MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kalkaran | 2025-04-21 06:16:40+00:00
The best thing you can do is compare it to another study, since turning 0.06 standard deviations into a percentage of happiness isn’t going to be that telling.

In general, 0.2 is considered a small effect. So 0.06 is quite small — likely not a practically noticeable change in well-being. But impressive to me when I compare it to effect sizes of therapy interventions which can lie around 0.3 for 12 weeks.

Quote:

> “50 randomized controlled trials that were published in 51 articles between 1998 and August 2018. We found standardized mean differences of Hedges’ g = 0.34 for subjective well-being, Hedges’ g = 0.39 for psychological well-being, indicating small to moderate effects, and Hedges’ g = 0.29 for depression, and Hedges’ g = 0.35 for anxiety and stress, indicating small effects.”

(Source: The efficacy of multi-component positive psychology interventions, 2019 — https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331028589_The_Effic...)
by _wire_ | 2025-04-21 06:18:50+00:00
Ah good call! I noticed that too, but didn't mention it because I want to believe the packaging would be designed tend to keep the food in... But yes, this too because the packages wouldn't use an open-ended straw?

At the time of that movie, my world didn't contain much of the materials and designs portrayed, so the whole production was mesmerizing with design elements that distracted from more practical details: like ZOMG what kind of plastic is that tray made out of? Look how spacey that furniture is!

The video phone Floyd uses seems ridiculous with its $5 charge for a call. But pay phones worked on dimes. On his call to his daughter, she is seen next to a totem with a touchtone keypad for dialing. ATT advertised that as a concept product at that time, and touchtone phones were still novel (as were Tang and ballpoint pens that could write upside down).

When LED pocket calculators arrived in early 70s the color red of those LEDs was unlike anything else you would see; it seemed amazing.

And at the time real tech design was often awkward and cheesy, especial goofy arrangements of car interiors, which smelled funny and had plastic that fell apart after a few years of exposure to the sunlight and heat.

In 60s it was typical for TV remotes to have just a button for channel change and that's all. And the channel change worked by an electric motor rotating the channel dial. A big feature was a second button to change down instead of up,

In the 70s when cable TV arrived the converter box added remote functions to old TVs, which was a big part of the appeal, and in 1981 MTV was in stereo if you hooked up the cable to your hi-fi FM receiver and tuned the simulcast station. You could write to MTV and there'd send you a sticker for your tuner.

So the sets in 2001 seemed like astounding fashion design for many people, and that was still so when Star Wars arrived in '77.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-21 06:19:41+00:00
If you were only watermarking short sections of the video, wouldn't that make it possible to analyze the stegotext and erase it? You could have a handful of people rip the same video and then compare them, and if different sections get watermarked then you can reassemble an unwatermarked file. This also applies to splicing in short segments of watermarked video.

If you have the whole thing watermarked then all you can do to fix that is averaging; which might not even destroy the stegotext.

Audio watermarking is definitely an option; hell, there's already a DRM scheme called Cinavia that relies on watermarking[0]. If you cam a movie and play it on a Blu-Ray player, it'll actually trip this DRM scheme and, at a minimum, mute the audio or refuse to play the file. I would argue this is probably the most successful use of watermarking, at least in terms of "how much piracy does this frustrate"; but even then you can just play your cams on something else and get around it.

And this is all assuming your CDN provider offers cheap-enough edge compute to inject watermarks before the video hits the user's device. I haven't looked into this recently, but I remember early DRM schemes having very silly bypasses[1] because CDNs could only serve static files. Someone else linked to Akamai documentation about watermarking, but I have no idea how much extra that costs or how much it might complicate other parts of the setup.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia

[1] e.g. Remember when someone made an iTunes Music Store client that just didn't encrypt anything, because all the encryption was done on your own device?
by kqr | 2025-04-21 06:19:55+00:00
> no downtime except when it restarts for updates.

This sounds a little like saying "all of North America except the U.S."

I don't think people are worried about random breakdowns on a single VPS, but scheduled updates are still downtime, and downtime causes revenue loss regardless of why it happened.

Any time a service is important enough I ask for two servers and a load balancer specifically to handle deployments and upgrade windows transparently. But! I agree services are usually less important than people think.
by MonkeyClub | 2025-04-21 06:22:54+00:00
> Is calling a massive embedded JS obfuscator a "VM" a bit of a stretch? Ultimately it's not translating anything to a lower-level language.

From the Repo's README:

"TikTok is using a full-fledged bytecode VM, if you browse through it, it supports scopes, nested functions and exception handling. This isn't a typical VM and shows that it is definitely sophiscated."
by thinkingemote | 2025-04-21 06:24:26+00:00
Removing one dopamine addicting and cortisol antagonising source might just be replaced by more of all the other sources that are being consumed. Perhaps they just watched TV news more, for example?

But perhaps the study shows that the effect works in the right direction even if small and even when replaced by any other behaviours that cause unhappiness, depression and anxiety.
by designerarvid | 2025-04-21 06:24:49+00:00
Intellectually many want this. But the feed shortcuts our reptile brain and gains more engagement minutes / day. As you say, the algorithmic feed is superior for creators wanting reach, and more importantly, advertisers who want eyeballs on their ads. Due to network effects, it is likely impossible to get friends and family to join a boring and non-profit alternative.

Instead of pausing social media altogether, I recently took some time off from the endless scrolling feeds only. When returning it's so apparent how everything is bait for engagement.

The feed hijacks the human attention process on a visceral level. Either with visual stimulus that's extremely intriguing for evolved apes like us (cutting a cake that looks like a dog), or by activating an emotional response from a tribal species like us (stupid takes on politics, in- and out-group stuff).

The rest of most social media apps is fine and offers much of what you are asking for.
by mock-possum | 2025-04-21 06:25:12+00:00
It’s crazy to me that he’s just making this shit up and people are laughing at it - it’s the same impulse that drives people to repost agitprop completely critically, without any thought for the accuracy of the content or the aim or the context or anything, really, aside from the like the way the idea of it makes them feel.

Walk into literally any place in America that serves coffee, ask for ‘just coffee’ or ‘black coffee’ or ‘drip coffee’ or ‘house blend’ or however you want to say it, and get a hot cup of exactly that: ‘just coffee.’ It’s fun to spout a list of XYZ-achinos but why are people if that’s somehow accurate or insightful? He’s making shit up.
by tossandthrow | 2025-04-21 06:25:33+00:00
> Even if the LLM never writes a line of code - this is still valuable, because helping humans understand software faster means you can help humans write software faster.

IMHO, Ai text additions are generally not valuable and I assume, until proven wrong, that Ai text provides little to no value.

I have seen so many startups fold after they made some ai product that on the surface level appeared impressive but provided no substantial value.

Now, I will be impressed by the ai that can remove code without affecting the product.
by nine_k | 2025-04-21 06:25:35+00:00
Regarding the LED lights: unless you use a lamp with CRI < 90, you see obvious, glaring color distortions, and some colors just "disappear", cannot be seen, because of the lack of a particular spectrum bands. Sadly, most inexpensive LED lamps have CRI around 80, and that light feeld definitely artificial, even if pleasant to the eye. A lamp with CRI 90 is okay, most things look natural, even though you can notice it's not sunlight. A lamp with CRI 95 is very fine, it's practically sunlight, and most tricky colors are visible well. I've never encountered a lamp with CRI, say, 97, but they exist and cost a lot.

(Source: doing object photography.)
by pjmlp | 2025-04-21 06:26:03+00:00
Probably because it gets tiresome after a while, I used to be big into Winamp themes, back in the 90's there were plenty of Demoscene and gamedev sites with desktop of the day, and what not.

After a while it loses the appeal, we decide to just use whatever defaults get offered, finetune one or two options and that is it.
by serbuvlad | 2025-04-21 06:29:00+00:00
Yep. I agree and now we've basically reinvented sigma. Take the x=1 and put it below, take the 4 and put it above take the x+3 and put it to the right.

Granted I always found sigma a bit quirky for separating the range ends like that. Either x below and 1..4 above, or x=1..4 below/above would have been more intuitive.

But it's just a notation you learn once and then you know it.
by rulesofthrw | 2025-04-21 06:29:41+00:00
I live these rules for 30 years and never got rejected. You can do whatever you want, like go and use interview time to vent out your bad internal state, who knows- maybe you'll get better outcome.

From experience, people who can't hold their tongue and tell bad things about their past bosses or coworkers, will also tell bad things about you behind your back.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-21 06:30:35+00:00
So the photo print market is really weird right now.

Remember how, in the 1970s and 80s, they used to have little booths surrounded by parking-lot, and you could drive up to the Fotomat booth and drop off your 110 or 35mm film, and they would go develop it and bring back your negatives and prints, and you could drive your Dodge Charger or your Ford Fairlane to come pick them up?

And then, the pharmacies got in on this, because pharmacies are where the chemicals are at anyway. And at a pharmacy, you could have film developed, and you could also get prints, and reprints, and larger-sized prints, and framed photos and albums and greeting cards and all sorts of things.

And this pharmaceutical extension tradition carries on into the present-day. Now you can waltz into CVS or Walgreens or Wal-Mart, you can bring your USB or your microSD card, or just your phone with a cable, and you can plug in your USB or thunk down a disc, and load it into their kiosk computer, and some even have scanners. And then you can order instant photo prints! And they still can sell you albums, and framed photos, and large-format prints, and posters and whatnot.

Here's the trouble, though: phone cameras don't generate the right-sized images.

I was at a Walgreens and they were selling, like, 8x10 and 5x7 and other standard photo-sized frames and prints. And I upload a photo, and the kiosk complains. Kiosk says it's low-resolution. Kiosk shows me a sample preview, and the edges are cut off.

So I chat with the clerk there, and she tells me to just take a screenshot of the image and it'll work. LOL a screenshot, when the resolution is too low already?

And so eventually I figured out that, even if I took a 50 megapixel photograph with the phone's sophisticated camera, it would not print correctly. I told the clerk: this phone takes photos like a TV set. It's in 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratios. Those are not the same as 8x10 photos!

So the pharmacies have all this tooling for conventional cameras. I suppose a DSLR could still turn out 8x10 photos. I suppose I could "crop" a photo down in my smartphone on Android. But what I really wanted was to download a PD photo from Commons.wikimedia.org and print that out in an 11x17 or larger. And that was not working out so well.

Phone cameras today are producing really impeccable photos of really impossible aspect ratios. There's a ton of tooling that is specifically made for photographs that were based on the size of negatives and the size of photo paper in the last 70 decades or so. Kodak and Fujifilm and their ilk are still haunting us.

Thankfully there are more online services. Everything I put now into Google Photos. Google Photos will happily generate a photobook and they'll even drop-ship them to my family. I have sent them cool photobooks in the past. I never got to peek at them. No complaints. Google Photos doesn't mind when your photos are a weird aspect-ratio. Google Photos will adapt. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be shown your memories.
by anovikov | 2025-04-21 06:30:55+00:00
Quit all social media 8 years ago, never missed it one bit. It was all good and i truly enjoyed it before ~2014 but then it started deteriorating so rapidly due to political polarisation and domination of "influencers" that kept peddling worthless trash, by about 2016 i no longer understood wtf i was doing there.

Since then, only tried reddit, but it has a different problem - it's an echo chamber where no real discussion is possible on any topic as anyone who disagrees with even minute details in dominating dogma of every subreddit, gets downvoted to invisibility. Plus too many subreddits are merely karma mills that people use to boost their karma to allow themselves at least some actual voice in other subreddits - and those useless-by-design subreddits dominate the whole thing because you need to do a lot of those "filler" posts to allow oneself one real one, thus SNR on the platform is ridiculously low - but it's not some evil bots who's creating noise, but actual live people, and not even dumb ones, just because they HAVE to. And going through this - for what? To get a chance to participate in one more "someone on the internet is wrong" debate?

Meaningful talk is possible in groups where people are united by at least something and where is at least some real barrier of entry. These are not the social media. They can't afford filtering who gets in because that way they'll lose viewership and leave a lot of money on the table. I wonder why that comes as a surprise to anyone.
by steveBK123 | 2025-04-21 06:34:11+00:00
There's something about the social media influencer industrial complex that short circuits women's brains worse, as far as I can tell. Most of my friends quit social media years to a decade ago but our wives are all on it. Men seem to get sucked into Youtube wormholes instead.

I think the only way out is cold turkey. The number of conversations my wife starts with telling me about some distant acquaintances recent vacation (as seen thru IG) is distressing.

My "social" internet use is more hobby based - forum/reddit hobby focussed content.
by emacsen | 2025-04-21 06:35:17+00:00
All that's old is new again. More than a decade ago, I inherited a Node application and was able to use many of these exact techniques inside the application.

Even moreso, I could introspect the entire application state, including providing myself a shell and modify application state within the application. Keeping a blocklist inside a simple array- no problem! And being able to run a shell inside the same process meant I could inspect and even modify the array while the application ran.

That made it incredibly pleasant to use and run.

On the flip side, upgrades can be very challenging.

In a modern web application it's standard practice to run (at least) two instances of the application at once and use the load balancer to test both, or to drain jobs from one to the other. This is relatively easy if the applications are stateless.

Once the application holds all the state in memory, there's a real challenge. That array that seemed so clever- you'll need to serialize it so it can be reloaded at initialization time. Keeping all the session identifiers in memory- be ready to dump that.

Worse, if the application is not designed to share this state with another application, you're now in some trouble. This is fine if you're running a small site with a few users who can accept some downtime, but if you're running a serious service, you'd like to have some kind of upgrade path other than shutting the application down and starting it back up again.

"I'll just share state with other application servers", you might think, and then use something like ZeroMQ to transmit state", but once you think about sharing state between application servers, you realize you'd probably be better off using a tool like Redis, and you're right back where we started.
by submeta | 2025-04-21 06:36:15+00:00
Deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts years ago and my inner peace increased immediately, my meditations became deeper, better within days. I never would have guessed how much negative energy these platforms created within me. People will post mostly how perfect their life is on these platforms. Distorting reality, inducing jealousy, guilt, and other forms of negative emotions. And finally a sense of depression.
by RajT88 | 2025-04-21 06:36:15+00:00
I logged into classmates a couple of years ago. I had a message waiting from 2005 from one of my sister's insane ex-friends. That was a blast from the past and hilarious. 18 years without bothering to log in.

Then I realized their business model is so low-rent, they had web 1.0 style protections on scraping all their scanned yearbooks. So I liberated all the ones with anyone I was likely to know and posted them to Archive.org.

You're welcome.

Also: #deletefacebook
by blackbear_ | 2025-04-21 06:36:40+00:00
On the contrary, reporting changes relative to the standard deviation of a control group frees you from scales and their meanings, because it relates the observed change to the normal spread of scores before the intervention. In this way, you don't need to know the scale and its meaning to know if a change is big or small, and from a statistical perspective, that's (almost) all you need to find if a change is significant or due to random chance. Of course, looking back at the original scale and its meaning can help interpreting the meaning of the results in other ways
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-21 06:37:01+00:00
Well if we go to an even more extreme degree with the devil’s advocate thing: what is the difference between an ~4 month embryo (or any cutoff after which miscarriage becomes very unlikely) and a newborn?

Either of them isn’t a real person, neither is fully conscious. Sure a newborn can feel pain but infanticide can be done in a humane way. What we are depriving from the newborn is the opportunity to live and experience the rest of its life but the same applies in both cases.

And in a quite a few ancient societies infanticide was fully acceptable (killing slightly older children was generally not) and used as a somewhat safer alternative to abortion.
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-04-21 06:37:24+00:00
VM-based architectures are really common in the obfuscation space, which is why you have executable packers[1], JS packers[2] and bot management products[3][4] leveraging similar techniques.

As for why the obfuscation is needed: bot management products suffer from a fundamental weakness in that ultimately, all of them simply collect static data from the environment, therefore it would make much more sense to make the steps involved as difficult to reverse engineer as possible. Once that is done, all you need to do is slightly change the schematics of your script every few weeks and publish a new bundle, and you've got yourself a pretty unsubvertible* protection scheme.

Regarding the "trojan horse", I think someone is yet to show proof that it's a Javascript exploit.

(*Unsubvertible is obviously relative, but raising the cost the attack, from say, $0.01/1000 requests to $10/1000 requests would massively cut down on abuse.)

[1] https://vmpsoft.com/

[2] https://jscrambler.com/

[3] https://github.com/neuroradiology/InsideReCaptcha

[4] https://www.zenrows.com/blog/bypass-cloudflare#_qEu5MvVdnILJ...
by steveBK123 | 2025-04-21 06:38:35+00:00
As far as I can tell, the algorithm can really harm people during times of mental illness/stress/anxiety. Part of it is that it is like a feedback loop.

When we lost our pet and my wife was very upset for a while, the algo kept showing her more and more content associated with pet loss. It got to the point that some random content pushed to her social media was upsetting her daily.

I can imagine someone experiencing depression, suicidal thoughts, etc can easily be pushed over the edge by the algorithmic feedback loop.
by smelendez | 2025-04-21 06:39:21+00:00
This has moved heavily into group chats and I’m not sure it’s coming back.

Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances.

Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares.
by raffraffraff | 2025-04-21 06:40:21+00:00
I looked up one of the major banks in my country and the difference in mortgage rates and monthly repayments for different LTV ratios is as follows for a €500k property with €50k down payment:

LTV <50%: 3.75% €2668pm LTV >80%: 4.15% €2762pm

Over the lifetime of the loan you'll spend roughly half of the time paying the upper rate and half paying the lower rate.

However, if, over the first 10 years of the mortgage, your house halves in value due to a recession then you won't break the 50% LTV mark until year 15 (2040).

On the other hand, if house prices were to increase by 50% over that period then you might hit the 50% LTV mark within 7 years (2032).

The difference between the total mortgage interest in these two scenarios is €9216. The only thing that changed was the valuation of the home.
by photonthug | 2025-04-21 06:41:05+00:00
> I’m tired of adversarially wrestling usefulness out of a trillion dollar company.

Hopefully people will learn to get tired of this sort of thing a LOT quicker, and this will be one good thing about out our new improved and now extremely shortened attention spans. Impatience could actually have an upside if it prevents decades of escalating arms racing with enshittification vs new-current-work-around. It’s like with stages of grief, right? Denial / bargaining. Whatever is broken in a trillion dollar corporation is broken on purpose, and it's getting worse, not better.. waiting around and hoping for improvement is a fools errand.

Up until now, boiling the frog/consumer slowly has been one tactic. Or corporations can leverage their size and simply make things so bad for so long that a new generation arrives on the scene and has no idea how bad the stuff on offer actually is. Enough completely ubiquitous impatience in consumers really does undermine both of those strategies.. if there's actually meaningful competition that's still left around to choose from
by masutaka | 2025-04-21 06:41:22+00:00
I couldn't find many real-world examples of how companies promote their open source projects — so I decided to document what we did.

In this post, I share our tactics, what worked, and lessons we learned while growing our OSS project from zero to 3,000 GitHub stars.

Repo: https://github.com/liam-hq/liam