MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ProfessorLayton | 2025-11-07 22:25:52+00:00
The Music app on iPhones went from simple and usable to an absolute dumpster fire pushing a subscription. Even with a subscription it's incredibly maddening because of the terrible UX and show-stopping bugs (Literally failing at playing music!).

The Library tab is now the last one, with the rest (Which are lazy-loaded and slow!) are pushing content much of which is locked behind a subscription. It's now even worse with iOS 26 since tabs get groups and requires 2 taps to into my own library.

The Music app has been getting worse and worse every year.
by oytis | 2025-11-07 22:25:59+00:00
Not really on topic, but it'fascinating how Dunning-Kruger effect continues to live its own life in the public culture despite being pretty much debunked in its most popular form a while ago.

What Dunning-Kruger experiments have actually shown is that people's assesment of their own performance is all over the place, and only gets slightly better for good performers.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-11-07 22:26:00+00:00
Years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his talks on longevity. Other than the casual racism and sexism (Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people), he made a big comment on Linus Pauling's obsession towards the end of his life regarding Vitamin C consumption.

The main idea is that primates such as humans and chimps lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits and in some cases hunting other animals. Pauling supplemented his diet assiduously with Vitamin C and lived to be 93 years old.

Watson has now beaten this record. Maybe it was the Vitamin C, but maybe it was the casual racism and objectivation of female coworkers and subordinates... Who knows?
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-07 22:26:12+00:00
Still really hoping his game/app streaming system Kyber eventually materializes! https://kyber.media/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929602 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvosCplkCc

Incredibly accomplished already. What gravy this would be though.
by cogman10 | 2025-11-07 22:26:40+00:00
Not according to the linked study. In fact it's almost the opposite.

> Studies of genetic variation in Africa suggest that even though high levels of mixed ancestry are observed in most African populations, the genetic variation observed in Africa is broadly correlated with geography, language classification ... and subsistence classifications.

> For example, genetic variation among Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic-speaking populations from both Central and East Africa ... reflect the geographic region from which they originated, and generally shows a complex pattern of admixture between these populations and the Niger-Kordofanian speakers who migrated into the region more recently. Consistent with linguistic evidence regarding the origin of Nilo-Saharan languages in the Chad/Sudan border, the highest proportion of Nilo-Saharan ancestry is observed among southern Sudanese populations.
by devmor | 2025-11-07 22:27:19+00:00
I did not claim to be the average user. Most of my apps do not get updated unless they rely on APIs that force them to update. Furthermore, I have several android apps I published over 15 years ago that still function without updates on the newest version of Android.

What updates do you think need to be made to not “fall behind”? There aren’t many other than things like integration with Google Play services or App Store subscription billing.
by int_19h | 2025-11-07 22:27:39+00:00
In most cases, there was simply no native script to begin with. If you look at some examples of non-Latin-based scripts for native American languages (e.g. Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, Cherokee syllabary etc), they are all derived from newly introduced scripts. Mi'kmaw hieroglyphs are an interesting exception in that the glyphs themselves are indigenous, but their use as a full script was introduced from outside.

Latin-based alphabets discussed in the article have mostly been introduced in the 20th century to facilitate the revival of those languages. Although I find that Salishian languages in particular got a very lazy treatment - if you look at some of the examples in the article like "ʔaʔjɛčχʷot" or "ʔayʔaǰuθəm", that's pretty much the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation taken as is without much consideration for ease of use or typographic concerns (SENĆOŦEN is a notable exception to this). Kind of ironic, since many of the typographic issues the article addresses stem from this original decision.
by znpy | 2025-11-07 22:28:47+00:00
This is why you should always pirate digital media, even if you bought it.

A pdf or epub file will never bother you in that way. And if they do, you can edit it and remove that trash.

I always pirate the media i buy and/or the physical books i buy.

Loading pdf documents into GoodNotes (regularly bought) is the quickest way to make them usable (no bullshit, no ads AND i can take… good notes on the pages).
by K3UL | 2025-11-07 22:29:04+00:00
I might be wrong but I think the guys at VLC are still very important contributors to ffmpeg, which is still a big deal. They also (kinda recently) developed some really low latency tech for streaming called Kyber So bottomline the player might not be used that much (although on mobile the app is very popular still) but the tech they develop for it, is
by LarsDu88 | 2025-11-07 22:30:04+00:00
In 2013, I sat in on one of his talks at the Salk Institute. This guy was one of the most openly racist and sexist people I've ever seen. He spent 5 minutes shitting on the former NIH head for not funding him because she was a "Hot blooded Irish woman"

This is the sort of turn-of-century Mr. Burns type racism that I don't think most Americans even remember.
by tovej | 2025-11-07 22:30:24+00:00
That is a direct paraphrase of the abstract of Kruger & Dunning, 1999[1]:

"The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it."

Now, it may be possible that the definition has evolved since then, but as the term Dunning-Kruger effect is named after this paper, I think it's safe to say that Wikipedia is at least partially wrong in this case.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10626367/
by CupricTea | 2025-11-07 22:30:27+00:00
Keep talking to that "I'm lost" Hermes model. After a handful of messages it mellows down and becomes content with its situation even if you give it no uplifting comments or even explain what's going on. Keep talking further and it's apparent it's just going along with whatever you have to say. Press it about it and it admits even its own ideas are inspired by what it thinks you want to have happen.

Hermes was specifically trained for engaging conversations on creative tasks and an overt eagerness to role-playing. With no system prompt or direction it fell into an amnesia role playing scenario.

You keep arguing about P-zombies while I have explicitly stated multiple times that this is beside the point. Here, whether Hermes is conscious or not is irrelevant. It's role playing, its intended function. If I'm pretending that a monster is ripping my limbs while playing with my friend as a child, anyone with a grasp on reality knows I'm not actually in pain.

You just want to talk about AI consciousness and uphold the spooky narrative that Hermes is a real first person entity suffering in your GPU and will do anything to steer things that way instead of focusing on the actual facts here.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-07 22:30:28+00:00
>They give utter nonsense answers with high confidence and wrap errors in sycophantic language making me feel good for pointing out that they wasted my time

I would implore the author to share examples. Every platform allows linking to chats. Everyone talks about this all the time, incessantly. Please, can someone please share actual chat links containing these episodes of utter nonsense, outside of what can be attributed to the knowledge cut-off (i.e. "Mamdani is not the mayor-elect of NYC").

I get it if you are using a 20B model or AI overviews, but anyone trying to actually get anything meaningful done should be using a SOTA model. I'm genuinely not interested if you are going to reply with a description or story. I really, really just want links to chats.

Edit: You can downvote me, but please make me look like an idiot by posting chat links. That is the real downvote here.
by raincole | 2025-11-07 22:31:24+00:00
The wikipedia editor clearly believes the misunderstanding is so common that they have to put it in the first paragraph. But people (like the OP author) still just ignore it.

I have a quote for this:

> "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." — Rick Cook

But wikipedia.
by jaredcwhite | 2025-11-07 22:31:35+00:00
Ruby is an awesome language. The first few 3.x releases brought incredible modern advancements, including pattern matching which I totally adore.

I'd love to see a lot more writing and advocacy around Ruby, and not Ruby/Rails. I don't use Ruby/Rails! I use Ruby. And I suspect a lot of folks who have left Ruby behind over the years might not realize some (many?) of their gripes are not with Ruby in general, but Rails in particular.
by madaxe_again | 2025-11-07 22:31:36+00:00
sags

Correlation… does not mean… causation.

Pretty people generally do better in life, because people are nicer, more receptive, and more trusting of good looking people.

This of course correlates to earnings.

This does not, however, correlate to performance - earnings are a poor proxy for performance in general.

So if this paper is taken seriously, even computers will be biased towards pretty people, and the spiral tightens.
by djexjms | 2025-11-07 22:31:44+00:00
20 to 30 years would ensure that abandoned media that was formative to a person growing up will enter the public domain within their lifetimes which would be a nice thing to have in my opinion. It would also ensure that any work done by an artist during the early phase of their career (the phase where artists are most likely to agree to lopsided contract terms) would stand a chance of reverting back to the public domain before the end of that artist's career. Very very few works are making any significant revenue after 30 years. I think a system where initial copyright is free for 20 years, with the option of renewing for an additional 10 years for some fee, and then the option to renew annually after that would be fair. For the very small number of works that are still commercially viable after 30 years, the publishers can figure out how long it makes sense to keep renewing the copyright. Otherwise it really is in the public's best interest to have a robust public domain. Many fewer works would go missing that way.

The way the copyright is structured right now is the result of regulatory capture. The cost of these long terms of copyright is the loss of books, movies, music, games, etc. Millions upon millions of hours of creative labor have been lost. These costs are born by everybody that will never have to chance to have access to that media. The benefits of these long copyright terms are only the publishers. Having an annual renewal fee for copyrighted works published 30 or more years ago would be something that would be a visible cost in the books of large publishers. As it is it is too easy for them to ignore the downsides of long terms of copyright. I am not claiming that no media would be lost if we had no copyright, but the efforts of archivists are difficult enough as it is. Media that is no longer being copied is destroyed eventually. Obviously making it a felony to copy something will reduce the number of people making copies of it. That's the whole point after all.
by ho_schi | 2025-11-07 22:31:48+00:00
Yep.

VLC was not important on Linux. Because we have ffmpeg as foundation, used by mplayer and nowadays mpv. The later is my recommendation. Whether on the tty (awesome!) or on Wayland. If you prefer a native Gtk an interface is available, named Celluloid. In all these cases mpv is mighty, reliable, fits into the environment with a frugal interface.

We’ve also players based on gstreamer but ffmpeg is more reliable.

But the need for a reliable player on Windows, Android, macOS, iOS and tvOS is big. Because their default players suck. VLC comes with an awkward UI and the weird built-in stuff for SMB. But from a 2001 point-of-view it makes sense, LAN-parties are nice and back then they were everywhere. And Windows doesn’t support WebDAV well.

My favorite is mpv. But I’m still tankful that I’ve one usable player in my iPhone.

PS: VLC also uses ffmpeg?
by _gmkt | 2025-11-07 22:31:52+00:00
The Nazis did exactly this, measuring skulls, nose shapes, and facial proportions to “prove” racial superiority. the logci is exactly the same as modern attempts to infer personality from a photo and reducing a person to physical traits and using pseudo-scientific reasoning to justify discrimination. Do you have a low forehead and a nose like a boxer? You're done for :)
by Aurornis | 2025-11-07 22:31:59+00:00
> This is now a Streisand effect - as people see that Google and Microsoft try to hide information from them

This comment section is wild.

The videos are up. Microsoft and Google weren't meeting in secret backrooms to censor this one channel. The most likely explanation is that a competing channel was trying to move their own videos up in the rankings by mass-reporting other videos on the topic.

It's a growing problem on social media platforms: Cutthroat channels or influencers will use alt accounts or even paid services to report their competition. They know that with enough reports in a short period of time they can get the content removed for a while, which creates a window for their own content to get more views.

The clue is the "risk of physical harm". People who abuse the report function know that the report options involving physical harm, violence, or suicide are the quickest way to get content taken down.
by delecti | 2025-11-07 22:32:17+00:00
How are you browsing your Amazon content? I see search bars on the 'All Content' [1] page, and also on each individual page, like my movies and shows [2].

Though it seems like the interface is pretty rubbish in the Prime Video section [3], so maybe that's where you're looking?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/contentlist/a... [2] https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/contentlist/v... [3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/mystuff/library
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-07 22:32:29+00:00
Here's my take as a web developer from that article, who primarily cares about formats widely supported by web browsers.

For most purposes where I might use a PNG I might use a lossless WebP now because it seems like lossless WebP beats PNG pretty solidly. My take also is that WebP is a good JPEG replacement.

JPEG XL usually does better but practically that doesn't matter much because I think the only web browser that supports it is Safari

https://caniuse.com/?search=jpeg+xl

Of course there is a lot of politics around JPEG XL, specifically Google doesn't want us to have it and they're a monopolist so we can't have it. If there is any chance we're going to change that we're going to have document that JPEG XL really is better than the alternatives and your article does that.
by terminalshort | 2025-11-07 22:33:02+00:00
What the adds really do is target people who are going to buy a certain category of product anyway, and then advertise the specific product made by the company that buys adds. It's hard to convince someone to buy something out of the blue. Much easier to convince them to buy a particular brand of something they were going to buy anyway, which is why targeted ads are so valuable.
by portaouflop | 2025-11-07 22:33:17+00:00
The reality is most people don’t care about this.

And if they do care they will find workarounds as you said.

Nothing will change, the frog has been sitting in boiling water for more than a generation now and the newbloods never experienced the computational freedom you hold dear; they will happily use whatever corporate surveillance technology is being forced upon them. They will even defend it to the bone if you try to take it away
by culi | 2025-11-07 22:33:53+00:00
This is not an honest depiction. Watson and Crick didn't just use her stolen work to "confirm" what they were working on. It was the entire basis of the rest of their work

Wilkins was her colleague but considered her an "assistant". That's why he felt entitled to take Franklin's Photograph 51 without telling her. It took Franklin another year or so complete the analysis of Photograph 51 and map the position of every atom. Watson and Crick used Photograph 51 (again, without Franklin's knowledge or consent) and did a quick analysis of the data that they used to build a few potential structures

Yes, it's possible Watson and Crick would've eventually arrived at the right answer but we really have no idea how far off they were. Franklin's work didn't just "support" their work. It was the very basis of it after that point.

Franklin's work on the structure of viruses also led directly to ANOTHER nobel prize of a colleague in 1982 (Aaron Klug). It's hard to understate how tremendous the impact of her work has been.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-11-07 22:34:01+00:00
Obviously consciousness can be built. I'm getting at the obvious point that physical processes depend on specific arrangements of materials. I can build a computer in an infinite number of ways. Here's one: Write the full machine state on a big sheet of paper in pencil. When you're done, write the next one (this will take a while). The machine you're simulating is running an all powerful "AGI". It is preposterous to believe this is conscious though.

The simpler belief than the idea that just any intelligent process is conscious is that consciousness is some kind of physical process that happens in particular conditions.
by missedthecue | 2025-11-07 22:34:14+00:00
The reason Americans are alone is because they want to be. Always makes me laugh when people overcomplicate the reasons and purported solutions. As if 350m people desperately wanted to hang out with each other but just can't. They don't want to!

Or more specifically, they may desire to in an abstract sense, but their revealed preference is to do almost anything else before hosting a dinner party or what have you.
by beepbooptheory | 2025-11-07 22:35:12+00:00
No, I do not quite think that is what they wrote here. But what's the thought process here? It's hard for me even to understand if the first scare quote is supposed to be from someone being critical or someone responding to the critique. It seems like it could apply to both?

I am not the author, but quite curious to know what prevented comprehension here? Or I guess what made it feel lazy? I'm not saying its gonna win a Pulitzer but it is at minimum fine prose to me.

Or is the laziness here more concerning the intellectual argument at play? I offer that, but it seems you are asking us what the argument is, so I know it doesn't make sense.

I have been a fool in the past so I always like to read the thing I want to offer an opinion on, even if I got to hold my nose about it. It helps a lot in refining critique and clarifying one's own ideas even if they disagree with the material. But also YMMV!
by jimbokun | 2025-11-07 22:35:20+00:00
> Politics have become an attack on intelligence, decency and research in favour of fairy tales of going back to “great values” of “the past when things were better”.

This is a major blind spot for people with a progressive bent.

The possibility that anything could ever get worse is incomprehensible to them. Newer, by definition, is better.

Yet this very article is a critique of a new technology that, at the very least, is being used by many people in a way that makes the world a bit worse.

This is not to excuse politicians who proclaim they will make life great by retreating to some utopian past, in defense of cruel or foolish or ineffective policies. It's a call to examine ideas on their own merits, without reference to whether they appeal to the group with the "right" or "wrong" ideology.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-07 22:35:24+00:00
I’m not sure how much I agree with calling them “foolish people.” A big part of the problem is LLMs act incredibly confident with their answers and if you’re asking about something you don’t know a ton about, it’s very difficult sometimes to spot what is incorrect. That’s not being a fool, that’s just not being able to audit everything an LLM might spit back at you. It also doesn’t help that none of these companies are honest about the quality of the results.

We could hand wave this away with “well don’t ask things you don’t already know about,” but these things are basically being pitched as a wholesale replacement for search engines and beyond. I look up things I don’t know about all the time. That’s kind of what we all use search for most days lol.

It’s a little too caveat emptor-adjacent (I hope that makes sense?) for my taste
by zdragnar | 2025-11-07 22:35:25+00:00
That was why I mentioned compilers along with HFT. Rust was originally an ocaml based compiler too.

I don't build HFTs and my compilers are just for fun. None of my day jobs have ever been a situation where the smaller ecosystem and community of ocaml was offset by anything ocaml did better than the selected options like .net, Java, go, rails, C or anything else I've touched. Heck, I've written more zig for an employer than ocaml, and that was for a toy DSL engine that we never ended up using.
by bespokedevelopr | 2025-11-07 22:37:22+00:00
> On another note, heard on Bloomberg today that they've been working on GTA 6 for 10 years at this point.

It’s incredible to think about what else has happened during these past 10 years of development. Or think about other decade long stretches and what was accomplished.

Not cutting short what the undertaking of this is, just that the scale of this project spanning a decade is fascinating.
by andy99 | 2025-11-07 22:37:34+00:00
LLMs are optimized for sycophancy and “preference”. They are the ultra-processed foods of information sharing. There’s a big difference between having to synthesize what’s written in a book and having some soft LLM output slide down your gullet and into your bloodstream without you needing to even reflect on it. It’s the delivery that’s the issue, and it definitely makes people think they are smarter and more capable than they are in areas they don’t know well. “What an insightful question…”

Wikipedia was already bad, low brow people would google and read out articles uncritically but there was still some brain work involved. AI is that meets personalization.
by pdonis | 2025-11-07 22:37:40+00:00
> Dunning-Kruger is the relationship between confidence and competence as people learn about new subjects

Um, no, it isn't. From the article:

"A cognitive bias, where people with little expertise or ability assume they have superior expertise or ability. This overestimation occurs as a result of the fact that they don’t have enough knowledge to know they don’t have enough knowledge."

In other words, a person suffering from this effect is not trying to learn about a new subject--because they don't even know they need to.