MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by acdha | 2026-02-10 21:36:43+00:00
The birth control pill wasn’t on the market in the first half of the 20th century (1960) and there was more religious pressure not to use contraception (e.g. how many women faced significant external pressure to be married housewives and mothers and weren’t even allowed to pursue careers?). Lack of choice masked true preferences – but as we could see from things like the big spike in divorces when it was legalized, there were costs to that.
by its_magic | 2026-02-10 21:37:23+00:00
Another great question, and another good opportunity to supply you with true facts and deep knowledge of reality. Here we go.

(This is turning into a real educational opportunity, unexpectedly.)

I have never--not once in my entire life--been so mistreated in person as I have been online, here or elsewhere. It simply does not happen, for some reason. At all. Ever.

This is not to say I haven't ever met any of you online abusers in real life; no, statistically speaking, I'm sure you're out there in the crowd somewhere, presumably within earshot when I speak truth. It's just that (for whatever reason) you simply never, ever think to approach me in the same manner as you do here.

(Maybe you can think of one or two good reasons why this is so. I'm sure whatever explanation you reach will be completely self-centered and self-serving, just like your other justifications and rationalizations about everything, which always reach the same conclusion: that I'm wrong, and terrible, and that you're a Good Person, and it's OK for you to just shit all over me.)

Since there is no such thing as downvotes or flags in real life--and since you don't have any actual rebuttal to offer to what I say, in 95% of cases--therefore your only choice (other than listening and, you know, learning) must be to sit quietly and fume in the corner, were you to suffer the indignity of hearing my horrible and unacceptable opinions spoken in the vicinity. So I guess that's what you do.

If you run into me in real life, feel free to speak up and make yourself known next time. Be sure to froth at the mouth as you call me a lunatic and a maniac and so on. Really, the more hatred you launch in my direction, the more success you will surely have. Everyone who hears will be thoroughly impressed at how right you are and how terrible I am.
by jsrozner | 2026-02-10 21:37:25+00:00
"full extent of the information...including any IP masking services"

This suggests that Google aggregates derived information based on how a user uses Google (i.e. VPN info). The fact that derived info was also potentially passed along is particularly upsetting to me.

Aside from the fact that I don't think companies should be able to collect user data at all (if you disagree, I think there's a good chance you're at least a little bit fascist), this amounts to Google providing free surveillance services to the government.

If you squint, it's minority-report-esque: eventually Google will tell the govt who it thinks is likely to commit crimes based on how they interact with its AIs. Almost certainly coming to a society near you soon.
by tuesdaynight | 2026-02-10 21:37:40+00:00
About your first point, I understand why it happens, but I get frustrated at these debates nowadays. Both sides cannot talk about their experiences without having to add something that invalidates the other side choice. They cannot fathom that the other side may prefer the disadvantages of their choice instead of the disadvantages of yours. Maybe it's the human condition to try to point out how the other side will regret their choices to validate our life decisions
by mjmasia | 2026-02-10 21:37:49+00:00
Solo dev – thinking a lot about death.

About a year ago, my grandpa showed me a note on his phone called "WHEN I DIE" with banking, insurance, property, investment, and other information in it. It really didn't sit right with me.

The past couple months I've been working on a more comprehensive, easy-to-use guide to document our (for better or worse) complicated lives and I'm just starting to show people.

It's free. It's anonymous. There's no tracking. Download the document if you want to work offline.

It's just something I think should existing in the world.

Maybe I'll put it on Gumroad or something. Maybe I'll make some kind of hosted version one day... idk, shrug.

Feel free to check it out, lmk if it's helpful to you or you think there's anything I should add: https://deathdocument.com
by program_whiz | 2026-02-10 21:37:57+00:00
Sorry man, that's rough. Best wishes to you. Definitely agree there are some things you lose, but for me at least, when I have multiple days of time away (e.g. some trip or something) its refreshing momentarily, but then I remember how lonely and empty things felt much of the time.

It may not be that way for everyone, some people are probably very content just working, watching netflix, a few hobbies, and occasionally hanging out with ever shrinking groups or random strangers.
by m-schuetz | 2026-02-10 21:38:09+00:00
Nah, I know about VMA and it's a poor bandaid. I want a single-line malloc with zero care about usage flags and which only produces one single pointer value, because that's all that's needed in pretty much all of my use cases. VMA does not provide that.

And Vulkans unnecessary complexity doesn't stop at that issue, there are plenty of follow-up issues that I also have no intention of dealing with. Instead, I'll just use Cuda which doesn't bother me with useless complexity until I actually opt-in to it when it's time to optimize. Cuda allows to easily get stuff done first then check the more complex stuff to optimize, unlike Vulkan which unloads the entire complexity on you right from the start, before you have any chance to figure out what to do.
by samuelson | 2026-02-10 21:38:21+00:00
I love your content, but I wish you'd make your blog theme responsive for wider screens/non-mobile. I prefer to read content like this on a large screen.

Showboat seems like it could actually be quite useful for humans too, just for making quick notes from a CLI without opening an editor. The "pop" command makes me wonder if there would be a benefit to also having an array-like in addition to the stack-like interface. It seems like it would be fairly trivial to generate an index of markdown blocks so that they could be edited individually.

I like the idea of Rodney, but I wonder if you might actually have better results by asking the agent to generate equivalent Selenium scripts instead. I'm specifically suggesting Selenium because it's been around so long so I assume there's a lot of Selenium in the LLMs training data, but there are other options that might work too.
by carshodev | 2026-02-10 21:38:21+00:00
The fastlane is just another name for the leftmost lane, I am not talking about the one moving fastest.

Again we are not talking about the fastest lane here we are talking about the safest as the OP was concerned about following distance.

> That's exactly my point. Which is why you can be in the right lane, and tons of people from the slower lane will try to merge in front of you

If everyone merged right it would not longer be faster but people do not do this. In the right lane you can slow down as much as you want and never cause an issue so you can always make a gap. In any other lane if you slow down more than traffic you cause issues because people will then try and pass you from the right which is dangerous.

You are placing the burden of your forward following gap on the cars around you but that is a terrible way to drive. You need to be in control of yourself when driving, do not trust that someone is going to follow traffic laws, do not trust that they will go whatever way there turn signal says, do not trust that they will look over there shoulder before merging.

If YOU want a following gap then the only possible safe way to do this is to merge all the way right and slow down whenever someone merges in front of you. There is no other way to do it in heavy traffic. And YES you will have to live with the fact that you will be driving slower than the traffic around you. That's the trade you make if you choose to have a large following gap.
by Zambyte | 2026-02-10 21:39:00+00:00
This is really cool! I have been looking for something exactly like this. One point of feedback is that I noticed you use a sort of builder pattern by chaining methods to set certain fields on structs. Do you have a specific reason for doing that? I think it would be more idiomatic to just set the fields directly, overriding default values.

Another thing: have you played around with 0.16.0 at all yet? I think it's worth checking out if not. It'll have a lot of implications on what you're doing. If you want a hand on making a 0.16.0 branch, I'd be interested in helping out :)
by reactordev | 2026-02-10 21:39:04+00:00
I’m just pointing out that Vulkan is supported on all major modern engines, internal and public. Some also go so far as to do DX12 (fine, it’s a similar feeling API) but what’s really amazing is taking all of those games that run on OpenGL, DirectX, etc and forcing them to run on Vulkan…

Proton is amazing and Wine project deserves your support.
by nphardon | 2026-02-10 21:39:21+00:00
Kind of, I mean you have to verify things experimentally but thought can go a very long way, no? And we're not talking about humans thinking about things, we're talking about an agent with internet access existing in a digital space, so what experiments it would do within that space are hard for us to imagine. Of course my post isn't meant to be taken seriously, it's more of a fun sci-fi idea. Also I'm implying not necessarily reaching the limits of the things you mentioned, but rather, just taking a massive step in a very short time window. Like, the time window from the discovery of fire to the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics but in a flash.
by thom | 2026-02-10 21:39:44+00:00
My experience was that enterprise programmers burned out on things like WSDL at about the same time Rails became usable (or Django if you’re that way inclined). Rails had an excellent story for validating models which formed the basis for everything that followed, even in languages with static types - ASP.NET MVC was an attempt to win Rails programmers back without feeling too enterprisey. So you had these very convenient, very frameworky solutions that maybe looked like you were leaning on the type system but really it was all just reflection. That became the standard in every language, and nobody needed to remember “parse don’t validate” because heavy frameworks did the work. And why not? Very few error or result types in fancy typed languages are actually suited for showing multiple (internationalised) validation errors on a web page.

The bitter lesson of programming languages is that whatever clever, fast, safe, low-level features a language has, someone will come along and create a more productive framework in a much worse language.

Note, this framework - perhaps the very last one - is now ‘AI’.
by mtlynch | 2026-02-10 21:39:45+00:00
> Sounds like having a big audience and pre-existing list really helps!

I didn't have a particularly big audience. I had about 2k mailing list subscribers on my main blog, but a pretty small percentage of them purchased. And I had something like 600 subscribers for the book because I've been saying I'd write it since 2021, but all I had was a mailing list.

> How did you go about building that audience and list, and what helped the most to doing that?

I haven't been focused on growing the list that much.

My main goal right now is to get feedback from readers and use it to improve the book. Once the book is done and I can't think of ways to improve it, I'll probably switch to focusing more on finding more places to find paying readers.

> Which lists / audience converted the most for your book offer

I find the most paying readers from HN, actually. I don't think it's the most in terms of conversion percentage, but it's the most in absolute terms because HN is so big. And then there are secondary effects of something doing well on HN because people share the link on other, smaller sites and social media.

> how did you promote or otherwise let folks know about your book?

The thing that's always worked best for me is writing blog posts that I hope my target audience will find interesting. So the thing that's worked for the book is adapting parts of the book to standalone blog posts and sharing those online.[0] A few of those posts did well on HN because I tried to make them interesting to developers interested in writing/blogging.[1]

> What was the compelling ask to pre-order a book?

Haha, maybe I should craft that more. It's mainly that they get to read more of whatever samples they've already hopefully found useful.

My pitch for early access is that early readers get to read it and ask me questions and help shape the book.

> And, how do you plan to publish the book?

I'm already publishing it as a PDF/epub that I sell through Stripe.

I might eventually do a print run or sell Amazon, but I hate dealing with Amazon and physical products, so I'd have to be really confident it would have a big impact on sales.

[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/

[1] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-10 21:40:35+00:00
There are two ways to improve fuel economy. The first is technology (fuel injection, aerodynamics, hybrids, etc.). The second is to make the vehicle smaller.

The first one is a trade off against cost, but the market is already pretty good at handling that one on its own. Fuel injection and aerodynamics don't add much to the cost of a car, so pretty much everything has that now. Hybrid batteries are more expensive, but the price is coming down, and as it does the percentage of hybrid cars is going up. You don't really need a law for this; people buy it when the fuel savings exceeds the cost of the technology.

The second one is a trade off against things like cargo capacity. If you say that "cars" have to get >35 MPG at the point before hybrids are cost effective, or keep raising the number as the technology improves, it's essentially just a ban on station wagons. And then what do the people who used to buy station wagons do instead? They buy SUVs.

The entire premise is dumb. If you want more efficient vehicles then do a carbon tax which gets refunded to the population as checks, and then let people buy whatever they want, but now the break even point for hybrids and electric cars makes it worth it for more people.
by 8note | 2026-02-10 21:40:51+00:00
the big problem with tools like that is that the agent can read all the existing code and docs when asked, but it cant read your mind.

its always going to do better if you give it a stronger description of the problem, and give it some more freedom on the solution.

if youre sitting more in the solution side, youre going to be dictating those exact functions because theres not enough context for it to just know what the right function you need is
by cwillu | 2026-02-10 21:40:54+00:00
I can stay parked at a green light the entire cycle, and it still will be 100% the fault of the person who rear ends me.

As for what I'm doing, it's probably something like scrolling the map to see what road I'll be turning on in 5 minutes, so that I don't have to look at it (regardless of whether I'd be touching it) later. Or a dozen other similar things, none of which have anything to do with social media.

And I know you, as a reasonable adult on this forum, know this.
by mtlynch | 2026-02-10 21:41:04+00:00
> Thanks for the reply. Just to clarify the picture for me, was the 2024 jump in profit attributing the sale or was that just a solid year?

Mostly the sale. The deal closed in April, but Jan-March was an especially profitable quarter.[0]

[0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2024/04/
by aspenmartin | 2026-02-10 21:41:13+00:00
I just cannot fathom how people can say something like this today, agentic tools have now passed an inflection point. People want to point out the short comings and fully ignore that you can now make a fully functioning iPhone app in a day without knowing swift or front end development? That I can at my company do two projects simultaneously, both of them done in about 1/4 the time and one would not have even been attempted before due to the SWE headcount you would have to steal. There are countless examples I have in my own personal projects that just are such an obvious counter example to the moaning “I appreciate the craft” people or “yea this will never work because people still have to read the code” (today sure and this is now made more manageable by good quality agents, tomorrow no. No you won’t need to read code.)
by unleaded | 2026-02-10 21:41:35+00:00
it literally is though that's why i'm confused. you pay a flat monthly fee and get a box that runs linux. yes you might not be able to press one button and Effortlessly Deploy Your AI-Managed SaaS Infrastructure Product To Valued Customers Across The Metaverse or whatever vercel does but it only takes a couple hours to learn how to setup nginx node rsync and cloudflare (and even then i think there's some easier closer to one-click solutions)
by nomel | 2026-02-10 21:42:00+00:00
Same here, and I also really enjoy the high level design/structure part of it.

THAT part doesn't mesh too well with AI, since it's still really bad at autonomous wholistic level planning. I'm still learning how to prompt in a way that results in a structure that is close to what I want/reasonable. I suspect going a more visual block diagram route, to generate some intermediate .md or whatever, might have promise, especially for defining clear bounds/separation of concerns.

Related, AI seems to be the wrong tool for refactoring code (I recently spent $50 trying to move four files). So, if whatever structure isn't reasonable, I'm left with manually moving things around, which is definitely un-fun.
by firstplacelast | 2026-02-10 21:42:01+00:00
While acts of war separate couples and would confound the analysis a bit, I think there is typically a big spike in births following wars. Baby boomers most notably being born after WWII. Optimism is dynamic and not a set threshold, wrapping up wars leads to new found optimism about the future. How terrible the recent past was is not all that relevant as it is about the trajectory.

If anything having a terrible past may make the bar lower for experiencing optimism, as it's easier to expect a better future when the overall bar is lower. Hopefully explaining that well enough and it's certainly not the only issue, but I believe we see the same thing on the stock market when large class action settlements are reached with a corp and the stock then rises as it is forward looking and optimistic now that the 'awful past' is settled. First-gen immigrants tend to have larger families as the impetus to move countries is an optimistic endeavor itself.

And while a reach, I think through this lens you can make an argument as to why lower classes tend to have more children than middle classes (currently in the US). It's easier to expect better for your children when you are at the bottom of the barrel (no where to go but up), whereas the middle class is in an increasingly precarious position.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-10 21:42:04+00:00
The square root of any number x is ±y, where +y = (+1)y = y, and -y = (-1)y.

So we define i as ±i = sqrt(-1). I.e. i itself has no need for a sign, so no sign needs to be chosen. Yet having defined i, we know that that i = (+1)*i = +i, by multiplicative identity.

We now have an unsigned base element for complex numbers i, derived uniquely from the expansion of <R,0,1,+,*> into its own natural closure. I.e. we are simply exploring the natural closure of <R,0,1,+,*>.

We don't have to ask if i = +i, because it does by definition of the multiplicative identity.

TLDR: Any square root of -1 reduced to a single value, involves a choice, but the definition of unsigned i does not require a choice. In this derivation, there is only the identity automorphism.
by SkyLinx | 2026-02-10 21:42:18+00:00
I'm building SprintPulse (https://sprintpulse.io), a real-time retrospective tool that transforms team feedback into concrete action items. With AI-powered summaries, merge suggestions, and sentiment tracking, every voice is heard and nothing gets lost. With the Linear integration, you can easily export your action items to a Linear or Jira project.
by reify | 2026-02-10 21:42:29+00:00
Fucking newspapers. All wankers

The mass media are always going on about "facts", Yet they are the prime culprits when it comes to telling bullshit and lies.

They truly are just enablers for the likes of Epstein and all his minions of paedophiles.

Using fake headlines to over state and create scare stories.

It is always the right wing newspapers, the daily mail ilk, et,al. conjuring up magic stories regardless of the negative impact it has on people.

The Daily Mail referred to Tavistock as a “transing factory” while The Sun called it a “discredited NHS clinic that happily handed out hormone drugs to children”.

On 11 August 2022, The Times ran with the headline: “Tavistock gender clinic ‘to be sued by 1,000 families.

turns out this was all bullshit. Only 8 families out of 12,000 patients who received treatment made a complaint about the services, minor complaints, like waiting too long for treatment or fertility not explained adequately, etc

The Tavistock clinic was closed down because of this and prevented many people getting treatment.
by msyea | 2026-02-10 21:42:37+00:00
I'm a solo dev working on a suite of Garmin apps in order to make the sportswatch into a fully flung smartwatch, with the intent of enabling you to reduce screentime (mobile) but still maintain "essential functionality" and live in the modern world. The ecosystem is offline and privacy first - no cloud/servers.

The watches are chronically underpowered (great for battery life) and need a phone for internet anyway (inbuilt Sat/LTE is not available to devs) - so I've offloaded most of the heavy work to an Android (for now) companion app.

The key features:

- Use the phone mic (headphones or built-in) to dictate to the watch (on-board transcription) - the built-in keyboards are tough to use

- Reply to android notifications with voice (ie. WhatsApp/SMS)

- No extra costs for AI - you have a flagship mobile - all AI inference is on-device

- No internet access for watch or phone app - privacy first, local.

The apps:

- [Untether Comms](https://apps.garmin.com/apps/ac3c70e8-d631-49b9-a6f3-4335dc9...) - Reply to notifications with voice

- [Untether Notes](https://apps.garmin.com/apps/3984f15b-0924-428a-895e-c4c97a2...) - Voice notes automatically transcribed onto the watch

- Untether AI (coming soon) - Chat with Gemini Nano (or others) about your health metrics or anything without your phone

- [Companion Android App](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=watch.untether...)

It is very much still in Beta and might be pretty unstable!
by kelseyfrog | 2026-02-10 21:42:41+00:00
The dollar became the world's reserve currency because the idea of Bancor lost to it. Thus subjecting the US to the Triffin dilemma which made the US capital markets benefit at the expense of a hugely underappreciated incentive to offshore manufacturing.

You can't onshore manufacturing and have a dollar reserve currency. The only question then is, Are you willing to de-dollarize to bring back manufacturing jobs?

This isn't a rhetorical question if the answer is yes, great, let's get moving. But if the answer is no, sorry, dollarization and its effects will continue to persist.