MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Earw0rm | 2026-03-06 08:32:21+00:00
It's a shame the author falls a little foul of the very thing he criticizes - out of a wish, perhaps, to needle individualist liberals with UnHerd-style communitarian-conservative talking points.

But let's ask some more questions.

The positive correlation between income and number of children, within education bands, is intriguing - and yet doesn't explain why policies intended to be pro-birth - generous financial support for young families, for example, seem to be ineffective. Even accepting that education does suppress the birth rate relative to income, increasing income ought to fix that.. but doesn't.

Perhaps there's a different story here, that income and number of children within a given education bracket isn't causal - that a third factor is behind both - or even that the causal arrow points the other way: if you've got lots of kids, you _have_ to take that higher-paying job, because you need to keep them fed and housed.

And there's an unspoken assumption that education = individualism, and that these are antonyms to communitarian-conservatism. Which isn't exactly true, and we can look at societies which sustain relatively high levels of both.

Denmark being a case in point. Its international reputation may be free-living liberal-Scandi, but it's communitarian, place-based and in many ways conservative. Not in the obvious way along Islamic or shouty Evangelical lines - morals around sex and alcohol are relatively relaxed - but in most other respects it's a distinct, cohesive and traditionalist culture, one which places more value on faith and nation than many.

They've high income, strong child support policy, and their birth rate is.. not much better than avowedly secular-liberal countries nearby. And a disproportionate number of kids are born to immigrants, which of course upsets the traditionalists.

But again, look for third factors. Do immigrants have more children because they're from "that kind of culture", or does the sort of innate drive which motivates somebody to pack their bags for a new life in a new country (by no means the easy path) also motivate them to have a family?

Or, flip that around, is there a "drag" factor affecting people who don't emigrate/immigrate, and that's suppressing "native" births? I certainly know more than a few people for whom that appears to be a thing, they're just kind of lightly anesthetized to life.

But I've also heard it said that some folks have always been that way, and that what's driving lower birth rates is more that on one hand fewer unplanned kids are being born (because contraception, and vastly lower teen pregnancy rates), and on the other, the women who do have kids (which has never been anywhere near "all") are often having one or two less than they'd ideally like for economic reasons.
by dns_snek | 2026-03-06 08:33:10+00:00
> This is a great article. It's why I roll my eyes when someone asks "Show me the data" or the classic "Sources please."

That doesn't follow. Yes, there are going to be multiple interpretations of the data, however the data must exist otherwise you're just pulling claims out of thin air.

Being asked to provide the data is just an easy filter for people who just say things, who only have the narrative, like "the earth is a flat disc" - okay, show me some experimental data that would show this to be true.
by mihaic | 2026-03-06 08:33:10+00:00
In general, I argue for less state control on anything. But your argument seems flawed from its core. If someone is a bad parent, should we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well? And the line is often blurry, so that's why we designed schools that should compensate even for dumb parents.

And, just to be clear on this topic, I think these age restriction laws are mostly bullshit, but I'm deeply against the concept of putting all the responsabiliy of raising children onto the parents.
by robinsonb5 | 2026-03-06 08:33:12+00:00
I don't have a problem with the concept of udev - I just find the details to be laden with papercuts. Needing different syntax depending on which subsystem is interacting with the device makes no sense from a user perspective.

To cover all bases my udev rule seems to need to contain both

SUBSYSTEM="hidraw", ATTRS{interface}=="CMSIS-DAP", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"

and

SUBSYSTEM="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="1d50", ATTRS{idProduct}=="602b", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"

I don't understand why the second rule isn't sufficient, and finding enough information online to even consider trying the first rule was extremely difficult.
by kkfx | 2026-03-06 08:33:23+00:00
Personally I use LaTeX for anything I have to write as pdf, I understand many critics but... So far is The Tool to makes good typesetting. PostScript can do nearly the same at a harder effort for the user, Typist can't match, others are just LaTeX wrappers or can't deliver anything decent.

The problem is that today we have a massive gap in development: there was a time when high-quality FLOSS development existed, followed by an era of resting on one's laurels while creating very little, mostly just stuff built on top of existing systems in an attempt to simplify things, which only resulted in making them more complex and fragile, with zero innovation.

Today, we have generations of developers who simply don't know classic FLOSS tools beyond the surface level and lack the technical background to create new ones that aren't dependent on the tech giants. This is because obsolete universities have de facto trained legions of big tech labourers rather than autonomous technicians capable of standing on their own two feet.

The issue is that there was never a real desire to give "the power of computing" to end users. Consequently, at the first opportunity, the desktop was undermined and rejected to keep everyone dependent on someone else's services. Now, young developers don't know how to evolve back towards the desktop, even though they sense, without fully understanding, that this is the right way forward.

We are losing decades of potential evolution with repercussions for centuries to come, just to feed a handful of people who profit from others' ignorance.

So, while it's true that on one hand we have excellent tools that are obsolete, clunky, and difficult to integrate today, it's also true that on the other hand we have a void. This is because the foundations of modern software are flawed and unsustainable, created solely for the interests of Big Tech. Either we move past this or we head for ruin, as has been happening for some time now; eventually, it will be impossible to carry on and we'll have to start again from scratch, with enormous costs, delays, and damage.
Show HN: AI pull request reviewer that analyzes Git diffs
by bolitupac | 2026-03-06 08:34:23+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a small tool called PR AI to help review pull requests faster using AI-assisted context.

The idea is to load the PR diff and let the AI analyze it directly, so you can discuss the changes, risks, and possible improvements without switching between tools.

What it does so far:

Connects to GitHub and loads PR diff context

Import diffs from GitHub, file upload, or paste

Renders readable diffs inside the workspace

Chat with AI using the active PR context

Structured review output (summary, risks, recommendation)

Right now I’m focusing on:

Better traceability from AI comments to exact changed lines

Improving the signal-to-noise ratio in reviews

Keeping the interface lightweight while adding deeper audit signals

It’s still early but already able to load and analyze real PRs.

If you review pull requests often, I’d love to hear:

What would make an AI PR reviewer actually useful for you?

What kind of issues should it prioritize detecting?
by smartmic | 2026-03-06 08:35:42+00:00
After quite some time, and actually after reading this post[0], I took another look at GNU Texmacs, this time with a little more depth and patience. And indeed, the program is an incredibly powerful tool for creating beautiful documents. I'm also currently on a roll where I'm reappreciating the philosophical advantages of WYSIWYG. Anyway, for me it's definitely an insider tip for anyone who is annoyed by LaTeX and is open enough to try WYSWYG.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47152982
by godelski | 2026-03-06 08:36:08+00:00
> It means you can bring your priors into the classroom but I can’t.

I've heard about this from Fox News but I've never experienced it myself, even having grown up in a very blue state. I'm sure this happens somewhere, but I'm unconvinced it is the norm.

> Ethics is and always has been applied theology

This is trivial to prove false. You even do it! "What do we do?" You've implicitly added "if god exists". You're so strong in that conviction you claim there's a former question and yet never wrote one down. I'd even argue it is important for theologists to ask "What do we do if god doesn't exist?"

You seem to be under the belief that without god there are no moral convictions. Well I'll quote a very famous conman, as I feel the same as him.

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you.
- Penn Jillette

You can even find in the Bible plenty of passages to support his point. If the only thing stopping you from doing evil is the belief of punishment, then you are not a good person. Conversely, if the only reason you are doing good is because you are seeking eternal reward, neither are you good. One does not need god to have morals, one only needs have society and a theory of mind.

Hey look, we did Secular Ethics, and discussed religion! I disagreed with you, but you'll notice I never made claims about if I believe in god or not. You'll notice I make no judgement on you for believing in god. You'll notice, my entire argument is based on the origin of morals and really we've discussed is what is in a man's heart matters. This is no different than "Is an act of kindness good if one films themselves doing it?" There's a lot of gray in that question, obviously.

No ethics class is going to exclude you for being religious, as that would be unethical.
by tuetuopay | 2026-03-06 08:36:15+00:00
Just check your memory with memtest.

Two years ago, I've had Factorio crash once on a null pointer exception. I reported the crash to the devs and, likely because the crash place had a null check, they told me my memory was bad. Same as you I said "wait no, no other software ever crashed weirdly on this machine!", but they were adamant.

Lo and behold, I indeed had one of my four ram sticks with a few bad addresses. Not much, something like 10-15 addresses tops. You need bad luck to hit one of those addresses when the total memory is 64GB. It's likely the null pointer check got flipped.

Browsers are good candidates to find bad memory: they eat a lot of ram, they scatter data around, they have a large chunk, and have JITs where a lot of machine code gets loaded left and right.
by staticassertion | 2026-03-06 08:36:39+00:00
You can do novel work with an LLM. You can. The LLM can't. It can be an aid - exploring papers, gathering information, helping to validate, etc. It can't do the actual novel part, fundamentally it is limited to what it is trained on.

If you are relying on the LLM and context, then unless your context is a secret your competitor is only ever one prompt behind you. If you're willing to pursue true novelty, you need a human and you can leap beyond your competition.
by robinsonb5 | 2026-03-06 08:36:54+00:00
If code becomes essentially free (ignoring for a moment the environmental cost or the long term cost of allowing code generation to be tollboothed by AI megacorps) the value of code must lie in its track record.

The 5-day-old code in chardet has little to no value. The battle-tested years-old code that was casually flushed away to make room for it had value.
by b112 | 2026-03-06 08:37:10+00:00
then you might as well take the bigger upgrades too.

No? A specific patch for a vulnerability is often tiny, and upstream LTS kernel devs handles much testing.

You test for issues, but the scope is tiny. The amount of churn to a new kernel is massive.

It's not even close to the same work. And why do it? Whatever for?

New isn't a good reason.

Frankly, as
long as the userland and kernel are getting security updates, who cares? Understand, this is a lot of work alone.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-03-06 08:37:18+00:00
> For me personally, what is more interesting is that we might not even be able to copyright these creations at all. A court still might rule that all AI-generated code is in the public domain, because there was not enough human input in it. That’s quite possible, though probably not very likely.

As I understand it, the US Supreme Court has just this week ruled exactly this. LLM output cannot be copyrighted, so the only part of any piece of software that can be copyrighted is that part that was created by a human.

If you vibe-code the entire thing, it's not copyrightable. And if it can't be copyrighted that means it is in the public domain from the instant it was created and can't be licensed.
by Karrot_Kream | 2026-03-06 08:37:35+00:00
One heuristic I like to use when thinking about this question (and I honestly wish the answer space here were less emotionally charged, so we could all learn from each other) is that: LLMs need a human to understand the shape of the solution to check the LLM's work. In fields that I have confirmed expertise in, I can easily nudge and steer the LLM and only skim its output quickly to know if it's right or wrong. In fields I don't, I first ask the LLM for resources (papers, textbooks, articles, etc) and familiarize myself with some initial literature first. I then work with the LLMs slowly to make a solution. I've found that to work well so far.

(I also just love statistics and think it's some of the most applicable math to everyday life in everything from bus arrival times to road traffic to order values to financial markets.)
by onli | 2026-03-06 08:37:36+00:00
Awesome. Now you have a system where every blog entry, every Facebook post needs a lawyer consultation.

Around 20 years ago, Germany actually made a law that would have enforced such a system. I still have a chart in my blog that explained it, https://www.onli-blogging.de/1026/JMStV-kurz-erklaert.html. Content for people over 16 would have to be marked accordingly or be put offline before 22:00, plus, if your site has a commercial character - which according to german courts is every single one in existence - you would need to hire a someone responsible for protecting teenagers and children (Jugenschutzbeauftragten).

Result: It was seen as a big censor machine and I saw many sites and blogs shut down. You maybe can make that law partly responsible for how far behind german internet enterprises still are. Only a particular kind of bureaucrat wants to make business in an environment that makes laws such as this.

Later the law wasn't actually followed. Only state media still has a system that blocks films for adults (=basically every action movie) from being accessed without age verification if not past 22:00.
by charcircuit | 2026-03-06 08:37:47+00:00
>The government really shouldn't be telling us how/what we can compute at all.

You could say the same thing about restaurants. "The government really shouldn't be telling us how/what we can cook at all."

When you are selling a product to the public, that is something that people have decided the government can regulate to reduce the harms of such products.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-03-06 08:37:52+00:00
Could the reason why uptake has been slow be because for about 99.9% of the world it doesn't matter if NTP is "secure" or not? There are all sorts of theoretical attacks possible, and some high-profile ones on time-based systems (that didn't involve NTP) have been done in the past, but when was the last time there was an above-the-fold news story about an NTP-based attack?

So in exchange for replacing a protocol that involves a single UDP packet back and forth and that you can implement in a few dozen lines of code on any type of device, you have to use a full TLS with PKI stack and certificates and revocation and all manner of other insanity in exchange for a perceived problem that no attacker has figured out what to do with in its forty-year history.

Heck, if you want a "secure time source" (for whatever definition of "secure" you're after) and you're going to go with the bloat and complexity of TLS and everything else, connect to www.google.com and read the value out of the HTTP Date header, that's supported right now and accessible over the public Internet from almost everywhere. And if you're on the non-public Internet, why are you worried about NTP attacks?
by dataflow | 2026-03-06 08:38:07+00:00
> ConTeXt often goes unmentioned in TeX threads.

> It's a monolithic kernel with a relatively sane collection of "setup" macros that, by and large, can accomplish much of what LaTeX and its packages can do.

I don't know what constitutes "sane", but I literally just downloaded and installed it right now because you mentioned it, and it choked on a trivial hello world:

$ mtxrunjit --script context doc.tex
...
> tex error on line 1 in file doc.tex: ! Undefined control sequence
...
1 >> \documentclass{article}
2 \begin{document}Hello, world\end{document}

...which might explain why it goes unmentioned?

I feel like this is gonna be a tougher sell than you expect. How the heck is a user expected to switch to ConTeXt?
by mrheosuper | 2026-03-06 08:38:09+00:00
>I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials

Maybe ROG Flow 13 ? It's more like hybrid laptop, and geared toward "gaming"(because it's usually the gamer market that demand high performance), but nothing prevents you to use it as business machine.

It's also top of the line asus laptop, so i expect decent build quality.
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-03-06 08:38:55+00:00
I'm never sure whether to believe llms about themselves.

Anthropic create developer containers with a selection of tools installed. Is that a better guide? Some of the config seems aimed at human developers but if claude likes the tools why aren't they in this list?

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/.devcont...
by msylvest | 2026-03-06 08:39:27+00:00
Around 1990 I attended ISO/JTC1 meetings generating standards for data communication. I still recall my surprise over the heated arguments over these words between the UK and the US delegations. (I'm from Denmark). In particular 'shall' and 'should' meant different things in English and American languages. ISO's first standard, ISO 1, states that ISO Standards shall be written in English so we had to do that, US delegation too. Similarly Scott Bradner stated in RFC 2219 how American conventions should be followed for future IETF STDs.

So I'm confident that the word 'shall' has a strong meaning in English; whether it has too in American legalese I cannot tell.
by sparklysoup | 2026-03-06 08:40:09+00:00
Having a single (government ID) is bad, so instead we hand our personal details over to one of a dozen private companies, none of which has any contract with us, the user, and all of whom happily share it with the (20 or so, in Persona's case) other companies they use to farm out bits and pieces of the identity verification job. Sure this is better.

Meanwhile, I have never had any fraud, scam, identity theft or anything else as a result of, or with any connection to my country's national ID. But I can't avoid also having to hand over my details to private (and foreign to me) companies that only exist because Americans can't get act together.

Srsly.
by kranke155 | 2026-03-06 08:40:27+00:00
I work in commercials.

We can now make 1$ million dollar commercials with 100,000$ or less. So a 90% reduction in costs - if we use AI.

The issue is they don’t look great. AI isn’t that great at some key details.

But the agencies are really trying to push for it.

They think this is the way back to the big flashy commercials of old. Budgets are lower than ever, and shrinking.

Big issue here is really the misunderstanding of cause - budgets are lower, because advertising has changed in general (TV is less and less important ) and a lot of studies showed that advertising is actually not all that effective.

So they are grabbing onto a lifeboat. But I’m worried there’s no land.

I’ve planned my exit.
by Moldoteck | 2026-03-06 08:41:54+00:00
France is not that tied. Most reprocessing is done at La Hague. Some tiny part is sent to Russia based on older contracts but it's absolutely irrelevant for french generation in general. Last year France imported from russia the equivalent of 5% of domestic consumption... If you think this is some life changing amount...

Up till recently Russia had a higher market share of enrichment market due to megatons to megawatts policy, but as we all know, russia got wild, so now all western companies are ramping up facilities, be it orano or urenco.

Consider this, out of 23Bn of energy imports last year from Russia, nuclear related imports were 0.8bn, the rest being from fossils. Out of this 0.8bn, a big chunk was for VVER reactors (Finland, Czechia, Slovenia, Hungary, Bulgaria) - all requiring a very special fuel element. Framatome and Westinghouse started manufacturing it and testing in several facilities, but it'll take time for full replacement.
by trashb | 2026-03-06 08:42:04+00:00
Myth: End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is the only way to ensure robust cybersecurity.

Reality: E2EE carries its own risks and vulnerabilities. No single, standalone method achieves bulletproof cybersecurity.

Robust cybersecurity requires layering multiple, diligently managed security measures and best practices. Malevolent actors can exploit E2E encryption to avoid critical data security scanning, to allow malware inside a network or onto a device, and to evade law enforcement.

https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-investigate/lawful-access/lawful-...
by Noyra-X | 2026-03-06 08:42:24+00:00
The trust problem is real, and I think the framing of "trust" vs "don't trust" misses the more useful question: trust for what, exactly? In our experience with small business automation, agents work well on bounded, well-defined tasks with clear success criteria and human checkpoints. The failures happen when people deploy agents on ambiguous, open-ended decisions and then walk away. The answer isn't less automation – it's better handoff design between agent and human. What specific failure modes have you seen that you think no amount of prompt engineering or guardrails can fix?
by dataflow | 2026-03-06 08:43:55+00:00
> A parent that creates a non-admin account on a computer, sets the age for a child account they create, and hands the computer over is in no different state. The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine and set the age to 18 or over.

Er, how does a child install a VM from a non-admin account?

> Or the child can simply re-install the OS and not tell their parents.

It's gonna be pretty easy to detect when the parent finds programs are missing/reset or the adult account they created can't log in with their password.

The California law seems entirely tame and sane, whereas the New York bill seems pretty heavy-handed and authoritarian. They are in no way similar to each other.