MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-01-12 16:46:54+00:00
All user data is E2E encrypted, so the government literally cannot force this. This has been the source of numerous disputes [0, 1] that either result in the device itself being cracked [0] (due to weak passwords or vulnerabilities in device-level protection) or governments attempting to ban E2E encryption altogether [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
by jmacd | 2026-01-12 16:48:09+00:00
This is one of those announcements that actually just excites me as a consumer. We give our children HomePods as their first device when they turn 8 years old (Apple Watch at 10 years, laptop at 12) and in the 6 years I have been buying them, they have not improved one ounce. My kids would like to listen to podcasts, get information, etc. All stuff that a voice conversation with Chatgpt or Gemini can do today, but Siri isn't just useless-- it's actually quite frustrating!
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-12 16:48:13+00:00
> If this works better for you than a Logitech or Kensington trackball, sweet, use it. But so far all the reviews are like "I've never used a trackball, but this looks cool".

Most people never saw a trackball, let alone used it.

Mainly because either your PC comes with a mouse, or you use a laptop which comes with a touchpad.

Your regular ~$50 sucks because it follows the form factor of a mouse even though you don't have to move it around. If you grew used to one then you don't notice the poor form factor, but it's awkward and still forces to move your hand away of a keyboard.

The Charybdis, Dactyl, and CCK-ball kind of address the problem by making it reachable by a thumb, but they don't eliminate it completely because it still forces you to follow an awkward user flow.

This product feels like a trackball that lets you place it where it makes sense. I think it's an improvement.

I have faith that keyboards with embedded touchpad such as the Kinesis Form fix this issue, but I'm not willing to shelf ~$300 for an experiment. I'd rather try out a split keyboard and have a boring touchpad where it feels right. Multi-finger touch gestures kind of eliminate any other flow. Hopefully keychron will consider that too.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-12 16:48:16+00:00
I've seen patients (both family and non) meaningfully improve their health outcomes with statistically-significant frequency primarily via 4 methods.

1. Take ownership of their own medical records, learn them, and bring them to appointments. The most common failure in the current US medical system is incomplete/missing record transfer because of disconnected systems. Physicians will almost always attempt to confirm critical details, but that doesn't help if the patient says "I don't know."

2. Learn basic medical system-level knowledge relevant to a case. E.g. college 1xx freshman-level. No need to become an expert, but if a patient is dealing with kidney issues... it's pretty important to learn the basics about what kidneys are and do.

3. Ask about alternatives. "If we didn't go with that plan, what would be your next two recommended plans, and why aren't they first?" Having that alternative context is especially helpful when visiting specialists / other parties, as the patient can more fully describe the thinking behind their treatment plan. Also when researching online, the context helps avoid obvious pitfalls. (And yes, sometimes the reason will be "Because your insurance wouldn't cover X", which is also useful to know)

4. Use second options to measure uncertainty about the primary plan (e.g. everyone agrees vs it's debatable), but don't treatment-shop. The useful piece of information is opening a discussion about specific alternatives, while also listening to reasons against them.

Peer reviewed studies are surprisingly accessible (e.g. PubMed et al.), but they're also functionally useless without basic medical knowledge and details about a specific case.

Finally, for potentially lethal and/or lengthy conditions, I'm a firm believer that any empowerment improves outcomes simply by making the patient feel more involved and in control of their care.

Almost every "that could have been avoided" case I know was a willfully-ignorant and/or disinterested patient.
by the_af | 2026-01-12 16:48:25+00:00
That's reading too much into my comment. No, it's not about bragging, wearing gold bracelets or driving expensive cars.

It's about not being a shut-in and understanding there's more to life than what you can see on your computer screen. Google and Wikipedia are just excuses for this kind of people, anyway.

I cannot go into details because I don't want to overshare.
by qsera | 2026-01-12 16:49:02+00:00
> for some reason

I think the reason is quite simple. Software is endlessly configurable. And thus a lot higher chance to get the configuration wrong.

This is what makes it attractive, and makes it hard to get right.

You cannot get good at it without making a ton of mistakes. When companies look for people with a lot of side projects, they are looking at people who already have made such mistakes and learned from them, preferably on their own time and not on paid, companies time.
by runjake | 2026-01-12 16:49:21+00:00
Since the SwiftUI rewrite, I have had showstopper problems with Overcast that made me move to Apple's Podcasts app. It's meh, but it plays podcast episodes reliably.

Overcast's streaming is utterly busted. And the UI state gets confused (enabled in UI turns into disabled in functionality, etc)

And it's not just me. :-(

https://old.reddit.com/r/overcast/search?q=streaming&restric...

Marco's latest iteration of focusing on quality: https://old.reddit.com/r/overcast/comments/1o4yuvz/focusing_...

Note that, two of those items that are crossed out are still being experienced by end users.

From listening to him discussing his Overcast rewrite on podcasts, I feel for him. It feels like he's really struggling to make Apple's frameworks work reliably. Moving to SwiftUI might have been the wrong move.
by drnick1 | 2026-01-12 16:49:22+00:00
Because Apple makes privacy claims all the time, but all their software is closed source and it is very hard or impossible to verify any of their claims. Even if messages sent between iPhones are E2EE encrypted for example, the client apps and the operating system may be backdoored (and likely are).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
by ben_w | 2026-01-12 16:49:24+00:00
> Could this be an experiment to show how likely LLMs are to lead to AGI, or at least intelligence well beyond our current level?

You'd have to be specific what you mean by AGI: all three letters mean a different thing to different people, and sometimes use the whole means something not present in the letters.

> If you could only give it texts and info and concepts up to Year X, well before Discovery Y, could we then see if it could prompt its way to that discovery?

To a limited degree.

Some developments can come from combining existing ideas and seeing what they imply.

Other things, like everything to do with relativity and quantum mechanics, would have required experiments. I don't think any of the relevant experiments had been done prior to this cut-off date, but I'm not absolutely sure of that.

You might be able to get such an LLM to develop all the maths and geometry for general relativity, and yet find the AI still tells you that the perihelion shift of Mercury is a sign of the planet Vulcan rather than of a curved spacetime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet)
by kamens | 2026-01-12 16:49:31+00:00
I agree. There’s another guy (in the quote tweet) here who’s pushed on Where’s Waldo stuff, but like you I think it’s currently stuck at the “deformed bodies/faces” issue: https://x.com/kamens/status/2001396716654727607

I also suspect it may be solvable by switching to something other than humans - we probably won’t be as weirded out by malformed cars or plants or whatever.
by phil21 | 2026-01-12 16:49:50+00:00
If you start looking around at the world you will likely start to notice an inverse correlation between those with “little free time due to working three jobs” and the amount of junk they feed their families.

Turns out that if you care enough and have the work ethic to grind out that sort of living to better your family, you also tend to care what kind of foods they eat.

There are of course seasons in everyone’s lives - but this observation has held generally true no matter the demographic or geographic location I’ve lived around.

I was obese - there is no intended judgement here for folks who struggle with it. I did for the better part of my adult life. The social tropes are simply unhelpful.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-12 16:49:56+00:00
If 44.1kHz is otherwise sufficient but you have a downstream workflow that is incompatible, there are arguments for doing this. It can be done with no loss in quality.

From an information theory perspective, this is like putting a smaller pipe right through the middle of a bigger one. The channel capacity is the only variable that is changing and we are increasing it.
by alexsherrick | 2026-01-12 16:49:57+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback, this is exactly the kind of thing that's useful to hear.

To clarify the mechanics: yes, you have to post before you can see anyone else's. The window is monday through sunday, reveal happens sunday 6pm mountain time, and there's a grace period until monday 6pm if you're late. The idea is that everyone posts "blind" without being influenced by what others said.

On the prompts, that's some fair criticism. I've collected a bunch of prompts that I pick through each week. They fall into 3 categories and it is always in order. Q1: Check-in (something about the week), Q2: Fun (something silly usually... this has weirdly been fun to see peoples answers across the friend spectrum), and Q3: thoughtful (something a little deeper but not too heavy). It sounds like you'd prefer it lean harder into the check-in category and it might go that route eventually. I just didn't want people to get bored of the same questions.

Also it is mandatory to post 1 photo, so it's min 1 photo, max 3 photos. I'm terrible at taking photos and it has forced me into trying to take a few more which is good for documenting my life a little bit. Also the life tab becomes your journal. Only you can see it. Once the week is over no one else can see it but you. That was one idea for monetization way down the line somehow leaning into that, but with it being so cheap I just want others to maybe use it and refine it.

Appreciate you taking the time to write this up. Good luck with the board game designs!
by mort96 | 2026-01-12 16:50:09+00:00
And actually, why do we have both 48kHz and 44.1kHz anyway? If all "consumer grade high quality audio" was in 44.1kHz (or 48kHz) we probably could've avoided resampling in almost all circumstances other than professional audio contexts (or for already low quality audio like 8kHz files). What benefit do we get out of having both 44.1 and 48 that outweighs all the resampling it causes?
by zipy124 | 2026-01-12 16:50:38+00:00
That seems a rather shallow - and probably incorrect - reading of the source. This is an efficiency and trust trade off as noted:

> given sufficient computing resources, we can resample 44.1 kHz to 48 kHz perfectly. No loss, no inaccuracies.

and then further

> Your smartphone probably can resample 44.1 kHz to 48 kHz in such a way that the errors are undetectable even in theory, because they are smaller than the noise floor. Proper audio equipment can certainly do so.

That is you don't need the original source to do a proper transfer. The author is simply noting

> Although this conversion can be done in such a way as to produce no audible errors, it's hard to be sure it actually is.

That is that re-sampling is not a bad idea in this case because it's going to have any sort of error if done properly, it's just that the Author notes you cannot trust any random given re-sampler to do so.

Therefore if you do need to resample, you can do so without the analog source, as long as you have a re-sampler you can trust, or do it yourself.
by bazzargh | 2026-01-12 16:51:23+00:00
You would find things in there that were already close to QM and relativity. The Michelson-Morley experiment was 1887 and Lorentz transformations came along in 1889. The photoelectric effect (which Einstein explained in terms of photons in 1905) was also discovered in 1887. William Clifford (who _died_ in 1889) had notions that foreshadowed general relativity: "Riemann, and more specifically Clifford, conjectured that forces and matter might be local irregularities in the curvature of space, and in this they were strikingly prophetic, though for their pains they were dismissed at the time as visionaries." - Banesh Hoffmann (1973)

Things don't happen all of a sudden, and being able to see all the scientific papers of the era its possible those could have fallen out of the synthesis.
by zipy124 | 2026-01-12 16:51:56+00:00
you're not missing something. You can re-sample them safely as stated by the author. They simply state you should check the re-sampler as:

> Although this conversion can be done in such a way as to produce no audible errors, it's hard to be sure it actually is.

That is, you should verify the re-sampler you are using or implement yourself in order to be sure it is done correctly, and that with todays hardware it is easily possible.
by f1shy | 2026-01-12 16:52:13+00:00
Exactly. And sometimes even very strange things happen. Currently I know of a company taking lots of positions from Germany to China, people in China are having more money in the pocket per year. The cost to the company are basically the same, but people is more motivated. Mind you, that people are not working crazy hs! Mostly 8 to 9 hs per day 5 days a week.
by feisty0630 | 2026-01-12 16:52:28+00:00
I fail to see how the two concepts equate.

LLMs have neither intelligence nor problem-solving abillity (and I won't be relaxing the definition of either so that some AI bro can pretend a glorified chatbot is sentient)

You would, at best, be demonstrating that the sharing of knowledge across multiple disciplines and nations (which is a relatively new concept - at least at the scale of something like the internet) leads to novel ideas.
by troupo | 2026-01-12 16:52:47+00:00
> Your own example was turning a steering wheel.

The original example was trying to compare LLMs to cars and table saws.

> Do you always drive the same route, every day, without alteration?

I'm not the one comparing operating machinery (cars, table saws) to LLMs. Again. If I turn a steering wheel in a car, the car turns. If input the same prompt into an LLM, it will produce different results at different times.

Lol. Even "driving a route" is probably 99% deterministic unlike LLMs. If I follow a sign saying "turn left", I will not end up in a "You are absolutely right, there shouldn't be a cliff at this location" situation.

Edit: and when signs end pointing to a cliff, or when a child runs onto the roads in front of you, these are called emergency situations. Whereas emergency situations are the only available modus operandi for an LLM, and actually following instructions is a lucky happenstance.

> It's just less like predicting what a calculator will show and more like predicting if, when playing catch, the other player will catch your throw

If you think that throwing more and more bad comparisons that don't work into the conversation somehow proves your point, let me dissuade you of that notion: it doesn't.
by zeras | 2026-01-12 16:53:13+00:00
This is actually a smart and common sense move by Apple.

The non-hardware AI industry is currently in an R&D race to establish and maintain marketshare, but with Apple's existing iPhone, iPad and Mac ecosystem they already have a market share they control so they can wait until the AI market stabilizes before investing heavily in their own solutions.

For now, Apple can partner with solid AI providers to provide AI services and benefits to their customers in the short term and then later on they can acquire established AI companies to jumpstart their own AI platform once AI technology reaches more long term consistency and standardization.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-12 16:53:31+00:00
One other issue that isn't mentioned, but has been voiced to me by my friends in the space is the rise of Data Science as an undergraduate discipline.

Econometrics has always had better hiring stats than other econ subdisciplines, and historically, most Econ adjacent jobs were largely data cleansing, analysis, and benchmarking.

On the other hand, math, statistics, and coding is hard, and a large portion of Econ undergrads (primarily at non-target programs) lacked the wherewithal or ability to tackle Baby Rudin or a data structures class. In a lot of cases, their professors themselves lacked significant mathematical or econometrics sophistication.

What ended up happening was a glut of Econ majors who lacked the skills that were in demand in the Econ space (anything econometrics adjacent).

Now that Data Science as an undergrad disciple has arisen, a number of jobs that historically would have hired an Econ major even if they lacked some technical sophistication have switched to hiring Data Science majors. Additionally, Econ majors who had significant maths/stats/cs backgrounds usually ended up double majoring or minoring in those disciplines already.

And finally, at the top Econ undergrad programs, departments had already been extremely adamant about requiring their students to build maths/stats/cs sophistication beyond being a Stata monkey.
by johnyzee | 2026-01-12 16:53:35+00:00
Calories isn't everything, there is a lot more focus these days on how different foods affect metabolic hormones affecting satiety, blood sugar, etc. On those metrics, fat alone (which account for most of the calories in peanuts) is very satiating and does not trigger a later blood sugar drop (which causes cravings). That's why people on a diet drink 'bulletproof coffee' (coffee with butter in it), because it is extremely filling while not making you hungry later.
by UncleEntity | 2026-01-12 16:53:45+00:00
I have a couple interpreters I've been poking at and one uses 'musttail' while the other uses a trampoline to get around blowing up the C stack when dispatching the operators. As for the GC, the trampoline VM has a full-blown one (with bells-and-whistles like an arena for short lived intermediate results which get pushed/popped by the compiled instructions) while the other (a peg parser VM) just uses an arena as the 'evaluation' is short lived and the output is the only thing really needing tracking so uses reference counting to be (easily) compatible with the Python C-API. No worries about the C stack at all.

I mean, I could have used the C stack as the VM's stack but then you have to worry about blowing up the stack, not having access (without a bunch of hackery, looking at you scheme people) to the values on the stack for GC and whatnot and, I imagine, all the other things you have issues with but it's not needed at all, just make your own (or, you know, tail call) and pretend the C one doesn't exist.

And I've started on another VM which does the traditional stack thing but it's constrained (by the spec) to have a maximum stack depth so isn't too much trouble.
by pessimizer | 2026-01-12 16:53:46+00:00
IIRC the true story behind that dark period is that Microsoft was making vague murmurings about suing everyone for cloning Windows XP, so everyone felt they had to run away from that.

The problem was that it was a bunch of people who had no good ideas and no insight trying to come up with new paradigms for interaction, and they were all bad. What the Linuxen desktops were doing was even worse than Win8, and the ones on that journey were all determined for some reason to deprecate the old WinXP clone UIs at the same time. Gnome really moved into a position of harassing and mocking its old users (basically regulation redhat behavior.)
by pseudony | 2026-01-12 16:54:05+00:00
I know I’ll get downvoted for this but it needs saying.

I don’t think the allies made any exemptions for the German that wrote their representatives in the lead-up to and during the second world war.
All got stuck with the bill, 6 million got forcibly deported from their homes.
There is a thing as collective guilt and responsibility.

Your country is on collision course with mine, threatening invasion. I really don’t think a few letters absolve you.

I might like you as an individual, who knows, but you can’t run from some responsibility for this.
by therein | 2026-01-12 16:54:16+00:00
Can't even disable the internal webcam or make the external webcam you connected the default. Same for picking the primary audio input in a way that sticks.

I am still yet to be able to update Tailscale in over a year because it needs some kernel extension update and a notification shows up for me to confirm it, I click on it, nothing happens. I go to System Preferences and it isn't in the silly place that they put it in.

Close to zero thought goes into what they do.
by JohnMakin | 2026-01-12 16:54:22+00:00
For better or for worse have spent a large amount of time in terraform since 0.13 and I can confidently say LLM's are very, very bad at it. My favorite is when it invents internal functions (that look suspiciously like python) that do not exist, even when corrected, it will still keep going back to them. A year or two ago there were bad problems with hallucinated resource field names but I haven't seen that as much these days.

It however, is pretty good at refactoring given a set of constraints and an existing code base. It is decent at spitting out boilerplate code for well-known resources (such as AWS), but then again, those boilerplate examples are mostly coming straight from the documentation. The nice thing about refactoring with LLM's in terraform is, even if you vibe it, the refactor is trivially verifiable because the plan should show no changes, or the exact changes you would expect.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-12 16:54:29+00:00
Speaking of things needing rationalization: Smelting iron, which the dwarves are supposedly past masters of, requires furnaces which routinely exceed 1,500 °C. Vs. even exceptionally hot lavas are considerably colder. So why bother forming a Fellowship of the Ring, or embarking on a long & dangerous journey to Mt. Doom, when it'd be vastly quicker & easier to shop local?
by Ocerge | 2026-01-12 16:54:40+00:00
I am employed (which, fair or unfair, seems to always look better to recruiters) but opportunistic. So far I have interviewed 3 times in the past year, every single one being a referral. It's definitely advantageous to have experience/a real network these days, as it must be a relief to all involved to not have to wade through a mountain of AI-generated resumes. I genuinely didn't know what to tell my intern last year when she asked me for advice on how to get a job. Telling her jobs were free when I graduated in 2012 is not useful, but because that was the case I don't know what to tell somebody without a network.