MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Sunspark | 2025-11-18 15:08:23+00:00
In North America, the problem is other than the fact they didn't allow dimming lights for whatever reason, they made a separate regulation for LED lights compared to the old incandescent lights.

The old light regulation actually had a limit on how bright the running lights could be.

The new LED light regulation says you can have it as bright as the manufacturer wants it to be.

So now there is the problem of misaligned headlights that don't point at the road but instead point at cars, and are as bright or brighter than the old incandescent high beams.

I have to have my rear-view mirror permanently flipped at night now. I never needed to do that in the past except when some idiot actually was using their high beams.
by EGreg | 2025-11-18 15:08:24+00:00
Countries will need local currencies during recessions and depressions. Here are just a few examples we track on our site: https://community.intercoin.app/t/currency-crises-around-the...

Here is a history of banking snd new forms of money in the USA: https://community.intercoin.app/t/history-of-us-banking-and-...

The fact is, from Berkshares to Disney Dollars, local currencies are not only possible, but they nudge everyone to buy local and hire local, strengthening the economy. The miracles have very good explanations :)
by xzjis | 2025-11-18 15:08:26+00:00
There are two situations where I have problems with being dazzled by headlights: - low beams on roads that aren't flat, because they shine right into my eyes - the high beams of cars behind me (sometimes close), which reflect in my mirrors but also off my ceiling, my dashboard, etc.

But I don't necessarily have a problem with the headlights just because they're too powerful.
by IAmBroom | 2025-11-18 15:08:52+00:00
Weirdest thing I know about titanium: it acts as a sponge for hydrogen, to the extent that H will knock Ti atoms out of the material until it becomes friable.

This is never observed in ordinary usage, because titanium dioxide forms SO DAMN QUICKLY, and completely blocks absorption of H.

Source: a series of failed parts inside a high vacuum device (chip photolitho).
by mayhemducks | 2025-11-18 15:09:00+00:00
Apparently coons used to be quite a popular delicacy in the south once upon a time. Dogs are predators, which is a very primal reason I could never imagine eating one. I've eaten bear, and it tasted terrible. Come to think of it, every predator tastes terrible. But the racoon is an omnivorous scavenger. I must admin I'm coon curious now. :)
Show HN: MCP Server for OpenTelemetry
by GalKlm | 2025-11-18 15:09:15+00:00
Hey HN, Gal, Nir and Doron here.

Over the past 2 years, we've helped teams debug everything from prompt issues to production outages.

We kept running into the same problem: Jumping between our IDEs and our observability dashboards. So, we built an open-source MCP server that connects any OpenTelemetry backend (Grafana, Jaeger, Datadog, Dynatrace, Traceloop) to our dev environment using an MCP.

While there are many MCP servers built for specific providers (like Datadog’s - https://docs.datadoghq.com/bits_ai/mcp_server), they’re closed source (so we can’t easily extend them), and they’re locked to a single platform, so organizations that leverage multiple platforms, where data is scattered in between them, can’t really use them.

We’re adding support for more providers every day - feel free to contribute your own.

We would love your feedback and opinions - feel free to connect it to Claude or ChatGPT and try to investigate your own production data. What do you think about the set of tools that we currently expose? Do you think we should expose more or others?

Github: https://github.com/traceloop/opentelemetry-mcp-server
by queenkjuul | 2025-11-18 15:09:19+00:00
Counterpoint, my personal project sites aren't that important, but are self-hosted. My blog being inaccessible for for half a day is preferable, to having to figure out my own protections, and why not just use their free CDN while I'm at it.

Do i need to? Definitely not. Am i going to stop using cloudflare? Also no.

When it comes to bigger sites, i think having someone to blame for an outage (especially when these big ones are effectively "the whole Internet broke") is still probably preferable to managing it all yourself.
by everdrive | 2025-11-18 15:09:24+00:00
We have quite a lot of wildlife around us; deer, moose, coyotes, hedgehogs, pheasants, nearly non-stop turkeys. It really hasn't been an issue.

It's not as if you cannot see with normal, old-fashioned headlights. That's what I'm confused about; the problem with headlights at night is that they have a distance. So rather than being unable to see, what you actually get is less reaction time. ie, rather than seeing 'til the next hill or turn, you can really only see to the end of your headlight beam. Ultrabright headlights actually make this worse; you have no night vision whatsoever due to their brightness, and and anything outside of the beam is completely invisible. This isn't as much of a problem with old fashioned headlights as they don't trash your night vision quite as badly. In any case, the problem is that you have less time to react due to only being able to see within the beam of the light -- and brightness really does not affect this.

This is totally aside from that fact that the moose threat is NOT that they're in the road 1000 feet ahead of you and it's too dark to see -- it's that they come right out of the woods before you have time to react -- and brightness, again, does not actually affect this.

Moose aren't invisible to a normal headlight.
by bunderbunder | 2025-11-18 15:09:25+00:00
Meanwhile the maintainer of Bear Blog - very nearly the poster child for small blogs with 100 visitors per month - recently put up a post talking about how much extra infrastructure it takes to keep the service online in the face of the massive uptick in AI scraper bot traffic we've had over the past few years.

I haven't tried managing my own site in ages, but I get the impression that the modern Internet is pretty much just one big constant DDoS attack, punctuated by the occasional uptick in load when someone decides to do it on purpose instead of out of garden variety apathetic psychopathy.
by bilekas | 2025-11-18 15:09:28+00:00
I don't use even close to all the services they offer, mostly just DNS and some web workers but the convenience of it as opposed to rolling my own is, excluding down time, an incredible free offering.

Way back years ago when I used to roll my own, any problems I had to fix took extremely long and painful. Could I do it again today ? Yeah sure, but I know I couldn't do a better job than Cloudflare.
by leshokunin | 2025-11-18 15:09:29+00:00
I don’t want to deal with terminal. I don’t want to deal with entering my password. I don’t want to deal with snap. I don’t want to think about what aspects of my nvidia card won’t be supported. Those QOL aspects matter to me a lot.

That’s why I’m waiting for specifically the console version of Steam OS, all usable via gamepad.
by Topfi | 2025-11-18 15:09:57+00:00
Additional context from AI Studio including pricing:

Our most intelligent model with SOTA reasoning and multimodal understanding, and powerful agentic and vibe coding capabilities

<=200K tokens • Input: $2,00 / Output: $12,00

> 200K tokens • Input: $4,00 / Output: $18,00

Knowledge cut off: Jan. 2025

Appears Rate limits are in place making the model inaccessible for now.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-11-18 15:10:11+00:00
> Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights. Other cars' headlights will always be visible and they have reflectors, so it's not as if you'll struggle to spot other cars. The road lines are actually reflective, so it's not as if you'll struggle to see the road lines. And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.

I don't know about the UK, but out here in France, this is wrong on most counts. Many country roads have no lines, reflective or otherwise. There will be pedestrians walking around. Also, roads are not always in tip-top shape nor clean, so you need light to be able to see.

However, I do agree that maybe extremely bright lights mounted high are a nuisance.
by Topfi | 2025-11-18 15:10:34+00:00
Additional context from AI Studio including pricing:

Our most intelligent model with SOTA reasoning and multimodal understanding, and powerful agentic and vibe coding capabilities

<=200K tokens • Input: $2,00 / Output: $12,00

> 200K tokens • Input: $4,00 / Output: $18,00

Knowledge cut off: Jan. 2025
by nijave | 2025-11-18 15:10:39+00:00
I think that really depends on feature usage. You can use Argo/Cloudflare tunnels to route to private backends that are normally unroutable. In such a setup, it might be quite difficult to remove Cloudflare since then you have no edge network and no ability to reach your servers without another proxy/tunnel product.

If you're using other features like page rules you may need to stand up additional infrastructure to handle things like URI rewrites.

If you're using CDN, your backend might not be powerful enough to serve static assets without Cloudflare.

If your using all of the above, you're work to temporarily disable becomes fairly complicated.
by throwaway150 | 2025-11-18 15:10:55+00:00
> These are very different situations.

It is obvious those two are very different situations. I'm not sure I understand your point. Yeah, nobody will be bothered by a short 15 minute DDoS attack. I prolly wouldn't even notice it unless I'm actively checking the logs. Sure, nobody is going to be bothered by that. But what if someone's DDoSing persistently with a purpose? Maybe they're just pissed at you.

My point is... a sustained DDoS attack will just make your host drop you. So one situation directly leads to another and you are forced to deal with both situations, like it or not.
by amluto | 2025-11-18 15:11:04+00:00
Google’s productization is still rather poor. If I want to use OpenAI’s models, I go to their website, look up the price and pay it. For Google’s, I need to figure out whether I want AI Studio or Google Cloud Code Assist or AI Ultra, etc, and if this is for commercial use where I need to prevent Google from training on my data, figuring out which options work is extra complicated.

As of a couple weeks ago (the last time I checked) if you are signed in to multiple Google accounts and you cannot accept the non-commercial terms for one of them for AI Studio, the site is horribly broken (the text showing which account they’re asking you to agree to the terms for is blurred, and you can’t switch accounts without agreeing first).

In Google’s very slight defense, Anthropic hasn’t even tried to make a proper sign in system.
by njarboe | 2025-11-18 15:11:13+00:00
One of the main reasons people want/need brighter headlights is that there is much more light inside the car from screens. These don't let your eyes adjust to the dark properly. Older cars had dim green lighting for the gauges and even had a knob to adjust the brightness up and down. You could create a very dim interior instead of the huge amount of white light you get with modern cars and the multiple screens.

I'm happy my Tesla does a decent job of having the screen be quite dark at night but the headlights are quite bad with the horizontal cutoff style that only lights the first few feet of horizontal ahead of the car. I need to see those deer and elk on the side of the road, damn it.
by alterom | 2025-11-18 15:11:45+00:00
>Yes, there’s certainly research involved in getting an existing drug approved for a new condition. That’s not development.

OK, I concede that point then. That's the information I intended to communicate.

>The suggestion that Adderall would only benefit folks with ADHD diagnoses is also fundamentally weird

Sure, let me rephrase.

There is, as we both agree, research performed to establish that Adderall is something that can help with ADHD symptoms (...and obesity).

There's plentiful data that demonstrates its effectiveness for some people with ADHD in that regard. And appetite loss is a well-known effect.

But there's no research done to establish that Adderall would work the way Huxley describes the hypothetical drug: giving anyone a boost in "mental efficiency", without adverse consequences to health otherwise.

To the contrary, we have extensive data and research that demonstrates Adderall doesn't work that way.

Particularly, for folks without ADHD, mental efficiency is likely to decrease when they take Adderall [1].

It gives them the feeling of being productive, though...

...which only exacerbates the problem.

Quote [2]:

What Adderall clearly does extremely well is make people think they are doing better — and to feel good while they’re doing it. “Adderall might not be a cognitive enhancement drug, but a ‘drive’ drug,” says Anjan Chatterjee, a professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Farah explains, “[Stimulants] make boring work seem more interesting, so they increase your motivation to work, energy for work, and that’s not nothing — that’s really helpful . . . Unfortunately, it also gets into the realm of feel-good drugs, and that means the risk of dependence is quite high.” Yet when I ask Farah exactly how addictive Adderall and other stimulant medications are, she tells me that there is currently no good answer. “Nobody has really looked at these drugs used as work enhancers and what the dependence risk there is,” she said.

"Nobody has really looked at these drugs used as work enhancers" is what I intended to communicate when I said that "this is not what Adderall was developed for".

When somebody did look (the study [1] came out years later), they found that a drug that wasn't for improving mental efficiency does not, in fact, improve mental efficiency.

The mistaken belief that Adderall is akin to Huxley's fantasy pill, which the author of the article perpetuates, is harming everyone.

As I said before, Adderall is for treating executive dysfunction: not being able to do things which you can do, should do, want to do, have the time and resources to do, but can't start doing because Brain Says No.

Adderall won't make anyone smarter. It'll make stupid people be stupid faster and with more enthusiasm.

That's not what Huxley talked about.

The headline, put simply, is a dangerous lie.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adderall-ritalin-adhd-decreases...

[2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/caseyschwartzauthor/add...
by kbolino | 2025-11-18 15:12:05+00:00
A number of US states don't even require regular safety inspections. For example, in Maryland, you only get a safety inspection when selling your vehicle or transferring it in from another state.

The number of people who don't use their lights judiciously is surprisingly large. Besides high beam issues, I've also observed people who think that their daytime running lights are headlights. This is especially obvious because their taillights will be off.
by jballanc | 2025-11-18 15:12:13+00:00
More like it's time for the pendulum to swing back...

We had very decentralized "internet" with BBSes, AOL, Prodigy, etc.

Then we centralized on AOL (ask anyone over 40 if they remember "AOL Keyword: ACME" plastered all over roadside billboards).

Then we revolted and decentralized across MySpace, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, etc.

Then we centralized on Facebook.

We are in the midst of a second decentralization...

...from an information consumer's perspective. From an internet infrastructure perspective, the trend has been consistently toward more decentralization. Initially, even after everyone moved away from AOL as their sole information source online, they were still accessing all the other sites over their AOL dial-up connection. Eventually, competitors arrived and, since AOL no longer had a monopoly on content, they lost their grip on the infrastructure monopoly.

Later, moving up the stack, the re-centralization around Facebook (and Google) allowed those sources to centralize power in identity management. Today, though, people increasingly only authenticate to Facebook or Google in order to authenticate to some 3rd party site. Eventually, competitors for auth will arrive (or already have ahem passkeys coughcough) and, as no one goes to Facebook anymore anyway, they'll lose grip on identity management.

It's an ebb and flow, but the fundamental capability for decentralization has existed in the technology behind the internet from the beginning. Adoption and acclimatization, however, is a much slower process.
by tedggh | 2025-11-18 15:12:57+00:00
If you have a blog with 100 visitors per month why would you worry about being hit by an 4-8 hours outage once every year or two? I like Cloudflare because it is easy to setup and manage and because the amount of value you get for free or just a few bucks per month can’t be matched by any other company. Sure, if my income depends on my website/service uptime then I would probably consider other options. I think for most folks that’s not the case. Just chill and wait it out.
by looperhacks | 2025-11-18 15:12:58+00:00
As someone who really struggled with social interactions (and still does at times, just not as bad), this fails already at the first two steps:

> Listen-- really listen --and engage with open ears

How do I understand what is important? People say a lot of stuff, some important parts and some parts that are beside the point. Talking also involves identifying and reacting to the "important" bits, picking up the "wrong" stuff will be very weird. An exaggerated example:

> "We had a really bad traffic accident when we went to Sweden"

The obvious thing to engage with is the accident - but a struggling person might as well ask how they liked Sweden.

> When it's your turn to talk, offer up an anecdote [...]

I really struggled to even notice when it's "my turn" to talk. Either interrupting the other person or awkwardly looking at them until I notice or the other person tries to recover the situation.
by mallets | 2025-11-18 15:13:00+00:00
The "omg centralized infra" cries after every such event kind of misses the point. Hosting with smaller companies (shared, vps, dedi, colo whatever) will likely result in far worse downtimes, individually.

Ofc the bigger perception issue here is many services going out at the same time, but why would (most) providers care if their annual downtime does or doesn't coincide with others? Their overall reliability is no better or worse had only their service gone down.

All of this can change ofc if this becomes a regular thing, the absolute hours of downtime does matter.
by whstl | 2025-11-18 15:13:00+00:00
I'm criticizing being an asshole to people who are not naturally the way society expects and had to work their way through.

But to be fair I'm mostly criticizing useless HN post-hoc rationalization.

> Refusing to be an asshole to someone being an asshole just enables them being an asshole.

I have nothing to do with this.

> Refusing to judge if someone is being an asshole, ensures that someone being an asshole will see no consequences for being an asshole.

I also have nothing to do with this.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-11-18 15:13:03+00:00
> IMHO it adds, but only if you are big enough. Netflix level. At that level, you go and dine with Bezos and negotiate a massive discount. For anyone else, I’d genuinely love to see the numbers that prove otherwise.

It adds if you're smart about using resources efficiently, at any level. And engineer the system to spin up / spin down as customers dictate.

For situations where resources are allocated but are only being utilized a low percentage (even < 50% in some cases), it is not cost effective. All that compute / RAM / disk / network etc. is just sitting there wasted.
by vunderba | 2025-11-18 15:13:19+00:00
> Moby-Dick remains perhaps the best reading experience of my life.

I sometimes half-jokingly maintain that Moby-Dick was really written as part of an early BOOK-IT [1] reading incentive program to improve literacy among whalers by disguising a novel as a cetological guidebook.

There are entire chapters devoted to the harpooning process, sperm whale anatomy, maritime legal disputes over whale harvesting, etc.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_Hut#Book_It!
by Aachen | 2025-11-18 15:13:52+00:00
"Nothing they can do"? I've never owned a car so genuinely don't know but surely you can buy whatever lights you want for it and/or correct the alignment?

I helped a friend with aligning the headlight after changing the bulb some years ago, I hear newer cars don't let you change the bulb yourself necessarily but then surely the mechanics can be asked to do this when they change it anyway, or upon the next inspection or so?
by close04 | 2025-11-18 15:14:29+00:00
> Quite a lot of tech CEOs get weirdly over-emotional about short-sellers.

They just can't picture themselves ever being in the wrong. They are genuinely convinced they are the hero. Logically any opposition comes from villains.

With the ego of people like Musk and other idiosyncratic, autocratic, and sociopathic CEOs, I think there needs to be a rational strategy behind it.
by ogurechny | 2025-11-18 15:14:40+00:00
The turbulent times and the breakneck speed of computer development need to be taken into account. Not long before that computer networks were strictly corporate things installed by contractors choosing hardware, driver and software suppliers suitable for tasks performed by employees or students, and someone who installed it at home was the same kind of nerd who would drag an engine from the work into his room to tinker. Non-business-oriented software rarely cared about third party network functions. Then network card became a consumer device, and a bit later it became integrated and expected.

Also, Windows did not install TCP/IP components on computers without a network card (most of them until the Millennium era), it was an optional component. You could not “ping” anything, as there was no ping utility, nor libraries it could call. In that aspect, those network-less Windows systems were not much different from network-less DOS systems. The installer probably still works that way (or can be made to, by excluding some dependencies), but it's hard to find hardware without any network connectivity today. I wonder what Windows 11 installer does when there is no network card to phone home...
by mvkel | 2025-11-18 15:14:41+00:00
It's because if you automate it, something could/would happen to the little script that defines "uptime," and if that goes down, suddenly you're in violation of your SLA and all of your customers start demanding refunds/credits/etc. when everything is running fine.

Or let's say your load balancer croaks, triggering a "down" status, but it's 3am, so a single server is handling traffic just fine? In short, defining "down" in an automated way is just exposing internal tooling unnecessarily and generates more false positives than negatives.

Lastly, if you are allowed 45 minutes of downtime per year and it takes you an hour to manually update the status page, you just bought yourself an extra hour to figure out how to fix the problem before you have to start issuing refunds/credits.
by cortesoft | 2025-11-18 15:15:17+00:00
As someone who has worked for a CDN for over a decade, this is what most big customers do. Under normal circumstances, they send portions of traffic to different CDNs, usually based on cost (and or performance in various regions). When an issue happens, they will pull traffic from the problem CDN.

Of course, if a big incident happens for a big CDN, there might not be enough latent capacity in the other CDNs to take all the traffic. CDNs are a cutthroat business, with small margins, so there usually isn’t a TON of unused capacity laying around.