MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mindslight | 2026-02-10 15:54:59+00:00
The looming big tech dystopia where individuals are pervasively tracked, quantified, and siloed. A destroyed economy squashing mobility, making the basic necessities uncertain, and future wealth questionable. Terror gangs executing people in the streets for political speech, and abducting them in their homes for AI says. All things that I'm sure give people warm fuzzy feelings about bringing children into this world!

As someone who has indeed reproduced, I will say that the reelection of the fascists has basically guaranteed that my son's life will be worse than my own. The only sane way to view the destructionists is as the death throes of our society, rather than latching on to any of their conflicting purportedly-constructive plans they chum out to fool the gullible.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-10 15:54:59+00:00
Animals have "r/k selection": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory ; some have huge numbers of offspring (e.g. spiders, most fish), some carefully nurture a single egg per year. Humans are already at the smaller number of offspring compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, but what I think is happening is that social pressure has simply pushed the tradeoff hard into "quality".

That is, the message is "unless you can give your children a perfect life, you shouldn't bother".

Certainly the main victory against birthrate worldwide has been the long process of eradicating teen pregnancy.

> Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too

This is so basic as to be an axiom of the whole thing. The politics of going back to forced childrearing through suppression of healthcare are horrific, but some of the US is pushing for that.
by arghwhat | 2026-02-10 15:55:07+00:00
Rather than a moat of details, it's first-mover advantage. Anyone can run a credit card network, but merchants and banks need to support them. Many others exist, but the issue is that they don't have widespread adoption. Solutions that work exist, which means the lesser supported alternative is not widely used, which again reduces reason for wider adoption...

Regulation changes "why bother" to "oh crap".
by prmoustache | 2026-02-10 15:55:13+00:00
Easy when shops start supporting them.

I've paid numerous time using the swiss counterpart, Twint, in small shops. For some like the farm I used to buy vegetables to it was their only supported payment besides cash because they deemed the card systems too expensive.

The same way chinese tourists can already pay with alipay in many retatail outlets in europe, you can already pay with such european systems on Aliexpress. More are probably comming.
by saberience | 2026-02-10 15:55:15+00:00
Did you look at Moltbook or how it works yourself? Because I did and it was blindingly obvious that most of it was faked.

In fact, various individuals admitted to making 1000s of posts themselves. Humans could make API keys, and in fact, I made my own API key (I didn't use Clawdbot) and I made several test posts myself just to show that it was possible.

So I know 100% for sure there were human posts on there, because I made some personally!

Also, the numbers didn't make any sense on the site. There were several thousand registrations, then over a few hours there were hundreds of thousands of sign-ups and a jump to 1M posts. Then if you looked at those posts they all came from the same set of users. Then a user admitted to hacking the database and inserting 1000s of users and 100ks of posts.

Additionally, the API keys for all the users were leaked, so anyone could have automated posting on the site using any of those keys.

Basically, there were so many ways for humans to either post manually or automatically post on Moltbook. And also there was a strong incentive for people to make trolling posts on Moltbook, e.g. "I want to kill all humans."

It doesn't exactly take Sherlock Holmes'esque deduction to realize most of the stuff on there was human made.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-02-10 15:55:21+00:00
There may be a risk of running into thermal throttling in such a use-case, as laptops are really not designed for sustained loads of any variety. Some deal with it better than others, but few deal with it well.

Part of why this is a problem is that consumer grade NICs often tend to overload quite a lot of work to the CPU that higher end server specced NICs do themselves, as a laptop isn't really expected to have to keep up with 10K concurrent TCP connections.
by ComputerGuru | 2026-02-10 15:55:29+00:00
This is more resourceful than what I once did, which was set up an atomic clock "repeater" to get analog atomic clocks (one in each room) in a site to actually receive the signal in a 1930s structure made of solid brick and concrete blocks.

Except it wasn't a repeater so much as it was a MITM fake, with an rpi connected to an sdr-like system to generate a fake WWVB (iirc?) based off an NTP clock.

Legality was technically questionable, but since the signal didn't really leave the site perimeter (or even the building, really), I think it was ok.
by sandworm101 | 2026-02-10 15:55:59+00:00
If they were only eating there would be no problem. But they want fancy vacations. They want houses. They need drugs. They need MRI machines. And they need these things for decades for minimal cost irrespective of ability to pay. And, when they do die, they expect to pass estates tax-free to thier children. Supporting the retired population is one thing, but the day may soon come when we revisit what it means to be retired.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-02-10 15:55:59+00:00
Please stop upvoting these posts. We have gotten to the point where both the front page and new page is polluted with these laments

It’s literally the same argument over and over and it’s the same comments over and over and over

HN will either get back to interesting stuff or simply turn into a support group for aging “coders” that refuse to adapt

I’m going to start flagging these as spam
by j_mao | 2026-02-10 15:56:01+00:00
I’m building FountainData, an agentic product & revenue intelligence platform.

The problem: companies collect massive amounts of customer feedback (reviews, support tickets, sales notes, social chatter, competitor signals), but they can’t tell which feedback actually impacts churn, revenue, or growth. Most tools stop at sentiment or dashboards. That doesn’t change decisions.

What we’ve built:

Smart ingestion that auto-detects relevant data sources (cuts setup/sync time ~70%)

Agentic Product, Financial, and GTM intelligence that clusters feedback, deduplicates noise, and prioritizes issues by business impact

Engineering-ready outputs (clear problem statements, evidence, tickets)

Focus on treating feedback as a leading financial signal, not UX noise

The product is real and live. Tech is not the bottleneck.

What is missing is distribution.

I’m looking for a serious co-founder who has:

A proven track record of distribution (content, community, outbound, partnerships, audience, or GTM)

Experience getting B2B or developer products real visibility

The ability to consistently drive demand, not just ideas

Offering 15–20% equity, depending on experience and involvement. This is not an advisor role. This is a real co-founder seat with ownership and accountability.

If this resonates, reply here or DM with:

What you’ve distributed before

How you’d approach distribution for a product like this

Why you think this problem matters

Happy to share more details privately.
by throwawayohio | 2026-02-10 15:56:02+00:00
Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth plans. Not only did many of my neighbors lose their jobs, but others are simply fearful of living their lives.

We're find financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might jump out and disappear our friends, family, or nanny who could be watching them?

And that is before we even get into the potentially disastrous child healthcare decisions and regulation rollbacks.

It's an unfortunate time to be trying to grow a healthy family, IMO.
by dh2022 | 2026-02-10 15:56:05+00:00
Flash news - todays people have higher standards and expectations of living than your grandma and grandpa. In particular - most people want college education for their kids. College education comes with tens of thousands in expenses and people are like "how am I gonna put 2 kids in college? I think I will have 1"

Another flash news for people who haven't had kids in daycare for a while - pricing for daycare means that for the first kid the mom could work and come ahead money wise. Second kid is about neutral (depending on location and salary, in some cases the mom comes ahead money wise, in other case she does not). Daycare pricing made us decide to have 1 kid - 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).

Access to contraceptives make a significant difference as well.
by dangus | 2026-02-10 15:56:10+00:00
Dude, you just blew my mind. Your code is under a commercial license?

I'm not sure you realize this, but that nullifies your blog post's purpose of existence.

Why would any reader care about your AI contribution policies if your code isn't even open source?

Be honest with me: would you contribute PRs to Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop? No, none of us would do that, because if we buy licenses to those products we are paying customers of proprietary software. It's not our job to fix bugs and add features for Microsoft or Adobe, we paid them to do that for us, and in turn they keep the code proprietary for themselves.

To put it as bluntly as possible, you're a freeloader. You not only accept contributions, but you keep them as proprietary code, you micromanage contributors, and you stoop even lower by writing a blog post complaining about the quality of those contributions.

I feel bad for your customers that are making PRs to your codebase. Here they are doing free work for your business and they don't even get to keep community ownership of that code. Hell, at least when I contribute to VSCode, we get to fork the hell out of that codebase as it's MIT licensed. You just keep it!!

> I care about OSS.

Doubt! Your actions don't show it! Words are meaningless in comparison.

My advice to you, if you really want it? Cut the bullshit, don't even make the source available. Be honest about what you are: a commercial software company.
by tantalor | 2026-02-10 15:56:17+00:00
The recent episode of The Daily gives a prime example of this,

I was seeing people getting hired and getting paid a lot less than me. And when I inquired about it, my boss would say, well, they’re less expensive. I don’t have to pay workman’s comp on them. I don’t have to pay general liability insurance on them. If they get hurt, they’ll go to the emergency room. No sweat off my back. And I was getting paid less and less, because I was competing against people who were hired because it cost less to hire them or employ them... It’s illegal, by the way. But people are getting away with it and I’m competing against them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/podcasts/the-daily/why-tr...

I think he unfairly places the blame on the immigrants themselves, when the true culprits are the employers and system of black market employment.
by dbspin | 2026-02-10 15:56:23+00:00
I don't think there's a country in Europe that funds childcare remotely to the level of cost. The most generous I'm aware of is certain states / cities in Germany that provide free 'Kita', essentially Kindergarten. In addition to maternity leave, national insurance etc. But this certainly doesn't cover the numerous costs (including time off work etc) associated with having kids.

Would be an interesting experiment to actually pay people to have kids - i.e.: financially reward them in accordance with the costs involved. I suspect, as with an actual liveable UBI, the results would differ radically.
by pessimizer | 2026-02-10 15:56:24+00:00
If productivity gains had ever filtered down to the population instead of being frittered away by the wealthy in orgies of creation and destruction, it would be easy to afford a population decline.

Productivity went up 90% since 1979, and pay went up 30%. We could support 2x the ratio of retirees to workers as 1979 at the same level of comfort. Instead, we build huge houses (for wealthy people) and tear them down, and build a military to kill impoverished foreigners (for our wealthy investors), blow it up, and build it again.

The "demographic crisis" people are a child-sacrificing cult posing as a child-worshipping cult. They want more people to keep the prices of labor down, and they act like that's a concern that you should share. Unless you're in the top 20-40% in the West, you're going to work until you die, or get sick and die in the gutter.

If you really wanted the population to go up, maybe don't engineer society so that all of its wealth lies in the hands of boomers and their failchildren who don't work. Governance would improve instantly and vastly if only people who worked got a vote.

The funny thing is that the right-wing pro-natalist points at wealthy elites and concocts a conspiracy that they want to reduce the population (for unknown, nefarious reasons.) No, they love cheap servants. They spend all of their effort in bombing and sieging poor countries on bizarre pretenses then opening the doors to their own countries to let them rush in. The only difference between the right-wing pro-natalists and wealthy elites is that the elite will happily import the servants from the South to wherever they want to live, and right-wingers (even if they call themselves "liberals") are secretly just doing the 14 words. We don't need more immigrants or more babies, we need to shed parasites.
by r14c | 2026-02-10 15:56:57+00:00
The line has to go up every year forever. You know the old saying

> Capitalist Economics: "Humans only value things monetarily."
Sociology: "Uh, I don't..."
Capitalist Economics: "Humans are always rational and value is calculated by complex internal calculus."
Sociology: "Uhhh, Psy, can you help?"
Psychology: "That's not how humans..."
Capitalist Economics: "ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!!"
Physics: drops teacup
by engineer_22 | 2026-02-10 15:57:05+00:00
Without discounting social media's harmful effects:

I do think Instagram in particular has been a boon for small businesses, providing them visibility in the marketplace that was previously unavailable to them.

Social media has also been a way for communities to connect organically with discoverability features missing on the old web.

There are positives and negatives - if it was only negatives people would be quicker to abandon the platforms.

Although I'm not familiar with the case at hand, I agree there's potential there for real harm, especially to children.
by tonymet | 2026-02-10 15:57:16+00:00
I have the opposite take. There’s nothing stopping you from jumping into any component to polish things up. You can code whatever you wish. And AI takes away nearly all of the drudgery : boilerplate, test cases, inspecting poor documentation, absurd tooling.

It also lets me focus more on improving things since I feel more liberated to scrap low quality components. I’m much braver to take on large refactors now – things that would have taken days now take minutes.

In many ways AI has made up for my growing lack of patience and inability to stay on task until 3am.
by trashb | 2026-02-10 15:57:17+00:00
The lighting is one of the main area's that really improved a lot.

For standard Q1 mapping ericw tools [0] is great (the page has some nice previews).

This project seems to use Nuclide for building which by default uses vmap compiler [1][2]. Which is really Q3 but I think FTE handles that well internally as the newer format has some more modern features.

> Powerful BSP compiler. Use VMAP to bake levels like you're used to from similar engine technology, with high quality lightmaps, cubemap-based environment mapping and adjustable vertex colors on spline-based meshes.

[0] https://ericwa.github.io/ericw-tools/

[1] https://developer.vera-visions.com/d4/d50/radiant.html#autot...

[2] https://github.com/VeraVisions/vmap
by czbond | 2026-02-10 15:57:54+00:00
I believe the trend of population decline coupled with the wave of retirees when coupled with "AI" will produce a net benefit for everyone.

I believe humans and jobs will be able to accomplish more, with less people and have better margins - and thus be able to be paid much more.

I am an optimist that these trends together, when managed and harnessed well, can make us better paid, less stressed, and with more free time.
by soulofmischief | 2026-02-10 15:57:56+00:00
/slap was perfectly enough fun for me without sacrificing the freedom of my peers and myself.

I use Discord all day and it's not for gaming. It's to involve myself in specific communities. And I'm not looking to migrate to a platform that caters specifically to gamers, because it will eventually make the same anti-user tradeoffs that Discord has made over the years, as ad money and payment processors and stakeholders continued to boil the frog.

This sudden news is very unwelcome. Unless something changes, I will begin the process of leaving each server, making whatever off-channel connections I need, then deleting my account, and either choosing or developing an alternative which suits my needs.

> They don't care that much that the search doesn't work well. They don't care that it's centralized. They don't even really care much about this age verification check!

Yes, and that's the problem. Manufactured consent cannot be used as a justification for further manufactured consent.
by yoyohello13 | 2026-02-10 15:58:02+00:00
I think it's inevitable, the model is unsustainable and going to fail. In a finite world we can't have social models that rely on infinite growth. I'm sure the changing demographic is going to cause pain (probably right when I'm getting ready to retire), but historically pain is the real catalyst for change so maybe some good will come out of it.
by whatever1 | 2026-02-10 15:58:22+00:00
Most of the developed countries are facing this.

I think our financial/defense systems are not prepared for population decline, so I foresee a lot of turbulence.

The new left will call for more immigration and more globalism to avoid wars, but will have to deal with integration of swaths of immigrants.

The new right will call for closing of the borders and double down on AI doing the work of producing and defending, but will have to deal with the fact that AI will not be ready for that.
by seydor | 2026-02-10 15:58:34+00:00
> seamlessly

It's not seamless if it includes a war, global isolation, exodus of all business and disconnection of the banks. This means they were left with no alternative, in which case, sure, it's 'seamless' to use the only alternative method.

Europe will have a lot of friction with consumer habits and Visa will always be relevant for buying things from outside EU. These are all competing entities which hate anything that makes them seamlessly lose their business.
by angiolillo | 2026-02-10 15:59:03+00:00
> It can be psychologically frustrating because you see all the cars around you moving at X mph but your self-imposed constraints mean you can only make way at (X minus Y) mph.

You are correct, but I suspect some people may be overestimating Y.

Let's say you follow the "three second rule" which is a buffer of ~264 feet at 60 mph. A driver then cuts into your safety buffer. Assuming they like to go fast they will likely be slightly closer to the front of the buffer so for the sake of argument we'll assume they reduced your safety buffer down to two seconds. In response, you gradually rebuild the safety buffer back to three seconds. If this happens every mile on average (sometimes more, sometimes less) then it costs you an extra second per mile, meaning you're only driving 98.4% as fast as you could have been if you were tailgating.

The lifetime odds of dying in a car crash in the U.S. is roughly 1 in 100. If you spend time near automobiles you can't eliminate that entirely but I'm willing to spend an extra second per mile to try to reduce that for myself and my passengers.
by dangus | 2026-02-10 15:59:13+00:00
No? That's the opposite. Christian logic dictates that we don't have to care about societal collapse, because it's prophesied and it's actually a good thing because that's when believers are raptured into heaven.

The population went from 1 billion to 8 billion in the last 226 years. So my question to you is: how many more billions do you really think our planet can support? How long can we support 8 billion?

According to the MAHB, the world's oil reserves will run out by 2052, natural gas by 2060 and coal by 2090. I'd love to hear about how a solution to that problem involves growing the population.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2026-02-10 15:59:16+00:00
> I'm not at all familiar with the American justice system, but would the fact that this case specifically describes the targeting of minors with such addictive tactics change things at all?

when you square the "for the children" argument with the fact that we live under an administration that still has not released the entire epstein files, it's pretty hard to assume that anything truly positive or transformative will come of this.
by pamcake | 2026-02-10 15:59:21+00:00
Good thing anyone is allowed to make a more user-friendly IRC client so that can be improved on, then. As long as we all follow protocols my choice of client doesnt concern you even as we chat in the same room.

For vertically integrated propriatery closed Discord it's both forbidden and made difficult. There's a reason clients like ripcord never make it.
by wcoenen | 2026-02-10 15:59:28+00:00
This comes up in every discussion about demographics. But counterintuitively, there are no examples of financial incentives actually fixing this problem.

For example, in 2022 Hungary was spending 6.2% of GDP on such incentives[1], but this only managed to bring total fertility rate up to about 1.6 [2].

It is the same everywhere else. The real reason fertility has declined since the sixties is because people have access to effective birth control. Nobody wants to be a baby factory.

[1] https://abouthungary.hu/news-in-brief/hungary-to-spend-6-2-o...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/hun/hun...
by jk1484 | 2026-02-10 16:00:14+00:00
Remove the developers - who writes the specs? Who reviews the output? Who debugs production at 2am?

Someone has to understand the code. That person is a developer regardless of what you call them. If nobody understands the code, you have vibe code - and vibe code has its own cost in hotfixes, rework, and rewrites.

The report covers this: replacing developers with agents requires three conditions to hold simultaneously - AI matches human general intelligence, AI matches human contextual understanding, and AI costs less. Currently the first one alone isn't met. The cost argument assumes all three are already true.
by ismailmaj | 2026-02-10 16:00:20+00:00
I agree that culture cascades but leadership is not the top of the food chain, their decisions or culture is often influenced by the capital.

The meta recently has been to ignore everything and only focus on maximizing the stock price, which is aligned with their incentives (stock based compensation, bonus based on stock performance) and the modern investors (money quick now).

I wonder if the rotten feeling I have on management is linked to western societies moving from high trust to low trust and from patient to impatient.