MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by itsme0000 | 2025-10-12 05:16:42+00:00
I saw many therapists and I have pretty mixed feelings about it. I honestly it did a lot for me when a therapist simply said “Wow that’s a bad situation I feel really bad for you. It so unfair.”

But anytime I looked for instructions or objectives on how to improve my life they would basically say “I can’t tell you exactly what to do, you need to come to that conclusion for yourself.” The problem was I genuinely didn’t know what to do. They always tried to see things from my side, but never really believed that spending my night in a drunken stupor watching TV until I passed out was actually contributing to my happiness more than being in agony every night slowly building my contempt for humanity. Even though it’s against their training, they can’t help but judge you lifestyle and unusually that manifests as silence on important issues instead of disagreement.
by nostrademons | 2025-10-12 05:16:53+00:00
> told me it take years to get to the core.

So FWIW, that part is true. I started therapy in 2012. I got to the core in 2020, after going through 4 different therapists. Along the way I founded about 15 startups, missed out on roughly $2M in lost wages, almost divorced my wife and walked out on my kid, thought seriously about killing myself, and needed a global pandemic to finally get my life in order. But I did eventually get my life back. And I didn't even get involved with any drugs or chemical dependencies; video games were my worst addiction.

The reason it takes so long is because a therapist will never tell you the problem, they need you to experience it for yourself. That is part of the point. As one of the better therapists I saw (the last one, actually, the one that got me through the breakthrough) said: "One of the ways to make feelings go away is to, well, feel them." Until your brain has the capacity to distinguish your feelings from existence, separate them out, and then push through some often very unpleasant, potentially life-ending feelings and actually feel them, you'll usually tend to end up deflecting or coping with them.

Much of the process of therapy involves stripping away these coping mechanisms and seeing what the feelings are beneath them. And that takes years, and has to be done in parallel with your life, because living your life is the point of therapy. That's why my first therapist encouraged me to try getting involved in my first relationship, even though I suspected I would end up hurt by it. (I ended up marrying and having three kids with her - the youngest is currently sleeping with his foot draped over me. And yes, I gave up nearly all my dreams and everything I thought was my identity for her.) That's why my therapist encouraged me to quit my highly-paid but soul-sucking FANG job to follow my startup dreams. Until you're actually in those situations, where you are risking your ego and living with vulnerability, you're not in a position to process the feelings that arise from them.

Possibly the best advice I got - from a random stranger on Reddit, not a therapist - was to think of your therapist as a guide, not a fixer or even an expert. You do the work of figuring out yourself, and it takes years, perhaps a lifetime. The therapist is there to make sure you don't hurt yourself and to keep the focus on your real issues, because when it comes to unpleasant feelings, the natural inclination is to avoid them. It almost doesn't matter if they're any good, as long as they adhere to a basic code of ethics and professional conduct, because all of the heavy lifting and all the major discoveries are made by you yourself.
by DuckConference | 2025-10-12 05:18:10+00:00
One of the famous small canadian mining companies that went under was named something like Bre-X, somehow a lot of members of the general public had shares of it so it was a big scandal on the news when it went under. Also as it was unraveling a whistleblower at the company "fell" from a helicopter in indonesia, I don't recall if anyone was ever charged or convicted for that.

EDIT: Oh damn it was far sketchier than I recalled and he wasn't a whistleblower. From wikipedia:

The fraud began to unravel rapidly beginning on March 19, 1997, when Bre-X geologist Michael de Guzman reportedly died of suicide by jumping from a helicopter in Indonesia.[11][12] A body was found four days later in the jungle, missing the hands and feet, "surgically removed".[13] In addition, the body was reportedly mostly eaten by animals.[14] According to journalist John McBeth, a body had gone missing from the morgue of the town from which the helicopter flew. The remains of "de Guzman" were found only 400 metres from a logging road. No one saw the body except another Filipino geologist who claimed it was de Guzman. One of the five women who considered themselves to be his wife was receiving monetary payments from somebody long after the supposed death of de Guzman.[13]
by signatoremo | 2025-10-12 05:18:40+00:00
> - People who like the act and craftsmanship of coding itself. AI can encourage slop from other engineers and it trivializes the work. AI is a negative.

Those who value craftsmanships would value LLM, since they can pick up new languages or frameworks much faster. They can then master the newly acquired skills on their own if preferred, or they can use LLM to help along the way.

> People who like product. AI can be useful for prototyping but won’t won’t be able to make a good product on its own. It’s a tool.

Any serious product often comprises of multiple modules, layers, interfaces. LLM can help greatly with building some of those building blocks. Definitely a useful tool for product building.
by bravetraveler | 2025-10-12 05:18:42+00:00
At a certain point one is "maintaining 0". High is "not on the floor writhing or worse."

That said, there can be signs. You may find them normalized from exposure. Or, perhaps: hidden, your cousin maintained appearances. With time and circumstance, everyone slips. Sometimes it's seen.

My (much older) brother managed his addiction, and appearances, well at work for decades. Now clean, thank goodness.
by x0x0 | 2025-10-12 05:19:28+00:00
I'm the same, with the same question if it's me.

I've had success with eg spitting out templated html; sometimes with css; sometimes with writing tests where I'm very specific about what I want (set up these structures, test this condition), etc. It's mediocre (good start, very far from production) with writing screens in react native. It does slightly better on rails, but far from production ready.

After that, it kinda works, but my effort level to turn the output into working code is higher than just writing it myself.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-12 05:19:53+00:00
Actually you are wrong again.

I guess because you realized that my reality wasn’t in fact “distorted” you had to try a different tack now I’m suffering from “stockholm syndrome” because I spent $7 for ad blocking in 2014…

I don’t have the web extension installed. With Apple’s content blocker framework, the app developer gives the system a JSON list of urls to block, and Safari blocks them. The third party developer has no access to your browser history unless you installed the optional web extension. The content blocking framework was introduced over a decade ago.

Even if you didn’t understand this concept because you aren’t interested in iOS, it’s the same concept that Google is doing with ManifestV2

You went from “look at what the internet says” to claiming I was in a reality distortion field before you tried it yourself to “it’s closed source and they can see your browsing history and it injects JS code” - which isn’t true.

To “oh gawd” you (now) have to pay $40 one time fee and it’s yours forever.

I paid $6 for the “legacy” version 11 years ago and have used it since. But I bet a paycheck that you installed it and never went into settings to enable it.

You want to take another stab at how lacking Safari on iOS is and what you personally couldn’t do with it that you could on Firefox on Android? I posted screenshots where you are wrong.
by abustamam | 2025-10-12 05:21:57+00:00
When I used to work as a technician at a medical school circa 2008, updating OS versions was a huge deal that required months of preparations and lots of employee training to ensure things like this didn't happen.

Not trying to say that you could have prevented this; I would not be surprised if Windows 10 enterprise decided to "helpfully" turn on auto updates and updated itself with its fun new "features" on next computer restart.
by TheCapeGreek | 2025-10-12 05:22:51+00:00
You can say that for a fair few of the services mentioned by GP.

Google killed a lot of things to consolidate them into more "integrated" (from their perspective) product offerings. Picasa -> Photos, Hangounts -> Meet, Music -> YT Premium.

No idea what NFC Wallet was, other than the Wallet app on my phone that still exists and works?

The only one I'm not sure about is Chromecast - a while back my ones had an "update" to start using their newer AI Assistant system for managing it. Still works.
by godelski | 2025-10-12 05:24:39+00:00
> I never said all cases.

You're right. My bad. I inferred that through the context of the conversation.

> If it works sometimes and not others, it's not a law.

I think you are misreading and that is likely what lead to the aforementioned misunderstanding. You're right that it isn't a scientific law, but the term "law" gets thrown around a lot in a more colloquial manner. Unfortunately words are overloaded and have multiple meanings. We do the same thing to "hypothesis", "paradox", and lots of other things. I hope this clarifies the context. (even many of the physics laws aren't as strong as you might think)

But there are many "laws" used in the same form. They're eponymous laws[0], not scientific ones. Read "adage". You'll also find that word used in the opening sentence on the Wiki article I linked as well as most (if not all) of them in [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws
by marttt | 2025-10-12 05:25:13+00:00
Thought about Non immediately, but I figured it must have (had) about 2 other users amongst HNers, though. :) Nice to see it mentioned.

I used it quite a bit to produce radio shows for my country's public broadcasting. Because Non's line-oriented session format was so easy to parse with classic Unix tools, I wrote a bunch of scripts for it with Awk etc. (E.g. calculating the total length of clips highlighted with brown color in the DAW -- which was stuff meant for editing out; or creating a poor man's "ripple editing" feature by moving loosely-placed clips precisely side by side; or, eventually, converting the sessions to Samplitude EDL format, and, from there, to Pro Tools via AATranslator [1] (because our studio was using PT), etc. Really fun times!)

1: https://aatranslator.com.au/
by abustamam | 2025-10-12 05:25:57+00:00
It's fun that the working class bears the brunt of the mistakes of management.

Manager: hey let's go all in on this fancy new toy! We'll all be billionaires!

Employee: oh yeah I will work nights and weekends with no pay for this! I wanna be a billionaire!

Manager: actually it failed, we ran out of money, you no longer have a job... But at least we didn't build skynet, right?
by LexiMax | 2025-10-12 05:26:08+00:00
The grandparent comment isn't "against AI" - it's against low-effort participation. When you paste raw AI output without even reading it critically, you're essentially saying "I care so little about this discussion that I won't spend 60 seconds engaging with it myself."

You ask why we should care whether it's AI-generated. Here's why: unedited AI responses often contain hallucinations, miss context from the thread, and make arguments the poster doesn't actually understand or stand behind. When challenged, can you defend the points "you" made? Do you even know what they are?

More fundamentally, forums like HN are built on human discourse - people sharing their knowledge, experience, and perspectives. When you automate your participation, you're taking from the community (reading others' contributions) while giving nothing of yourself back. You're treating other humans as if they exist to process your LLM's output.

If a topic matters enough to you to hit "reply," it should matter enough to formulate your own response. If it doesn't, just move on. Nobody benefits from discussions cluttered with unvetted AI text from people who couldn't be bothered to engage.

---

Thus spake Claude Sonnet.
by johngossman | 2025-10-12 05:27:35+00:00
The author interviews both Pico Iyer and Alex Kerr. I can't recommend these two authors highly enough. Iyer's "The Lady and the Monk" and Kerr's "Another Kyoto" are worth reading even if you don't travel to Japan.

I was in Kyoto last year for two weeks. There are still lots of places where you can be completely alone in nature or a garden or a lovely street. But "the Big Five" are off limits unless you love human traffic jams.

That said, Gion before 10am is practically empty. You can wander around and look at the architecture. And I know quiet places within five blocks of central Gion.

I have mixed feelings about even saying this. Please, don't go . But if you are a respectful, slow traveler, Kyoto is still doable.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-10-12 05:28:13+00:00
> If the US SEC were replaced by 50 per-state SECs, you'd probably see Alaska or Wyoming becoming the scam capitals because they lack the resources to properly regulate.

Sure, but BC is 10× the population of Wyoming, so that's not really the best comparison. Plus, Delaware is tiny, yet their business regulations are fairly strong.
by w10-1 | 2025-10-12 05:28:53+00:00
I'm grateful to those tracking and publishing this information, but as smoking guns go, the evidence doesn't seem particularly compelling.

China announced their rare-earth restrictions on 10/9. Trump predictably over-reacts with tariffs on 10/10. The trader had plenty of reason to expect new tariffs, and some reason to expect Bitcoin to go down.

If I were corrupt, I'd always make sure there was some justifying event in advance of my trade, even if I knew there was to be some precipitating event for a market swing. Plausible deniability.
by nostrademons | 2025-10-12 05:29:28+00:00
> The problem was I genuinely didn’t know what to do.

That is the problem, yes.

I think a lot of the confusion from people just beginning their psychotherapeutic journey is that they think the point of therapy is to make them happier. No. The point of therapy is to make them happier, and sadder, and angrier, and more driven, and aware of their fear, and connected to their shame and guilt, and able to love. In short, it's to give you perspective on emotions, so that you can feel them on a minute-to-minute basis and decide what you want to do, and realize that "because you want to do it" is just as valid as any other reason, if not more.

> spending my night in a drunken stupor watching TV until I passed out was actually contributing to my happiness more than being in agony every night slowly building my contempt for humanity

A therapist would be naturally conflicted about this, because spending your night in a drunker stupor watching TV will make you happier, but being in agony every night slowly building your contempt for humanity is the work that needs to be done. The point of therapy is to help your understand a.) that you are in agony every night and b.) why are you building your contempt for humanity? It's to help you feel the emotions, and to feel them as emotions, and then to eventually integrate them into your life in a way that is constructive.
Show HN: I made an esoteric programming language that's read like a spellbook
by sirbread | 2025-10-12 05:31:00+00:00
i made an esoteric programming language which i call spellscript. every program is a "spell" written in a "grimoire," and you have to use keywords like summon, enchant, inscribe, and conjure.

it's literally read like a spellbook because the syntax consists of all natural language, and newlines are optional. your code can now be an essay, like everybody wants!

for example, if you want to print something, you'd write: `begin the grimoire. inscribe whispers of "hello, world!". close the grimoire.`

it has variables, dynamic typing, arrays, functions, conditionals, loops, string manipulation, array manipulation, type conversion, and user input, among other (listed in the docs!)

but why? i wanted to see how far you could push natural language syntax while still being parseable. most esolangs are intentionally obtuse (BF, Malbolge), but i wanted something that's weird but readable, like you're reading instructions from a spellbook, which makes it incredibly easy to read and understand. like an anti-esolang? hmm...

github: https://github.com/sirbread/spellscript

docs: https://github.com/sirbread/spellscript/blob/main/resources/...
by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-12 05:31:14+00:00
The is an enormous amount of environmental activism that exists to achieve an ideological result, it has nothing to do with science or a reasonable analysis of tradeoffs. They cynically exploit people’s ignorance of the subject to justify their actions.

A well-known example of this were regulations that require super-low arsenic levels in water. The thresholds were set extremely low, far below natural levels in most mining districts. The proposed limits were so low that ironically it would put some populations at risk of arsenic deficiency — arsenic is an essential micronutrient in animal biology, much of which comes from water. The people pushing to set levels so absurdly low were anti-mining activists.

If you operate a mine, that benchmark for water quality is now your problem, even if the natural levels are much higher. This puts the mining operation in the somewhat intractable position of remediating the arsenic levels of ambient nature as a pre-condition of mining. You can’t just ensure the arsenic is at the level it was when you found it, you have to reduce to some idealized standard that can be intractably expensive to meet and has no scientific basis. It is exploitive and ugly by people that don’t care about the long-term implications as long as it serves their short-term ideological purpose. Civilization requires mining, it does little to help the environment by exporting it to other countries.

I’m a major nature lover and conservationist, grew up in remote rural areas, and spend more time in the deep wilderness than most, but I am also a relevant scientist by training. The amount of scientific malpractice that happens under the pretext of “saving the environment” in the US is pretty damn gross. There are good people inside the Department of the Interior that try to mitigate the worst excesses but the onslaught is unrelenting.

On the specific point of rare earth mining, the chemistry of rare earth ores are naturally unpleasant, much like gold and silver ores. For historical reasons, the massive deposits of gold and silver in the US were developed before any real regulations. Some of those made quite a mess (see: silver mines of Idaho). Modern versions run quite clean but the hurdles to opening new mines are so prohibitively expensive that the US mostly only still operates the grandfathered pre-regulation mines.

REE mining has none of these advantages. The demand for REE is almost entirely modern, so none of it was grandfathered in. I’m sure the US could operate them at a level that is adequately clean but there is a huge contingent of activists that are against all mining and refining on principle and use the myriad levers created by policy over the last several decades to make sure that never happens in the US.

That said, a few months ago the US government announced a strategic investment in the largest REE deposit in the world, which happens to be in the US but has spent most of its time in bankruptcy. I have to imagine that the intention is to streamline production under some kind of exemption.
by somat | 2025-10-12 05:32:29+00:00
It sounds like you have revoked their permission to tag(verb) the photos, why should this interfere with what tag(noun) the photo already has?

But really I know nothing about the process, I was going to make an allegory about how it would be the same as adobe deleting all your drawings after you let your photoshop subscriptions lapse. But realized that this is exactly the computing future that these sort of companies want and my allegory is far from the proof by absurdity I wanted it to be. sigh, now I am depressed.
by braza | 2025-10-12 05:33:06+00:00
I'm totally in favor of assisted suicide, and I think it's a good mechanism for those suffering, if voluntarily chosen.

That said, I think the same, and there are some non-obvious second-order effects around it being the menu, especially regarding life extension incentives and if people started to feel guilt-tripped by it.

The first thing that comes to mind is a reduction in commitment to the elderly. As soon as health care costs ramp up, people will start to make more decisions based on the economic aspect of the people's support instead of thinking in life extension mechanisms as a natural first choice.

Second, it is related to the public health services. From my experience in some parts of EU/America, if you have a disease until your 50s, you will get treatment. However, after that, there are probably some parts of the public/private health system that throttle down the treatments.

The 2-week interval between a return if you are 30s/40s, will become 6 weeks if you are over 60s.

The next one, the "inheritance social contract," will be changed. As long as folks know that assisted suicide will be placed on the menu, I do not doubt that folks terrified with the possibility of loved ones "not doing enough to keep them alive" will dilute everyone who lifts the gas.

And as a second-order, I can see the securitization and life insurance industry will demand insane premiums to cover elderly persons, given that potentially people can lift and coast the treatment for their loved ones, and this can break part of their actuarial models, which, yes, expect people to exhaust resources to keep their elderly alive and not to choose together to pull the plug in a single-digit number of years before.

And maybe a third-order effect (in Germany there are some cases) where people with resources (single-digit million real estate + assets) exercise liquidity on it and live the best of their lives after 70 or in some cases, legally marry 30+ nurses to take care of them in the last 3 years and offer a chunk of inheritance, post-death pension, or insurance premium.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-12 05:33:21+00:00
> A simpler regulation [is disclosing] how much ad content

I disagree, it's much less simple in the long run. (A phenomenon I'm sure is painfully-familiar to a lot of software developers.)

First, it's playing whack-a-mole with just one of many kinds of infringement on the user's ownership. It does nothing to protect against aggressive spying "telemetry", against forcing users to make an Acme Fridge Online Account to continue, or against standard/free features being "discontinued" and then introducing a suspiciously similar paid-subscription option.

Second, even in that narrow "showing ads" aspect, there are too many dimensions to lock down by spec. For example, consider the difference between a system that shows X minutes of ads when idle which are instantly-dismissable, versus another system that shows fewer/shorter/smaller ads which are unskippable phases of normal operation.

In contrast, freeing users to fight back--and to share what they've developed--encourages a democratized and counterbalancing force, which will naturally be strongly aligned to consumer interests regardless of yearly electoral changes.