MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by com2kid | 2025-11-07 23:29:57+00:00
I call it the first mover disadvantage!

(I was there first hand to witness it again and again!)

Bill Gates is terrifyingly smart. He sees trends decades ahead. But knowing something is coming (smart TVs) does you no good without timing.

You build a first gen product, accrue mountains of legacy tech debt in the process (being first is hard! There is no one else to learn lessons from!) and then a competitor comes along and makes a V2 when the market is more ready and they can implement it better than you because they can learn from everything you did wrong (possibly also hiring half your team away).

Timing is equally important as product. Making a smart TV before widespread broadband adoption? Before streaming video had a flood of high quality content? Oops.

Real Player was doing streaming video in the 90s! Everyone knew it was the future, it was obviously the future! The future is now and the majority of video is streaming from a server somewhere!

Great idea, but ouch that timing. (That said, founders got rich anyway, and real video was a necessary step to where we are now!)
by pdonis | 2025-11-07 23:30:33+00:00
> if you google "Dunning Kruger Effect" and then look at the images

Then I would be doing a very poor job of actually researching the topic.

If you are aware of any actual research papers that describe actually studying how the same people's competence vs. confidence evolves over time, by all means point me to them.

> just because the study took measurements of many people at one point in time didn't mean they weren't studying an over-time phenomenon.

Um, yes, it does. It's possible that the things the study saw were effects of an over-time phenomenon, but the study did not study that, and its results are not evidence either for or against any such hypothesis.
by tovej | 2025-11-07 23:30:38+00:00
Above average is not unskilled. That does not compute for me. The point is clearly about how lack of skill/experience in a task make people bad at judging how they do at the task. That is clearly what the article Kruger and Dunning) and the article (OP) are both saying.

You could help your argument by explaining how I'm misinterpreting the quote.
by analog31 | 2025-11-07 23:31:13+00:00
My current hypothesis du jour is that AI is going to be like programming in a certain way. Some people can learn to program productively, others can't. We don't know why. It's not related to how smart they are. The people who can program, can be employed as programmers if they want. Those who can't, are condemned to be users instead.

The same may end up being true of AI. Some will learn to make productive use of it, others won't. It will cause a rearrangement of the pecking order (wage ladder) of the workplace. I have a colleague who is now totally immersed in AI, and our upper management is delighted. I've been a much slower adopter, so I find other ways to be productive. It's all good.
by sevg | 2025-11-07 23:31:27+00:00
> the way people actually have come to use it

I have never seen anyone use it as part of an up arrow spread across two lines in the way that you’re suggesting. So I don’t really understand your point.

Ok it’s not symmetrical, but I don’t buy your argument that it _should_ be (or that it’s a reasonable complaint to make about a font).
by rablackburn | 2025-11-07 23:32:00+00:00
That was not an appeal to the authority of academic papers so much as the OP trying to give context for the information that has informed their position.

Your responses have been an appeal to tradition (“every generation thinks that”), and a dismissal of the information because of the reproducibility crisis.

Ie you are arguing that we (humans) struggle with discerning Truth, and therefore we are wrong, and everything is fine.

But taking the negative position is just as epistemologically flawed. Hence the OPs attempt to discuss the best data we can find.
by khazhoux | 2025-11-07 23:32:02+00:00
In fact, it was a photograph she took 8 months earlier, and she didn't realize its significance or implication. If useful data is shelved, is it still useful? For Watson, the image corroborated the double-helix theory and caused them to focus exclusively on that (instead of triple or single). The photograph itself did not deliver a DNA model.
by Groxx | 2025-11-07 23:32:08+00:00
yeah, if it's only 20-30 lines then it's likely overkill to do any way except by hand.

most of the stuff I've done has involved at least 20-30 libraries, many of which have other dependencies and config, so it's on the order of hundreds or thousands of lines if written by hand. it's totally worth a (simple) DI tool at that point.
by throwuxiytayq | 2025-11-07 23:32:16+00:00
I genuinely strictly disagree; The Steam review section is usually an accurate description of the game’s quality.

The overall score tends to fairly represent the likelihood that I’ll like the game, and when in doubt reading a couple of reviews tends to give a clearer picture. And then, the reviews themselves can be rated, and there’s a “recent reviews” score that protects against review bombings and gives a clearer picture of the game’s current state. Not to say that there aren’t exceptions - there’s a poorly-received game that I’ve poured hundreds of hours into recently - but I literally wouldn’t know how to set up a better system myself.

In contrast, the Epic storefront is fucking laughable.
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-07 23:32:37+00:00
I never said anything about "trying to learn".

> "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."

I agree completely. Nothing I said contradicts this.

Every expert starts as a beginner. Not every beginner ends up as an expert.

Also people can learn without a deliberate intent to learn. As far as I am aware right now, deliberate intent has nothing to do with DK, and I certainly wasn't making any claims about it.
by pixelpoet | 2025-11-07 23:33:03+00:00
It's so easy to forget or ignore the good people whose great work was overshadowed by random controversy out of their hands. It's not the fault of the programmers who wrote the animation systems, or the artists who styled the characters' hair, that some random dickface manager pulled a random dickface move.

I write this out of pure sympathy for the incredible work that I know gamedevs do, I'm not associated with Rockstar at all.
by NYCNews | 2025-11-07 23:33:14+00:00
NYPD Looking for Group Behind String of Robberies

By Dan Gesslein Queens Voice November 7, 2025

QUEENS LOCAL NEWS - Guess you can call them the Eclectic Crooks. Cops are looking for a robbery crew that stole everything from wallets, to prescription pills to the tills of local businesses, to a car. In total investigators said the crew struck at least five times throughout Queens.

The crime spree started early morning on October 22, when a 34-year-old man was standing near 37-20 Prince Street in Flushing. At around 4:15 a.m., three people pulled up in a vehicle. One of the trio pretended to have a gun and proceeded to grab the victim’s phone and wallet.

Just one day later, in another part of the 109th Precinct, a 35-year-old man was approached near 40-22 College Point Boulevard around 1:30 a.m. This time, one suspect showed a gun while the others took the victim’s car. Later that same day, the pattern turned to burglary. At around 11:37 p.m. on October 23, two people broke into NADA Marketing, a business on Fresh Meadow Lane in Bayside. Police say they used a crowbar to force open the back door and made off with about $4,500 before taking off in a vehicle.

Less than a week later, at around 4 a.m. on October 29, three suspects hit a drug store on Merrick Boulevard in the 113th Precinct. They broke the front window, grabbed about $600 in cash and three bottles of prescription medicine, and took off heading north on Merrick Boulevard.

Only minutes later, another attempted break-in happened — this time at The THC Shop on 243rd Street in the 116th Precinct. Around 4:25 a.m., the same group is believed to have smashed the front door window but left empty-handed after failing to steal anything.

No one was injured in any of the incidents.

Police have released images of the suspects, captured during the burglary at NADA Marketing, and are asking for the public’s help identifying them.

Anyone with information is urged to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) — or 1-888-57-PISTA (74782) for Spanish. Tips can also be submitted online at crimestoppers.nypdonline.org or on X (formerly Twitter) at @NYPDTips. All calls and tips are kept completely confidential.
by casey2 | 2025-11-07 23:33:19+00:00
Why not consult with industry professionals rather than random people on the internet? Gaming is a huge industry worth billions and have many people who have dedicated themselves to the craft. They not only can diagnosis common problems and future problems, but can help effectively change your processes, ultimately identify and solve these similar problems yourself. All for not that much money, you are in a good position to capture a bunch of value if you are serious.
by lazide | 2025-11-07 23:33:38+00:00
You might want to ask ChatGPT what that is referencing. Specifically, Steve Jobs telling everyone it was their fault that Apple put the antenna right where people hold their phones and it was their fault they had bad reception.

The issue is really that LLMs are impossible to deterministically control, and no one has any real advice on how to deterministically get what you want from them.
by dlisboa | 2025-11-07 23:33:38+00:00
I somewhat agree. In general most apps are small where the language choice doesn’t really matter.

Caching is also vastly underutilized, most apps are read-heavy and could serve a significant portion of their requests from some form of caching.

> When there are performance issues, 95% of the times they come from the database, not the language.

Eh, statements like these are always too hand wavy. Resource usage has to do with performance, the DB has no fault in it but the runtime does.

Having worked with Rails a ton there’s a very large overhead. Most apps would see a significant speed up if rewritten in a faster language and framework, with no changes to the DB whatsoever. The amount of memory and CPU expended to the app servers is always significant, often outweighing the DB.
by hettygreen | 2025-11-07 23:33:57+00:00
I spent a few days in Bombay Beach, a small town right on the Salton Sea. There's a community of people that call this place home, most seem to be artists, outcasts or just people drawn to the ability to purchase an entire house for $20,000.

The air is clearly toxic, you smell it the second you get there. To live there means living in olfactory mental ignorance in exchange for affordable housing and community.
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-07 23:34:02+00:00
The actual order is here: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/FAA-Emergency-Order-11-6-25.pdf

Unfortunately, the article title is somewhat incomplete, as the restriction on commercial rocket launches is only for certain hours (for now, at least):

> Accordingly, with respect to commercial space launches and reentries, under the authority provided to the FAA Administrator by 49 U.S.C. §§ 40103, 40113, and 46105(c), and authority delegated to the FAA Administrator under 51 U.S.C. § 50909(a), it is hereby ordered that, beginning at 6:00 a.m. EST on November 10, 2025, and until this Order is cancelled, Commercial space launches and reentries will only be permitted between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. local time.
by pdonis | 2025-11-07 23:34:57+00:00
> the over-time aspect is kind of self-evident

It's self-evident that, in order to become a master at anything, you have to pass through increasing levels of competence to get there.

It is not at all self-evident, at least not to me, that while a particular person is going through that process, their estimate of their skill vs. their actual competence will be similar to what Dunning and Kruger found when they compared different people's confidence vs. competence at a single time.

> just because the data collection wasn't done over time doesn't mean that the principle behind the effect isn't time/effort based.

It could be, but a study that only collects data at one point in time can't possibly provide evidence either for or against any such hypothesis.

> competence can only increase over time

This is simply false. Skills and knowledge that aren't used can deteriorate. People can forget things they used to know.

In a much narrower sense, we would hope that if a person is studying a subject with the intent of mastering it, that their competence will only increase over time. But even that's not always true.

> there is lots of research on how mastery is gained. I don't have time to throw a bunch of it at you, but I suspect you won't need me to in order to see my point.

Sorry, but since, as you can see from the above, I don't agree with several of your key points, you're going to have to back them up with research if you want me to consider them further. If you don't have time for that (which is fine--we're all posting here in our spare time), then we'll just have to disagree.
by jujugoboom | 2025-11-07 23:35:06+00:00
This is the first time I've heard of this standard and it looks interesting, but it doesn't seem like the payment processing is well standardized. I see in the W3C draft that the "Interledger Protocol" should be utilized, but looking at the wallet limitations (https://webmonetization.org/wallets/#limitations) it seems like there are no wallets that allow cross-wallet payments. Is that something thats planned in the future, or will wallets be allowed to lock down who can pay who?
by chrisco255 | 2025-11-07 23:35:17+00:00
You can use regular buffers for many things, but a lot of core Zig std functions require an allocator (satisfying std.mem.Allocator interface) as an argument. This means the developer retains control of how memory is managed. It's also advantageous for testing, as you can pass in specialized allocator for detecting memory leaks during testing but use the more efficient allocator for release mode. You can wrap regular buffer into a FixedBufferAllocator which just uses stack values. ArenaAllocator is just a container that wraps an underlying allocator but it will free everything when you call defer arena.deinit(), which is useful for short-lived things like http requests.
by miiiiiike | 2025-11-07 23:35:25+00:00
I spent a few hours trying to debug some fixed position issues with my JS/CSS code recently.Found out that iOS Safari fundamentally broke fixed positioning. How do you break `position: fixed`?

Apple devs are constantly attacking people on Twitter for complaining about Safari bugs but the front-end workflow is a waterfall because of Safari. You get your code working in every other browser and then rewrite it to work around all of the Safari issues.
by liquid_thyme | 2025-11-07 23:36:13+00:00
Um, Capital sits at the bottom of the payment waterfall, labor, suppliers, lenders, creditors all have priority claims. Capital returns are vastly more volatile than labor compensation. Most startups burn and die, but employees still get paid (keeping illegal practices aside). Capital bears most of the uncertainty that labor doesn't.

To argue your point, the strongest argument is that labor cannot easily diversify or easily re-train for new sectors. But there aren't entire job sectors being wiped out with any kind of regularity or high frequency. Mostly people take skills from one job into another.

And speaking more about the US, social safety nets (not arguing that they're perfect) have some role to play when labor faces downsides. There is no "unemployment" for a company (again I'm talking about average businesses without cherry picking the too big to fail examples - which are a tiny percentage when looking at the number of small/medium/large businesses that operate around the world).
by defrost | 2025-11-07 23:37:00+00:00
Your initial comment may not have been well stated.

It asserts that underage bans are usually applied to things that are unhealthy for all.

You follow that by stating that provided examples of underage bans are things that are not things with negative impacts on populations.

I'd suggest that real world examples exist of adolecsent alcohol induced brain damage, drivers 10-16 having higher rates of accidents causing death and injury, child soldiers having a negative impact on society, industrial scale under age sex in Christian Brother homes having bad outcomes, early exposure to excessive porn being cited as causing brain rot and social malfunction, etc.

As for:

> we regulated smoking out of the market through a combination of safety regulations, limitations on marketing etc.

I'd point to Australia that started down that path with good results, and continued further only to regulate tobacco out of "regular" markets into the embrace of black markets that come with worse problems than the older established markets that "had a code" (established criminals rarely went after family or indiscriminately acted such that bystanders were killed or injured).

You raise interesting questions that deserve deeper thought and consideration.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-11-07 23:37:25+00:00
I don't think apple executives understand what made apple so successful.

Or maybe I'm out of touch ? I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

But to me, i buy apple because this a premium device that is well thought out and doesn't make me waste time on advertisement, dark pattern and other bullshit i don't have the time nor the will to care about.

I ditched windows for macos after the candy crush saga in start menu and just the overall philosophy of windows 10. For instance, not being able to decide if I want to update and when.

I ditched Android because Google made me loose so much time with their ad riddled services, and their app professionalism is abysmal. It constantly change, no user interface is the same,...

For all these reasons I bought expensive apple devices and I tolerated the many bugs, often having to restart my iphone once every day.

Now if you're going to monetize me just as the other and make me waste my time fiddling around on apple maps checking if one thing is an ad or something I actually want to see, I'll just buy the cheapest thing I can get.

There is no reason to pay premium for the same quality.

But that's just me, maybe they know something I don't. Brand fidelity, especially in the USA is strong, people don't want to be that guy who has an Android ? iPhone are status symbols in China ?
by Brybry | 2025-11-07 23:37:42+00:00
Per AA's 10-K, in 2024 87% of American Airlines employees were represented by a union[1]. So according to that source it sounds like the people who were fired were union members that didn't pay their dues.

They could surely have paid their dues and left the union and kept their jobs (or could have never joined the union to begin with).

[1] https://americanairlines.gcs-web.com/node/42651/html#:~:text...
by lillesvin | 2025-11-07 23:38:46+00:00
I've always seen AI as Brandolini's Law as a Service. I'm spending an unreasonable amount of time debunking false claims and crap research from colleagues who aren't experts in my field but suddenly feel like they need to give all those good ideas and solutions, that ChatGPT and friends gave them, to management. Then I suddenly have 2-4 people that demand to know why X, Y and Z are bad ideas and won't make our team more efficient or our security better.

It's very much like that article from Daniel Stenberg (curl developer): The I in LLM Stands for Intelligence: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-f...
by pdonis | 2025-11-07 23:39:27+00:00
> people can learn without a deliberate intent to learn. As far as I am aware right now, deliberate intent has nothing to do with DK

I agree with this: DK's research wasn't about whether anyone is trying to learn anything; AFAIK they didn't even look at that.

However, in the GGP to this post (the post of yours I originally responded to in this subthread), you said:

"Dunning-Kruger is the relationship between confidence and competence as people learn about new subjects."

But DK didn't test for "non-deliberate learning" any more than they tested for deliberate learning. They didn't test anything over time at all. So their research can't tell us anything about what happens over time as people learn (whether they're doing so deliberately or not).
by defen | 2025-11-07 23:39:32+00:00
> the common case is small values with periodic very large values

I find that a common scenario here is parsers where "Real world" input will tend to be small but you're also exposed to adversarial input. e.g. a parser for function prototypes would typically not expect to see more than 16 arguments in the wild, but you still need to handle it without erroring in case someone decides to send a 1000-argument function through your parser.
by jaaustin | 2025-11-07 23:40:11+00:00
I want to use this opportunity to shill possibly the best history of science ever written: The Eighth Day of Creation [1], which describes the history of structural biology, including Watson’s various contributions. He comes across as a precocious asshole, not without talent but with a stronger eye towards self-advancement.

[1] https://www.cshlpress.com/default.tpl?cart=17625586661954464...
by rsolva | 2025-11-07 23:40:35+00:00
Banning personalised ads would solve a lot of the underlying incentives that drives the attention grabbing economy today.

Increasing the age a few years for when young people are allow to make accounts on social media is not going to make a large difference in the big picture of things, and do not address the core problem that is the collection and abuse of massive amounts of personal data.

Upping the age limit a few years is a compromise that big tech can live with. Here in Norway, we've had a 13 year limit for years, but most parents have not cared so far and help their kids register at a much earlier age anyway. This is changing though, as more people realise the downsides of addictive and manipulative apps fighting desperately for our data and attention.

It is frustrating to see how unwilling we are to address the economic incentives that causes the biggest harms.
by thxforthepost | 2025-11-07 23:41:01+00:00
Made an account to say thank you for sharing this post (and to Rona Wang for writing it)! I stumbled into having an interview for a Compiler Engineer position coming up and I wasn't sure how to prepare for it (the fact that I got this interview just goes to show how little people really know about Compilers if they're willing to take a chance on a normal C++ dev like me hah) and I had absolutely NO idea where to even begin (I was just working through Crafting Interpreters[1] that I picked up at the end of my contractorship last week but that's to make an Interpreter, not to make a Compiler)

...And honestly it seems that I'm screwed. And I need about 6 months of study to learn all this stuff. What I'd do right now is finish Crafting Interpreters, then grab that other book on Interpreters that was recommended here recently[2] and written in Go because I remember it had a followup book on Compilers, and THEN start going through the technical stuff that Rona suggested in the article.

And my interview is on Monday so that's not happening. I have other more general interviews that should pay better so I'm not too upset. If only I wasn't too lazy during my last position and kept learning while working. If the stars align and somehow I get that Compiler Engineer position, then I will certainly reach out to Rona and thank you again lalitkale for sharing this post with HN!

[1] https://craftinginterpreters.com/

[2] https://interpreterbook.com/