the Rohingya genocide is the fault of Meta, but they definitely contributed way too much.
by mbreese | 2025-11-23 14:18:13+00:00
I don’t get it. I like MCP as an interface in general, but I don’t understand the use-case they present. For those of you here who like this idea, what is the killer use case?

To me, this looks less like UI interactions and more like the MCP equivalent of maintaining state. You start your program and “click” buttons until you get the desired result, maintaining a constant state between interactions. Isn’t that currently possible if you passed through something like a session-id back to the LLM?

Am I missing something? I’m struggling to see what a UI makes possible that the current workflow does not.

I also generally see/use MCP in terms of remote access to programs through servers. Perhaps that’s where I’m getting lost. Is this exclusively something for local MCP?
by keepamovin | 2025-11-23 14:19:06+00:00
Hm, is that really the case? Nextgen reactors are not just about lowering the cost of U. Or "saving the environment" from waste. Bonuses, sure. Real strength is increasing efficiency, which means: 1) lower buildout costs, 2) faster time to first iphone charged, 3) smaller, safer designs. They're a way around the giganto-plants of the past, on the way to making nuclear power the ubiquitous reliable utility it should be.

I also like to think of U/nuclear as "Civilizational thinking" - it's the only solid power we can trust to stay by us through 10,000s of years, through cataclysims, and planet migrations, and it's ideal (before we find something more abundant, dense, and reliable) to take us from Earth, to a multi-planet, local-cluster exploring species, I think.
by Tepix | 2025-11-23 14:19:18+00:00
I think I‘ll try adding Bluetooth to my old Imax B6 charger to get that data.

Looks like Atorch DL24 battery tester can be used for that at a cost of around $22 or so. And the Tuya BW150 also has WiFi in and acts as a HID device for a couple bucks more.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-23 14:19:55+00:00
> The point? Not sure. Does this reflect positively upon the some style of comedy favoured by the Brits, or negatively about their credulity? As a nominal Brit, I can't comment with any impartiality.

You’re just bitter that you never spot the ostrich first.

Prosaically, one step removed: Mornington Crescent absolutely has rules, and the joy of the show is everyone on the show is playing by them.
by jmyeet | 2025-11-23 14:20:24+00:00
For the last 50+ years, Western governments have largely acted to funnel wealth from the poor to to the wealthy. Each economic crisis seerms to have ushered in a big jump in inequality. The OPEC oil crisis, 1987, recessions in the 1980s and 1990s, the dot-com bubble, the GFC and Covid.

Ultimately this is going to correct. My preference is that it corrects by governments enforcing a fairer distribution because otherwise it's going to end violently and we're rapidly approaching a point of no return where the wealthy hold so much power and there's nothing left to steal. Basic human necessities like food, water and shelter are being eroded.

You can look at a bunch of warnings like this. Food bank usage, claims for various forms of welfare (such that it is), homelessness (and housing insecurity more generally), levels of debt, etc.

Sadly, I personally believe we're beyond the point of no return where it comes to solving these problems with electoral politics. The world is going to sink deeper into fascism and for awhile "order" will be maintained with ever-increasing police states.

In the UK in particular, Labor has predictably completely failed to address affordability issues. Keir Starmer will likely be ousted in a leadership challenge and the likely winner of the next election is Reform.

All so a handful of people can have even more wealth they just don't need.
by no_circuit | 2025-11-23 14:20:55+00:00
Yes, it is huge to spread the work out on embedded UIs in chat interfaces. But I think the design direction is going, is exactly the same direction of how Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, or any of the other assistants work, ifkyk.

The MCP community is just reinventing, but yes, improving, what we've done before in the previous generation: Microsoft Bot Framework, Speaktoit aka Google Dialogflow, Siri App Shortcuts / Spotlight.

And interactive UIs in chats go back at least 20 years, maybe not with an AI agent attached...

The next thing that will be reinvented is the memory/tool combination, aka a world model.
by hobofan | 2025-11-23 14:20:59+00:00
It sounds like you are viewing MCP servers through a narrow lens of local coding agents.

I'm mostly working with MCP servers in the context of enterprise/organizational usage for connecting internal data sources and workflows/internal APIs through a standardized interface. There is no equivalent of a "ls or AGENTS.md" there, as there is no file system and no shell in those contexts.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-11-23 14:21:45+00:00
While it is true, that Markdown is available in more places, it is also true, that it as well "requires custom tools". Just that those tools already got put in place by people developing things. There is no technical reason keeping developers from supporting other languages as well. It's more of a social issue, that they don't.

I also doubt, that Markdown will be able to be extended with the same "ease" HTML has been extended. Markdown does not have a systematic syntax like HTML does. It is not parser and machine friendly. It may be human friendly, but that doesn't make it easy to extend. In HTML on the other hand, one could, theoretically, just come up with a new tag name and introduce a new tag. Mind, we are talking about using both formats for writing a document. Of course Markdown doesn't have the same burden of already being the workhorse of the web and being directly interpreted by browser rendering engines. That however is an aspect that resides outside of the actual format considerations.

We already got tons of Markdown dialects and most of them don't gain particularly much traction, because they are only supported in niche tools. The only one of them that could be considered standard is maybe common mark, with its extensive test suite. Specialized ones like Pandoc Markdown for writing papers exist, but will most likely never leave their niche.

What I could imagine is, that maybe the changes from dialect to dialect could be outsourced into "extensions" and then one would need to pick "syntax conflict free" extensions. But since the format itself is kind of ad-hoc, and not systematic like HTML with its tags, it seems also unlikely, that such an extension system would work well.
by bccdee | 2025-11-23 14:21:49+00:00
None of the author's other suggestions are portable either. So what if pandoc markdown is only understood by pandoc's tooling? DocBook is only understood by DocBook tooling. The difference is that pandoc markdown is already 95% similar to every other flavour of markdown, so migrating to a new system (if necessary) would be relatively simple. Also, the difference is that XML is a pain to write and I'm not sure semantic tags matter all that much.
by wslh | 2025-11-23 14:21:59+00:00
At the end of the day I don't think Silicon Valley represents anything fundamentally different from the world at large. The world is unfair, and it may become even less fair.

What is disturbing is how the hype-machine around "startups" and the unicorn myth encourages people to believe they can be the next big thing. But basic arithmetic makes that impossible: you can't have an abundance of unicorns when the attention economy, capital, and market share are structurally limited.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-11-23 14:22:41+00:00
The title was edited for some reason, the actual one is:

"Budget 2025: how inflation and the two-child benefit cap has increased poverty"

And indeed this is an article against the 2-child benefit cap.

This is obviously full of warm feelings but ignores the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford. The article interviews a family with 4 young children and apparently no money, for example...

Regarding poverty in general, I think the main issue in the UK is that there has been no economic growth since the financial crisis and GDP per capita is decreasing, i.e. people are getting poorer, which bites those on low/no income first and most.
by gfiorav | 2025-11-23 14:22:50+00:00
To be clear, I don’t believe it’s an “education” issue. I think it’s a “for too long removed from politics” problem.

For most Europeans, a tax is an unclear bill at the end of the month, leaving them feeling powerless to do anything about it.

One thing I learned from living in America is that people here are much more engaged in civic life and politics. The UK (which I also lived in) is perhaps the exception to this European rule.
by theoreticalmal | 2025-11-23 14:22:51+00:00
Unfortunately, the roadway infrastructure on Mars hasn’t been updated in decades, so there are lots of rocks and potholes/craters and other obstacles that need to be avoided. You know how those jeeps go out to Moab, Utah and do the 4x4 trails? It’s like that but there’s only one vehicle and no human and 1 hour communication round-trip and if something goes wrong the tow truck is millions of miles and billions of dollars away
by fweimer | 2025-11-23 14:24:21+00:00
If you can find the patches, it's fun to tweak them in the most conservative way possible to apply to the old code base.

However, things get annoying once something ends up on some priority list (like the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list from CISA), you ship the software in a much older version, and there is no reproducer and no isolated patch. What do you do then? Rebase to get the alleged fix? You can't even tell if the vulnerability was present in the previous version.
by jaen | 2025-11-23 14:24:35+00:00
These links are all mostly unmaintained AI-generated random MCP servers. Could have put in a bit more effort than copy-pasting search results...

To talk about where it's _actually_ at:

Agentic IDEs have LSP support built in, which is better that just tree-sitter -such as Copilot in VSCode, which contrary to what you might expect, can actually use arbitrary models & has BYOK.

There's also OpenCode from the CLI side etc. etc.

From the MCP side, there are large community efforts such as https://github.com/oraios/serena
by sofixa | 2025-11-23 14:24:44+00:00
France, Germany, UK, Switzerland , Netherlands, Belgium are a few I'm familiar with. There are of course areas of improvement, but in all of those you have strong press that can annihilate politicians for for crimes, as well as more or less working institutions that punish corruption.

Take a look at France, where a former president went to prison. Okay, it got commuted to house arrest (same sentence as a former PM candidate for president), but that's still a pretty serious punishment, especially for a such a high level politician.
by varispeed | 2025-11-23 14:24:54+00:00
It's not capitalism, but corruption. Subsequent governments have been shovelling billions to tax avoiding multi national corporations without checks and balances. "Taxing the rich" is a distraction. Correct action is investigate corruption and cut spending. For instance NHS reliance on agencies - they pay agency for a nurse £2,500 a day, nurse gets £500 from agency if lucky, £2k goes offshore. That's how our money is sucked out of the economy. Multiple that by every local authority to government departments and you'll see billions are going to waste. But current government is too corrupt to do something about it. Soon they'll claim we have best food banks in the world and support for working people... whilst corporations are laughing all the way to the bank.
by rootnod3 | 2025-11-23 14:25:50+00:00
Sorry, thought I had posted, but didn't get through. It's a T480 with the 72Wh and the 24Wh battery running on FreeBSD. Screen has also been replaced with a low power usage screen which helps a lot in saving battery while still giving good brightness.

Most of the time I am running StumpWM with Emacs on one workspace and Nyxt in another. So just browsing and coding mostly.

OpenBSD gets close, but FreeBSD got a slight edge battery wise. To be fair, that is on an old CPU that still has homogenous cores. More modern CPUs can probably benefit from a more heterogenous scheduler.
by orev | 2025-11-23 14:26:27+00:00
Did you read the article? The opening statement points directly to this type of culture (not specifically at work, but in society in general), and your example of people joking about needing their first cup is part of the same. Other commenters in this thread allude to similar.

I’m a little surprised you haven’t been exposed to this type of bragging. (It’s very similar to people who brag about how much alcohol they can drink, which is a very common type of contest people have).
by hommes-r | 2025-11-23 14:26:33+00:00
"Because there’s too much you need to feed into it" - what does the author mean by this? If it is the amount of data, then I would say sampling needs to be implemented. If that's the extent of the information required from the agent builder, I agree that an LLM-as-a-judge e2e eval setup is necessary.

In general, a more generic eval setup is needed, with minimal requirements from AI engineers, if we want to move forward from Vibe's reliability engineering practices as a sector.
by throwaway89201 | 2025-11-23 14:26:38+00:00
Meta sees your entire social graph by design, and stores the name and participants of groups you create. You (meaning: experts) can independently audit and through reproducible builds verify that Signal does not do this by design, while nothing about WhatsApp can be audited in the same way. Meta is also a plainly for-profit company with bad track record, while Signal often gets flak from (IMO mistaken) radical nerds but otherwise has a very good reputation.

The privacy fatalism in your comment here and in other comments is plainly incorrect.
by _heimdall | 2025-11-23 14:26:48+00:00
I agree, but don't quite follow how your comment fits in here.

In a REST approach, I'd expect an LLM to need some kind of initial entry point, much like needing the initial URL for the HN home page. From there the LLM should be able to parse and discover possible actions, call those actions, and understand the response only by parsing the results and any schemas provided.
by Libidinalecon | 2025-11-23 14:27:11+00:00
It is a completely different scale.

I loved MTV as a kid but it was as different to social media as can be.

Half the time you would turn it on and not like the video playing then switch the channel. Even if you liked the video that was playing, half the time the next video was something you didn't like so you would switch the channel.

Now imagine if MTV had used machine learning to predict the next video to show me personally that would best cause me to not change the channel.

That is not even really a different scale but a different category.
by Balgair | 2025-11-23 14:27:21+00:00
If any 'normal' person wants to experience the smallest titch of this, go take your best American accent to someplace remote (but not in North America or tourist-Europe).

The locals there will try to pin which celebrity you are or if they have seen you before on the television.

It's not a 100% thing, maybe a 10% thing, of course.

But the more remote you are, the higher the hit rate.

It's because they know they are remote and off the paths, so they think that the only reason that an American is there is because they are filming something. Note this doesn't work with French speaking areas.
by programjames | 2025-11-23 14:27:35+00:00
Read what I wrote:

> "Everyone is welcome here" is now a callsign for "registered Democrat".

Maybe it's suspicious that this phrase is able to distinguish Republicans from Democrats, but the point isn't the virtue of the parties, it's that it's one of the most common phrases people choose to use to distinguish themselves as Democrats. If you don't want one teacher walking around with a MAGA hat, but don't have the political power to just ban them from schools, you have to make a treaty like, "we'll ban rainbow capes and MAGA hats."