skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Add to that insane workaholic culture, like the "996" culture that pervades China and South Korea. Look into South Korea's birth rates for an extreme example of what this does. People don't have time to even date, let alone marry or raise kids. Japan's "salaryman" culture is another example.

Note that many of the loudest population decline doomers (e.g. Musk) also push exactly this work culture, and are generally opposed to social welfare of the sort that would make it easier for people to have children.

Their solution seems to be to take rights away from women. Not only do I find this odious, but I don't think it will work either. I think it will result in something like the also South Korean 4B movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4B_movement -- which will further depress birth rates. People who have tasted freedom do not go back without a fight. If you tell women they have to give up their rights and have babies, they will respond by refusing to have babies. Then there's the fact that men who actually care about their wives, sisters, and daughters, will not support this either.

The root problem with birth rates is this: modern society transforms children from an asset into an economic burden. In un-developed societies children are needed as both labor and old age insurance. In developed societies both of these can be obtained more easily, or are supplied by the economy and/or the state. I can sit here and write code and obtain both of those alone. I don't even need a spouse to do it, let alone kids.

It's a direct consequence of societal wealth, which is why you see birth rates decline in all wealthier societies regardless of culture, language, ethnicity, or religion.

This neatly disproves the far right's idea that pushing trad right bullshit will raise birth rates. Birth rates are as low in Orban's Hungary and Putin's Russia as they are in the rest of Europe. Very Catholic Poland has a lower birth rate than much less religious Sweden (as of 2023). Very Islamic Iran's birth rate is the same as the Bahamas and lower than less religious Argentina. Birth rates are declining in Africa as it develops.

If we want higher birth rates, we will probably have to do what we do with other things the free market is inadequate at providing: directly subsidize birth and child raising. It's the same reason we directly subsidize infrastructure and defense, other things the free market isn't great at providing.

A start would be to greatly increase the child tax credit, provide free birth and post-natal care, free preschool, and do something about the runaway cost of college. Start by making it easy for people who want to have kids to have them. Then, if that's not enough, consider even more direct subsidies.

Maybe the Social Security system in the US could be reimagined as a demographic support system that funds both ends of the curve: free health care and support for birth and child raising, and end of life support and care. They're connected of course. You need the former to keep providing the latter.
Thats why no laws should be possible to pass without a 2/3 vote. 50% + 1 vote will always lead to a weak mandate and an accusation of tyranny. Let them haggle and if it's not worth passing at 2/3 of a vote it's not worth passing at all.
Predict Tomorrow's Financial Markets Today with the Best Financial AI
Espressif's Response to Undocumented Commands in ESP32 Bluetooth by Tarlogic
Its not always that easy. I specifically bought a Zenfone 9 due to its small size and unlockable bootloader. Guess what - Asus removed the bootloader unlock tool after I purchased the device. Can't trust anyone these days
Amazon steps up use of robotics in warehouses
All the creative output of mankind, reduced to fodder for feeding a hungry probability machine.
A couple years ago I did some experimenting with applying Ansible ideas on a smaller scale (like a shell script rather than operating on fleets of machines). I started off with using YAML and some alternate syntaxes, because I was coming from ansible.

But then I decided I really kind of despise "programming" in YAML (conditionals and loops in particular). So I adapted Ansible ideas to Python, in particular: idempotent commands and notifications (commands triggered later, when another set of commands make a change; like restarting apache after making a bunch of config changes).

https://github.com/linsomniac/uplaybook?tab=readme-ov-file
We had a similar experience at my house one time, except it was in a bowl and all we saw was blood in the yoke. It had not been quite as developed as the one in your egg.
Interesting. I literally switched to Debian (finally!) because of this change (which debuted in the most recent major release, Debian 12 "bookworm").

I'd always wanted to (because Ubuttnu sucks, Fedora seemed like it would get all-wet from Red Hat pissing on their derivatives (which finally did happen just as the prophesies foretold), so I was using Arch which is, I mean fine — or at least okay — but just not the O.G. daddy linux that I wanted).

Not that it is insane to deal with getting the non-free firmware yourself on like, one real hardware machine, or a couple machines, but I took this change to mean Debian was sort of growing up from the Richard Stallman-level purity in favor of moving the lever one notch over toward the side of pragmatism.

As an aside, there's a full-thread index that reveals the scope of the discussion, which may not be obvious if you just click the link at the top of this thread: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/03/threads.html#0...
Very unlikely that you'll see mass-use of LLMs as opponents. Enemy AI in most games doesn't need the level of complexity that machine learning demands. (Ignoring computational costs for a second.)

The main goal of an enemy AI isn't to be the hardest thing in the world, it's to provide an interesting challenge for the player to overcome. It's not necessarily difficult to make a hypercompetent AI in most games, but that also wouldn't make it very interesting to play against. Most games have finite states of logic, just large enough to the point where a human would have trouble finding every solution to it (although humans tend to be very good at pushing on the edges of these states to find ways around them).

Even in games where the amount of state is much higher than usual, you rarely want a super AI; nobody likes playing against an aimbot in an FPS for example.

Factorio is an outlier because unlike regular games, the true condition for a "victory" is almost entirely up to the player. You can make a rocket in non-DLC Factorio (the games victory condition) without building any factory at all beyond the most basic structures for stuff you can't handcraft. It'd be extremely slow, but it's an option. That's why the benchmark for this sort of thing is more efficiency than it is "can this work".
I feel actively annoyed by the amount of public gaslighting I see about AI. It may get there in the future, but there is nothing more frustrating than seeing utter bullshit being spouted as truth.
Oh, I see now you've edited that to say:

> They achieved it a few times before in 10000 lines (Smalltalk-80 and earlier versions), a little over 20000 (Frank) and 300000 lines (Squeak/Etoys/Croquet)

Smalltalk-80 is significantly more than 10kloc. 6–10kloc gets you a Blue Book virtual machine without the compiler, editor, GUI, class library, etc. The full system is about 80kloc (Cuis is a currently runnable version of it, plus color: https://cuis.st/). Nobody's seen Frank (though you say you have a mostly working copy, I note that you haven't included a link). The 300kloc estimate for Squeak with all the trappings is at least in the ballpark but probably also a bit low.

None of the three contained spreadsheets, "social media" similar to Mastodon or MySpace, or a web browser, though they did contain a different piece of software they called a "browser" (the currently popular term for such software is "IDE" or "editor".)

You could implement those features inside that complexity budget, as long as you weren't trying to implement all of JS or HTML5, but they didn't. In the case of Smalltalk-80, those things hadn't been invented yet—though hypertext had, and Smalltalk-80 didn't even include a hypertext browser, though it has some similar features in its IDE. In the other cases it's because they didn't think it was a good idea for their purposes. The other two systems do support hypertext, at least.

These systems are indeed very inspirational, and they pack a lot of functionality into a small amount of code, but exaggerating their already remarkable achievements does nobody any favors.
I'd place most of the blame at the feet of modern agile tbh (as practiced by the majority of actual software companies). it makes you pay the cost of agile (so much communication) and makes worse products than waterfall, because now nobody ever has the whole context when writing something. you have to focus on the tiny little ticket you've been given or face the wrath of the team and having to defend your decision to work on something else.
I know a bank in Sweden that does _not_ do this and apparently runs various batch jobs at something like 1-3 am. So, one night I made a transaction to it and it looked just fine in the app, then it was mysteriously gone in the morning! On the receiving side; my cash had still been withdrawn! I called the support and we eventually realized that no, you shouldn't do transfers at 2 am on a Saturday because it's likely to fail and then we have to wait for the weekend to be over for them to reappear. I was like... "Alright, thanks. But maybe you should close your app these hours..."

The software engineer within me shudders at the thought of running batch jobs in production while there are ongoing transactions, and where conflicts can and are fully expected to happen.
Moreover, I'm thinking that modern information tools (Internet, polls, tracking, etc). have lead to better and more accurate forecasting, which in turn allowed the parties to apply ever narrower targeting at hyper-focused groups and minimize wasted effort past getting the majority needed to win elections. Basically as there is less and less noise the battles get closer and closer to the theoretical equilibrium point.

And this is bad because it causes huge shifts based on the whims of what, fractions of a percent of the population?
There is a "big 3" rule to understand some capex intensive markets (in capitalistic markets with antitrust regulations), for example telco with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile (similar for other countries), and for ride-sharing Uber, Lyft, and Bolt, etc.
I consider code bad if it takes more then 5 seconds to read and understand the high level goal of a function.

Doesn't matter how it looks. If its not possible to understand what a function accomplishes within a reasonable amount of time (without requiring hours upon hours of development experience), it's simply bad.
I definitely agree that planning is essential to perform well in Factorio - my hope is that we can create agents in FLE that can better front-load the planning part, as well as create utility functions for future use - such that as the agent progresses, it can do more and more in each program / step. For example, it could create a function called 'resolve_resource_dependencies', which would enable it to backfill missing resources in order to proceed.

LLMs tend to build themselves into corners here quite often. Basically, if they break the topology (e.g enclose their factory in pipes) they struggle to reason over it and correct it. My basic view on this is that there exists some set of functions/data-structures that they can design in FLE, which will give them a better view over their factory to enable scaling (if the models take a step back to consider it).

We currently do track SPM, but decided against making that our main metric, as it zeroes out in the early stages. We use 'production score' instead, which is a more generalised metric that just captures total production (multiplied by an item-price).

There was a cool paper that came out a few years ago using meta-heuristics to do this, (https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04871), but I reckon the combinatorial complexity of large factories makes it challenging to solve beyond trivial factories.

Its worth noting that agents in FLE can write their own libraries etc, so a dominant strategy could be for an LLM agent to implement a solver in Python to do the heavy lifting. This is quite far from current capabilities though.
They probably eat a lot more protein than their parents.
I exclusively fly Southwest for my work trips between LA and SF several times a month. It's more chill and the flight credits don't expire. I hope they continue to allow flight credits without any cancellation fees. Otherwise I have no reason to fly Southwest exclusively anymore.
If and only if the host's serial or HCI driver has some undocumented exploit to gain code execution. (They probably don't)
Saying it's the aim is a ridiculous caricature along the same lines as people on the left who say that MAGA is a Russian-backed fifth column deliberately trying to destroy America.

My own position is in the now-forbidden middle.

There does seem to be such thing as a socially sustainable rate of immigration, and exceeding it clearly seems to cause problems. That means immigration can help some with declining population, but there's a limit to how much lifting it can do without causing a backlash or other issues.

It also probably matters a lot where the immigrants are coming from and why they are coming. People who immigrate because they want to join your country and do productive things are great. Refugees who are just fleeing something are going to be harder to assimilate and probably will impose costs, while immigrants who want to come usually impose a net gain.

I'm generally in favor of helping refugees if we are able for humanitarian reasons, but I think governments allowing such people in have to be realistic about what kind of support they need to provide. Just dropping them off on the street en masse doesn't seem to work out well.
Too little vram.
Those look like mostly nonsense tweaks to put a "paywall"/"sign-in wall" on content. They have mostly made the service less useful to the world.
While then Uncle Bob clean code movement has a lot of answer for, it is far far better than much of what came before. I've had to work with 60,000 line functions where #ifdefs worked across brace boundaries

...
#ifndef foo
break;
case SomeCondition:
doSomething().
#endif
moreCode();
break;

I'll take the worse uncle Bob can throw at me over that mess.
Desktop-wise there's https://msty.app which is rather good but not open source. I'm using OpenWeb UI [1] with a desktop shortcut but that's a web app.

1 - https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui
What's surprising to me is how many ex government employees they're able to find who voted for Trump and just didn't think they would get downsized because they're actually doing what they're supposed to be doing. I think it's interesting that Trump consistently gets the benefit of the doubt even in cases where the people he puts in positions of power pretty clearly intended to demoralize people by firing them.
not that I've done the LOC calculations, but I would guess Alan Kay, etc. include, e.g., Etoys, the equivalent of paint, and some games in what they consider to be their personal computing system, and therefore in the ~20 kLOC.

and hardware is one of the crucial points Alan makes in his talks. the way he describes it, hardware is a part of your system and is something you should be designing, not buying from vendors. the situation would be improved if vendors made their chips configurable at runtime with microcode. it doesn't seem like a coincidence to me that a lof of big tech companies are now making their own chips (Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft are all doing this now). part of it is the AI hype (a mistake in my opinion, but I might be completely wrong there, time will tell). but maybe they are also discovering that, while you can optimize your software for your hardware, you can also optimize your hardware for the type of software you are trying to write.

another point is that any general purpose computer can be used to simulate any other computer, i.e. a virtual machine. meaning if software is bundled with its own VM and your OS doesn't get in the way, all you need for your softare to run on a given platform is an implementation of the VM for the platform. which I think begs many questions such as "how small can you make your OS" and "is it possible generate and optimize VM implementations for given hardware".

also something that came to mind is a general point on architecture, again from Alan Kay's ideas. he argues that biological systems (and the Internet, specifically TCP/IP, which he argues takes inspiration from biology) have the only architecture we know of that scales by many orders of magnitude. other architectures stop working when you try to make them significantly bigger or significantly smaller. which makes me wonder about much of hardware architecture being essentially unchanged for decades (with a growing number of exceptions), and likewise with software architecture (again with exceptions, but it seems to me like modern-day Linux, for instance, is not all that different in its core ideas to decades-old Unix systems).
Show HN: Hide messages in astrology readings to control your friends
Built this freemium astrology service that can be totally biased by whatever you put in to the secret other site: https://www.neptunesheart.com

Here we suggested they go to therapy and in "Chiron" it says "Consider the path of therapy or self-reflection":
https://www.neptuneschart.com/?v=HAU0m1MC9F

Here is a product demo video where you can see how it all works:
https://www.loom.com/share/78140a2721e9409a9f1629c7c669e782?...
I think the consensus appears to be summed up here, with the response from wraw at debian:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/03/msg00185.html
As much as I love Firefox, the only thing I can read here is: We have failed to diversify, and we would really like our yearly $400 million to pay our CEO
FLE agents technically can implement their own Python libraries to leverage GOFAI to do the heavy lifting. None has actually attempted this yet though. It would be interesting to see if this can be achieved just by modifying the manual given to the agents to bias in favour of this approach.
The diagonal belts and diagonal pipes are especially cursed.
To be clear: it's not a notable character thing. Yes, yes, some people are uncorruptible paragons who'd never bend to the will of an autocrat, not matter the personal cost. Most of us aren't. Bezos isn't. The notable people are the paragons, not the bland rule-followers.
Sesame represents a transformative approach to human-computer interaction, positioning itself at the frontier of conversational AI and wearable technology. The company envisions a future where computers become lifelike entities that see, hear, and collaborate with humans in natural ways, with voice interaction serving as the cornerstone of this paradigm shift. This comprehensive analysis explores the technical foundations, potential applications, and broader implications of Sesame's vision, examining how their approach could fundamentally reshape our relationship with technology and herald a new era of ambient intelligence.
If the existing weights don't let it ask the right questions, assuming it is properly fit, why would retraining it fix the problem?
Captchas have become so annoying to solve. I've spent minutes resolving captchas over and over without success so many times in recent memory.
The Impact of Opportunity Zones on Housing Supply
Show HN: Generate Version 7 UUID's for a Timestamp
I use UUIDv7's in multiple places as an efficient index in Postgres. When querying this data I usually need to be able to query between a time range so wanted to have a quick way to generate a reference ID that I could use in a BETWEEN query.

All the simple, fast tools I found online were focused on generating bulk ids or converting from an ID to a timestamp rather than the other way around, so I wrote one myself.

For example if I wanted to find everything that happened between 2025-03-11T13:00:00.000Z and 2025-03-11T13:59:59.999Z I can type in the timestamp, select earliest (or latest) to get the min/max and copy the identifiers of 0195854a-6480-7000-8000-000000000000 and 01958581-52ff-7fff-bfff-ffffffffffff

Sharing in case someone else finds it as useful as I do.
> you'd absolutely have to collaborate to ever do anything

You could also refuse to collaborate to do everything. This would result in an anarchist system where power/money has the ability to do whatever they want without regulatory oversight and the public are unable to vote to give themselves any rights they can't take by force.
You can't fire free.
> Both factions commit resources to the electoral contest to secure a mere one percent advantage

That only makes sense if the factions are interchangeable for their members, i.e. if it's the same to them whether they win as part of one faction or the other, as long as they're on the winning side in the end.

And I'm pretty sure that's not true for most regular people.

It may be true for large corporations and wealthy individuals, though.
You know, the YouTube app on my Amazon FireCube recently started prompting me to log in every time I open it. I don't have to authenticate or anything but I do have to choose a profile.

This started a couple of months ago and I didn't really think anything about it. However, it appears as if this behavior might have been a precursor to this new DRM initiative.

Every day, YouTube gives me more reasons to avoid it completely.
Representative democracy is not a technical challenge, it's a human challenge. If reigned in, electing representatives to act on your behalf is a far better system because being even close to informed on the topics and nuance and long-term thinking it takes to govern is a full time job that most people simply are not equipped - in terms of time and expertise - to handle. And we don't even have guaranteed holiday time to research and vote once every year, let alone every few days as this would require.

Sucks that they keep electing lunatics. But do you really think the party who ran almost entirely on hurting others wouldn't independently vote for hurting others? Or that the 100,000,000 people who didn't vote to stop it would suddenly vote? Or that people wouldn't look toward leaders and form parties so they can quickly get a feel of the room based on like minds?

Politicians being corrupt is, at the end of the day, mostly the fault of the people. They refuse to hold them accountable. I mean, they elected a convicted felon - a convicted rapist - an impeached president - a known con man and womanizer - who works with dictators and mafias and tried to overthrow America. And they're still cheering on every insane idea.
Engineering Reasoning LLMs: Notes and Observations
You can't just personal responsibility your way out of deeply-ingrained societal issues.
Confirmed at our household. Carmen, our dog, never watches tv, but she was entranced by Flow. She kept staring at it, then looking at us, and then looking back at the tv, like “Are you seeing this?”
Heygem AI: China's Open Source Heygen and Synthesia Alternative
Made by a Chinese Company "Silicon Intelligence", still Windows-only but looks interesting.
It is "hardest" in a context of the AI actually having a chance.

There's no problem asking AI for the blueprints to a working faster-than-light spaceship, only we already know the AI will fail, and the way it fails provides no useful information.
You are right, and thanks. Typing on mobile with alternative keyboard without spelling correction is a challenge. I was fortunate enough to be on a part Dutch/English primary school. That helped a lot with getting a lot of assumptions corrected. For instance as a kid I assumed the English word for "monkey" is "ape", because the Dutch word is "aap".
> And what the numbers show is that a 10% drop happens on average every 1.2 years

Is the market done dropping?