MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-19 21:26:15+00:00
I was working on one of the biggest open access publishing platforms and the world and under pressure I rolled up an upgrade that wasn't properly tested and then spent about a month trying to make it work before the team gave up, rolled back to an earlier version. I got sidelined and worked on other systems, my contract wasn't renewed and I was looking for a job 8 months later with a really bad attitude.

There was a lot of crazy politics but it turned out that the team was completely reorganized and a lot of people left that year, including my boss and her boss and the head of the organization. It led that platform to confront the sustainability, funding and management issues that had been neglected up until then.

I'm certainly not 100% responsible for what happened but I was probably the only person who could have stopped the disaster but had I done so I probably would have lost my job anyway.
by mmooss | 2025-11-19 21:26:34+00:00
> Did it end up being childish, overblown and power-trippy?

Very often what any group outside the mainstream does do to address their concerns is called 'overblown', etc. by people in the mainstream. 'They make too big a deal of it', you'll hear. The 'overblown' perception is a strong signal of the problem at work (and also condescending).

It goes to what is often the heart of the cause of the problems: The mainstream doesn't experience it directly, they only see it peripherally, and they can easily ignore it, which they mostly do. Doing anything effective about the problem therefore challenges the mainstream's norms.

If you are studying Ada programming, you talk to Ada programmers, not to people who read about Ada somewhere - the latter would be absurd; what do they know? If you want to know about the experiences of Black people, conservative Christians, etc., you need to talk to those people and listen to them. It's not overblown to them.
by gregates | 2025-11-19 21:26:54+00:00
The idea that there is some significant, load-bearing distinction in meaning between "ethical" and "moral" is something I've encountered a few times in my life.

In every case it has struck me as similar to, say, "split infinitives are ungrammatical": some people who pride themselves on being pedants like to drop it into any conversation where it might be relevant, believing it to be both important and true, when it is in fact neither.
by imiric | 2025-11-19 21:27:10+00:00
Well, that's a bummer.

Despite the sentiment on this forum that EU regulations are hindering tech progress, Europe is one of the few places in the world that actually tries to keep tech companies on a leash. We need much more of that, not less. The GDPR and the AI Act are far too weak, IMO. We've seen that fines when companies step out of line are simply the cost of doing business for them. Tech oligarchs should be getting jail time for every infraction instead.

I'm not too concerned for myself, since I don't trust any of these companies with my data anyway. But this is bad news for the majority of people who aren't tech savvy, or simply have "nothing to hide".

We know what happens when we let CEOs run a country. The last thing Europe needs is to follow USA's lead.
by GloamingNiblets | 2025-11-19 21:27:22+00:00
The nature of the content is an important variable to control for in future work, but the primary negative impact appears to be via the devastating effect on human attention.

From the paper: "repeated exposure to highly stimulating, fast-paced content may contribute to habituation, in which users become desensitized to slower, more effortful cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving, or deep learning. This process may gradually reduce cognitive endurance and weaken the brain’s ability to sustain attention on a single task... potentially reinforcing impulsive engagement patterns and encouraging habitual seeking of instant gratification".
by palata | 2025-11-19 21:28:23+00:00
Sure, someone argues something. Who knows if it's right or wrong? It's not a hard science.

How do you estimate the cost of regulations on businesses? You ask businesses. Businesses have absolutely zero incentive to say that regulations are not bad. "Just in case", they will say it hurts them.

That is, until there is a de facto monopoly and they can't compete anymore, and at that point they start lobbying like crazy for... more regulations. Look at the drone industry: a chinese company, DJI, is light-years ahead of everybody else. What have US drone companies been doing in the last 5+ years? Begging for regulations.

All that to say, it is pretty clear that no regulations is bad, and infinitely many regulations is bad. Now what's extremely difficult is to know what amount of regulation is good. And even that is simplistic: it's not about an amount of regulation, it depends on each one. The cookie hell is not a problem of regulations, it's a problem of businesses being arseholes. They know it sucks, they know they don't do anything with those cookies, but they still decide that their website will start with a goddamn cookie popup because... well because the sum of all those good humans working in those businesses results in businesses that are, themselves, big arseholes.
by mrandish | 2025-11-19 21:28:30+00:00
On Firefox you can block short form content from YouTube as easily as adding one extension or a few uBlock Origin filter lines. With a bit more work it's possible to fix a lot of other stuff using various browser extensions and userscripts on desktop/laptop. On mobile (Android) I use an app that patches the YT executable called "Revanced Extended" (https://github.com/inotia00/ReVanced_Extended). On set top (Android TV sticks) I use an app called SmartTube (https://smarttubeapp.github.io/).

On desktop/laptop I decided to go deeper into YT customization. My current mod stack for YT completely re-imagines the YT interface to be focused and space efficient, replaces spammy, inaccurate thumbnails with actual video stills, re-formats spammy ALL CAPS AtTentIoN SeEKiNG headlines, shows enough of the expanded description to be useful and outright blocks a bunch of stuff I never want to see (channel promos, upcoming, shorts, live streams, algorithm recommendations, etc). It takes me straight to a grid of only new videos posted by the niche channels I subscribe to, so I never even see the Youtube home page.

Warning: I cobbled together this stack over time out of disparate unrelated components by just experimenting until I found a combination which "fixes" YT in exactly the ways I want. Even though it heavily customizes YT, it's all been working great with no changes for over two years - but YT could break it any time. If you're okay with that, this should get you started:

1. A UserScript YouTube 'mod platform' called [Nova YouTube](https://github.com/raingart/Nova-YouTube-extension). This does the thumbnail, description and other reformatting as well as most of the content blocking by type (with a couple uBO filters found in the uBO subreddit).

2. A Stylus userstyles (CSS) mod called [AdashimaaTube](https://github.com/sapondanaisriwan/AdashimaaTube). This mostly handles reformatting the interface like number of rows and columns in grids and selectively removing YT's dark-pattern UI cruft.

3. "Youtube Enhancer" (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-enhan...) is a Firefox add-on which I mostly use for one feature it does perfectly (auto-expanding videos to fill the browser viewport but not in 'full-screen'). I also like the way Enhanced YouTube's configurable player interface buttons work and look.

My YT account was created in 2008 and until I did this I didn't even realize just how awful YT had become because it was done so gradually over the years. There are a lot of different add-ons and userscripts out there and the ones I happened to land on may not suit you, so just try different options to see what's possible and then experiment until you find a stack which works for you.
by comeonbro | 2025-11-19 21:29:18+00:00
A label placed half an inch wrong on misleading affordance -> 200,000 ton bridge collapse, 6 deaths, tens of billions of dollars of economic damage

Instant classic destined for the engineering-disasters-drilled-into-1st-year-engineers canon (or are the other swiss cheese holes too confounding)

Where do you think it would fit on the list?
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-19 21:29:32+00:00
> All Microsoft would have to do to shock the world and get months of good press is announce they were never going to opt anybody into anything by default any more. At this point that would be considered astonishing.

One can dream. I manage M365 where I work, and MS never opting tenants into anything by default again would save me many hours of work on a seemingly weekly basis now.

The fact that they can abuse even their enterprise customers and still retain them is what blows my mind.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-11-19 21:29:45+00:00
That article does contain the correct answer, so thank you very much for finding it, although the passage you've quoted is ChatGPT gibberish not in the source given.

Per https://iep.unibocconi.eu/europes-internal-tariffs-why-imfs-..., the model treats shopping local as evidence of the existence of a trade barrier, as opposed to a rational preference based on cultural and environmental considerations. This is why the numbers are ridiculously high. (Is there a 120% implicit tariff for textiles? Or do people just prefer warm clothes in the north and breezy clothes in the Mediterranean?)
by alnwlsn | 2025-11-19 21:29:51+00:00
In my eyes it's quite the opposite: there is almost nothing that exists as a complete product on Amazon. Faster and cheaper? Yes. Better and more complete? Not a chance. But you have to want it bad enough, and have enough skill to do it.

Arduino is (was?) one of those skills. Practice them enough, and you'll soon find the things you want aren't available for sale, at any price.
by nemonemo | 2025-11-19 21:30:30+00:00
The danger of short form videos is because the form enables the algorithm designer to artificially maximize the reward with minimum effort by the viewer. It doesn't matter whether you watch kitten ones initially. After watching it for a month casually, chances are you would end up watching some addictive videos for hours with little effort. It could be some endless stream of Buddhist monks talking about suffering, if someone likes that kind of thing. It's just designed to be addictive with crazy high reward/effort ratio.
by notahacker | 2025-11-19 21:30:48+00:00
Thanks for explaining the downvote.

But the position that because an institution works on behalf of the public, every communication it receives should be public seems naive. The entire publicly funded criminal justice service depends on secrecy to function, for example. Similarly, the public doesn't need to be know the budget and shortlist of possible locations for the next Gigafactory or how to build a Falcon 9 any more than it needs to know the identities of whistleblowers, and if you don't redact that information, you don't get people blowing whistles or sharing their expansion plans with governors or IP with NASA. Without the ability to deliver suitcases full of cash in response to a private conversation being inconvenienced in the slightest.

As you've already pointed out, we have such things as subpoenas already to deal with the actual criminal conduct. This is a better approach than "don't write anything you wouldn't share with everyone", not least because the latter actually normalizes every interaction with government officials being a request for an off-the-record in-person conversation.
by meowface | 2025-11-19 21:30:55+00:00
>It would rather rewrite a TLS library from scratch than bother to ask you if the network is available.

This is definitely one of the biggest issues with coding agents at the moment.

That said, from my experience, Codex so often does things that are so useful and save me so much time that the occasional "oh god what the hell did it just go off and do" are an acceptable cost for me.

I regularly get great results with open-ended prompts and agents that spend 15+ minutes working on the task. I'm sure they'll eventually get better at common sense understanding of what kind of work is wasteful/absurd.
by hereme888 | 2025-11-19 21:31:15+00:00
Where does this guy get his information from?

There's nothing underwhelming about AI. It's how Microsoft damages anything it touches, and lies to users about it. They force a stupid "copilot" key into computers and encourage the waste of resources into "chips with AI capabilities", only to push your data to the cloud, deceitfully, and with very poor safety guarantees.

Also, people have a Windows backlash in general, and Microsoft ignores it, as usual.
by psunavy03 | 2025-11-19 21:31:20+00:00
There's also a whole lot of people who point out the middle ground fallacy just so they can avoid examining their own beliefs. No, the correct answer is not always exactly between the two sides. But no, that doesn't mean that one side or the other has a monopoly on recognizing the best way to handle things.

Centrism and objectivity aren't reflexively seeking "the middle," just refusing to buy into either tribe's propaganda and FUD.
by w10-1 | 2025-11-19 21:31:32+00:00
It may be that some media or some alcohol is more toxic than others, but it's still fair to test whether the mode of administration has an independent or enhancing effect.

E.g., crack cocaine is more addictive than nasal, and extended release Adderall is less addictive the immediate-release. So there's good reason to hypothesize that SFV has similar addiction-enhancing effects over long-form, and the article meta-analysis says problems in inhibition and cognition are among the strongest.

wrt choice, the thing about addiction is that while becoming addicted results from a series of choices, being addicted impairs your choice-making executive functions. Addicts use even when they don't like it, and to the exclusion of other things they prefer, and often switch from expensive drugs to cheap ones just to maximize use.

So in the same way that society would prefer to prevent rather than treat legions of fentanyl addicts infecting cities or meth addicts roaming the countryside, society would like to avoid the cognitive decline and productivity loss of a generation lost to scrolling.
by or_am_i | 2025-11-19 21:31:39+00:00
The subscription revenues is a decent chunk of your lifetime value (LTV) as a customer, but it's not all of it. The goal here is to squeeze as much value from you aside from that as possible, measured mostly by two things, really: the direct ad revenue, measured by dollars that go on the balance sheet, and the indirect "engagement" value measured by the KPIs (think daily, weekly, monthly active users) that go into the quarterlies. The more time you spend on the platform, the more "things" you have got used to interacting with (aka day-to-day, week-to-week "retention"), the more they can potentially "sell" to you -- and it's not just ads / youtube subscription upsells, it can be and often is other "products" on the same platform: their music streaming, their search, their documents and emails, maps, drive, etc. etc. And it just so happens that the short format is _really, really_ engaging for many folks.

The more time you spend in the mall, the fuller are the bags on the way out, be it out of chance, habit, or convenience.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-19 21:32:03+00:00
My wife is bipolar 1, and whenever she would go into a manic phase, I noticed her attention span would diminish as her condition worsened. First she couldn't tolerate a whole movie. Then not a 40 minute TV show, then not even a 20 minute show. She would go through a music video phase where she would watch those on repeat for hours, but eventually even those become too long, so the last stop was YouTube shorts when her mental health was at its worse. I always knew she was getting better when she started watching longer-form content.
by bpt3 | 2025-11-19 21:32:04+00:00
I'm not pissed off.

It's tiring watching people with no idea what they're talking about repeat the same "what about ..." arguments when professionals in the field have spent decades developing and maintaining models that have been proven over that time to be helpful.

It's also not a coincidence that nearly 100% of the people trying to poke holes in those models are people who disagree with the results generated from them, and that nearly 100% of those people don't have a clue about the topic at hand.

Of course a broad based index that is designed to represent the behavior of hundreds of millions of people is less accurate for you (or me, or anyone) personally than a model based solely on an individual's behavior. I don't know anyone on earth who would argue otherwise.

As a reminder, you started off by making a very lazy statement broadly criticizing a post that included well cited economic data showing that the inflation-adjusted median household income has increased substantially since the 1960s, which was in response to yet another terminally online doomer incorrectly claiming that your average American is worse off today than they were then.

You're now claiming that your issue with the provided data showing that people are overall financially better off today than they were in the 1960s is that that data isn't tailored to you (or any other individual) personally? I think that just demonstrates the validity of my original comment, because that's an absurd criticism.

FYI, you don't need to "advocate" for a personal price index. Track your spending over time and calculate it. If you want get much use out of it, you're going to want to incorporate the CPI data for your metro area as well (which exists and is publicly available) so you can both compare your spending to the median and backfill missing data as needed (for example, historical childcare expenses when you become a new parent).
by constantcrying | 2025-11-19 21:32:18+00:00
The changes to the GDPR are completely irrelevant compared to what the EU is planning with chat control.

The Commission is completely out of control, pushing through (or at least trying to) vast amounts of awful legislation, while the democratic processes are totally failing.

What this bloc desperately needs is leadership, which represents collective economic interests on a global stage, not some more pieces of legislation trying to control the Internet or putting the entirety of EU citizens under suspicion of raping children.
by palata | 2025-11-19 21:32:24+00:00
My theory is that companies are not the sum of their employees. Employees are generally good; toxic humans are a small minority (unfortunately they tend to be over-represented at the head of companies).

But put employees together into a profit-maximisation machine, and the machine will try to maximise profit, with dark patterns and downright evil things.

Similar with our species as a whole: nobody is actively working to break the climate so much that their kids will die long before they reach the age of retirement. But that's what we as a species are doing together, somehow. Individually, we don't want that, but that's not enough.
by m463 | 2025-11-19 21:32:25+00:00
> how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?

I think about things like this...

Some people enjoy watching horror movies, and some people don't. Some people enjoy watching game of thrones, and others don't.

And I know a lot of smart people disengage from politics because it is a big mess.

In the same way, I think lots of people on and around the ladder disengage in the same way, and these people rise (and feel empowered).

I also remember reading how steve jobs would figure out if someone was a good employee. He would go to their coworkers and say "I hear xxx is shit". If people would defend xxx, then maybe he was ok, while if they didn't say much, maybe xxx was shit.

so... this might be the pattern.
by aurizon | 2025-11-19 21:32:56+00:00
Yes, here in Ontario, Canada, the salary rate is quite low, but over time ramps to $60-80K. This tends to limit new enrollments at the low end via Teacher Colleges, but is so large at the top end that budgets are starved. As a kid in HS in the 50's the scale was a lot flatter. This has led to a lower presence of teacher staff in halls and stairwells (where we had a teacher in every hall segment and stairwell). Now the halls/stairwells are under supervised and this has tended towards many teacher free areas where it becomes 'Lord of the Flies' territory. I can see a growing role for AI in subject supervision on an individual basis to follow detailed student progress with explanatory input/repetition, as needed, perhaps with a dual screen setup where the teacher is able to monitor and have input above and beyond what the AI is capable of. My reason for this POV is teachers are spread thin and often are not aware of the people who might be lagging(and who often lose heart = drop out). I expect this idea has already begun to grow, and I hope AI pushback does not limit this concept.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-19 21:32:57+00:00
> The study also shows the same pattern in the US.

The modern US where a negligible number of reactors are being built, or the US in the period of the regulatory changes that accompanied the Cold War when everyone was afraid of nuclear bombs and then The China Syndrome and Chernobyl?

If you want it to mean anything you need data from when the regulatory environment isn't increasing in hostility over time during the measurement period.

> How many trillions in handouts from tax payer money to get there?

It's a loan at an interest rate higher than the government itself is paying to issue the bonds, i.e. the taxpayer is making money from this.

Also, the main issue isn't funding it, it's making it cost less, e.g. by moving most of the approvals from being needed at each and every site to the factory where components are being mass produced.

> Renewables and storage deliver that dream unsubsidized today.

Then why does the price per kWh that consumers are paying keep going up instead of down?
by adishj | 2025-11-19 21:33:08+00:00
yes! you can upload as many videos as you want (file limits currently are at 20GB and 90 minutes, per file). then I'd recommend using either the Rough Cut tile or the Montage tile to stitch them all together. In those tiles, you can prompt particular visual cues in terms of how you want the videos to be combined. Let me know if any questions.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-19 21:33:12+00:00
> Microsoft also doesn’t have user trust in the way Apple does, so everyone just assumes MSFT is going bad things with the data.

I think this is a big part of it. If Apple ever achieves their vision for personal context Siri & AI in their OS, I bet people will praise it and actually use it. Because Apple has built trust with their customers, and has strong marketing around privacy.

Microsoft burned that bridge a long time ago. They feel sleazy. Maybe if they haven't violated their users trust over and over again, people would be more receptive.
by daemonologist | 2025-11-19 21:33:23+00:00
First impressions are that this model is extremely good - the "zero-shot" text prompted detection is a huge step ahead of what we've seen before (both compared to older zero-shot detection models and to recent general purpose VLMs like Gemini and Qwen). With human supervision I think it's even at the point of being a useful teacher model.

I put together a YOLO tune for climbing hold detection a while back (trained on 10k labels) and this is 90% as good out of the box - just misses some foot chips and low contrast wood holds, and can't handle as many instances. It would've saved me a huge amount of manual annotation though.