MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by b65e8bee43c2ed0 | 2026-02-10 17:08:11+00:00
incels blame women, femcels blame men, the left blames cost of living, the right blames lack of values, journalists blame the current thing. it's all so tiresome.

the real reason is both boring and obvious: a very significant percentage of educated urban people in the developed world don't want children. both sexes have a very high number of very valid reasons for that, and it's utterly pointless to examine any particular one.

and no, importing uneducated rural people from the undeveloped world won't fix shit, because their children too will be educated urban people. I think our young global leaders are beginning to realize that, hence the very recent shift from ubiquitous antinatalism of the previous decades to frantic nagging about our unwillingness to breed.

it would take extremely dystopian measures to "fix" the birth rates, and no one, not even Russia and China are presently willing to go that far. Russia is, however, rapidly ramping up its authoritarianism to North Korea levels, so I assume it will be them who will be the first to ban contraception - the least insane measure that can make significant difference. and given how eagerly the West has been embracing Internet censorship, political violence against dissidents, social credit, and other hallmarks of authoritarian regimes in the past decade, I assume that after a few years of pearl clutching, they will follow suit.
by alexpotato | 2026-02-10 17:08:16+00:00
At my first full time job in the early 2000s I was tasked with building a webscraper. We worked for law firms representing Fortune 500 companies and they wanted to know who was running "pump and dump" stock schemes on stocks using Yahoo Finance message boards.

At the time, I didn't know the LWP::Simple module existed in Perl so I ended up writing my own socket based HTTP library to pull down the posts, store them in a database etc. I loved that project as it taught me a lot about HTTP, networking, HTML, parsing and regexes.

Nowadays, I use playwright to scrape websites for thing I care about (e.g. rental prices at the Jersey Shore etc). I would never think to re-do my old HTTP library today while still loving the speed of modern automation tools.

Now, I too have felt the "but I loved coding!" sense of loss. I temper that with the above story that we will probably love what comes next too (eventually).
by JPKab | 2026-02-10 17:08:18+00:00
I think your point is correct about the lack of optionality for women being in the workforce, but there are entire regions of the United States where it absolutely is optional. I live in one of them (Lynchburg, VA, which is filled with young evangelical Christian families that live in apartments and the mother stays at home) and my coworkers live in another (Salt Lake City, Utah which also has a ton of young moms staying at home).

I'm not foolish enough to think it's remotely possible in all places, but I do think an element of this is humans in the 21st century demanding a standard of living that far exceeds what they wanted in the 1970s, especially when it comes to vacations, automobiles, houses, etc.

My wife and I raised my first son (born when i was 23) in a 1 bedroom apartment, and my second child was born right after we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Most of my colleagues were shocked that I "didn't have a REAL HOUSE TO RAISE THE KIDS IN!!!! GASP!!!". And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-10 17:08:19+00:00
On Portugal we have the Multibanco network, which already provided Internet like services for buying stuff on the terminals and eventually graduated to have online payments as well, however only in Portugal.

Likewise, in Germany we can have SEPA for most stuff.

And in Greece there is Viva.

Problem is getting something that actually works across all European countries.
by levxn | 2026-02-10 17:08:21+00:00
I developed a comprehensive Slack MCP tool suite that transforms Slack from a simple chat interface into a fully operational control plane for AI agents. It was tested end to end with other tool capabilities like CRM, where all executions can happen from slack itself, all you have to do is call this slack bot which is connected via webhooks hence anything you name it, it will use available tools to help you out with actions reducing multiple touch points.
(I am @levxn on github, feel free to connect)
by js3642 | 2026-02-10 17:08:25+00:00
While I used to think Railway was an amazing service, I had a production workload get broken because they removed a feature without any depreciation period or warning. I now struggle to recommend it for anything more than a hobby project. Vercel has the benifit of being big enough they have to do things properly. For reference https://station.railway.com/questions/smtp-connection-failur...
by than132004 | 2026-02-10 17:08:33+00:00
Congrats on the launch! My contribution focus was on hardening the MCP (Model Context Protocol) infrastructure.

The Issue: JSON-RPC is fragile when mixed with standard logging. A single rogue print() to stdout corrupts the protocol payload, causing tools to fail unpredictably or agents to crash silently.

The Fix & Impact: Enforcing a strict stderr logging standard. This effectively separates "human debug info" from "machine protocol data." This is critical for moving agentic workflows from experimental demos to production-ready systems, ensuring stability even when integrated tools are noisy or throwing errors.
by yomismoaqui | 2026-02-10 17:08:43+00:00
You are not out of touch, I rember in the 90s when people recommended using IRC for Linux questions and I hated it.

I didn't want to ask something and interacting in pseudo-realtime with another human being (that could potentionally laugh at me for asking a n00b question).

News groups were a little better for this, but the real progress was when you could search them or later read the answer in Stack Overflow. And the final step here is a LLM agent that has a web/doc search tool and can answer more difficult questions.
by godshatter | 2026-02-10 17:09:09+00:00
I'm 60, started with a Tandy Model I in junior high, learned 6809 assembly for my Color Computer, loved the fact we could put certain values in particular memory positions and change the video mode and put pixels to the screen. It's been decades of losing that level of control, but for me coding is the fun part. I've never lost that spark of enjoyment and really obsession I felt early on. I enjoy the supposedly boring job of writing SQL and C with embedded SQL and working with business concepts to produce solutions. Coding is the fun part for me, even now.

I got moved up the chain to management and later worked to get myself moved back down to a dev role because I missed it and because I was running into the Peter Principle. I use AI to learn new concepts, but mostly as a search engine. I love the tech behind it, but I don't want it coding for me any more than I want it playing my video games for me. I was hoping AI would show up as robots doing my laundry, not doing the thing I most enjoy.
by whalesalad | 2026-02-10 17:09:20+00:00
The circumstances where you would use one or the other are vastly different. A dataframe is an optimized datastructure for dealing with columnar data, filtering, sorting, aggregating, etc. So if that is what you are dealing with, use a dataframe.

The goal is more about cleaning and massaging data at the perimeter (coming in, and going out) versus what specific tool (a collection of objects vs a dataframe) is used.
by Balaji_T07 | 2026-02-10 17:09:21+00:00
I contributed to the documentation by adding a comprehensive Goal Creation Guide.
While the existing docs covered the node-and-edge architecture, there was a significant gap in explaining how to define Goals, Success Criteria, and Constraints — the core components of Outcome-Driven Development that actually drive an agent's learning loop.
My guide bridges the gap between conceptual theory and practical implementation, giving developers a structured way to define what "success" looks like and how their agents should evolve over time.
by Coeur | 2026-02-10 17:09:40+00:00
Not sure Wero will succeed, but European country-specific mobile payment systems like Swish (Sweden), Vipps (rest of Scandinavia), Bizum (Spain), iDeal (Netherlands), Bluecode (Germany and Austria), Twint (Switzerland), BLIK (Poland) etc. are also working on interconnectivity under the EMPSA association. Combined they already have 110+ million users.

Wero is like a monolith, while EMPSA is more like mobile phone roaming. If I would bet, I would bet on EMPSA.

https://empsa.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Mobile_Payment_System...
by komali2 | 2026-02-10 17:09:50+00:00
> As a marxist

Great! Me too. In fact I am a communist. That's why I can't enter the PRC without facing prison. Discussion of class consciousness is currently banned.

> 1) Why is that that are very few if none of the sources you've linked are Islamic sources ? If Muslim people can recognise the plight of the Palestinian people, why can't they recognise the plight of the Uighurs?

I don't understand how something like a newspaper can be "Islamic." As far as I know, all well-regarded news organizations are secular. So, I guess that is why none of the sources I've linked are "Islamic sources": because newspapers are secular.

Also, who is "Muslim people?" Every follower of Islam on planet earth? Why is it their specific responsibility to take notice of something in Xinjiang? Because the people have a religion of the same name? What's that matter?

This is what I meant when I wrote, "smells like ethnonationalism," this seems to me like an ideology that creates Statehood around people, and draws lines around people based on their ethnicity or religion. I prefer to take people as they are, rather than lump them into arbitrarily defined categories. Why aren't men in France doing anything to stop school shootings in America, which are committed almost entirely by men?

> Those sources are, for most of them, from countries that were extremely hostile to the idea of islamic and arabic independence movement.

Which sources? What does it mean to be hostile to "the islamic and arabic independence movement?" Which countries?

> Why is that they wished for the continuation of Colonialism

Who is "they?"

> Bourgeois journalists are reporting on those "facts" because it directly serves the interest of their wealthy Masters

And reports out of the PRC serve the interests of the CPC. The bourgeois journalists have provided substantially more evidence. The CPC restricted entry to Xinjiang, and when it finally acknowledged the existence of the reeducation camps, still never let foreign journalists in. As a Marxist, I choose the side with the most evidence.

By the way, some of the sources include: a PRC based associate professor in Fudan University (Chuchu Zhang), a newspaper famous for exposing corruption in South Africa (AmaBhungane), and other independent or NGO sources that I challenge you to claim are afraid to "bite the hand that feeds them." Did you know that Blackwater had plans to build a training center in Xinjiang? Did you know that it set aside 2.7$ million USD for establishing business in Xinjiang? Did you know that American companies helped build the surveillance system used in Xinjiang? (Thermo Fisher Scientific, Promega) But, it's the journalists that are bourgeois? (https://www.thenation.com/article/world/china-xinjiang-genoc...)

You still have not addressed PRC imperialism against Taiwan.
by rzwitserloot | 2026-02-10 17:09:53+00:00
that's a bit of a hairy situation. You're doing it wrong. Or not really, but.. complicated.

As per [RFC 5321](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321.html):

> the local-part MUST be interpreted and assigned semantics only by the host specified in the domain part of the address.

You're not allowed to do that. The email address `foo@bar.com` is identical to `foo@BAR.com`, but not necessarily identical to `FOO@bar.com`. If we're going to talk about 'commonly applied normalisations at most email providers', where do you draw that line? Should `foo+whatever@bar.com` be considered equal to `foo@bar.com`? That souds weird, except - that is exactly how gmail works, a couple of other mail providers have taken up that particular torch, and if your aim is to uniquely identify a 'recipient', you can hardcode that `a@gmail.com` and `a+whatever@gmail.com` definitely, guaranteed, end up at the same mailbox.

In practice, yes, users _expect_ that email addresses are case insensitive. Not just users, even - various intermediate systems apply the same incorrect logic.

This gets to an intriguing aspect of hardcoding types: You lose the flex, mostly. types are still better - the alternative is that you reliably attempt to write the same logic (or at least a call to some logic) to disentangle this mess every time you do anything with a string you happen to know is an email address which is terrible but gives you the option of intentionally not doing that if you don't want to apply the usual logic.

That's no way to program, and thus actual types and the general trend that comes with it (namely: We do this right, we write that once, and there is no flexibility left). Programming is too hard to leave room for exotic cases that programmers aren't going to think about when dealing with this concept. And if you do need to deal with it, it can still be encoded in the type, but that then makes visible things that in untyped systems are invisible (if my email type only has a '.compare(boolean caseSensitive)' style method, and is not itself inherently comparable because of the case sensitivity thing, that makes it _seem_ much more complicated than plain old strings. This is a lie - emails in strings *IS* complicated. They just are. You can't make that go away. But you can hide it, and shoving all data in overly generic data types (numbers and strings) tends to do that.
by nearbuy | 2026-02-10 17:10:15+00:00
I'm not doubting that we can choose a rate for the living wage.

I'm asking about the sentence I quoted. What makes the living wage the "true cost" of labor? Why consider it to be a cost that private industry should rightfully pay, and if they don't, they're "externalising" it to the government?

By the same logic, isn't nearly all government spending just externalized costs? When the government pays for roads or police, are these also externalized costs that private industry should pay for?

It sounds like a minarchist viewpoint, where government spending is kept to a minimum and services are privatized.
by phainopepla2 | 2026-02-10 17:10:16+00:00
It's possible that the things that would motivate people to have children in poor undeveloped countries are very different from the things that would motivate people to have kids in wealthy developed countries. So OP's take could be right for the US but wrong for Chad.

Of course, it could also be true that a certain level of affluence and freedom for women simply results in a strong downward pressure on birth rates, which is what I think is most likely. (I am not advocating for rolling back women's rights).
by mosburger | 2026-02-10 17:10:23+00:00
Oh my god. This is me. If I were any better at writing, I could have written this, the author is even the same age as me (well, a year younger) and followed a similar trajectory. And a lot of what I've been feeling lately feels similar to burnout (in fact I've been calling it that), but it really isn't burnout. It's... this, whatever this is... a "fallow period" is a good term.

And I feel like an old man grumbling about things changing, but... it's not the same. I started programming in BASIC on my Tandy 1000 and went to college and learned how to build ISA cards with handwritten oscilloscope software in the Computer Engineering lab. My first job was writing firmware. I've climbed so far up the abstraction chain over a thirty year career and I guess I don't feel the same energy from writing software that first got me into this, and it's getting harder to force myself to press on.
by masklinn | 2026-02-10 17:10:27+00:00
> it feels like sometime after Java got popular [...] a large chunk of the collective programming community forgot why strong static type checking was invented and are now having to rediscover this.

I think you have a very rose-tinted view of the past: while on the academic side static types were intended for proof on the industrial side it was for efficiency. C didn't get static types in order to prove your code was correct, and it's really not great at doing that, it got static types so you could account for memory and optimise it.

Java didn't help either, when every type has to be a separate file the cost of individual types is humongous, even more so when every field then needs two methods.

> In most strong statically typed languages, you wouldn't often pass strings and generic dictionaries around.

In most strong statically typed languages you would not, but in most statically typed codebases you would. Just look at the Windows interfaces. In fact while Simonyi's original "apps hungarian" had dim echoes of static types that got completely washed out in system, which was used widely in C++, which is already a statically typed language.
by avgDev | 2026-02-10 17:10:28+00:00
As someone with unsupportive family, I feel this.

I have a single child, we both work. It is tough.

I grew up in a small town in EU, my parents had a lot of help from their parents and I was able to play outside with friends early on. Everyone knew each other. My life in the US is nothing like this.

The first 5 years, I've spent $100k on daycare, and this is relatively "affordable".

I try to be an active and involved parent, add home projects/maintenance, and other things like health issues and I have zero energy and a lot of burn out.

When I was younger I did not understand why people stick around jobs for long. Now, I do.
Show HN: GitEcho – set-and-forget Git mirroring on every push
by prashantsengar | 2026-02-10 17:10:41+00:00
I built GitEcho after the recent GitHub outages led me to reading this HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947085.

My goal was simple: make GitHub mirroring dead simple and invisible.
Set it up once, then forget it.

I wanted "push to GitHub" to also mirror to another provider (GitLab/Bitbucket/Gitea/self-hosted) without changing my day-to-day workflow.

How it works:

- ge add <mirror-url> installs a local pre-push hook

- normal git push origin ... still works as usual

- GitEcho captures pushed refs and mirrors them in the background

- it uses existing SSH keys / git credential helper (no new token system)

Install:

uv tool install gitecho

Quick start:

ge add git@gitlab.com:you/repo.git

git push origin main

Why not just add another remote and push yourself?

You can, and that works. I am lazy and forgetful. I wanted something I could set up quickly and never think about again.

GitEcho packages the boring parts: hook setup, background push, non-interactive auth behavior, and logs (`ge logs`).

Current behavior:

- safety-first by default: it checks origin refs before mirror push

- if origin likely rejected, mirror push is skipped and logged

- optional best-effort mode via `GITECHO_CONTINUE_ON_ORIGIN_REJECT=1`

Planned next:

- auto-create mirror repos on providers

- watch a folder and auto-setup all repos (instead of per-repo setup)

Repo: https://github.com/prashantsengar/GitEcho

Mirrored at: https://gitlab.com/prashantsengar/gitecho
by SV_BubbleTime | 2026-02-10 17:10:50+00:00
For the more technical…

Qwen 2512 (December edition of Qwen Image)

* 19B parameters, which was a 40GB file at FP16 and fit on a 3090 at FP8. Anything less than that and you were in GGUF format at Q6 to Q4 quantizations… which were slow, but still good quality.

* used Qwen 2.5 VL. So a large model and a very good vision model.

* And iirc, their own VAE. Which had known and obvious issues of high frequency artifacts. Some people would take the image and pass it through another VAE like WAN Video model’s or upscale-downscale to remove these

Qwen 2 now is

* a 7B param model. Right between Klein 9B (non-commercial) this (license unknown), Z-Image 7B (Apache), and Klein 4B (Apache). Direct competition, will fit on many more GPUs even at FP16.

* upgrades to Qwen 3 VL, I assume this is better than the already great 2.5 VL.

* Unknown on the new VAE. Flux2’s new 128 channel VAE is excellent, but it hasn’t been out long enough for even a frontier Chinese model to pick up.

Overall, you’re right this is on the trend to bring models on to lower end hardware.

Qwen was already excellent and now they rolled Image and Edit together for an “Omni” model.

Z-Image was the model to beat a couple weeks ago… and now it looks like both Klein and Qwen will! Z-Image has been disappointing to see how it just refuses to adhere to multiple new training concepts. Maybe they tried to pack it too tightly.

Open weights for this will be amazing. THREE direct competitors all vying to be “SDXL2” at the same time.

The Qwen convention was confusing! You had Image, 2509, Edit, 2511 (Edit), 2512 (Image) and then the Lora compatibility was unspecified. It’s smart to just 2.0 this mess.
by JPKab | 2026-02-10 17:10:58+00:00
I agree. I think that paid parental leave and then later, paid daycare is an amazing investment of government resources. If we diverted a fraction of what we spend on retirees who had good jobs their whole lives and don't even need assistance to child care, society would benefit.

We spend far too much on former taxpayers instead of fostering and forming new taxpayers.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-10 17:11:23+00:00
Original article: "Mindful endoscopy: holistically supporting patients through awake examinations of the path of swallowing" - https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/full/10.12968/bjon.2025...

"Methods: The mindful endoscopy team, consisting of an endoscopist and endoscopy support practitioners (ESPs) was created. Nurse-led mindfulness comprised patient education on a range of relaxation methods just before the start of the procedure, and holistic and proactive patient support within a clear structure during it. Patient experience of awake oral and pharyngolaryngeal endoscopy (180 procedures) and transnasal panendoscopy (70 procedures) were recorded using the Gastrointestinal Endoscopy Satisfaction Questionnaire.

Results: Overall, 92.4% of patients were satisfied or very satisfied with their awake endoscopies and 96.4% indicated that they would be happy or very happy to undergo the same procedure undertaken by the same team again. At a mean follow-up of 14 months, 12 cancers had been detected and no cancers had been missed."
by kubanczyk | 2026-02-10 17:11:41+00:00
> The thinkers of the day rightfully saw a conceptual shift with no apparent advantage and several additional costs.

I'm holding a big fat Citation Needed banner. Seemingly none of these "thinkers of the day" took it far enough to write down the thoughts.

While at it, were the "thinkers of the day" fond of the idea of Ptolemy's equant?
by BugsJustFindMe | 2026-02-10 17:11:41+00:00
> And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.

I agree with this. I also believe that modern people have become substantially...hmmm...dumber about expenses like food? People think it's impossible to make delicious nutritious meals quickly and cheaply, but in fact it's actually very easy and you just need to actually consider it as being possible, and you need to be willing to spend 5-10 minutes of effort. It's appalling to me the number of people who think that cooking anything beyond boiling water is mysterious or who will argue that it's impossible to eat well on a budget by pointing exclusively at niche products that only exist to satisfy a drive for extreme novelty and ignoring staples.