MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anarticle | 2025-05-01 13:37:05+00:00
Hate to break this to you, they do in fact go on expeditions in tents for quite a bit, with guns (polar bears). You've got them insofar as they don't forage for food, turns out we have portable food tech. There is a base camp but there are areas where they go far. They get govt issued Canada Goose jackets! What a perk! O Canada!

I agree with all you are saying, and those techs can be developed. I am a tech optimist. I see these as problems to try to solve, not a list of reasons why they can't happen.

We can agree as well that it will be fantastically more expensive and yes an order of magnitude etc etc. These are engineering problems, not physics problems. Probability vs possibility in my mind. We can disagree about if the resources are worth spending (that's not my call, I vote, which doesn't seem to do much). I can't predict the future.

Another point against it is it used to be a boat with dudes sent into the unknown with no way to know what to know what was happening. This was totally affordable for imperial seafaring nations at the time relative to the cost of rockets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_Age_of_Antarctic_Explor...

After this age there was a rise in using tech to do it. (mechanical age I think?)

It will be an insane feat to pull off, and I hope it happens in our life time.
by zeroq | 2025-05-01 13:37:15+00:00
Say what you want, but I genuinely miss the comfort of working with Flash where you had a single target and you knew that whatever you see on the screen right now will be exactly the same for every single user, ever, despite on whatever device they will be viewing your project.

I earned my first money for "web developement" in '99, and as much I understand underlying dynamics, I - as a user but mostly as a developer - really enjoy the current phase and I really liked that brief period when IE was the browser.
by kouteiheika | 2025-05-01 13:37:22+00:00
That's true, but in general it's easy to archive games from Steam and (as long as the publisher doesn't use any 3rd-party DRM) they're trivial to crack.

I buy my games from Steam because of the convenience and to support the developers, but if, say, Gaben kicks the bucket and Steam suddenly closes/turns evil I can just as easily pirate all of my games back. So from a game preservation standpoint Steam isn't that bad compared to the locked down consoles and their walled gardens.
by iJohnDoe | 2025-05-01 13:37:28+00:00
I’ll always ask this question when these articles appear. How are North Koreans so successful in landing interviews and even jobs?

There are thousands of laid off tech workers desperately trying to get even an interview, let alone a job. Yet, North Koreans having a success rate better than zero seems like a major problem.

The article even says they are interviewing candidates with long complicated names with defunct LinkedIn profiles. Yet, seemingly a normal candidate cannot get past the resume filter.

Tons of articles posted here over the recent years of how broken hiring is and the horror stories. This is taking broken to a whole new level.
by pxoe | 2025-05-01 13:37:56+00:00
Yeah, I wanted to add that it may be less of a problem when there's source code, but sideloading and third party app stores includes apps that don't have source code available, like random loose apks people just download and install, or just third party stores that aren't open source oriented (like game stores, phone maker stores, etc.) Checking source code is also not an option on play store itself, so they might want to have some other ways of verifying where something comes from and letting other people check something for themselves.
by malcolmgreaves | 2025-05-01 13:38:10+00:00
The Republicans’ trade barriers do not solve any labor problems. They contract the total market size and tax economic activity.

The French have higher disposable income because Americans are too busy wasting their income on sky high rents, sky high healthcare costs, paying for cars because it’s necessary, higher food and alcohol costs, etc. (Plus they have more of the thing money can’t buy: time). And these tariffs are going to make American’s lives even more expensive. (No one release in the world is going to oh these taxes: only Americans).
by proc0 | 2025-05-01 13:38:16+00:00
That's what should happen over time within a domain. As you engineer the codebase it should become into its own domain framework. I feel the web industry leans heavily into only using existing frameworks and tools instead of just building it. Frameworks are actually simple, but for whatever reason the industry decided that engineering is more about gluing software together while looking at customer metrics instead of solving computer problems.
by ferguess_k | 2025-05-01 13:39:14+00:00
They actually also interview for Chinese companies too. I have a friend who got a big shock when he saw someone wearing military uniform on Zoom. Apparently they didn't bother to hide the identities. My friend told me that the interviewee has very, very good skills (e.g. deep knowledge of X11) but he quickly declined him.

He dug a bit deeper and found out that the North Koreans have special programs for gifted kids. They send them to the schools for dedicated CS education. They also (presumably without proof) have access to the source code of various commercial closed source software.

It's a good pay job (comparing to other NKs) and they get to do what they love, so they are pretty loyal. But I always wonder, wouldn't they burn out eventually? Maybe they can switch fields or become teachers, though.
by ericmay | 2025-05-01 13:39:48+00:00
> Why do you expect to gain jobs?

Because we don't live in a static equilibrium with respect to population? Even if we didn't gain jobs because the population was stagnant, this just puts wage pressure on employers to the benefit of workers. Or is that not a good thing?

But you are providing an argument against your own point:

> More likely is that the US looses all the jobs that the imports were dependent on, and unemployment goes up.

> The US is currently at fairly high employment[0]. To a first approximation, if you attempt to move factory jobs to the US, not only do you need to build a factory, someone not currently working in a factory has to loose their non-factory job

Which is it?
by pseudocomposer | 2025-05-01 13:39:58+00:00
I agree in ways, but I think a single global fund is a bit far-reaching and over-centralized, thus prone to corruption. I think it would make sense for, say, the US, EU, and BRICS (with maybe China as a separate entity) to each have open-source funds for OSS digital infrastructure, and cooperate on global web standards. So if one fund goes rogue/corrupt or is crippled by Republican-types, the world still has two (or three) backups.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-01 13:40:11+00:00
Yeah, I'm not arguing the propriety of it. I'm arguing that you're not even reading the decisions. It is demonstrably untrue that district courts couldn't review agencies' interpretations of statues, as you've argued several times now.

Again: read more closely. Nowhere does Loper Bright say there was any conflict with the Constitution. Merely citing the Constitution in a decision does not mean the ruling is on Constitutional grounds. It says there was a violation of APA. That's the extent of the ruling.

You misunderstood what Chevron deference is, now you've misunderstood Loper Bright. Find new sources for your legal analysis!
by ApolloFortyNine | 2025-05-01 13:40:27+00:00
Nor does calling browsers dependent on Search funding a cartel.

People expect web browsers to be provided for free, which heavily complicates funding.

There is nothing stopping someone from making a new browser. The base of Chrome is open source, you don't even have to do the hard part. And distribution worldwide is relatively easy, if you can give people a reason to use your browser.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-01 13:40:28+00:00
When the pre-cursor to MI5 would interrogate suspected German spies during the war, they would ask them to talk about squirrels, and they'd mangle the word so badly, no matter who well trained, that it was an easy tell.

Related: after the war, they were concerned that there were Nazi spies still in England they hadn't uncovered. When the files in Berlin were seized, they went through every single asset sent to England. Not only had they successfully identified every agent, and turned quite a few into double-agents, they also noted that very few agents going the other way had ever been detected.
by dtagames | 2025-05-01 13:40:38+00:00
The problem is the cost and knowledge base required to keep servers running. A game server is a big proprietary ball of spaghetti with hundreds of API endpoints and only the people who built it really know how it works[0]. It's expensive to keep those folks around and expensive to pay for the cloud services and SaaS tools they need to do their jobs.

All software has a "lifecycle" and has to be turned off at some point because no one is willing to pay the costs of keeping it running (with hosting and client changes as ongoing moving targets). We see this even with games that have sales! So ones that don't have sales are not likely to attract anyone to pay for such staff.

[0] Source: I spent 2 years inside a studio owned by "big gaming."
by bsrkf | 2025-05-01 13:40:52+00:00
Since this thread, rightfully so (and in full agreement), has people complain about the bloat of today's software stack, is it only me in thinking there may be sincere potential profit streams for high quality paid software?

I would happily pay for software that

was high-quality was fast was privacy preserving had sane defaults had/provided reasonable support/insight (forum and developer blog) had a fair pricing models (non-subscription, x-years of updates etc)

as in

an e-mail client an office suite a scheduler (scheduling learning, tasks, various deadlines, calendar, ...) photo/video editor (wouldn't need to be of the scope of a professional suite) a browser (earnestly, one that wasn't a mere chrome re-skin, wasn't run by a bloated paid by Google organization like Mozilla, and would take fingerprinting prevention and privacy seriously) ...

or am I underestimating the problem? How many full-time developers working how many hours, building on open-source software where sensible (as in you wouldn't hand-roll your own cryptography, networking protocol implementations, GUI libraries) would it take, for e.g. a good cross-compatible Desktop E-Mail Client? (there's little in terms of software that I hate more than Outlook)

And given competitive non-US, maybe even non EU-wages for such developers, how many 'customers' with fair pricing would such a company/startup need?

You could open-source part of your stack (as in singular libraries) for exposure and good will, could maybe offer free-tiered versions, potential fair pricing models could be similar to Sublime's https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text you could build upon technologies people are exited about and willing to take pay cuts for if that's what they could work in (Odin, Zig, Rust, ...) etc...

Even considering vendor lock in, market dominance of existing solutions, the dominance of smartphones over desktops, isn't there still a viable market? Maybe what's left is even more so, given Desktop use seems (besides gamers) consist (to a significant extent) of power users, semi-professionals/professionals & businesses?

And, even though this place here is of course a highly niche bubble, the plights of modern's software lack of quality are real and I'm sure felt beyond us.
by abrouwers | 2025-05-01 13:41:03+00:00
I'm not a huge fan of this statement - just because some users prefer simplicity, doesn't make them "illiterate." I'm happy to be a pretty tech-savvy gnome user - everyone uses a computing device for different purposes (as a tool, not a hobby). For example, it's great that KDE offers 2 or 3 kick-off menus, multiple clock plasmoids, etc, but just because a user is fine with a single, well-refined option, doesn't mean they are less "computer literate."
by post_break | 2025-05-01 13:41:14+00:00
The top brass at Apple just think they are above everyone else. Remember when Tim Cook lied about Apple not giving anyone special terms in the app store and that everyone gets the same deal. And then it came out Netflix was one that got special terms?

The sheer arrogance of Apple leaders is astounding. They think they are outright owed rent on anything that runs on an iPhone, iPad, etc. Apple thinks developers are nothing without Apple. Look at how snubbing developers has worked out for the Apple Vision Pro. It was already a niche device, but it's a ghost town.
by mcphage | 2025-05-01 13:41:27+00:00
It's an imperfect solution to a real problem—Nintendo wants to use cartridges instead of discs for some good reasons, some not-so-good reasons—but the costs per cartridge are too high for cartridges big enough to hold modern games.

But you can look at it as a transferable license to otherwise digital games, and that's not bad. A console with entirely (or almost entirely) digital games would have no used game market, and that sucks both for sellers (which I don't do), and buyers (which I happily do).

It would be nice if there was some legal protection for the buyer that, by selling a physical license, that Nintendo be required to make the download itself available for some time period > 20 years.
by rbanffy | 2025-05-01 13:41:40+00:00
It wasn’t Google’s investment that made Linux a viable OS for enterprise applications. Google using Solaris would have made little difference.

Active Directory was a huge win for Microsoft. We’ll see them milk that product for generations. Sun could have captured a part of that, but it’d need to compete against Microsoft when 99.9% of the clients using AD were Microsoft. I doubt they would succeed.

Another fun alt-history branch is the one Sun manages to sell thousands of Amigas as low-end Unix workstations, moving Unix down into the personal computer space, and saving Commodore.

Sadly, none of that happened and we live in the crappiest timeline.
by jeltz | 2025-05-01 13:41:45+00:00
Maybe you should skip bashing modern devs and people who learnt from online courses when the parent poster is the one in the wrong. Unless InnoDB has a particularly bad implementation of disk backed temporary tables almodt all disk IO should be done in the background so the latency cost should be small. I recommend benchmarking on you particular workload of you really want to know hur big it is.

I am an old-school developer with a computer engineering degree but many of the old famous devs were self taught. Yes, if you learn how to code through online courses you will miss some important fundamentals but those are possible to learn later and I know several people who have.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-05-01 13:42:04+00:00
It's certainly true in my experience. The main thing that makes a difference is simply how curious and interested you are.

Plenty of graduates simply got into to it to make money, and have no real deep interest. Some of them love the theory but hate the practice. And some of them are good at both of course.

By contrast, self taught people tend to have personal interest going for them. But I've also worked with self taught people who had no real understanding (despite their interest), and who were satisfied if something just worked. Even if they are motivated to know more, they are often lacking in deeper theoretical computer science (this is a gap I've had to gradually fill in myself).

Anyway, the determining factor is rarely exactly how they acquired their skills, it's the approach they take to the subject and personal motivation and curiosity.
by jsheard | 2025-05-01 13:42:22+00:00
I get that Switch 2 games need faster storage, and that makes the traditional model of running games directly from the cart prohibitively expensive, but they could have just copied the Xbox/Playstation model of shipping physical games on slow media (Blurays in their case) and then having a mandatory installation step which copies the data to the fast internal SSD before you start playing. That way you're not entirely dependent on online services to play a physical game.
by gwern | 2025-05-01 13:42:35+00:00
At that sort of tariff, you'll see a lot of people dabbling in tariff evasion by smuggling stuff in their luggage (whether they realize it or not). If you pull it out of the packaging and just put it in your checked-in baggage, I doubt US Customs would know what it was or that you didn't bring it with you. "I'm a digital nomad, so I like to bring a lightweight monitor to work on."
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-01 13:42:35+00:00
Easily over 99% of what I use a browser for are essentially static pages, so wasm and especially webgpu strike me as extremely niche. Like it's cute that you can run quake in a browser, but I can also just open my start menu and launch quake. For actual web usage (looking up information, shopping, paying my bills, bank transfers, stock trades, etc.), simple, static html is the high performance approach.
by Wobbles42 | 2025-05-01 13:42:53+00:00
Non-lawyer here. This information is surprising to me (to be clear, I believe you, I just would have guessed otherwise).

Is some degree of malicious compliance not extremely common when companies deal with the courts? From the outside it seems like the incentive would be to comply with a court order to the minimum degree required to avoid further legal consequences, but no more. Is compliance more enthusiastic that that in practice? Again, I have zero experience, but the idea of a company losing a lawsuit and then actually acting in good faith is a strange one to me.

An individual might be intimidated to act in actual good faith to avoid serious consequences, but Apple as an entity can't be tossed in jail for contempt of court, right? So it would seem that it is incentivized to push it's employees to take risks like this, with the understand that they can be replaced by employees who will if they refuse.
by dTal | 2025-05-01 13:43:00+00:00
LLMs learn to translate without explicit Rosetta stones (pairs of identical texts in different languages). I suspect they would learn to translate even in the absence of any identical texts at all. "Meaning" is no more or less than structural isomorphism, and humans tend to talk about similar things in similar ways regardless of the language used. So provided that the pendrive contained similar topics to known texts, and was large enough to extract with statistical significance the long tail of semantically meaningful relationships, then a translation could be achieved.
by WA | 2025-05-01 13:43:18+00:00
The worst thing about YouTube in 2025 is auto-translation. Whoever is behind this doesn’t seem to understand that many people outside the US actually understand two languages rather well.

In my case: German and English. I don’t want either to be translated to the other, but no chance. If you switch languages in the UI, you will get the garbage translated titles.
by phkahler | 2025-05-01 13:43:21+00:00
>> The big anti-feature is that developers can block users from flashing the chips.

There's a liability angle too. If a company (or person) makes a product that has any potential for harm and you reprogram it prior to an accident, YOU must take responsibility but will probably not.

Another angle is that the hardware may be cloneable and there's no reason anyone should be able to read out the code and put it into a clone device. There is a valid use case in making a replacement chip for yourself.

Companies will buy far more chips than hobbyists, so this feature caters to them and for valid reasons.

>> Yes, there's a security angle, but if I have the chip in my hands, I should be able to flip some pin to reprogram the chip and prevent all the e-waste.

What if the chip used masked ROM? Your desire is not always feasible. You can always replace the chip with another one - and go write your own software for it </sarcasm>.

BTW I'm a big fan of Free Software and the GPL, but there are places where non-free makes sense too.
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-05-01 13:43:47+00:00
>but rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund.

How do you ensure it’s not just laundering money with little or no work into the problem.

I think it’s messed up Google essentially funds all browsers but putting it in the hands of politicians isn’t going to help, would be better to try and have more companies funding it so at least the dependency on Google is less.
by MisterTea | 2025-05-01 13:44:19+00:00
> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor

How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.
by kjs3 | 2025-05-01 13:44:37+00:00
Zhaoxin is China's answer to "what if we need a drop-in x86 replacement immediately?"

Exactly this. China isn't going to be doing HPC on these, or building domestic clouds, or wooing gamers. This is a strategic project so Chinese users can continue to access the x86 ecosystem regardless of 'supply chain issues'.[1][2] And much of that ecosystem can get by with a fraction of the compute of the average gamer, it's just fine that it hits mediocre performance numbers, for now.

[1] And, sure, some national pride. No harm in that. [2] No, "emulators!" is not the only answer.
by palata | 2025-05-01 13:44:58+00:00
> so one could use a tool like Cryptomator to encrypt folders locally and send that folder to the cloud

Yeah I already use restic, which I believe is similar (E2EE backups to cloud). But I don't need Nextcloud for that :).

I was actually interested in the Hetzner managed Nextcloud for e.g. my family, so that I can move them away from Google Drive/iCloud. I can't reasonably ask my family to use cryptomator or restic :D.
by hereonout2 | 2025-05-01 13:45:30+00:00
I think I agree. Objectively we do have it better than most and tech is generally an extremely cushy job.

Even here in Europe salaries can match Doctors and Lawyers but the barrier to entry is much lower and in my experience employment is still based on merit more than anything.

Perhaps there's some element of "don't rock the boat" but maybe some guilt too. We really have lucked out.

Not sure how comfortable I'd feel taking union action over my job that requires me to leave the house once a week but pays 3x a teachers salary.
by matkoniecz | 2025-05-01 13:45:42+00:00
> police have never been on the side of the people

that is a remarkable generalization, that overstates things to the point of being misleading

> They are they muscle of the state.

still, there are better and worse states

if you go fully pacifist and disempower yourself and your state it will not result in peace - it will result in someone else, likely worse, taking over

Police in my country did some bad things (and far more bad things when we were a Russian puppet state) but last time I had an actual contact with police it was on railway station when they have cordoned off a group of aggressive football hooligans.

I assure you that I preferred policeman over group of drunk abusive hooligans. And some kind of "muscle of the state" is needed to keep such people in check.

(at the same time, police power should be kept on a leash)