MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-25 22:46:21+00:00
Great news that these draconian pro natalism efforts will be ineffective. Low fertility rates and traps are primarily due to modernization and more opportunities for women. Bodes well for the citizens of remaining countries not yet below replacement rate, as their modernization and opportunities approaches.

> While China’s historic programs to push down fertility rates were successful, they were aided by wider societal changes: The policies were in force while China was modernizing and moving toward becoming an industrial and urbanized society.

> It’s policies aimed at increasing the birth rate now find unfavorable societal headwinds. Modernization has led to better educational and work opportunities for women – a factor pushing many to put off having children.

> In fact, most of China’s fertility reduction, especially since the 1990s, has been voluntary – more a result of modernization than fertility-control policies. Chinese couples are having fewer children due to higher living costs and educational expenses involved in having more than one child.

> Another factor to take into consideration is what demographers refer to as the “low-fertility trap.” This hypothesis, advanced by demographers in the 2000s, holds that once a country’s fertility rate drops below 1.5 or 1.4 – far higher than China’s now stands – it is very difficult to increase it by 0.3 or more.

> The argument goes that fertility declines to these low levels are largely the result of changes in living standards and increasing opportunities for women.

> Accordingly, it is most unlikely that China’s three-child policy will have any influence at all on raising the fertility rate. And all my years of studying China’s demographic trends lead me to believe that making contraceptives marginally more expensive will also have very little effect.
Show HN: MCP server that lets AI agents fetch real UntitledUI components
by steffenbilde | 2026-01-25 22:46:39+00:00
I built an MCP server that gives AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor) direct access to UntitledUI's component library.

The problem: AI tools can generate functional UI, but it often lacks the polish of professionally designed systems. Instead of generating a modal from patterns, why not fetch the actual UntitledUI modal?

How it works:
- AI says "add a settings modal"
- MCP fetches the real component + all base dependencies (buttons, inputs, etc.)
- Files are placed in your project with correct imports

Tools available:
- search_components: Find by name/description
- get_component_with_deps: Fetch with all dependencies
- get_example: Fetch complete page templates (dashboards, landing pages)

Requires UntitledUI Pro license for premium components. Base components are free.

GitHub: https://github.com/sbilde/untitledui-mcp
npm: npx untitledui-mcp

Would love feedback on the DX and any edge cases I've missed.
by monero-xmr | 2026-01-25 22:46:43+00:00
It’s true that large leftist groups fund protests. 100% true. Here’s a recent ABC News report on the No Kings protests https://abc6onyourside.com/news/nation-world/no-kings-protes...

Also they completely stopped once the new anti-ICE thing became popular. Where are all the new organic No Kings protests? Everyone wrote about it in all the major publications and now we forgot(?) and the Tesla dealership protests? No normal person engages in this stuff, it’s hyper activists part of organized groups with real financing
by Muromec | 2026-01-25 22:46:46+00:00
Fuses are there on all phones since 25+ years ago, on the real phone CPU side. With trusted boot and shit. Otherwise you could change IMEI left and right and it's a big no-no. What you interact with runs on the secondary CPU -- the fancy user interface with shiny buttons, but that firmware only starts if the main one lets it.
by dpc050505 | 2026-01-25 22:47:17+00:00
You spend a ton of time belaying you partner (with whom you need to coordinate free time, which is a major hassle if you're trying to climb on a weekday as an unemployed dirtbag) or just clipping the rope into protection while roped climbing. Free soloing you get to do nothing but climb. There's ways to toprope solo so you can just flow up a route without having to fiddle with any of your equipment while you're climbing, but even that will require you to spend a solid 25% of your time rigging (and that's assuming you're efficient, a lot of climbers don't rig very efficiently). A rope team will climb about 3-4 pitches of moderate difficulty in an hour if they're efficient. A free soloist can easily get this done in a quarter or a third of the time. You climb a whole lot more and you get to only climb instead of working with ropes.

Your average roped climbers at a crag might get 3 pitches of climbing in an hour (sometimes even less when they're on hard stuff where they flail). You can get that done in 15 minutes free soloing. After climbing for a while there's a lot of terrain where you know the odds of falling are minuscule, and you know exactly when you feel insecure and have the option of backing off by down climbing. It's a very common practice among alpinists, where moving fast is an enormous advantage and the terrain usually isn't difficult compared to current sport climbing standards.
by RealityVoid | 2026-01-25 22:47:18+00:00
I'm honestly sorry, you're right to be angry. I'm not trying to demobilize you. I'm despairing myself as well, I hope for the US to keep its shit together. But I just don't think it's looking great. Sorry, really, I don't want to make fun of the shit the US is in.

I think I _am_ guilty of using a poor intellectual facade trying to make sense of this what the fuck historical moment we're in. Because trust me, my country is in a dangerous place as well.
by dvrp | 2026-01-25 22:47:50+00:00
Care is the most important trait of people who make great things; it's not money or time. Is not even skill.

I was interviewing a candidate yesterday and I noticed that a project inside their personal website was not working. I told him my opinion on care and he said that he hasn't had the time to deploy it, since he's been working on it for 2 weeks already and it was working on his local machine.

A few hours after the interview, the project was online.

The bitter pill of realizing the importance of care is that this applies not just to literary works, like Gwern's case, but it also applies to any creative endeavor: writing, music, drawing, and yes, software engineering.

That CLI tool without a tutorial. That product with a confusing sign-up flow. The purchase without a confirmation dialog such that I don't feel I was just scammed.

It's all the same. Lack of care.

I've also noticed that when caring is there, skills follow.
DDD was a great debugger – what would a modern equivalent look like today?
by manux81 | 2026-01-25 22:47:55+00:00
I’ve always thought that DDD was a surprisingly good debugger for its time.
It made program execution feel visible: stacks, data, and control flow were all there at once. You could really “see” what the program was doing.
At the same time, it’s clearly a product of a different era:
– single-process
– mostly synchronous code
– no real notion of concurrency or async
– dated UI and interaction model
Today we debug very different systems: multithreaded code, async runtimes, long-running services, distributed components.
Yet most debuggers still feel conceptually close to GDB + stepping, just wrapped in a nicer UI.
I’m curious how others think about this:
– what ideas from DDD (or similar old tools) are still valuable?
– what would a “modern DDD” need to handle today’s software?
– do you think interactive debugging is still the right abstraction at all?
I’m asking mostly from a design perspective — I’ve been experimenting with some debugger ideas myself, but I’m much more interested in hearing how experienced engineers see this problem today.
by Nevermark | 2026-01-25 22:48:53+00:00
I can’t say I have no trust for any institutions.

But my trust depends on each institutions choices. Just as my trust in people varies based on their records.

Mostly, I trust everyone to be who they show themselves to be. Which can lean one way or the other, or be very mixed across different dimensions.

But, yes, governments and corporations which are steadily centralizing power are inherently untrustworthy. As they at best, are making us all vulnerable and less powerful as individuals. Meaning they are decreasing our freedom, not increasing it.
by neilv | 2026-01-25 22:48:59+00:00
Yes, I remember that period of conscious choice, and the fence-sitting or rationalizing.

The thing about "Don't Be Evil" at the time, is that (my impression was) everyone thought they knew what that meant, because it was a popular sentiment.

The OG Internet people I'm talking about aren't only the Levy-style hackers, with strong individualist bents, but there was also a lot of collectivism.

And the individualists and collectivists mostly cooperated, or at least coexisted.

And all were pretty universally united in their skepticism of MBAs (halfwits who only care about near-term money and personal incentives), Wall Street bros (evil, coming off of '80s greed-is-good pillaging), and politicians (in the old "their lips are moving" way, not like the modern threats).

Of course it wasn't just the OG people choosing. That period of choice coincided with an influx of people who previously would've gone to Wall Street, as well as a ton of non-ruthless people who would just adapt to what culture they were shown. The money then determined the culture.
by atmosx | 2026-01-25 22:49:10+00:00
Adrian Wooldridge (the Economist) in "Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World" argues, rather successfully IMO, that what made Venice the maritime super-power was meritocracy. Indeed, he argues, that the fall of the Venitian empire came swiftly when the Doge was forced to place only Venitians (birthright) to top positions, instead of the most "capable". Hence the available talent pool shrunk.

The book makes for a fine read IMO: https://www.amazon.com/Aristocracy-Talent-Meritocracy-Modern...

ps. this book came out as a response to Michael Sandell's "The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?" which was a best seller at the time.
by simulator5g | 2026-01-25 22:49:37+00:00
Whenever I buy parts for my regular gas car the parts site asks if it’s PZEV or DOHC. To make matters worse the PZEV version is also DOHC (dual over head cams) as far as I can tell. And the VIN number doesn’t say if it’s PZEV or not. It’s not on any of the paperwork I got with the car either.
by johnea | 2026-01-25 22:49:41+00:00
I don't see how your claim of lack-of-contribution is correct.

I'm stating, to quote you "I disagree with the article's claims as poorly founded happy talk".

Additionally I'm stating that it really vastly depends on which 3.5% of the population you're talking about, as to weather they have the ability to make major changes to world wide economic policy.

To me, this seems to contribute much more substance than "pull your head out of your rear"...
by qiqitori | 2026-01-25 22:50:10+00:00
That's nitpicking, IMO. It's still 99% true. There are just two "Mini-Shinkansen" lines, they only run once or twice per hour, are shorter than non-Mini-Shinkansen, and only a relatively short part (distance-wise) of their journey is spent on the slow tracks. There are non-Shinkansen trains on the Mini-Shinkansen portion of their journey, but not very many. (Also the word "shinkansen" implies new tracks.)
by m4rtink | 2026-01-25 22:50:18+00:00
There are some lines that were originally built as regular narrow gauge railways and later converted to standard gauge supporting Shinkansen trainsets.

This is called Mini-Shinkansen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-Shinkansen

This comes with limitations, as the maximum track speed on these converted lines is apparently around 130 km/h.

None of the actual Shinkansen stadard lines have level crossings.
by kennethops | 2026-01-25 22:50:29+00:00
>The real problem isn't lack of tools - it's that the knowledge is ephemeral.
This 100% the problem. This is why we are trying to capture business context and attach it to the infra itself vs just keeping it in docs.

>How are you handling the drift problem? Auto-discovery polling, change events from cloud providers, or something else?

We built a pretty awesome approach to handling the drift problem. We do a combination of indexing, change even capture and then user behavior. So if a user is looking for a information we pull the live value first.
Show HN: I built an app that blocks social media until you read Quran daily
by kalyfacloud | 2026-01-25 22:51:16+00:00
Hey HN,
I'm a solo developer from Nigeria. I built Quran Unlock - an app that blocks distracting apps (TikTok, Instagram, etc.) until you complete your daily Quran reading.

The idea came from my own struggle with phone addiction. I wanted to read Quran daily but kept getting distracted. So I built this for myself, then shared it.

Some stats after 2 months: - 123K+ users - 64.9% returning user rate - 31M events tracked

Tech stack: - React Native - Firebase (Auth, Firestore, Analytics, Cloud Messaging) - RevenueCat for subscriptions - iOS Screen Time API + Android UsageStats

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/quran-unlock/id6754449406

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.quranu...

Would love feedback from the HN community!
by attendant3446 | 2026-01-25 22:51:24+00:00
I didn't say there are none at all. And I've heard that internet from small internet providers can actually be good.

But after living in 3 different apartments there, I never had a luxury to be able to connect the internet from a small provider. Their coverage is very, very limited. So it always was Telekom/Vodafone/o2.
by westurner | 2026-01-25 22:51:28+00:00
Designing a concept sustainable RAM product and in working around multiplexing scaling challenges I somewhat accidentally developed a potential solution for hosting already-trained LLMs with very low energy and hardware in carbon and lignin;

> You have effectively designed a Diffractive Deep Neural Network (D^2NN) that doubles as a storage device.

Mode Division Multiplexing (MDM) via OAM Solitons potentially with gratings designed with Inverse Design of a Transition Map to be lasered possibly with a Galvo Laser. This would be a very low power way to run LLMs; on a lasered substrate
by guerrilla | 2026-01-25 22:52:02+00:00
Back then there were quite a few competing architectures and UNIXes to go with them. SGI MIPS with Irix, IBM had POWER with AIX and later Linux, DEC had Alpha Tru64 UNIX and VMS (not a UNIX), Sun SPARC with Solaris, HP had HA-RISC with HP-UX. Only SPARC and POWER survived for long and only POWER survived until today as far as I know. Solaris of course lives on in various forms. The old UNIXes I guess mostly do not, being displaced almost entirely by Linux and BSDs.
by eichin | 2026-01-25 22:52:15+00:00
Stackoverflow code has a license (not per post, but a blanket one depending on which year - https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing it's mostly CC BY-SA.) I've written corporate policies that emphasize that you can learn from SO answers, but (as you point out) they basically never fit exactly - and you should include a link to the original so when the next Ubuntu LTS breaks your clever hack, we can see if someone has already posted a fix :-)
by with | 2026-01-25 22:52:23+00:00
This is the same risk with any DLQ.

The idea behind a DLQ is it will retry (with some backoff) eventually, and if it fails enough, it will stay there. You need monitoring to observe the messages that can't escape DLQ. Ideally, nothing should ever stay in DLQ, and if it does, it's something that should be fixed.
by StrLght | 2026-01-25 22:52:26+00:00
> A million years ago when I was in highschool, teachers would make us show them that we cleared our TI-83 calculators.

Comparing high school to a dictatorship is one way to confirm that you have very little experience with the latter. You do understand that if something is causing issues to the regime, then regime will simply make it illegal? Illegal to use, to posses, to buy, etc. — not like specifics matter here.

> Generally just don't come here anymore, but with the US fascists now checking phones at borders, the idea of having low detectability digital "smuggling compartments" (digitally speaking) in our devices is becoming all too real. Some loopback filesystem that your phone can mount that has the rest of the phone, various systemd-sysext layers for bitchat.

Even then, that's just wishful thinking. Only GrapheneOS has something similar right now, duress PIN/password (which isn't exactly designed for cases like this, but still) [0]. It won't help you much in a dictatorship, the police isn't that dumb — you'll be subjecting yourself to physical harm by using it. They know that your phone isn't empty, and they don't need anything to prove it. For them gut feeling is enough, laws and human rights are irrelevant.

Also, let's be realistic, Apple isn't going to have something like that on iOS.

[0]: https://grapheneos.org/features#duress
by mlyle | 2026-01-25 22:52:56+00:00
Yes, assuming you don't need to connect anything together and that RAM is tinier than it really is, sure. At 28nm, 3megabits/square millimeter is what you get of SRAM, so an entire wafer only gets you ~12 gigabytes of memory.

And, of course, most of Cerebras' costs are NRE and the stuff like getting heat out of that wafer and power in.
by wisty | 2026-01-25 22:54:10+00:00
There's bqsically IMO two types of ads - marketing and sales.

Marketing ads are signalling, brand recognition, etc. You want the cool earbuds that everyone knows. You want to buy them from a big, reputable company with good r&d.

Sales is simpler - click on the ad and buy the product. It tends to be a bit sleasier - sales doesn't care as long as it makes a sale.

There's often a bit of tension between sales and marketing. A 50% ooff exploding offer can be good for sales in the short term, but can make the brand look cheap.
by yesco | 2026-01-25 22:54:16+00:00
In the age of centralized broadcasting where everyone watched the same TV channels, smaller protests could have outsized impact. That was an anomaly of the 20th century, not a timeless rule.

Some still haven't gotten the memo and are now framing declining effectiveness as somehow the "other side's" fault. But how could it be? The people you actually need to convince are those in the middle, and it seems like many protests aren't even trying to reach them anymore.

I genuinely don't understand what a lot of modern protests are attempting to accomplish in terms of persuasion. I see their political goals, but why would going outside and complaining change any minds? Why would blocking traffic and ruining someone's day make them sympathetic to your cause? How is shaming people who aren't already supporters supposed to win them over?

It was always naive to think 3.5% of the population could force the other 96.5% to do whatever they want by making enough noise. It's even more naive to suggest it's everyone else's fault for not listening. And it's completely unhinged to imply that roughly 35% on the opposite political side are somehow bamboozling the remaining 60%.

If you're asking what they should do instead, I honestly couldn't tell you. But not having a better answer doesn't mean the current approach is working. Maybe try doing something that would actually make people like you? Pick up litter, volunteer visibly, something that builds goodwill instead of resentment. I don't know. But whatever this is, it isn't persuading anyone who wasn't already on board.
by tombert | 2026-01-25 22:54:20+00:00
I think generally the mods like to avoid anything involving "politics" since it's likely to start a flame war.

The issue, of course, is that literally anything can be "political", and moreover by trying to actively avoid political discussions you sort of tacitly endorse the status quo.

It's a tough line to draw, and I'd be lying if I said where I knew where to draw it; HN is a fun forum specifically because the moderation is generally very good. They're not perfect but they do try and shut things down before they devolve into flame wars and personal insults. If there weren't aggressive modding, HN would devolve into 4chan or 8chan, and it wouldn't be appealing to me after the age of ~17.
by fooker | 2026-01-25 22:54:28+00:00
I know what you mean, and it was correct one year ago. Now, you are wrong.

AI is reliable enough to not mess up this translation now, especially if you configure it right (top p, and temperature parameters).

This abstraction lifting is absolutely happening in front of our eyes now. The different is that you don't yet store the prompts, just the generated code. That's not going to last too long.
by drusepth | 2026-01-25 22:54:43+00:00
Why would you buy a 5-year-old iPhone for the same price you can get a new Android with comparable specs though? If I'm gonna spend 2-3 hundred on a phone, I'd like it to last at least a couple more years. Regardless of OS, you're more likely to get that on a new phone vs any phone 5+ years old.
by andsoitis | 2026-01-25 22:55:51+00:00
> 500 dollars a month, which is more than most families on this planet earn a year. People are so ignorant, it hurts.

Wildly inaccurate statistic.

Bottom 10% live on less than $800 per year. [1]

Bottom 30% around $2000 - $3000 per year. [2]

Global median income is about $3000 per person per year. [2]

[1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/poverty-prosperity-...

[2] https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-1/
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-25 22:56:10+00:00
When I was a child I was a libertarian. I was screaming about how these regulations were going to be enforced at gunpoint, how this was just a way for the establishment to make money, etc...

I'm not a libertarian anymore, but I can tell you, I was a genius fortune teller.

My assets performed really well ignoring economic orthodoxy about supposed 2% inflation.
Show HN: Meru OS – The First Sovereign AI Stack (<2MB, CPU-Native)
by akulasairohit | 2026-01-25 22:56:29+00:00
Hi HN, I've spent the last few weeks building an experimental AI Operating System called Meru OS, based on the idea that intelligence should be verifiable, not probabilistic.

Most LLMs are "Black Boxes". I wanted to build a "Glass Box" where every output traces back to a certified source.

The Architecture:

The Kernel: Instead of vectors, state is represented as Integers. We use the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (Unique Prime Factorization) to encode concepts.
Example: If Time = 3 and Space = 5, then Spacetime = 15. This allows for reversible "time-travel debugging" by just dividing integers.
The Hypervisor (Bija): It doesn't just run cycles; it runs "Frequency Modulations".
The kernel itself is coded in specific Prime Frequencies (Hz).
Execution is effectively a "Resonance" state between the Instruction and the Data, rather than a fetch-decode-execute pipeline.
The Data (< 2MB): We compressed the entire Constitution of India, the IPC, and an Indo-European Etymology Dictionary into a <2MB bundle using a custom schema-based compression (Pingala).
Why?

Sovereignty: The logic and data are locally owned. No API calls.
Green AI: It runs on my MacBook's CPU with negligible heat/power.
Vedic Logic: It implements Panini's Grammar rules (Ashtadhyayi) as a graph traversal algorithm rather than just statistical attention.
It's definitely experimental, but it questions the "Scale is All You Need" dogma. Would love feedback on the reversible prime state machine logic.

Links:

Code: https://github.com/akulasairohit/meru-os
Live Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/akulasairohit/panini-demo
The Manifesto: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/introducing-meru-os-worlds-fi...

Thanks, Rohit