MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmsc | 2025-12-09 06:14:00+00:00
>one for tourists (requires a local SIM card only available in a specific hotel in Pyongyang).

I do not think that exists. I imagine the diplomats and other foreigners living there will have this, though.

When I was there two times (in Pyongyang, and in villages in the north east & Rason) any access to the outside world was prohibited via a network other than telephone (I could make outgoing phone calls via the hotel). Even traveling very close to the border (which they use jammers to block outside connections), my guides were annoyed when they saw I was trying to connect to the Chinese network from my phone.

The only place I saw any access "to the outside world" was in Rason (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rason_Special_Economic_Zone), where one of the casinos had a computer which could be used to access the internet (through the Chinese GFW, of course).
by 9rx | 2025-12-09 06:14:36+00:00
I don't know. You're the one who has studied the data, not me. What's the answer?

If you are asking about what I've seen anecdotally, which is all you can expect of me given that I am not the one of us who is the subject matter expert between us, all those who were moderately wealthy children that I know have grown up into having success with R&D in at least some limited capacity. They haven't all dedicated their lives to R&D, but they've had no trouble being able to invent things when the situation necessitated it.

If they had more time to dedicate their life to it, I see no reason for why that would stop. But, again, you're the expert among us here. I don't know much about it — that is why I'm asking you.

Aside, R&D fundamentally isn't guaranteed to deliver fruit, so elaborate for us on how the research you spoke of differentiates between someone who is well suited to R&D work but never strikes gold due to the nature of the beast, and someone who cannot strike gold because they are straight up incapable as a person. That might help us communicate about this more effectively.
by Saline9515 | 2025-12-09 06:14:41+00:00
The killings of civilians in the West Bank and the colonization process has nothing to do with the anecdotic presence of Hamas there. When fanatic religious colonizers point guns at Palestinians to prevent them from harvesting their olive trees, and then call the army as backup if things heat, what does Hamas has anything to do with the situation?

By the way, Hamas is so bad that Netanyahu was actively helping funding it before the start of the war[1]. I guess that you should consider Netanyahu and your intelligence services as terrorists, then?

Israel will spend 750M$ on advertising next year to clean its international image. I really wonder why, since they do only the right things!

[1]https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2020-02-24/ty-artic...
by whstl | 2025-12-09 06:14:47+00:00
People at Apple is gonna read this and they will do a man-month’s worth of meetings but the designer and PM will never agree in whether to remove some or add more, the developers are too busy adding icons to other random places to get a promotion and the QA is filling about missing icons after finally getting around to check Tahoe.

People are saying they miss Steve Jobs but they probably just miss the product having actual direction.
by auxiliarymoose | 2025-12-09 06:15:13+00:00
Much of the challenge in JS today is due to unnecessary packages, build systems, and workarounds found throughout blogs and forums which were reasonable 5-10 years ago but aren't really needed today. Unfortunately, LLMs tend to output old-fashioned JS.

With (almost) everyone using an up-to-date standards-compliant browser, you can sidestep most of the complexity and weirdness by just using the standard library and ES Modules (instead of frameworks, libraries, build systems etc.) and an IDE with good intellisense + inline documentation lookup.

MDN documentation is good and up to date overall, but I'm not sure there is a good overview/entry point resource that is up to date as of today... maybe I'll have to write it!
by bonesss | 2025-12-09 06:15:33+00:00
Well put. In that broken metaphor we’ve seemingly enter into a web ‘inclusiveness’ discussion focused on pronouns over, say, accessibility for visually impaired readers and readers reliant on tool-based assistance…

Degenerative diseases and chronic functional limitations are super, duper, inclusive to start with.

From SGML and crystallizing the dreams of archivists, librarians, and academics for centuries we’ve ended in a place where actual Microsoft has to use other companies’ web engine because “too ‘spensive” and the ability to even copy text from a website isn’t a guarantee. If you can even see the text under the ads, inline ads, the cookie popup, the delayed email list popup, and then the helpful ai chat agent pop-up.

Stricter markup yields simpler tooling yields better accessibility and transformations. Letting the public web degenerate hurts humanity, every race and creed included.
by bitwize | 2025-12-09 06:15:47+00:00
Postel's Law was one of those Great Mistakes of computing, alongside null pointers, fork(2), and well, C in general. Conform to the spec or be in error. If you allow for sloppiness, you create a problem because different implementations will tolerate different kinds of sloppiness, yielding incompatibilities and horrors like "quirks mode".

XHTML tried to rein this in but by then the cat was out of the bag, and every Tom, Dick, and Mary who was trying to learn HTML was used to the mire tolerant behavior.
by smaudet | 2025-12-09 06:17:07+00:00
I think the focus on the state machine may be the problem. I don't know much about prolog, or why it doesn't really enjoy more status in the programming world, but I suspect that while it is good at repesenting states, it is not very useful for writing programs...

Case in point, the pong programs. Looking at the impl, vs a <50 line js impl, this looks more like an assembly language for state, not necessarily something that makes state more visible or readily apparent...

Having a nice dialect for a (is this formally provable?) state machine is nice, but I'm not convinced founding the language from state machines is the correct approach vs merely using a fluent library e.g. https://stately.ai/docs/xstate

Not saying that I'm correct, but would be interesting to hear more of the philosophy of why Nova, vs just a simplisitic implementation of some card game rules...
by seinecle | 2025-12-09 06:19:16+00:00
To nick pick, it is more about 800% gain in productivity. Cost actually increased.

I refer here to my experience as a solo developer.

With AI assistance I don't spend less hours coding, but more.

There is the thrill of shipping relevant features that were sleeping in my drawers for ages, quicker. Each hour of coding delivers just 8 x more features and bug solving.

Also, whereas I spent a few dozen dollars per month on server costs, I now also spend an equivalent amount on subscriptions and API calls to LLM services for this AI assisted coding. Worth every penny.

So while productivity increased manifold, absolute cost actually increased as well for me.
by omnimus | 2025-12-09 06:21:11+00:00
It doesn't actually matter that much what the icon is. It's impossible to creat icons people would fully understand - otherwise you wouldn't need a label at all.

The function of the icon is to have distinct shape so you are able to visually distinguish menu items quickly in future (more you use the app).

There are other factors like consistent placement that can help. This icon approach is good especially if you have common shared menu items over the OS or they change their placement throughout the app.
by StrangeSound | 2025-12-09 06:21:50+00:00
There was a good video on YouTube that talked about the Walkman resurgence, and why they're so large these days. Almost all of these walkmans are using the same internal mechanism because there was only one place to source them. I don't know if that's still the case now.

https://youtu.be/2DWtkSVNvTg
by thingortwo | 2025-12-09 06:21:55+00:00
I always see this point mentioned in "App VS Spreadsheet" but no one gives a concrete example. The whole point of using a "purpose" build app is to give some structure and consistency to the problem. If people are replicating spreadsheet feature then they needed "excel" to begin with since that is a purpose built tool for generalizing a lot of problems. It's like I can say well my notebook and pen is already in front of me, I can use this why would I ever bother opening an app? well because the app provides some additional value.
by XCabbage | 2025-12-09 06:22:08+00:00
I would guess that what matters most is stops for driving disqualified/uninsured/unregistered, DUI, running lights, and failing to yield (especially at crosswalks), and perhaps for speeding on non-highway roads where it has more of a safety impact. As you say, in the USA as in virtually every culture, almost everyone speeds in some contexts, and especially on big, multilane, motor-vehicle-only roads; enforcement of speed limits in that context is likely one of the lowest impact things police can do, but I think it's a massive error to treat "traffic stops" as a category as equivalent to that sort of enforcement specifically.
by 112233 | 2025-12-09 06:23:07+00:00
From the article:

"I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) for a fairly complex internal tool"

Did you catch what the author didn't mention? Are the tests any good? Are they even tests? I'm playing with Opus now (best entertainment for a coder), it is excellent at writing fake code and fabricating results. It wrote me a test that validates an extremely complex utility, and the test passed!

What was the test? Call utility with invalid parameters and check that there is an error.
by arionmiles | 2025-12-09 06:23:48+00:00
I love this site. Earlier this year I was working to revive my sister's old WM-EX170 and was able to find a service manual for it here.

It made me appreciate how these devices are like pieces of beautiful clockwork!

I only had to replace the belt so it wasn't a complicated repair. But, in comparison to the level of documentation manufacturers of any modern electronics offer today, looking at that service manual was a reminder of what we've lost.
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-09 06:23:58+00:00
> that's just an <a href> link. the only latency is your browser pulling the (admittedly, unnecessarily large) page

I fail to see the relevance of your comment. So you came up with an explanation of why the page might have awful accessibility. How does this make the accessibility problem any better?

> would you prefer some static hydration garbage?

I think everyone would prefer to not wait 3 seconds to get feedback on what they clicked. We're talking about accessibility, right?
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2025-12-09 06:24:12+00:00
Perhaps you have missed the essential point. Who drives the cars? It's not the horses, is it? And a chess computer is just as unlikely to start a game of chess on its own as a horse is to put on its harness and pull a plow across a field. I'm not entirely sure what impact all this will have on the job market, but your comparisons are flawed.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-12-09 06:24:26+00:00
Pictograms in the interface are not decoration. Their purpose is to convey information in limited space. (The information should be that could be conveyed this way.) Currently they are often used as decorations or these two uses are mixed up. This is a mistake.

(It is interesting and saddening to see how years of UI research just went down the drain after Apple "resurrection". In my impression Apple was the first that started to lose their carefully collected UI expertise and replace it something that was original for the time, but that was all. E.g. I remember the very first ads after Jobs' comeback. They still had the beige Macintoshes, but their ads changed. Instead of a typical computer ad that showed a computer with a turned on screen and some desktop picture Apple's ads pictured turned off computers photographed from unusual angles or in unusual positions, like keyboard standing on its side leaning on the box, mouse hanging on its wire and so on. It was different, indeed, it stood out. Thing is, to always strive for that is harmful. Especially for user interface, where the motto is: do not make it original, make it right.)
by bossyTeacher | 2025-12-09 06:25:03+00:00
> Humans also hallucinate

"LLM hallucinations" and hallucinations are essentially different. Human hallucinations are related to perceptual experiences not memory errors like in the case of LLMs. Humans with certain neurological conditions hallucinate. Humans with healthy brains don't.

This habit of misapplying terms needs to stop. Humans are not backpropagation algorithms nor whatever random concept you read about in a comp sci book.
by MarkusQ | 2025-12-09 06:26:41+00:00
This article is almost incoherent. The author (a philosopher turned science journalist, I gather) presents everything from a "which side are you on" perspective, as if physics was a branch of sociology. Little wonder they seem to have trouble with the notion that physics can (and should) be possible without the concept of "an observer".

I stopped reading at "Let’s put this moon thing to rest. It’s true. We can’t say the moon is there if no one’s observing it."
by isodev | 2025-12-09 06:27:05+00:00
isn't that just because it's an Apple device? I mean, there are people buying those old Macs that shipped with System 7 or 9... it's a fun hobby I guess. But there again, fast forward to 2025, you download a 17GB OS update so it can tell you which apps you can and can't run on your computer (in a barely readable messages because transparent backgrounds are a thing now)
by modeless | 2025-12-09 06:28:17+00:00
They are trained on exactly the same data in the same order with the same optimizer because they are literally the same base model. With a little fine tuning added on top.

I see now that they did one experiment with trained from scratch models. They trained five Resnet-50s on five disjoint datasets of natural images, most quite small. And IIUC they were able to, without further training, combine them into one "universal" model that can be adapted to have only somewhat worse performance on any one of the five datasets (actually one of them is pretty bad) using only ~35 adaptation parameters. Which is kind of cool I guess but I also don't find it that surprising?

I don't expect that you'd get the same finding at large scale in LLMs trained from scratch on disjoint and dissimilar data with different optimizers etc. I would find that surprising. But it would be very expensive to do that experiment so I understand why they weren't able to.
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-09 06:28:38+00:00
> Again, they are not pressed into Russia, they are volunteering to go into Russia (...)

They volunteer to join the armed forces once they are promised cushy non-combat positions in the homeland or in the rear. Then they are pressed to form suicide assault groups to execute Zapp Brannigan tactics. Who do you think they are fooling with this assumption that everyone in Russia is suicidal?
by inejge | 2025-12-09 06:28:55+00:00
There's illiteracy, and there's functional illiteracy. They're not the same, and people often confuse the two. A literally illiterate person (ha!) wouldn't make headway with almost any realistic computer interface, icons or not.

The 20% statistic is about people who have great trouble reading and comprehending simple sentences, not discerning individual words. It's tragic and debilitating, but such people could muddle through a simple interface with textual labels. A truly illiterate person couldn't.
by usmur | 2025-12-09 06:29:12+00:00
I believe that "hidden contact form" may have a use if build intentionally.

I had a similar (but intentional) idea with "Un-business card", which is a business card with fake data (even errors in the name).

So whenever someone I don't like ask me to work with them I still seem kind to give them a business card, but at the same time they will not bother me anymore.

But as I said, it intentional!
by antonvs | 2025-12-09 06:29:47+00:00
> there is no difference as jj is only a frontend to git.

It's easy to get this impression because git is so dominant, so most people using jj use it as a frontend to git.

But jj is a fully self-contained version control system. It always stores all its commits, branches, and other repo metadata in the .jj directory. You can use it standalone like this without ever using git.

Git integration is optional, and works by importing from or exporting to Git. Internally, jj still manages its own history. Git support is just a bridge.
by AIchemist | 2025-12-09 06:29:51+00:00
If even remotely fact what you suggest here, I see two antipodal trajectories the authors secretly huddled and voted on:

1. As John Napier, who freely, generously, gifted his `Mirifici' for the benefit of all.

2. Here we go, patent trolls, have at it. OpenAI, et al burning midnight oil to grab as much real estate on this to erase any (even future?) debt stress, deprecating the AGI Philospher's Stone to first owning everything conceivable from a new miraculous `my precious' ring, not `open', closed.
by avereveard | 2025-12-09 06:30:11+00:00
Overseeing robot is a time limited activity. Even building robot has a finite horizon.

Current tech can't yet replace everything but many jobs already see the horizon or are at sunset.

Last few time this happened the new tech, whether textile mills or computers, drove job creation as well as replacement.

This time around some component of progress are visibile, because end of the day people can use this tech to create wealth at unprecedented scale, but other arent as the tech is run with small teams at large scale and has virtually no related ondustries is depends on like idk cars would. It's energy and gpus.

Maybe we will be all working on gpu related industries? But seems another small team high scale job. Maybe few tens of million can be employed there?

Meanwhile I just dont see the designer + AI job role materializing, I see corpos using AI and cutting the middleman, while designers + AI get mostly ostracized, unable to raise, like a cran in a bucket of crabs.
by 9rx | 2025-12-09 06:30:33+00:00
UBI sees everyone receive an income, typically with a clawback mechanism. GBI sees an income paid to only those who need the support (means-based). The difference is subtle, I suppose, but could have a dramatic effect on what the studies show — or maybe not, I don't know. The key takeaway here is that I've never been able to find a UBI study to contrast the numerous GBI studies I am familiar with against. You spoke of UBI studies so I was hoping you'd be able to share. But, it seems not.

I don't understand the questions you are asking at the end. Apologies for not having a good answer.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-12-09 06:31:17+00:00
> Huh? The point I was trying to make that the returns seem to equalize the further back we go.

Except this not factually true.

BRK-B has outperformed the SP500 on pretty much every time horizon outside of the 2009-2019 period and as you have pointed it significantly does so in the last 5 years.

> As of September 2025, Apple is still 21% of BRK's publicly listed holdings:

Tech is 34% of the SP500.

There is valid reasons to prefer SP500 ETF in a diversified portfolio. Hoping that it will perform better with less risk based on historical data is not one of them.
by 4k93n2 | 2025-12-09 06:32:16+00:00
minidisc has a lot going for it. you can easily carry a few around with you. you dont really need to carry the outer cases. you can put some album art directly onto them. if your player has netMD support then you can just use a web browser to manage the tracks on a disc.

the only downside i can think of is the loud screeching every once in a while when the disc is seeking. but that could just be the player that i have maybe
by youainti | 2025-12-09 06:35:16+00:00
Those are documented, but not necessarily in the paper. You can find the info at clinicaltrials.gov. Check out this current trial for breast cancer treatment by Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC for example. For the control arm, they are allowing doctors choice from a set of alternatives. Assuming the doctors are selecting control treatments to improve chance of survival, this test is comparing the new treatment to "the best known treatment for this specific cancer".

https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07060807#study-plan
by amatecha | 2025-12-09 06:38:16+00:00
you were probably scraping the thick transparent side, not the side with the label? the data is immediately under the label. the clear side can be surprisingly scraped up and still read properly, though I'm not sure how!! I have some CDs that I thought were ruined because of how scratched up the underside is, and they play just fine. Pretty sweet! Then I have one or two where the label side got a scratch taken out of it, and indeed, you can see right through the disc at those points - unrecoverable damage. Conversely a scratched up underside can simply be buffed/polished smooth and the disc will read good as new. I actually have one disc that cracked in half (a singular crack from the center to the outside edge, not spanning the total diameter of the disc)... and it actually plays without any skips (though surely depending on quality of the player and its resilience to read errors). I couldn't believe it at the time. A single piece of masking tape to hold the edge together was a sufficient "repair".
by mock-possum | 2025-12-09 06:38:42+00:00
It really depends. If it works it works, if it doesn’t it doesn’t, like everything else.

But I do feel like he’s hurting his case here:

> You know what would be a fun game? Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right.

That’s an excellent example of how effective icons actually are! I can mostly read that menu at a glance with no text lables, because good use of iconography doesn’t assign “arbitrary” icons to options, jt fields well-known icons that are easily recognizeable. Take for instance the ‘save’ icon - everybody knows what the floppy disc means, even if they have never seen, touched, or used a floppy disc IRL. A 15 year old born in 2010 knows what the ‘save’ icon is. My nearly 70 year old mother knows what the ‘share’ curly arrow icon means.

They’re not arbitrary at this point - they’re standard.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-09 06:38:49+00:00
> You can wrench attack them, but that’s the only option.

That's not the only option for a government. You don't need those specific coins, you only need anything of value. Their car, their house, the wages their employer would have paid them, anything else they'd already bought with the money, etc. And they're criminals, they're going to jail, and they're staying there a lot longer if they don't give back the money, which has a way of making non-compliant people more compliant without hitting them with a wrench.

> The only way it’s possible for there to be recourse even if the scammer is noncompliant, is for there to be a fiat money system.

That doesn't give you recourse either because they can spend the money right away. Which transaction are you going to reverse if they use it to buy a physical commodity or foreign asset? Then the scammer has the asset, not the money, so the only thing a fiat money system can do is cause the victim to be the innocent asset seller instead of the potentially negligent or actually in on it person claiming to be the original victim.
by gambiting | 2025-12-09 06:38:49+00:00
Here in the UK it's common for online grocery sites to say "fresh for at least X days" on every item, so bread will usually say 5 days, eggs 7 days etc etc. Doesn't matter if I select collection(so someone is picking those items for me at the store) or delivery(so they come from a larger warehouse). They stick to that promise.