MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by garciasn | 2026-02-10 16:21:52+00:00
TL;DR: the article argues we cannot fix the population crisis with small tax breaks or traditional values because the modern world has made the cost of raising a child being too high for most people to want to try.

---

The article argues that the global drop in birth rates isn’t a moral failure or a biological accident, but a logical response to the pressures of modern life.

1. Myth: People are too selfish/liberal to have kids.

Reality: It’s not about hedonism. Instead, people are avoiding parenthood because the life has become such a grind. In places like Korea, young people feel that bringing a child into such a hyper-competitive, expensive world is unfair to the child.

2. Myth: It’s a biological problem (low testosterone/chemicals).

Reality: There is no evidence that people can’t have kids physically. The issue is a lack of desire. It is a social and economic choice, not a medical one.

3. Myth: Women working is the cause.

Reality: Data show birth rates are actually higher in countries where women have more jobs and support. In countries where women stay home more (like parts of India), birth rates are still crashing. Work isn't the enemy; lack of support is.

4. Myth: Immigrants will replace the population.

Reality: Newcomers quickly adopt the habits of their new country. Within one generation, immigrant birth rates drop to match everyone else’s.

5. Myth: The government can just pay people to have babies.

Reality: South Korea spent $280 billion on this effort and the birth rate still hit record lows. Cash doesn't work if the overall culture is too stressful and the difference in culture between men and women remains fixated on old roles.

e: moved TL;DR to the top.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-10 16:22:00+00:00
Prices are not public, but comments over the years have hinted it’s in the $500K to $1mm range.

Their hardware is multiple generations behind at this point, however. I wonder if they’re starting to reduce the price because it’s hard to justify paying so much for old hardware. They could just be targeting customers who don’t care as much about performance or efficiency as they do the software stack.
by Beretta_Vexee | 2026-02-10 16:22:09+00:00
Wero is just one of many systems available that allow individuals to make transfers easily and almost instantly.
There is also Bizum in Iberia and Blik in Poland.
These instant phone-to-phone transfers are very popular, especially among young people who rarely use cash.
Wero itself was launched by large banking networks because they had no solution to compete with neo-banks such as Lydia, which was a pioneer in this type of service.
France has its own payment network, Carte Bleue, which dates back to when the very first smart cards were introduced, but it is not European.
The real problem is therefore not a lack of projects, banks or services, but a lack of interoperability, too many players and geographical fragmentation.
Europe is not fast, but it has worked wonders with SEPA transfers. It needs to put in place a clear timetable imposing the interoperability of these services. The absence of plastic cards is absolutely not a problem, just look at WeChat, Alipay, etc.
by lelandbatey | 2026-02-10 16:22:25+00:00
Foamcore is truly the world's best "around the house" material for quick projects. An amazing trick not used for simple boxes in the parent post, is to simply score the fold-lines of a box and then fold the foamcore into the shape you desire, instead of cutting all the edges. It makes for very fast and fun crafting.

My favorite activity I ever did with foamcore was to make a to-scale layout of an apartment my wife and I were moving into so that we could experiment with simple to-scale rectangles as stand-ins for furniture to figure out our layout.

What a wonderful material!
by cyber_kinetist | 2026-02-10 16:22:28+00:00
I think flat structures aren't always bad - if the organization is geared towards maintenance and care work, it's essential to be as flat as possible. Another good example would be research labs, where experimentation cannot happen in hierarchical envrionments.

For an organization that has definite goals and have to ship a product by a deadline, a flat structure can surely be detrimental to any progress. In an environment of competition (from outsiders) and scarcity, a flat structure will only create either chaos or an implicit form of hierarchy that is even more cruel than what should have been.
Ask HN: Are automated tests (Selenium) still relevant today?
by ohitsujiza | 2026-02-10 16:22:50+00:00
I've been learning automated tests, using Selenium, but I'm wondering if it's a good idea to invest my time to build a stream to pay my bills for 5 years, giving me time to a long the way be reviewing and adapting myself to the new trends.

AI is around us, and even though AI is not perfect, it is trending and taking over a lot of skilled professionals space. I would like to listen experiences and thoughts, so I could review what I am doing is valuable enough, or maybe I am missing something, or eventually pivot my plan completely.
by qsi | 2026-02-10 16:23:08+00:00
Well-written and it expresses a mood, a feeling, a sense of both loss and awe. I was there too in the 8-bit era, fully understanding every byte of RAM and ROM.

The sense of nostalgia that can turn too easily into a lament is powerful and real. But for me this all came well before AI had become all consuming... It's the just the latest manifestation of the process. I knew I didn't really understand computers anymore, not in the way I used to. I still love coding and building but it's no longer central to my job or lif3. It's useful, I enjoy it but at the same time I also marvel at the future that I find myself living in. I've done things with AI that I wouldn't have dared to start for lack of time. It's amazing and transformative and I love that too.

But I will always miss the Olden Days. I think more than anything it's the nostalgia for the 8-bit era that made me enjoy Stranger Things so much. :)
by bluGill | 2026-02-10 16:23:18+00:00
> if we had 2 kids in daycare my wife would have been better off staying at home (which we could not afford and she did not want to do anyway).

Why the sexist idea that only your wife you could stay home? There are a growing number of men who are staying home to raise their kids - still a minority, but a good trend to encourage.

Of course I have no idea what your personal situation is. You may have made the best choice for your situation - but you implied you didn't even consider one of your options and that is bad.
by mg | 2026-02-10 16:23:22+00:00
My napkin-math approach to get a bird's eye perspective on the situation:

A $1T investment needs to produce on the order of $100B in yearly earnings to be a good investment.

Global GDP is about $100T.

So one way for things to work out for the AI companies would be if AI raises GDP by 1% and the AI companies capture 10% of the created value.
by dismalaf | 2026-02-10 16:23:28+00:00
For everyone who thinks this is the death of Bazzite or whatever, keep in mind Bazzite, all the UBlue projects, are all based on Fedora Atomic which makes it super easy to make an immutable spin.

There's also Silverblue which is ready to go out of the box (unless you have Nvidia), Nobara which adds some gaming things. And on a different vein CachyOS is making waves with some gamers (but it's Arch based instead of Fedora and not atomic/immutable).
by phendrenad2 | 2026-02-10 16:23:31+00:00
As someone who has always enjoyed designing things, but was never really into PUZZLES, I always felt like an outsider in the programming domain. People around me really enjoyed the "fun" of programming, whereas I was more interested in the Engineering of the thing - balancing tradeoffs until within acceptable margins and then actually calling it "DONE". People around me rarely called things "done", they rewrote it and rewrote it so that it kept satisfying their need for puzzle-solving (today, it's Ruby, tomorrow, it's rewritten in Scala, and the day after that, it's Golang or Zig!)

I feel that LLMs have finally put the ball in MY court. I feel sorry for the others, but you can always find puzzles in the toy section of the bookstore.
by tcoff91 | 2026-02-10 16:23:34+00:00
It was a lot easier to get along with people who voted differently when it was about differences in fiscal policy and taxation.

It's hard to respect people who support mass racial profiling by unidentified masked secret police. My American friends of mexican descent have to go about every day knowing that they might get harassed or detained for the way they look. In my book white supremacy is outside the bounds of legitimate political opinions that I can look past.
by vessenes | 2026-02-10 16:23:48+00:00
This is a good analyst report - lots of data. Conclusion - firms are spending ahead of sustained revenues right now, and a lot of the money is going offshore to TSMC, basically.

I’m not certain of the conclusion - I think a lot depends on amortization schedules - if data centers are fully booked right now, then we don’t need very long amortization schedules at the reported 60+% margin on inference to see this capex fully paid off.

My prior is that we are seeing something like 1/10,000th or so of the reasonable inference demand the world has fulfilled. There’s a note in the analysis that might back this - it says that we are seeing one of the only times ever where hardware prices are rising over time. Combined with spot prices at lambda labs (still quite high I’d say), it doesn’t look like we’re seeing a drop in inference demand.

Under those circumstances, the first phases of this bet, cross-industry, look like they will pay off. If that’s true, as an investment strategy, I’d just buy the basket - oAI, Anthropic, GOOG, META, SpaceX, MSFT, probably even Oracle, and wait. We’ll either get the rotating state of the art frontier capacity we’ve gotten in the last 18 months, or one of those will have lift off.

Of those, I think MSFT is the value play - they’re down something like 20% in the last six months? Satya’s strategy seems very sensible to me - slow hyperscale buildouts in the US (lots of competition) and do them everywhere else in the world (still not much competition). For countries that can’t build their own frontier models, the next best thing is going to be running them in local datacenters; MSFT has long standing operational bases everywhere in the world, it’s arguably one of their differentiators compared to GOOG/META.
by pyrophane | 2026-02-10 16:24:01+00:00
Yeah, this is something I am thinking a lot about. Companies won't be able to sustain this level of spending forever, and one of two things will need to happen:

1. Models become commodities and immensely cheaper to operate for inference as a result of some future innovation. This would presumably be very bad for the handful of companies who have invested that $1T and want to recoup that, but great for those of us who love cheap inference.

2. #1 doesn't happen and the model providers start begin to feel empowered to pass the true cost of training + inference down to the model consumer. We start paying thousands of dollars per month for model usage and the price gate blocks out most people from reaping the benefits of bleeding-edge AI, instead being locked into cheaper models that are just there to extract cash by selling them things.

Personally I'm leaning toward #1. Future models near as good as the absolute best will get far cheaper to train, and new techniques and specialized inference chips will make them much cheaper to use. It isn't hard for me to imagine another Deepseek moment in the not-so-distant future. Perhaps Anthropic is thinking the same thing given the rumors that they are rumored to be pushing toward an IPO as early as this year.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-10 16:24:04+00:00
Falcon Heavy costs around $1,400 per kg. This is still quite a lot but it can be contrasted against the ~$54,000 per kg from Space Shuttle to understand why the 'hype' around Starship is justified, with the big goal there being to drop another couple of orders of magnitude off the price. At that point costs will be low enough that the door to space will finally be open to full commercial exploitation.
by pessimizer | 2026-02-10 16:24:04+00:00
> You should read report from those support workers. How many disgusting image they need to see each day.

Nonsense. You're talking about image moderation when somebody else is talking about appealing when their account is shut down after an accusation of being automated. There is 1) no one being (overly) traumatized by basic customer service, and 2) no reduced responsibility for removing child pornography from your platform if your customer service is terrible.
by pbshgthm | 2026-02-10 16:24:16+00:00
Upcycling a phone LCD into an optical contraption.

Pairing a DSLR lens with a mirrorless camera body leaves a gap that has to be filled by an adapter mount. I thought it would be fun to build a computer that fits in that mount.

A transmissive LCD acts as a programmable iris, inserting digital effects into an otherwise purely optical pipeline. It enables some interesting manipulation of the lightfield such as in-camera parallax wobbles, as well as animated bokeh effects.
by veunes | 2026-02-10 16:24:17+00:00
The problem isn't the abstraction level, it's the loss of the incubation period. Moving from Assembly to C didn't remove the need to think through data structures. Prompt engineering, however, triggers skipping the reflection stage entirely. Constantly managing bots leaves zero bandwidth for the "are we building garbage?" question. AI scales typing speed, not the speed of architectural decision-making
by rendx | 2026-02-10 16:24:28+00:00
> Karl Popper's 'Paradox of Tolerance' applies. TL,DR: tolerating intolerance turns out to be a bad idea.

To provide some additional context to an often over-(ab)used quote:

I often see it used as a "thought-terminating cliché". Applying it this way would likely meet his definition of intolerant at least half-way:

Popper defines what he means by 'intolerance'. According to his definition, it requires both (A) the refusal to participate in 'rational discourse', and (B) incitement to and use of violence against people with different views.

You will find 'intolerant people' on all sides of the political spectra. (I don't see how dumbing it down to 'left' and 'right' really serves any rational discourse.)

> "I do not imply, for instance,
that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies ; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force ; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument ; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal." (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945)

https://ia800100.us.archive.org/10/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.5...

(It's well worth to read as a whole, given how often it is used and abused out of its surrounding context in the book.)
by palmotea | 2026-02-10 16:24:34+00:00
> the relevant facts would be, whether this guy has a criminal record. the rest is (legal) bullshit.

That's just your opinion, and a controversial one.

> after all there are laws about detention too. if I were DHS I'd be very afraid not to get picked up by law enforcement for breaking them. oh wait. :(

And honestly, detention conditions/process along with ICE tactics are where the focus should be, which are egregious and unacceptable and there seems like a consensus against them. But it's overreach to try to delegitimize all deportations or those of non-criminals, and that works against addressing the more serious issues. IMHO, polarization and overreach in the other direction gives the ICE abuses more cover than they'd otherwise get.

> and yes, there's a political goal. the polity wants to remove some people. the machinery is set to work. still, there are better and worse ways to do this. keeping this guy in this hunger games box is more expensive and less humane than putting him on a plane to Ireland.

Honestly, I think that could probably happen pretty fast if the guy wanted it. It seems like this guy is fighting his deportation through a PR campaign (e.g. drum up sympathetic coverage and hope that the rules are bent for the white guy).
by htx80nerd | 2026-02-10 16:24:37+00:00
>"XYZ used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works. Even basic functionality..."

The new normal is too many cases. Then people act put off you complain, or act like you are expecting too much.

Lots of people are in software development, or management, who dont have the mindset and personality for it. These roles are not for everyone. But people like the $$$ and so the wrong people get involved.
by tavavex | 2026-02-10 16:24:47+00:00
In 2020, about 63 million Americans were parents to children under 18 [1]. That's about one in four adults. It's a small minority. Maybe 69% of all people have children in general, but most of those children are above the age of 18.

Not that it matters anyway. You picked out a single word out of my multi-paragraph comment with many arguments and ignored the rest. Even if parents of young children were the minority, does that mean they should dictate what the rest do for the sake of their safety? Like 85% of Americans are drivers, should the non-driving pedestrians start stocking up on bubble wrap? It's for the common good, after all.

[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/estimate...
by 0xy | 2026-02-10 16:24:49+00:00
That's for the courts to decide, and in this case his Habeas Corpus petition was denied and he has a final order of removal signed by an immigration court judge, who is not a part of the administration.

His I-485 is ineligible, period. He entered under the VWP, which makes you ineligible for any adjustment of status. His case would have been denied, undoubtedly.
by wat10000 | 2026-02-10 16:24:51+00:00
I'm not sure, maybe a little bit. My own journey started with BASIC and then C-like languages in the 80s, dabbling in other languages along the way, doing some Python, and then transitioning to more statically typed modern languages in the past 10 years or so.

C-like languages have this a little bit, in that you'll probably make a struct/class from whatever you're looking at and pass it around rather than a dictionary. But dates are probably just stored as untyped numbers with an implicit meaning, and optionals are a foreign concept (although implicit in pointers).

Now, I know that this stuff has been around for decades, but it wasn't something I'd actually use until relatively recently. I suspect that's true of a lot of other people too. It's not that we forgot why strong static type checking was invented, it's that we never really knew, or just didn't have a language we could work in that had it.
by 4ndrewl | 2026-02-10 16:24:57+00:00
"They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of."

and they still call themselves 'full stack developers' :eyeroll:
by lmeyerov | 2026-02-10 16:25:09+00:00
Pass as immutable values, and try to enforce schema (eg, arrow) to keep typed & predictable. This is generally easy by ensuring initial data loads get validated, and then basic testing of subsequent operations goes far.

If python had dependent types, that's how i'd think about them, and keeping them typed would be even easier, eg, nulls sneaking in unexpectedly and breaking numeric columns

When using something like dask, which forces stronger adherence to typings, this can get more painful
by vurudlxtyt | 2026-02-10 16:25:13+00:00
Just install another distribution—Bazzite has some conveniences in setup, but doesn’t fundamentally provide anything that you can’t get elsewhere, and a lot of those customizations you probably won’t need.

I decided to try Fedora Kinoite for my gaming machine (to have something with less “maybe not maintained one day stuff” out of the box and a long term community of maintenance), and have been happy.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-10 16:25:19+00:00
> What the author describes is also the feeling when you shift from being a developer all day to being a team lead or manager.

I think that's very true. But... there's a reason I'm not a team lead or manager. I've done it in the past and I hate it. I enjoy doing the work, not tasking others with doing work.
by BosunoB | 2026-02-10 16:25:35+00:00
Y'all gotta stop looking at politics this way.

You know why they don't share the fruits of capital with us now? Because Americans hate getting taxed to pay for welfare, and so they've been voting against taxes for 50 years. This whole political landscape changes when people lose their jobs to AI, a thing that everyone thinks should be taxed. In fact, the entire ideological underpinning behind extreme wealth accumulation is gone when AI runs everything.
by throwaway77385 | 2026-02-10 16:25:37+00:00
Things that can only be used by an exclusive elite don't tend to survive, unless we're talking super-yachts.

AI is only going to work if enough people can actually meaningfully use it.

Therefore, the monetisation model will have to adapt in ways that make it sustainable. OpenAI is experimenting with ads. Other companies will just subsidise the living daylights out of their solutions...and a few people will indeed run this stuff locally.

Look at how slow the adoption of VR has been. And how badly Meta's gamble on the metaverse went. It's still too expensive for most people. Yes, a small elite can afford the necessary equipment, but that's not a petri dish on which one can grow a paradigm-shift.

If only a few thousand people could afford [insert any invention here], that invention wouldn't be common-place nowadays.

Now, the pyramid has sort of been turned on its head, in the sense that things nowadays don't start expensive and then become cheaper, but instead start cheap and then become...something else, be that more expensive or riddled with ads. But there are limits to this.

> People who are cut out to be software developers

You mean the people AI is going to replace? What's the definition of 'cut out to be' here?