MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Veserv | 2025-12-21 20:23:15+00:00
I already accounted for consumed resources when I said 10 million instead of 100 million. I allocated 10% to logging overhead. If your service is within 10% of overload you are already in for a bad time. And frankly, what systems are you using that are handling 10 million requests per second per core (100 nanoseconds per request)? Hell, what services are you deploying that you even have 10 million requests per second per core to handle?

All of those other costs are, again, trivial with proper design. You can easily handle billions of events per second on the backend with even a modest server. This is done regularly by time traveling debuggers which actually need to handle these data rates. So again, what are we even deploying that has billions of events per second?
by isodev | 2025-12-21 20:23:20+00:00
> because I have to raise two young children

It’s a missed opportunity for posts like the link to also mention and reinforce the importance of family planning. Many go into setting up a family because of peer pressure without assessing that it’s a very long term commitment. I’m sure you’re doing the best you can, of course. Maybe raising awareness that having kids is no longer an imperative for humans living in the 21st century could be something we do more of.
by nradov | 2025-12-21 20:23:41+00:00
By any objective metric the world is less broken than ever before. But people who want to be defeatist and cynical can always find a plausible sounding reason to justify their negativity regardless of the facts. I'm part of an older generation and not burnt out or existentially starving or whatever. And more importantly I'm not actually starving or dying of plague or being sent off to die for my king or any of the other horrors that were a routine part of human existence for most people before the modern era.
by kens | 2025-12-21 20:24:04+00:00
It's too late to edit my previous comment, but I wanted to add one more random tanning fact: UV releases β-endorphin so tanning is literally addictive, to the point that naloxone will cause withdrawal symptoms, at least in mice: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(14)00611-4
by desmoulins | 2025-12-21 20:24:18+00:00
The context of these book titles appearing in comments might skew the results. Ulysses is high up on the list, but the source comments have a lot of people using it as an example of a lengthy, difficult book.

I read a lot, but if I'm going to use a book to make a point or example in a comment, which will be read by someone I don't know, I'll reference a well-known book that most people have heard of, even if it was just from 9th grade English class, instead of something more obscure.
by to11mtm | 2025-12-21 20:24:53+00:00
Yep. When I had to fill CO2 tanks at a paintball shop yes there were times that I had to open a door (I mean we were talking a lot of fills in short time, btw fills had to start with draining the tank's existing volume so I could zero out the scale) but even indoors a door+fan was enough to keep even the nastiest of sale days OSHA compliant.

Also a 'puncture' is very different from the gasbag mysteriously vanishing from existence; My only other thought is that in cold regions (I saw wisconsin mentioned in the article) CO2 does not diffuse quite as fast and sometimes visibly so...
by gorgoiler | 2025-12-21 20:24:58+00:00
I love The Internet, it came into my life as I became an adult, I’ve watched it change the world, and I find attempts to lock it down to be abhorrent.

I also grew up in a world where intelligence fieldcraft was an in-person activity where it was just about possible for one side to keep track of the other side, or at least hold some kind of leverage, counter-leverage, and counter-counter-leverage to stop the Cold War getting out of control.

The internet, as well as giving us all this freedom to communicate, also gave the Controls of this world — high level intelligence officers based in their home countries but directing operations overseas — a wonderful new lever to influence, harass, and sabotage. Why burn an agent when you can find a useful idiot in a foreign country to agitate on your behalf?

I sympathize with nation states’ urge to be able to see what’s going on online, but I hate the way they’re going about it. How do we balance a free Internet against a need to crack down on foreign influence?
by wvenable | 2025-12-21 20:25:03+00:00
I disagree. Satya doesn't give a crap about Windows; he's the cloud guy. Over 40% of Microsoft's revenue is cloud. Another 20% is office (which is also heading towards cloud). Windows revenue is a measly 9% -- even less than gaming.

Windows is what it is because it's really not important to Microsoft to anymore. It's effectively unmoored from the rest of organization and left to fight for some kind of financial relevance in an organization that doesn't care about it anymore.
by andy12_ | 2025-12-21 20:25:50+00:00
It seems like this could be solved by partial structured output, where the structure of the JSON itself is constrained, but the values of the JSON entries is not (so even if "quantity" here is set to int, the model can output "52.2"). Of course, we would need additional parsing, but I think it's a fair compromise.

And about structured outputs messing with chain-of-thought... Is CoT really used with normal models nowadays? I think that if you need CoT you might as well use a reasoning model, and that solves the problem.
by Xelbair | 2025-12-21 20:26:33+00:00
I find it preposterous that anyone defends this agenda that flips concept of 'innocent until proven guilty' on it's head by collectively punishing everyone for POSSIBLE crimes of some individuals.

In a way that any criminal will be easily able to circumvent by not following the law, so it doesn't even achieve it's goal.For example with one time pad exchanged outside of Eu's control + stenography messaging, bundled into 'illegal' app that works as VPN over HTTPS.

I find it preposterous that this issue is pushed without any input from citizens in most of member states - as it wasn't a part of political campaign of either internal elections nor EU ones!

i can keep going on and on. This isn't anything inevitable, this isn't anything that needs to be even solved. This is all done by a single lobbying group trying to push this for years.
by tt24 | 2025-12-21 20:26:50+00:00
This attitude is what’s beautiful about the United States and is in large part responsible for why it’s so wealthy.

There’s a widespread faith and believe in the idea that there’s opportunity in every corner, regardless of familial status or other shortcomings.

This belief is largely factual, as the vast majority of unicorn founders and billionaires come from an upper middle class uninteresting background.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-12-21 20:26:51+00:00
I think the idea was that the truly exceptional would only survive- and all the nearly exceptional and less competent would be in other fields. As a result, supply would plummet because no one would hire anybody less than the best.

I think the more appropriate analogy from the 2001 bust is if those fields turn into similar to professional sports where you have to be unimaginably, talented and skilled and disciplined, and everybody else is playing in the rec league fact for nothing
by pcrh | 2025-12-21 20:27:22+00:00
A decent example being Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights:

>1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

>2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Specifically:

>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...
by otterley | 2025-12-21 20:27:58+00:00
In my experience working at AWS and with customers, you don't need billions of TPS to make an end-to-end logging infrastructure keel over. It takes much less than that. As a working example, you can host your own end-to-end infra (the LGTM stack is pretty easy to deploy in a Kubernetes cluster) and see what it takes to bring yours to a grind with a given set of resources and TPS/volume.
by nostrebored | 2025-12-21 20:28:30+00:00
You seem to not be reading anything I’m saying. I have family that works for legally operated blue collar businesses.

The difference is engaging in criminal activity.

Your arguments are spectacularly lazy so I’ll ask you to show me where people not authorized to work in the country have no legal liability if they choose to work in the country.

I don’t really know what’s ruffled your feathers so much here, but this isn’t really how HN operates. It seems like you got a bit flustered when the “you’re a bad rich person” argument didn’t work, and now you’re just flailing wildly.
by dexwiz | 2025-12-21 20:29:34+00:00
I have seen pushback on this kind of behavior because "users don't like error codes" or other such nonsense. UX and Product like to pretend nothing will ever break, and when it does they want some funny little image, not useful output.

A good compromise is to log whenever a user would see the error code, and treat those events with very high priority.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-21 20:29:46+00:00
It's something that can't be fixed, so rather than trying to cure it through bad privacy invading laws we should be looking in how to mitigate the problem through good reporting, accountability laws, and therapy laws.

A few examples of how mitigate the problem

* Require 2 adults at all times when kids are involved. Particularly in churches and schools.

* Establish mandatory reporting. None of this BS like "I'm a priest, I shouldn't have to report confessionals." That sort of religious exemption is BS.

* Make therapy for pedophiles either fully subsidized or at least partially subsidized.

* Require adult supervision of teens with kids (one of the more common sources of child sexual abuse).

CSAM will happen. It's terrible and what's worse is even if the privacy invasion laws could 100% prevent that sort of content from being produce, that just raises the price of the product and pushes it to be off shored. No amount of chat control will stop someone from importing the material via a thumbdrive in the mail.

The problem we have is the truth of "this will happen no matter the laws passed". That truth has allowed politicians to justify passing extreme laws for small but horrific problems.
by jaggederest | 2025-12-21 20:30:22+00:00
CO2 is in general less dangerous than inert gases, because we have a hypercapnic response - it's a very reliable way to induce people to leave the area, quite uncomfortable, and is actually one of the ways used to induce a panic attack in experimental settings.

If it were, say, argon, it would be much more likely to suffocate people, because you don't notice hypoxia the way you do hypercapnia. It can pool in basements and kill everyone who enters.

That being said it is an enormous volume of CO2, so the hypercapnic response in this case may not be sufficient if there's nowhere to flee to, as sadly happened in the Lake Nyos disaster you cited.
by exceptione | 2025-12-21 20:30:34+00:00
> since the firehose of government money creates a lot of market distortions and inefficiencies.

You mean elite capture¹ of government resources. Government money has repeatedly shown to create a lot of wealth, but the government should be free from the oligarchy. The monopolist sponsored narratives don't match with the data.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_capture
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-21 20:30:37+00:00
Each of these entities requires the work of creating and maintaining a specialized construct (often for profit) - which will then only attract a purposefully narrow audience.

Contrast this with public spaces that are attended by diverse people, because their attendance isn't constrained by ability to pay or having a particular interest.

The advantage of a public space is that it isn't an exclusionary club.
by to11mtm | 2025-12-21 20:30:39+00:00
> Even something like Cobalt which is touted as unavailable is only that way because the industrial uses of cobalt is basically only li batteries.

AFAIR Cobalt is also kinda toxic which is a concern.

But as far as that and

> In fact, the limiting element for Li chemistries is generally the Nickel

Isn't that part of why LiFePO was supposed to take off tho? Sure the energy density is a bit lower but theoretically they are cheaper to produce per kWh and don't have any of the toxicity/rarity issues of other lithium designs...
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-12-21 20:30:45+00:00
Maintenance of the system is my biggest question. Lot of mechanical complexity with ensuring your gas containment, compressors, turbines, etc are all up to spec. This also seems like a system where you want to install the biggest capacity containment you can afford at the onset.

All of that vs lithium/sodium where you can incrementally install batteries and let it operate without much concern. Maybe some heaters if they are installed in especially cold climates.
by atq2119 | 2025-12-21 20:30:50+00:00
This framing is extremely counterproductive, though.

Most societal problems cannot be fixed entirely. There will always be child sex abuse just like there will always be murder, theft, tax evasion, and drunk driving. It makes sense to see if things can be improved, but any action proposed must be weighed against its downsides. Continued action by police is a good thing, but laws for that have been established for a long time, and the correct answer may well be that no further change to laws is required or appropriate.

(Ab)using child sex abuse to push through surveillance overreach is particularly egregious considering that by all objective accounts most of it seems to happen in the real world among friends and family, without any connection to the internet.
by markus_zhang | 2025-12-21 20:31:48+00:00
Damn true. I figured it out by myself a while ago, when I was in the middle of a crisis after my son was born. TBF I’m still in the crisis on and off, but now I feel better.

What worked is:

- Realize that not loving my work is fine, as long as I have something else that I love and want to do.

- YouTube channel “Napoleon Hill Notes”. Yeah, it is AI voiced and I have no idea whether what it says makes sense or not. But it works for me, tremendously. Whenever I fell into a low mood, I boot up a session and I felt better afterwards. Now I use it to brainwash myself into a better version.
by toast0 | 2025-12-21 20:31:53+00:00
> Huh, and that works? Sounds a bit… old-fashioned? I’d think people are looking for these services online or in some gig work app.

You need to go to the home improvement store to get materials for your job anyway, you can also pick up some people to help, too.

Why fuss on an app trying to figure out who to hire, when you can head over, say 'hey, who knows how to dig a foundation' or 'who can help me hang a door' or whatever your job is. Maybe find the worker first and they can help you shop for the stuff you need.

Drive them back to the lot at the end of the job.
by GMoromisato | 2025-12-21 20:32:10+00:00
I feel the same way about kids. For me, I think, it changed my perspective. Lots of things at work that would have bothered or frustrated me no longer do so. Having kids is a great way to develop a Zen attitude about some things.

Though, to be fair, you gain a whole new set of much scarier things to worry about.
by mr_person | 2025-12-21 20:32:29+00:00
The more likely option than any of these excellent free options is going to be MacOS… just because your average user with even semi-technical inclination does not want to use LibreOffice Present; they want PowerPoint.

I have just seen this first hand with my significant other: they are very technical and more than capable of it, but have zero interest in learning Linux and instead just bought a MacBook on Black Friday specials when their 5 year old HP laptop finally got too annoying to use.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-21 20:32:31+00:00
In my opinion the explanation is easy: it comes all down to conditional probability and Bayes' theorem:

Conditional probability and Bayes' theorem tell you that how given some "ground belief" and new facts, the ground belief should be adjusted to incorporate the new evidence. Making this part of your daily life and belief system is what rationalism is about.

But what happens if your ground truth is "fucked up" (in the sense of how an average person would see it)? Then it can easily happen that new evidence can perfectly explained by your ground truth/belief system and thus (in a very rational sense) actually strengthen it.

Also keep in mind that a lot of things in the world are "messy", so it's not so hard to come up with a belief system that gives an "encompassing" framework that actually "explains" more things. If this system than becomes "strengthened" by incorporating lots of additional seen evidence (again using conditional probability and Bayes' theorem), this leads to a similar situation.
by randallsquared | 2025-12-21 20:32:50+00:00
I think the described problem is real, but I'm astonished at the "went into politics" solution. I would expect that the lab work was a much more concrete, achievable, and lasting good than anything that will come of engaging with zero-sum or negative-sum games.

I also wonder about the "now it's time to lift everyone else into abundance" earlier in the article. I don't disagree that this is valuable, but it doesn't solve the existential "why", it just puts it off for a few decades until the poorest humans are as rich as wealthy Americans are now. "What a problem to have!" one might say, but literally that is the problem that the article is about, right? Going back to power-level everyone else doesn't actually solve the problem of what to do when someone reaches the level cap.

Ultimately there is nothing that is obviously and provably more important than the individual reading or writing this, as there kinda was in previous eras. Some candidates include religion, panhuman expansion or thriving (Musk), building a successor entity or entities (Altman), and the State or politics (the OP). I don't know of any argument better than personal preference, at the moment.
by Xelbair | 2025-12-21 20:32:57+00:00
>I sympathize with nation states’ urge to be able to see what’s going on online, but I hate the way they’re going about it. How do we balance a free Internet against a need to crack down on foreign influence?

and more importantly - whose influence? how do we pick whom do we ally ourselves with and who we go against? How do we prevent such system from being abused to just entrench current powers that be, and stifle genuine opposition?

If it is done behind closed doors, there's not much difference in EU becoming like Russia or China, with a coat of liberal paint instead.
by blintz | 2025-12-21 20:33:30+00:00
I tend to avoid sci-fi that hits too close to home (don't love any of the AI/internet/crypto classics, same reason I can't bear to watch Silicon Valley), so I was a little bored by the top of the the list.

But, there's really good stuff that I've loved just a bit down the list: Foundation, The Left Hand Of Darkness, The Dispossessed, Stories of Your Life and Others, Exhalation, Children Of Time, Dune.

Was surprised the Mars trilogy was pretty low (might be the keyword indexing?) - highly recommend, as long as you don't get too bored by descriptions of rock.
by silexia | 2025-12-21 20:33:52+00:00
There are no banned books in America. Not spending taxpayer money forcibly taken from citizens on books they disagree with for public school libraries is far from banning books.

If you are okay with a book indoctrinating kids with far left ideology, why not put in copies of far right books to balance it out?

No one wants kids indoctrinated in culture war garbage.

If you want to own a book, go buy it yourself.
by rozap | 2025-12-21 20:34:07+00:00
They want to be able to afford a house. Historically, in the US at least, for lower and middle class people that has been within reach. Now that's not the case. If I was in my late 20s and was lighting thousands per month on fire in rent, it'd be pretty darn alienating. Sure, if you zoom out far enough, the standard of living for zoomers is pretty good, there's not a mass casualty event when the potato crop fails. But if you don't (and I'd argue, you shouldn't) it's pretty clear that their economic prospects are worse than their parents. That is pretty bleak. It's no wonder why they're politically more radical than the other generations.

Put in the simplest terms: Economic nihilism happens when no house.
by foldr | 2025-12-21 20:34:24+00:00
I'm a big Chomsky nerd, Chomsky fan, and card-carrying ex Chomskyan linguist. I hate to break it to you, but not even Chomsky thought that the Chomsky hierarchy had any very interesting application to natural languages. Amongst linguists who (unlike Chomsky) are still interested in formal language classes, the general consensus these days is that the relevant class is one of the so-called 'mildly context sensitive' ones (see e.g. https://www.kornai.com/MatLing/mcsfin.pdf for an overview).

(I suppose I have to state for the record that Chomsky's ties to Epstein are indefensible and that I'm not a fan of his on a personal level.)
by like_any_other | 2025-12-21 20:34:48+00:00
> You are pulling equally fictitious numbers out of your hat

Am I? Ignoring the natural experiment the Guardian article retells, how often do self-supervised human societies descend into savagery or war among themselves? How often when they are smaller than 100 members (Lord of Flies is about a group of 50)?

Even without the <100 member criterion, only the most violent outliers of human societies reach a 1% yearly violent death rate [1]. So my "fictitious numbers out of my hat to defend my comfortable worldview" are actually the worst humanity is capable of (the average for the 20th century, with all the world wars, was 0.06%). Yet I'm not getting a Nobel prize despite being closer to the truth. I guess that's why he got it in literature, not a scientific field.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...
by Arainach | 2025-12-21 20:35:21+00:00
I find the presentation of this article jarring. Bold, italics, underlining, yellow highlighting, light yellow highlighting.

I would argue that content should never highlight anything. Highlighting should be reserved for the reader to highlight the parts they find important or relevant. Authors have plenty of other tools at their disposal - all of which this article uses - and the preemptive highlighting is distracting and almost.....offensive in a sense that the author thinks I can't determine the relevant parts simply based on the fact that they are also in bold.

The high level of visual distraction detracts from the article as 20 elements on screen are all screaming for my attention and making it significantly harder to read the content in its entirety. It's like the text-only version of a mobile website filled with ads popping in and out.