MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2026-02-10 17:17:28+00:00
Most of everybody thinks their behaviors and decisions are not meaningfully influenced by advertising. Companies spend literally trillions of dollars running ads. One side is right, one side is wrong.

And advertising largely relies on this ignorance of its effects, or otherwise most of everybody would go to much greater lengths to limit their exposures to such, and governments would be more inclined to regulate the ad industry as a goal in and of itself.
by incahoots | 2026-02-10 17:17:28+00:00
The economics no longer support families—and after decades of calls for “fiscal responsibility” across cultures and states, is it any wonder birthrates are falling? Burnout among the working class plays an equal part in the decline.

“It takes a village to raise a child” isn’t advice, it’s a policy framework because massive support is needed to rear kids and the majority today have less than their previous generations.
by Levitz | 2026-02-10 17:17:46+00:00
> I doubt most people railing against capitalism are actually against private property. They probably dislike corporatism which only exists as an extension of the government.

I really don't know. In my experience, it can about private property when talking about housing, it is about markets when talking salaries and work conditions, and it's just about having no idea of what capitalism even is and just vaguely pointing at economics the vast majority of the time.

"Capitalism" can be safely replaced with "the illuminati" or "Chem trails" in the vast majority of complaints I hear and read and the message would ultimately make as much sense. There's not a lot of how or why capitalism doesn't work, but by God there sure is a lot of what it seemingly does wrong.
by ncruces | 2026-02-10 17:17:55+00:00
> Whatever they come up with, I hope it doesn't tie you to a Google or Apple smartphone.

Even if it does, Google won't be taking a cut from it.

Also, it's then much easier to provide a mobile web version, or something else.

My country's internal system also sells a bracelet for contactless payments, and there are obviously payment cards.

Once there's a mandatory standard, it's much more likely competition will show up. EU wide SWIFT, direct debits, instant transfers, all show this.
by MITSardine | 2026-02-10 17:17:57+00:00
I'm a bit puzzled because this seems backwards from what I thought had been the evolution of things.

Didn't companies historically own their own compute? And then started offloading to so-called cloud providers? I thought this was a cost-cutting measure/entry/temporary solution.

Or is this targeting a scale well beyond the typical HPC cluster (few dozen to few hundred nodes)? I ask because those are found in most engineering companies as far as I know (that do serious numerical work) as well as labs or universities (that can't afford the engineers and technicians companies can).

Also, what is the meaning of calling an on-prem machine "cloud" anymore? I thought the whole point of the cloud was that the hardware had been abstracted (and moved) away and you just got resources on demand over the network. Basically I don't understand what they're selling if it's not what people already call clusters. And then if the machine is designed, set up and maintained by a third party, why even go through the hassle of hosting it physically, and not rent out the compute?
by zrm | 2026-02-10 17:17:59+00:00
That's assuming you're requiring the ordinary HTTPS port to be used. For that matter, why would it even need to use HTTPS? Have the peer make a TLS connection to the XMPP server to get the CA.

But it still seems like the premise is wrong. The protocol is server-to-server and the legacy concept that one of them is the "client" and needs a "client certificate" is inapplicable, so why shouldn't the protocol just specify that both peers are expected to present a "server certificate" regardless of which one initiated the connection?
by lukeschlather | 2026-02-10 17:18:00+00:00
It would be nice if you could run separate instances of an app that were considered separate, and forking around a push notification key would make a lot of sense. Another reason I would like to do this is to be able to have different Discord accounts coexisting on the same device. (But, the idea of having some set of different Zulip instances is maybe the exact same use case, with better server-side support.)
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-10 17:18:07+00:00
Technically this is true. Practically speaking most realists are perceived to be pessimists. There are tons of scientific studies to back this up as well. People who are judged to be pessimistic experimentally have more accurate perceptions of the real world.

This means that most people who you would term as "realists" are likely optimists and not realists at all.
by Esophagus4 | 2026-02-10 17:18:08+00:00
Sigh

The fact that EU sees dependence on American tech in the same way as Russian oil now is saddening and telling.

Americans and American companies had it really good - our tech extracted money from the world, and they were mostly willing to pay for it. And it was an incredible advantage to the US.

But now, it seems that we are happily throwing all that away, for what benefit I do not yet see. Regardless of whether this effort succeeds, why stoke this fire at all?

I would say I hope Americans realize what they’ve done by making their own companies enemies of the world at large, but I’m not holding my breath for any sort of self reflection.
by ben_w | 2026-02-10 17:18:17+00:00
> I mean, who else going to grow the food and sweep the streets?

I'm not sure what the state of the art is with either of these, but I'm now imagining scaled-up Roombas stealthily cleaning the streets at night.

Or this, but self-driving: https://www.alamy.com/compact-kubota-bx2350-street-cleaning-...

More seriously, I think there is a before-and-after point with AI, before some point the automation is just a "normal technology" and we need humans for a lot of jobs, pensioners can only get meaningful pensions when a new generation is present to pay for it all, otherwise pension ages need to keep rising; after that point, automation is so good we can do UBI (AKA "set the pension age to birth")… well, provided the state owns the automation, otherwise good luck demanding free access.
Show HN: CSL-Core – Formally Verified Neuro-Symbolic Safety Engine for AI
by aytuakarlar | 2026-02-10 17:18:21+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Aytug, the creator of CSL-Core.

We built this because we realized that "prompt engineering" isn't enough for critical AI systems (like in finance or governance). You can't just ask an LLM nicely not to delete a database—you need a runtime guarantee.

CSL-Core is a policy language designed to bring "Policy-as-Code" to AI agents.

Instead of relying on the model's probabilistic nature, CSL enforces constraints that are:

1. Formally Verified: Policies are compiled into Z3 constraints to mathematically prove they have no logical conflicts or loopholes.

2. Deterministic: The checks happen in a separate runtime engine, independent of the LLM's context window.

3. Model Agnostic: It acts as a firewall between the LLM and your tools/API.

It's currently in Alpha (v0.2). Currently working on TLA+ specifications for the dual formal verification engine and governance architecture because we believe AI safety needs mathematical rigor.

I'd appreciate any feedback on the DSL syntax and our verification approach.
by tfehring | 2026-02-10 17:18:21+00:00
The timing for those factors doesn’t match the timing of the fertility decline in the US.

Birth control usage is slightly down since the mid 90s. Among sexually active women not trying to get pregnant, the rate has been flat since 2002. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-unit...

Women’s labor force participation rate peaked in the late 90s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002

It’s hard to see how a stronger social safety net would decrease birth rates, but that has actually also decreased, e.g. from welfare reforms in 1996.

Meanwhile, total fertility is down ~20% over the ~30 year period since then.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-10 17:18:22+00:00
I've seen some devs prefer that route of programming and it very often results in performance problems.

An undiscussed issue with "everything is a string or dictionary" is that strings and dictionaries both consume very large amounts of memory. Particularly in a language like java.

A java object which has 2 fields in it with an int and a long will spend most of it's memory on the object header. You end up with an object that has 12 bytes of payload and 32bytes of object header (Valhala can't come soon enough). But when you talk about a HashMap in java, just the map structure itself ends up blowing way past that. The added overhead of 2 Strings for each of the fields plus a Java `Long` and `Integer` just decimates that memory requirement. It's even worse if someone decided to represent those numbers as Strings (I've seen that).

Beyond that, every single lookup is costly, you have to hash the key to lookup the value and you have to compare the key.

In a POJO, when you say "foo.bar", it's just an offset in memory that Java ends up doing. It's absurdly faster.

Please, for the love of god, if you know the structure of the data you are working with it, turn it into your language's version of a struct. Stop using dictionaries for everything.
by JPKab | 2026-02-10 17:18:24+00:00
Awww man, I agree with you sooooo much on the food portion.

My son is now 19 years old, and doing very well financially (he chose to join the Army). I taught him from a young age how to shop and cook on a budget, in a healthy fashion. Started with hard boiled eggs, beans and rice, chicken and broccoli. Those kinds of things.

I also taught him (by observing his teenage friends) to always always always refer to DoorDash as a "Burrito Taxi" to help mentally reinforce the utterly absurd level of luxury you are indulging in when you have a human being drive a 3500 pound vehicle to your home to bring you a single meal prepared by somebody else.

The number of people I encounter who struggle financially (including one of my sisters) who indulge in these practices is insane. Our culture has forgotten that eating at restaurants (at least in the West, unlike say Singapore) is historically an expensive luxury, due to our relatively high cost of labor.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-10 17:18:24+00:00
As mosburger says, this is a great analogy. Do you think that the great artists paint, sculpt, and draw everything by hand, by themselves? Of course not... they never did, and they don't today. You're being offered the ability to join their ranks.

It's your studio now. You have a staff of apprentices standing by, eager for instructions and commands. And you act like it's the worst thing that ever happened to you.
by spaceribs | 2026-02-10 17:18:28+00:00
I don't see a lot of comments about how China is tackling this. While the US is spending all it's time/investments developing AI, China is investing heavily in robotics.

They seem to understand that they can't mitigate the decline, they may be able to provide the same level of service without the need for as many workers. Based on the experiments we have attempted to fix this issue, I think that's actually a smart move.
by axus | 2026-02-10 17:18:28+00:00
The benefit of one big app is a consistent identity. Seeing that an account was created years ago, and how long it's been a member of the current server, helps identify spam and scams. When a user you're familiar with provides a link to another Discord server, its more trustworthy.

Discord has also done a good job protecting identity; better than DNS has :) I use lots of other apps with "real" identity, Discord is good for centralizing non-work, non-family activity.
by Anonyneko | 2026-02-10 17:18:46+00:00
Some demography experts mention that financial incentives do work starting from the second child (if provided as a lump sum, and with usage not restricted too much). It's not something that can stop the population decline, but it can slow it down to some extent.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/216331/1/dp13019.pdf

The rest, statistically speaking, doesn't make much of a dent in the established social and religious conventions of any given nation, which the governments generally have little control of.
by pixelsort | 2026-02-10 17:18:47+00:00
I was 7 in 1987, learned LOGO and C64 BASIC that year, and I relate to this article as well.

It feels as though a window is closing upon the feeling that software can be a powerful voice for the true needs of humanity. Those of us who can sense the deepest problems and implications well in advance are already rare. We are no more immune to the atrophy of forgetting than anyone.

But there is a third option beyond embrace or self-extinguish. The author even uses the word, implying that consumers wanted computers to be nothing more than an appliance.

The third option is to follow in the steps of fiction, the Butlerians of Dune, to transform general computation into bounded execution. We can go back to the metal and create a new kind of computer; one that does have a kind of permanence.

From that foundation, we can build a new kind of software, one that forces users to treat the machine as appliance.

It has never been done. Maybe it won't even work. But, I need to know. It feels meaningful and it has me writing my first compiler after 39 years of software development. It feels like fighting back.
by overfeed | 2026-02-10 17:18:52+00:00
> Quite a few - and I know I am only speaking for myself - live on my different computers

I use AI/agents in quite similar ways, and even rekindled multiple personal projects that had stalled. However, to borrow OPs parlance, these are not "houses" - more like sheds and tree-houses. They are fun and useful, but not moving the needle on housing stock supply, so to speak.
by strictnein | 2026-02-10 17:19:30+00:00
In the second half of my 40s now and I'm in the same boat. I started slapping keys on a c64 when I was 2 years old. Really enjoyed software development until 10-15 years ago. With the current LLM tooling available the number of systems I've been able to build that are novel and tackle significant problems has been kind of mind blowing over the past 8 months or so.

Staying up late, hacking away at stuff like I used to, and it's been a blast.

Finally, Homeworld was awesome and it felt magical playing it.
by logicchains | 2026-02-10 17:19:36+00:00
>My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.

There's only one developed country with a birthrate above replacement and that's Israel, which is hardly a paradise. Largely due to Ultra-Orthdox Jews, who believe they have a religious duty to have children. Empirically religion is the only thing capable of making people in rich countries want many children, and religiousness is partially heritable so eventually the problem will solve itself as the secular-inclined genes are bred out of existence.
by lbrito | 2026-02-10 17:19:39+00:00
I felt the same. I resonate with the message, but it really rings hollow with so much AI directing.

I'd wish people would stop doing that. AI writing isn't even particularly good. Its not like it makes you into Dostoevsky, it just sloppifies your writing with the same lame mannerisms ("wasn't just X — it was Y"), the same short paragraphs, the same ems.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-10 17:19:41+00:00
Abstractions can take away but many add tremendous value.

For example, the author has coded for their entire career on silicon-based CPUs but never had to deal with the shittiness of wire-wrapped memory, where a bit-flip might happen in one place because of a manufacturing defect and good luck tracking that down. Ever since lithography and CPU packaging, the CPU is protected from the elements and its thermal limits are well known and computed ahead of time and those limits baked into thermal management so it doesn’t melt but still goes as fast as we understand to be possible for its size, and we make billions of these every day and have done for over 50 years.

Moving up the stack you can move your mouse “just so” and click, no need to bit-twiddle the USB port (and we can talk about USB negotiation or many other things that happen on the way) and your click gets translated into an action and you can do this hundreds of times a day without disturbing your flow.

Or javascript jit compilation, where the js engine watches code run and emits faster versions of it that make assumptions about types of variables - with escape hatches if the code stops behaving predictably so you don’t get confusing bugs that only happen if the browser jitted some code. Python has something similar. Thanks to these jit engines you can write ergonomic code that in the typical scenario is fast enough for your users and gets faster with each new language release, with no code changes.

Lets talk about the decades of research that went into autoregressive transformer models, instruction tuning, and RLHF, and then chat harnesses. Type to a model and get a response back, because behind the scenes your message is prefixed with “User: “, triggering latent capabilities in the model to hold its end of a conversation. Scale that up and call it a “low key research preview” and you have ChatGPT. Wildly simple idea, massive implications.

These abstractions take you further from the machine and yet despite that they were adopted en masse. You have to account for the ruthless competition out there - each one would’ve been eliminated if they hadn’t proven to be worth something.

You’ll never understand the whole machine so just work at the level you’re comfortable with and peer behind the curtain if and when you need (eg. when optimizing or debugging).

Or to take a moment to marvel.
by jlokier | 2026-02-10 17:19:51+00:00
That's because flat structures are often, or often turn into, "flat-in-name-only" structures.

I don't think the Tyranny of Structurelessness is arguing in favour of hierarchy, or against other forms of organization than hierarchy.

I don't think it's arguing against "flat" or "anarchy" style organizations either.

In essence, I think it's asking us to do whatever we're doing better, more honestly, more effectively, and less stressfully. By acknowledging, clarifying, communicating, and seeking to understand the real operating structures, what's really going on. And then to improve them, using that understanding.

An actually flat organization might be good, I don't know. I've never seen one. I've been in some that claimed to be flat, and became stressful places to work, for the same usual reasons hierarchies can be unpleasant, including incompetent bosses (not called bosses). But I've also had some pleasant experiences in flat organizations, and I prefer it that way, if it's designed and run well.
by encom | 2026-02-10 17:19:51+00:00
>IRC exposes your IP

That hasn't been true for decades, and even if it was, it sounds like Hollywood's idea of a problem.

>IRC only will exclude a lot of people

If they can't figure out how to point a client to an IRC server, their contribution is worthless. It's the most trivial barrier to entry possible.

>sharing screenshots

Print screen > paste to image host > share link. Not hard.

I get that the Discord experience is slick, if you're willing to give up any sort of privacy or confidentiality. IRC is lightweight and simple, and its shortcomings can be worked around without too much effort. Discord is bloated, malicious, evil - I will gladly suffer some inconveniences of IRC.
by unethical_ban | 2026-02-10 17:20:17+00:00
In one thread I am defending anonymity online from government mandated ID laws.

Then I think to the persistent, malevolent, destructive lies that people spread with complete impunity and with faked video and photo evidence. This is not what the first amendment was designed to protect.

Wary of making government the arbiter of truth, I don't know what society should do to combat this evil. In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail.
by swyx | 2026-02-10 17:20:36+00:00
if you were an experienced/mature tech employee you should probably know that there are real HR reasons why companies are strongly advised not to give too much information in a rejection email. there is only ever downside. your reaction here is a potential red flag.

i'm sympathetic to you, it sucks, why cant we all be nice to each other, and my answer to that all is lawyers.
by tshaddox | 2026-02-10 17:20:46+00:00
> Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.

Nah, I think that it is just selfish, and that it’s the least weird thing in the world to expect people to commit to sacrificing some things for the sake of their children.

You must have been led to these conclusions by ideas (perhaps labeled “individualism” or similar). Like all ideas, someone had to invent them, and these particular ideas surely have not been widespread for even 100 years.
by autoexec | 2026-02-10 17:20:48+00:00
When anything or nothing at all can draw tariff threats at any time it stops making sense to worry about what may or may not anger an insane clown overseas and just do the best thing for your nation and its people. Reducing dependence on the US is the smart thing to do and retaliation would just make it more obvious how important it is to get away from the US as much possible.
by dan_mctree | 2026-02-10 17:20:50+00:00
Yes, this absolutely appears to be the main reason. Both in practical terms through birth control, but also through cultural terms in that it's now seen as a choice rather than as an obvious thing you do. To change this course, we probably need to change the culture first so that a birth control ban will be supported. That's currently not looking likely, so population collapse it is
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-10 17:21:04+00:00
> every comment you make is a legal statement

Every comment people can prove you made.

They learned putting it in email isn't ideal, for that reason.

https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/steve-jobs-told-g...

I'm sure these days when Apple and Google want to set up this sort of clearly illegal deal, their CEOs meet in person, or at least use phone/Signal.
by margana | 2026-02-10 17:21:05+00:00
The problem isn't just getting something that works across all European countries. It's getting something that works globally.

While we may make most of our payments within EU, basically everyone still occasionally pays for something outside of EU, either online or when they travel. This means if the new thing only works in EU, every European will still need and have a MasterCard/Visa even if they use it less often than before.

This is still a massive amount of leverage - MC/Visa still have the ability to block payments made from EU citizens/companies to outside.
by Nephx | 2026-02-10 17:21:06+00:00
Congrats on the launch! Love to see more minimal, single-purpose sites like this popping up. The no-JS, no-ads approach is refreshing.

Two quick questions. On data ownership: do the ToS allow you (or a future acquirer) to sell or commercially use the content people publish on their blogs? And is there a way to export blog posts, say as Markdown? Portability is a big deal for me before committing to a platform.

Will definitely subscribe either way. Nice work.