MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by levocardia | 2025-12-21 19:31:56+00:00
I make content and have a following that's ~1/10th the size of what he claims to have in this 2020 post, and I have had, within a rounding error, zero percent of the crazy encounters he had. YMMV. If I were a political influencer or a self-help guru, yes probably that would be different, but audience selection effects are a real factor here.

This article always strikes me as insane because he -- a famous person with a history of serious mental illness and suicidal thoughts which he's discussed publicly -- has a moderately bad encounter with a person on the internet and decide that he now needs to purchase a firearm and carry it with him in public.
by mrkeen | 2025-12-21 19:32:13+00:00
> Your logs are lying to you. Not maliciously. They're just not equipped to tell the truth.

The best way to equip logs to tell the truth is to have other parts of the system consume them as their source of truth.

Firstly: "what the system does" and "what the logs say" can't be two different things.

Secondly: developers can't put less info into the logs than they should, because their feature simply won't work without it.
by pchangr | 2025-12-21 19:32:16+00:00
Correct, and I am saying the Luddites were a group of people that suffered mass unemployment following a technological change. Specifically, the luddites were a group of 19th century textile workers that were left out of work due to the introduction of automated machinery in the textile industry. In other words, they are a perfect example of what GP claims hasn’t happened.
by aisdijoa | 2025-12-21 19:32:29+00:00
I was reading about your company and really liked your post about benchmarking bot detection systems (https://research.roundtable.ai/bot-benchmarking/).

I find myself wondering why Google isn't doing as good a job as you guys. In particular, I'm wondering if you think they've been kind of lazy about the problem because they don't see captcha detection as faring particularly poorly, and perhaps once AI agents really start taking off and becoming prevalent, then Google will buckle down, at which point they'll be able to hone their troves of data to build a newer captcha even better than yours. Or is there an additional secret sauce you guys have?

That kind of leads me to my other question-I assume your secret sauce is the cognitive science, stroop-esque approach to bot detection (which I think is brilliant in the abstract). But I'm curious how that scales. Like, do you go one-by-one for each website you have a partnership with and figure out how a human would likely use the site, or do you use general techniques (besides the obvious ones like typing speed and mouse movements, which almost certainly Google could implement too if it decided to buckle down). Like, can you scale some broad stroop task across websites?

By the way, asking all of this out of admiration. You guys are doing really clever work!
by nostrebored | 2025-12-21 19:32:32+00:00
I’ve never talked to someone supplementing vitamin D who was aware at all.

I think that the correct approach would be start at 10x vitamin D with baseline bloodwork and adjust dosage from there.

But yeah I’m in the camp of “sun is good for you, in most cases.” I would be very unsurprised to find that there are precursor hormones released beyond vitamin D that impact efficacy. We don’t really understand the endocrine system very well.

I think that because we can see and understand the dermatological effects we overly weight them. Anecdotally older people I know who have not avoided the sun seem much better off mentally and physically, but I think because there isn’t a measurable reason we’re aware of, we completely discount any benefit.
by kace91 | 2025-12-21 19:32:33+00:00
>although a given novel may give great commentary about a social/philosophical issue, its primary purpose is entertainment. If I wanted to understand the underlying social/philosophical issue, a more direct, nonfiction book will always do a better job.

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding there, if you think all the potential value of a fiction book is some commentary padded by a story.

Good fiction usually exercises the mind in ways a non-fiction book never would. You experience life through someone else's eyes, you try to understand someone's mind by the actions they take and the words they say, you wonder in a meta-plane what the author is trying to show, you see language being used in non-common ways to provoke emotions or express ideas, you wonder how you would have acted in someone's shoes... Saying the author could get to the point quicker is like saying that lifting weights in the gym is done faster with a forklift, the process is the point rather than the extracted output.

There is also a fundamental difference between being told 'pain is an unpleasant feeling that living beings take effort to avoid' and being punched in the face. Fiction gives you a fraction of the extra wisdom you get with the latter.

>It would help if you gave some examples of books that should be here.

That's the thing, there is not specific book I could recommend that is most likely change your life for the better, for the same reason there is no single specific equation I can mention that will make someone good at math if they solve it. Some exercises are better, some are pointless, but it's the act of engaging that counts in the long term.

My comment about this list had no implication that the books at the top of the list were less valuable than other hidden works; they're just a sign of a path not travelled quite far, if that makes sense.

And leaving aside the usefulness of it all, pleasant experiences not all amount to entertaining. You'd probably agree that having sex with the love of your life and watching TV are not equivalent experiences, even if you come out of both with roughly the same level of self-improvement.
by aerozol | 2025-12-21 19:32:39+00:00
It would be reasonably trivial to set up a bot that mass-imports metadata from Spotify to MusicBrainz (note that MB rules do not allow this, community cleanup from a single user doing this with another source, years ago, is still ongoing).

The value that MusicBrainz adds is the community editor who spent a few hours going through YouTube videos and wayback machine social links to figure out that Fog (Wellington, NZ, punk/post-punk) and Fog (Auckland, NZ, Post-Punk) are different bands - even if they share a Spotify profile. The editor that hunted down and listened to 5 compilations that have mixed up a radio edit and an original mix of a track, to find out which is which, and separate them in MB and make notes. [these are made up examples]

That's not to imply that these two projects are 'competing', or that the ISRC figure comparison isn't useful and correct. But community database + scraped data is apples and oranges. And a mixed fruit bowl is wonderful.
by otterley | 2025-12-21 19:33:06+00:00
One of the points the author is trying to make (although he doesn't make it well, and his attitude makes it hard to read) is that logs aren't just for root-causing incidents.

When properly seasoned with context, logs give you useful information like who is impacted (not every incident impacts every customer the same way), correlations between component performance and inputs, and so forth. When connected to analytical engines, logs with rich context can help you figure out things like behaviors that lead to abandonment, the impact of security vulnerability exploits, and much more. And in their never-ending quest to improve their offerings and make more money, product managers love being able to test their theories against real data.
by prmoustache | 2025-12-21 19:33:42+00:00
I don't know who that guy is but my small and very limited in scope (a particular sport) and radius (regional level) experience with fame made me wary for life of ever being famous and I don't really understand why people would seek that.

Just the fact that complete strangers were recognizing me and chatting to me like I was their best friend while I had no clue who they were was a really uncomfortable feeling. It was one of the multiple reasons I didn't tried to be a professional in this sport.
by aster0id | 2025-12-21 19:34:43+00:00
I agree with the premise but take issue with the measure for "success": do you feel excited to get up and work on Monday?

We're humans and no matter what you're pursuing, you'll hit a point where your brain will adjust to the new reality and things will start feeling mundane. This is called the hedonic treadmill.

To me, what has helped is developing hobbies and relationships outside of work. We're social animals and need connection with others to feel fulfilled. Personally, my own life feels way more fulfilled right now than when I was just working on interesting projects at work or on my startup (that went nowhere).
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-21 19:34:52+00:00
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that religious vocations in the Catholic Church are way more rare than they used to be. The church sometimes struggles to have enough priests to meet the needs of the parishes, let alone having enough monks to keep up all the monasteries.

Since there aren't enough monks, the church would have to pay people to come in and maintain the place - but they can't really afford that. So, either they let these beautiful places crumble and decay, or they sell them to someone who will hopefully be able to take care of it. Between the two, the latter seems like the least bad option to me. I certainly wish that these places could stay as part of the church and not be some billionaire's home, but I would rather they be a billionaire's home than go to ruin.
Show HN: Tooly – Developer tools without the ad clutter
by hengery | 2025-12-21 19:35:02+00:00
I kept opening online JSON formatters and getting buried in ads and popups. So I made a clean version with a few tools I actually use daily – JSON formatter with syntax highlighting, Base64 encoder/decoder, JWT decoder, text diff, and timestamp converter.

Everything runs client-side. No tracking, no server calls, no signup walls.

Built with React 19 and TypeScript. It's open source: https://github.com/chken007/tooly

My 5-year-old helped name it. She insisted on "Tooly" and I couldn't argue with that logic.

Open to feedback – especially if you spot bugs or have feature ideas.
by creativeSlumber | 2025-12-21 19:35:25+00:00
what happens if that large enclosure fails and the CO2 freely flows outside?

That enclosure has a huge volume - area the size of several football fields, and at least 15 stories high. The article says it holds 2k tons of co2, which is ~1,000,000 cubic meters in volume.

CO2 is denser than air will pool closer to the ground, and will suffocate anyone in the area.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster

Edit: It holds 2k tons, not 20K tons.
by analogpixel | 2025-12-21 19:35:40+00:00
Would be nice if you could filter out all the only 1 mention books, and then sort by least number of mentions. There seems to be a million 1 mention books, and I can't scroll through them all, but would be more curious to see books with 2 or more mentions.

It was kind of disappointing to see the highest mentioned books, since I've read most of them already (nothing new really popped out.)
by verdverm | 2025-12-21 19:35:45+00:00
This is the CEO of Palentir, one of the more dubious or evil companies out there

The stratification has become much worse the last few decades and the trend is not showing signs of slowing. This cannot be taken out of context of the larger going ons in the US and the world. People see the kleptocracy because they are so brazen they do it right out in the open
by IlikeKitties | 2025-12-21 19:35:57+00:00
> Europe is preparing for the Russia invasion from one side, and betrayal by the US from the other.

Let's assume for a moment that would be true. And let's also ignore the lack of a nuclear weapons in most EU countries.

How does breaking encryption for normal people help? Spies and Operatives will just use PGP and ignore these laws, because that's what spies do.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-12-21 19:36:34+00:00
> "My view is that poor and average people are alright..."

My preferred counterexample is the actions of soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army invading various Asian countries in the years leading up to WW2 and during it, perfectly ordinary people conscripted to the military behaving in absolutely savage ways to a civilian population. There is a reason the Japanese are still despised by their neighbors, though it has become more muted over the years. It is also a large enough sample (~4 million in occupied territories from a casual search) that it cannot be handwaved away as being some kind of isolated aberration.
by WXLCKNO | 2025-12-21 19:36:40+00:00
Unfair or not, same thing for me.

Then I'm not even focused on the content more than I'm scanning through it for signs of AI slop writing so I don't have to waste brainpower consuming that which took no brainpower to produce.

Also unfair perhaps but I think writers in particular, like the author of this post, should be aware enough of the patterns of AI written slop to consciously avoid them nowadays.

It doesn't matter if you used to write like this, the reality is people will question you now if you do.
by homeonthemtn | 2025-12-21 19:36:41+00:00
I am condensing down a much longer thought here but I would argue that this is the result of consumerism.

You work to earn, you earn to buy.

But buying is not meaning. It's a momentary sugar high that's lost to the wind the moment the transaction is over. No deeper life meaning can be derived from this.

When your culture is based around constant self satisfaction, there's nothing bigger than the self.

Community is dead, culture over generations is dead, building and making is dead, even cooking your own food is dead - "just order it". There's nothing for us to do except our individual parts, and our individual parts often feel like we're just putting a quarter into a machine that spits out a paycheck.

Etc etc
by untech | 2025-12-21 19:37:25+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. Interesting. Sounds unpleasant both for workers that have to hang around on the street, and customers that are approached (at least that’s how I imagine it) by people offering services even when they don’t need it. (Or do customers approach workers themselves?) From the outside, sounds weird. I wonder what in the US caused it.
by kgklxksnrb | 2025-12-21 19:37:59+00:00
When I, as a developer, was told (essentially forced if I wanted to keep my job) to implement dark patterns, I did it knowing I made the world worse. I was fully aware of it, and my coworkers as well, we discussed it openly, and I imagine everyone implementing such tech are. Of course I and other could claim plausible deniability, ”we didn’t understand consent”.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-12-21 19:38:11+00:00
So I'm no kernel dev and only did a web search out of curiosity... Based on https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/debugging/gdb... and https://sergioprado.blog/debugging-the-linux-kernel-with-gdb... , it reads as if it's fairly easy so long as you're willing to compile the kernel yourself. Actually, at that point I would personally favor UML, since at that point Linux is just a normal userspace program that you can attach to: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/virt/uml/user_mode_li...

But I'm not a kernel dev and it's been a very long time since I would have needed to debug the kernel; does this not actually work?
by dzhiurgis | 2025-12-21 19:38:19+00:00
At this point overhead cables are likely many orders more expensive.

Buses in Paris run with IIRC 60kWh battery and pantograph charger at every other station. Packs (not cells) recently dropped to below $100 kWh. At $6k thats probably what city pays for couple of replacement seats (gold plating et all).
by jchw | 2025-12-21 19:38:19+00:00
The operative word is "day laborers". These are people who work on a day-to-day basis. In America at least, there is a large contingent of people who are informal day laborers, especially Hispanic immigrants apparently, although I'm not sure if that's really true or just a stereotype, and a lot of them hang out or around at home improvement stores, waiting to be hired for various handyman-type jobs.

It is frequently referenced in American media, like South Park (in "D-Yikes") and Mike Judge's Beavis and Butthead (in "The Day Butt-Head Went Too Far"). And well, probably some other media that isn't adult cartoons, but for some reason that was what first immediately came to mind.

I was aware of the stereotype of Hispanic day laborers hanging out in Home Depot parking lots for a long time, but it was interesting to see the degree to which it seems to be true in California, where I often saw fairly large groups of people that I believed to be day laborers in the parking lot. I'm sure there are also day laborers at home improvement stores in the Midwest too, but I don't really pay that much attention, so I haven't noticed it much.

edit: I see I took too long to reply and now am the sixth or so person to point this out, sorry. Race condition.
by otterley | 2025-12-21 19:38:56+00:00
> Logging is not metrics is not auditing.

I espouse a "grand theory of observability" that, like matter and energy, treats logs, metrics, and audits alike. At the end of the day, they're streams of bits, and so long as no fidelity is lost, they can be converted between each other. Audit trails are certainly carried over logs. Metrics are streams of time-series numeric data; they can be carried over log channels or embedded inside logs (as they often are).

How these signals are stored, transformed, queried, and presented may differ, but at the end of the day, the consumption endpoint and mechanism can be the same regardless of origin. Doing so simplifies both the conceptual framework and design of the processing system, and makes it flexible enough to suit any conceivable set of use cases. Plus, storing the ingested logs as-is in inexpensive long-term archival storage allows you to reprocess them later however you like.
Show HN: An authority gateway that controls AI actions before they execute
by bhaviav100 | 2025-12-21 19:39:00+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been uneasy watching AI systems get wired directly into production systems without any real authority layer.

So I built a small gateway that sits between an application, an LLM, and real-world actions.

It enforces things most infrastructure systems take for granted: - environment controls (dev vs prod) - kill switch - policy allowlists - cost ceilings - human approvals - idempotency - append-only audit logs

The LLM can suggest actions, but nothing executes unless it passes policy.

This is an early prototype. Executors are stubbed, approvals and idempotency are in-memory. The goal is not completeness, but exploring the right control abstraction.

I’m sharing this because I think AI needs a control plane, not just better prompts.

Curious how others here are thinking about approvals, idempotency, and execution safety in AI systems.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-12-21 19:39:05+00:00
The Social Construction of Reality[1][2] provided me a method of examining the things that I assumed where obviously true and describes the process by which human ideas are transformed from beliefs into real tangible objects and natural truths. It forever changed the way I look at claims of human behavior framed as universal laws and my ears pearl up whenever I hear phrases like reality, truth, and nature used to justify personal beliefs.

1. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Penguin Books, 1991.

2. https://amstudugm.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/s...
by WXLCKNO | 2025-12-21 19:39:18+00:00
I mean marriage is a global concept but it feels like the US makes a huge deal about it.

Like two people can't be together without being married.

But mostly it's a low effort low with quality comment that adds zero value and implicitly passes judgment on those who are not married and don't have kids.

As if married people with kids are the happiest people in the world lol.
by teraflop | 2025-12-21 19:39:27+00:00
> Expectations vs systemd/supervisord/tmux/dtach: where would you use this?

Sorry to be blunt, but I feel like this is a big unanswered question that you should be addressing. Why would I use your tool over the other well-known alternatives? I read through your overview and I don't see an answer.

You say that this is intended "for environments where you don’t want to stand up a full supervisor stack (or don’t have one)". And you compare it to systemd. But what Linux developer doesn't already have systemd installed?

Or to use a different comparison, what advantage does "fws run" have over "podman run"? Podman already supports PTYs that can be attached/detached, allows isolating different processes, and has an HTTP API.

It seems like you intend this for situations where you want a multi-pane text-base UI that resembles an IDE. But personally, I prefer to do this sort of thing by composing existing tools that provide that functionality (namely tmux/screen and Docker/Podman) rather than using a single integrated tool that tries to replace both.
by tetha | 2025-12-21 19:39:42+00:00
One thing this is missing: Standardization and probably the ECS' idea of "related" fields.

A common problem in a log aggregation is the question if you query for user.id, user_id, userID, buyer.user.id, buyer.id, buyer_user_id, buyer_id, ... Every log aggregation ends up being plagued by this. You need standard field names there, or it becomes a horrible mess.

And for a centralized aggregation, I like ECS' idea of "related". If you have a buyer and a seller, both with user IDs, you'd have a `related.user.id` with both id's in there. This makes it very simple to say "hey, give me everything related to request X" or "give me everything involving user Y in this time frame" (as long as this is kept up to date, naturally)
by nostrebored | 2025-12-21 19:40:46+00:00
Why not?

It is really no different than having drug dealers set up shop on your corner and sharing footage with police. You have people who are likely committing criminal activity (multiple crimes in the day laborer case) and are sharing footage with the relevant authorities.

The politicization of enforcement doesn’t change that as a business owner I would not want to own the location people facilitate illegal transactions.
by MBCook | 2025-12-21 19:40:54+00:00
>If Waymo literally didn't foresee a blackout, that's a systemic problem.

I agree with this bit

> If, on the other hand, there was some weird power and cellular meltdown that coïncided with something else, that's a fixable edge case.

This is what I have a problem with. That’s not an edge case. There will always be a weird thing no one programmed for.

Remember a few years ago when a semi truck overturned somewhere and poured slimy eels all over the highway? No one‘s ever gonna program for that.

It doesn’t matter. There has to be an absolute minimum fail safe that can always work if the car is capable of moving safely. The fact that a human driver couldn’t be reached to press a button to say to execute that is not acceptable. Not having the human available is a totally foreseeable problem. It’s Google. They know networks fail.