skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It has the implied assumption that a functioning economy is linked strongly to the number of people of working age relative to the number of people outside it, and part of the population decline comes with an inversion of the population pyramid where an increasing proportion of the population is retired.

As such, even if there is a "best" population size below the current population size, you will face massive upheaval if the decline toward that size isn't happening slowly enough that you can offset that either with technology, temporary workers, or just grit.

You also have no reason to assume the drop will stop at whatever level you want, and so you will see even countries where people do think some reduction is fine start to aggressively compete to hold on people or attract immigrants at whatever level they feel will give them a soft-enough landing and then stabilization.

E.g. you can look to Italy over the coming years. Italy is already in population decline, yet has a government many consider far-right and anti-immigrant - clearly, Italy is not ready to loosen up immigration to stem it yet, and is willing to accept even increasing the rate of its population decline while trying to address the underlying fertility rate.

Personally, I expect to see a major change in policy from Italy once this really starts to bite, but their current unemployment rate will still buffer them for a few more years (and once it drops, it might well create a slight rebound, but even if that happens, it's unlikely to do more than slow the decline slightly, and won't address the labour market for more than two decades).

If I'm right, you should start to see the tone change once the unemployment rate drops a bit further and pressure from businesses in need of labour starts affecting Italian politics more, followed first by increased attempts at appealing to European migrants first, with e.g. tax breaks and the like, before they eventually give in and start rolling back the restrictions on non-EU migration.
I can understand job losses due to AI at Stack Overflow, Chegg, and possibly Quora. Everywhere else, as you say it's a fig leaf for other concerns.
>The very evidence you seek is right here, right now, all about us - a world in which men and women have a reproduction rate lower than than their grandparents and great grandparents. They have clearly bucked the trend of those in times past. Q.E.D.

From the graph I saw the total fertility rate in the US has been falling since 1800 (start of the graph). It briefly improved after WW2 for a bit and then started falling again. There was another brief increase at the end of the 90s and it's been dropping to historical lows ever since. It's not just two generations - it's 200 years and possibly longer.

The graph: https://infogram.com/20221003_gygi_vanessa_calder_fertility-...
Innovation can happend in places where FAA has no say. There are a lot of countries using short distance flights where electric airplanes would drive down costs a lot.

E.g. Scotland, some intercity flights in Europe and between a lot of small islands such as Sint Maarten.

When this happends, the FAA will have to follow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_Tidal_Power_Station

240 MW, built in 1966.
To the downvoters, which part of this analysis do you disagree with and why?
> GIF was, despite patents a dominating image format for a long time and PNG took quite a while to replace it.

Yes, and it caused quite some legal grief for many software vendors.

> If we look at video codecs "open" variants are quite a small part. Heavily patented MPEG dominates the space over webm etc.

We were talking about Open Source Software, not patents. There are lots of OSS codecs for the various MPEG formats.

> Windows still got a very successful proprietary API. (Or set of APIs)

Depends on what you call "successful". Sure, it's been in use, thanks to a quasi-monopoly. But I'm not aware of any other OS implementing the Windows APIs because they think it's a great set of APIs. There are some projects like "wine" that try to implement it to offer compatibility, and it took them many years to make it mostly work.

Would it have been better for society as a whole if Windows had implemented System V APIs instead of their own, proprietary APIs?

Monopolies are the other avenue to introduce new protocols and formats, but apart form that, OSS seems to be the main pathway to introduce them.
Such a tragedy; he leaves behind a wife and two kids (the eldest of which is about 9 yo).

Some pictures of the crashed car at

https://nation.africa/kenya/sports/athletics/shock-as-world-...

> Kiptum lost control of the vehicle, veered off the road, hit a big tree before landing in a ditch about 60 metres away.
I think the real reason is that interest rates are high so growth will be slow for a while so they need to cut headcount in response.
Assuming those people are being compensated for the elder care they provide, why is that selfish?

I remember my grandmother moving in with us for a while when I was a kid. It was miserable. Our house wasn't set up for another bedroom. My parents were both stressed out about it and it put a strain on their relationship. My grandmother certainly wasn't thrilled with the situation.

Certainly not all elder care situations are like that, but I bet grandma would have been way more comfortable in an assisted living situation, where people who are trained could have seen to her needs. And my immediate family would have been way more comfortable too.
Is there _any_ usable profiler on macOS? I've found Instruments to be straight-up useless (very slow, frequently gives just plain wrong results on larger projects) and pretty much every search I've tried just gives “use Instruments”.
Didn’t Imram Ghory invent that?

Which company has a bad Glassdoor score? StackExchange? Fog Creek? Construx? All of the above?
Another factor is transparency.

FOSS software is independently auditable without permission. It does not always happen (few things have "many eyeballs" on them) but it is at least possible. AT the very least, it is a deterrent to malice because of the greater risk of being caught.

Yet another is the reduction in administrative cost because of the simpler licensing requirements.

Another is the the huge difference to distribution between cheap and free to use because there is not payment mechanism needed. it makes trying software easier too.
The point is that we drastically increased our standards along with the wealth.

And I'd say it's fair to say that at this point the standards increased more than the wealth for a fair amount of people.
Would companies like Google or Facebook even exist if they didn't have access to Linux, GCC, etc. in their early beginnings?
Back at fosdem 2002, I remember taking old pentiums boxes and putting a firewire DV card in there, and sending the raw DV frames over the network to another central box.
fwiw every 40yo I know who had kids at that age wish they did it earlier when they had more energy. Wealth building is easier in your 40s however for most
the internet was decades old when http appeared.
Rands is awesome, and “Managing Humans” is just about the best management book I own.
Moving a step closer to defining Open Source AI [video]
Since 2018-19 this topic of employee bloat kept coming up within my circle of friends (late 30s, early/mid 40s). Despite working in big/small orgs I always reacted with massive surprise whenever a team/company said they have X employees, X being an order of magnitude higher than what I expected. And it's not as if I'm not aware of products' complexities, I have had experience in working in and leading small teams that delivered high impact projects. My cohort entered the workforce in mid 2000s when efficiency was paramount.

Now looking back the impact of ZIRP is quite clear. The justification for last yaer's layoffs was rate hikes and macro conditions. This year it's AI. It's as if companies are still quite bloated and they are jumping at the first opportunity to lay them off. AI is just a reason I feel.

Elon demonstrated with Twitter that tech companies can work despite cutting down a good chunk of workforce; CFOs at other companies can now point finger at Twitter and say, look they are still up and running despite cutting down like 80%, what's stopping us from reducing headcount by 15%-20%?

Anyway, I feel middle managers will be the ones hardest hit by these layoffs. I've already begun hearing that line/middle managers are now expected to code; which is a good thing IMO. Will be interesting to see how this plays out this decade.
Title was truncated, it was "pivot to AI valuations"
Deluge, a portable sequencer, synthesizer and sampler
If you think there were good old days were all software was well specified, you are wearing very rose tinted glasses.

We are inventing the field as we go. Have been for the last decades.

Also it's one of those fields where the expert in the topic must build a system for something he is not an expert with.

Again and again.

And most project are custom.

Agile has nothing to do with it.

It's the nature of IT right now.
Same here. To be sure, those women (i.e. my grandmothers) were definitely hard working. Raising lots of children, without "modern" appliances like dishwashers etc. in the household. But the money that came from one income was enough.

> Effectively the worth of income nearly halved.

At least the worth that reaches the worker after taxes etc.
I agree, if you think of just a few big OSS project, like Linux, Postgres, Sqlite, nginx or apache web server, run as proprietary companies each of those would easily be worth way more then $177M (for reference, nginx was sold for $670M in 2019).
> (Same btw. with geothermal?).

Not a chance, we're barely scratching the surface

> More renewable is good.. but there is always one fear in my crazy mind about these

It depends a lot on the rate of maintenance, materials used, &c. For example small windmills are next to useless: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/04/small-windmills-pu...
I'd been using the internet for 14 years before InfoSeek Net Search appeared in 1994, this is honestly the first time I've heard of it.

I don't even consider myself an early user of the internet either, the people I learnt from had already been using it a good while.
https://archive.is/PfgdD
You’re right that nothing is unlimited. Luckily in this case, the energy of waves and tides is given to the oceans mostly by the gravity of the moon pulling the water as it passes overhead. Also a little bit by the wind which is fed by solar heat energy. The moon is slowly moving away from earth and eventually, in hundred of millions of years, it will impart significantly less energy into the tides.

The energy that the moon gives the tides is essentially the same as how the sun gives energy to the ground with light. That is to say: If we don’t collect it, it just gets turned into another kind of energy that is absorbed by the environment. For tides and waves that would be mostly heat, and a little sound. And most of that heat would eventually be radiated back out into space.
So suffice it to say, while there is a finite pool of energy stored in the tides, it is so massive we could never make a difference, and it gets recharged everyday by the moon.
25 is too young to start making those predictions I think. We won’t for a while
twitters advertising revenue is down 54% since musk took over

https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/twitter-x-elon-musk-usag...
New AI tool discovers realistic metamaterials with unusual properties
I saw that it was already being mentioned in this thread. I have tried out both Javalin and Ktor recently but as a beginner I was lost as to what I should choose and why. Given that this thread itself was probably created due to this[0] thread about Spark, I think it is on topic to discuss it here. I will admit, I could have written more than just "what about..", that is my mistake.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39331126
Without getting into whether or not FT’s analysts are correct, wouldn’t redirecting budgets from human employees to AI development also be part of a free market at work? Even more so than responding to zero interest rates and subsequent increases (which are actually caused by an external, “non-capitalist” factor, the state).
More like educated people are more likely to know how to not have babies, and to plan for them, and plan to have them on their schedule.

Certainly that does sometimes translate into not having babies at all.
Does it mean that he has no trust in the UN?

It does not matter much here, but most probably he's not the only one.
I have never heard about the LLM-based solution, but the tests written with help of Cucumber (https://cucumber.io/tools/cucumber-open/) framework looks very similar to what you're asking about.
I met a guy once who had actually done programming with a hand drill.

He was working on an old mainframe that controlled a steel plant and originally this beast booted from paper tape but that had long since been worn away and replaced by a thick leather strap with holes bored in it. He had to modify the boot process so had to get a hand drill out!

I heard this around '94 from a guy in his 40s so it probably happened in the 1970s.
Thanks! Even just one instance running on Windows can be used for a Windows+Linux setup
My sentiment is that we've been getting diminishing returns from cities for quite a few years now and it's time to put some pressure on those who benefit the most from the current situation.

It so happens that the same people insist that we all, especially specialists with considerable disposable income, return to offices.

To reiterate a point I already stated: you won't get cheaper housing when it's seen as an opportunity for passive income. Only making these properties valued less can help here and remote work is the tool for that.
SCSI isn't dead yet – new SSD for old or obsolete systems
TMW is seriously a very interesting game.
Our team's been going full throttle, cooking up all sorts of new stuff and making it even better. The gameplay? Smooth as butter.
Seriously, you gotta try it out!
Universal Analytics, as the new version of Google Analytics, entered the market in 2012.
There's also ocean thermal energy conversion, which exploits the temperature gradient in the ocean.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_convers...
The funniest bits about this sort of argument is that I often see people become completely estranged from their parents because the attitude of 'I need my children to take care of me when I'm older' is like a package deal for a whole host of other shitty behaviors.
In this article, I wanted to share the nearly two-year journey of development of our startup. I believe these insights could be interesting for B2B startup founders and entrepreneurs.
While 28 tonnes appears to be a lot of material for generating 1.2MW of energy, it compares favourably when you look at wind turbines. How often does this need maintenance though?
the tidal systems are insanely vast and powerful. the gravitational pull of the moon and the sun is so large that even if you deploy a massive amount of kits on a small surface, you're unlikely to have an impact on the tides. theoretically it's possible, but it'd require an implausible scale of deployment
Had a very similar experience when I requested a Private Enterprise Number (PEN) in the early 00s.

I was doing some experimentation with LDAP, mailman and identity based encryption and needed some OIDs to support my undergraduate project work.

Private Enterprise Numbers are identifiers that can be used in SNMP configurations, in LDAP configurations, and wherever the use of an ASN.1 object identifier (OID) is appropriate.

So I went about signing up my university for a PEN. It helped that I also worked for the IT Services team at the time but I distinctly remember the request being done by email with the response more of less being "here's your number". :)

To my knowledge, I believe I'm the only person who has made use of the PEN assigned to the university.
Brows: Keyboard-centric file browser for Windows
Trust in traditional currency shaken quite significantly in last 3 years. Especially when inflation ruins many businesses and government justify inflation by war and green energy.

When you cannot make living from money that you get from your hard work, naturally, you are forced to look at alternatives. As more people adopt cryptocurrencies, the less value traditional currencies had and eventually ignores inflation. Which, for now, bitcoins does. It just isn't that much popular yet.

No one would expect ten years ago that some cryptocurrency would survive or be adopted by more and more people. But somehow, it's still there and grows every year.

If crypto wouldn't be a thing, there wouldn't be plans for digital Euro by ECB for example. Basically same thing as BTC, except with regulations with centralized bank.

To be clear, I'm not a fan of digital currencies. Cash is still most private and free way of exchange method. For digital, you need electricity, device and data which many cannot afford to have.
> We're about to hit increasingly aggressive competition both to hold on to people, and to attract immigrants as more and more countries start getting bitten by demographic shifts.

And yet we are seeing more and more walls (literally and figuratively) that rich countries put in the way. Even for "desirable" people immigrating and naturalizing in a western country the whole process is quite degrading, all the quotas and queues for H1B/Green cards, constant threat of deportation if person lost a job and couldn't find another one in very short time period, arbitrary delays and constrains on getting citizenship, etc.
> 7T is 8% of global gdp

Formally, that's not the correct analogy, but very creepy, as it sounds pretty similar (however not equivalent) to asking for 8% of the world population to be his project slaves.
People are no longer looking for ML , they’re looking for LLM.
You do realize that good specifications and requirements do not necessarily mean trivial and easy implementation?

Also, indeed, not all dev work is equally costly / hard / basic. It’s a crazy thought, but maybe that’s partially the reason why different devs can have different pay grades. :O
After playing with AI for a bit and letting my own hype die down, I see something that will undeniably be useful and improve productivity, but still require skillful application and only help at a relatively low level. It doesn't reason or create new things, but it does useful low-level work and eliminates drudgery.

In that sense it reminds me of spreadsheets and short python scripts. We've had those for a while and they have not displaced so the entire workforce.
What to do when everyone around you hates Lego
> Natural selection will make that desire stronger over time.

Natural selection doesn't work like that.

There is no guarantee that traits appear because they are needed ; only that traits that somehow appear may spread if they are useful or associated with something else that is useful.
New Zealand and Ireland? You're wildly off. Both countries extremely expensive and hard to get by in.
It's snarky, but I think it's in good faith.

People used to value the labor of their children. At the dystopian tail-end of it, they valued selling it on the market, which is what's being referenced.

But, generally, my impression from light reading is people throughout history thought of children as progressing pretty quickly into helpfulness. Now, though, people have jobs children can't help with, ever, which keep them too busy to project-manage children into helpfulness around the house. So people have them exclusively for their company (which, again my impression from light reading, has not been at all the historical norm).
You do realise this system is unsustainable, though ? We just cannot grow infinitely just because .end of life care costs money.

We are way too many, and the #1 source of global warming is human activity. At one point we'll have to stop growing, so the system of how we pay for elderly care has to change.
Ask HN: Reading around PKI, client certificates, vaults etc.
I am trying to refresh and write up my understanding of security and authentication

I am hoping to keep it based around private/public keys and certificates- so having a CA we trust, having each server hold a certificate, having each client / web browser hold a certificate.

I am sure there was a simple approach but I seem to have gotten lost in okta, oauth, AWS and so on

I am no longer sure I get it and would value any pointers to reading folks may have
From what I remember, what was illegal was exporting a (useful) encryption library, and that Wikipedia link supports my memory: It talks about exporting munitions. I remember at the time that even though libraries existed inside the US they weren't supposed to be exported to other countries (i.e. the rest of us should get encryption libraries developed outside the US). Nothing prevented US citizens in the US to use encryption. Nothing in that "cryptography is considered munitions" legal issue, at least, because that was about export.
My biggest gripe with FOSDEM has been the same for over 20 years: the doors to devrooms should remain firmly closed during a talk. It's so annoying (and disrespectful) when people come and go during talks. The seats and tables are all very noisy, the accoustics tend to be poor. The best way to attend dev room talks is by watching the videos. Sigh. I wish people would just be polite enough to wait outside when a talk is already in progress. Or at least bother to enter quietly.

The criticism of Brussels is warranted. There is a serious lack of public toilets in Belgium in general, but it's worse in Brussels due to the population density and prevalence of poverty. The trash situation is something I've been meaning to write an essay on, but two words to sum it up: political incompetence.
I build guitars in my spare time. Definitely not a luthier, more a hobbyist mainly because guitar is also my main hobby.

I like the woodworking because the results are immediate. Nothing is ever the same, either. Different woods have different properties. Different batches of the same wood can be different. Lots of surprises.

No project has ever been smooth sailing from start to finish, so you always learn something new.

Making your own tools - jigs, templates, modifying tools, etc. - is a huge part of the process.

And there are so many parts to the process...in professional setting, you have workers that only work on small number of tasks, since they're experts on said tasks. But as a hobbyist, you just have to learn a bit of everything.

Though some parts can be really tedious (sanding being the worst), it is very rewarding to start seeing results. I absolutely loathe the finishing/painting process, but getting a mirror-like sheen is very rewarding, after spending all that time wet-sanding a surface.
Here's my related guess: many people want to wait until they feel in an appropriate position personally and financially before they have children. That might mean earning a certain amount or feeling like they have a foothold in home ownership or waiting for a future renovation. Only, the world in 2010+ constantly exposes you to bigger options on top of the issue of housing affordability: more adventures, more expensive furnishings, stories of others' salaries, etc. It would be quite easy to push back child-rearing for 5 or more years if you didn't feel like you were quite where you wanted to be, or wonder if you'll ever get there.
> “Destroying jobs” is pretty much a _good_ thing.

It's not destroying only jobs, it's destroying those people's probably the sole profit source, with their families, health, lives.

Calling it a "good thing" is basically calling for a human genocide.
JS is necessary to maintain state, can this be done with CSS and HTML?

Also, I'd say that manipulation of CSS classes and HTML elements with JS gives the developer quite a strong understanding of them.