MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kube-system | 2025-07-22 16:24:23+00:00
A battery compartment that is "almost the right size" is going to encourage unfamiliar users to do stupid things.

https://budgetlightforum.com/t/my-18650-batteries-are-about-...

> The batteries that come with the light are perfect, but all the panasonic 18650s I have purchased are about 1/8 (3mm) too short.

> I was thinking of using aluminum foil.

If people on enthusiast forums are struggling to put batteries in their devices safely, the mass market is doomed. Proper safety engineering is to design a device in a way where foreseeable misuse by a layperson does not result in a safety issue.

This isn't incompatible with a right to repair. Just simply don't glue the device shut. The LiPos used in many devices are common jelly-bean components.
by wredcoll | 2025-07-22 16:24:27+00:00
There's too much information in the modern world to function without some degree of compression.

Compare the journey of Newton inventing calculus to that of the modern day student learning it in a semester. The student is presumably experiencing "compression", but the alternative is they spend their whole life merely returning the point that humanity has already achieved.

If someone tells me they did a scientific study that proves that changing the color of my phone background will save some percentage of my battery life per day, should I spend the time to reproduce this experience without compression, or should I take this knowledge and use it to improve my life as I move forward?

Sometimes it is of course dangerous to act on the "compressed data", you need to unpack it to either understand it or evaluate its truthfulness, but just knowing that doesn't magically grant you the time to uncompress all the data you receive, you plainly couldn't function in modern society that way.

Instead we develop heuristics about which information we accept at the summary level and which we need to delve into more deeply. The alternative is never accomplishing anything because you're too busy re-doing all of human history.
by MostlyStable | 2025-07-22 16:24:31+00:00
And I'm saying that the question of whether language production and consciousness imply one another is orthogonal to the argument. My argument, in it's simplest form, is that in order to confidently claim a non-human is not conscious, we would indeed need to solve the hard problem. We have not solved that problem, and therefore we should make no strong claims about the consciousness or lack thereof of any non-human.

I may have been imprecise in my original comment, if it led you to believe that I thought that language production was the only evidence or important thing. If so, I apologize for my imprecision. I don't think that it's really that relevant.
by freezed8 | 2025-07-22 16:24:37+00:00
This blog post makes some good points about using vision models for retrieval, but I do want to call out a few problems: 1. The blog conflates indexing/retrieval with document parsing. Document parsing itself is the task of converting a document into a structured text representation, whether it's markdown/JSON (or in the case of extraction, an output that conforms to a schema). It has many uses, one of which is RAG, but many of which are not necessarily RAG related.

ColPali is great for retrieval, but you can't use ColPali (at least natively) for pure document parsing tasks. There's a lot of separate benchmarks for just evaluating doc parsing while the author mostly talks about visual retrieval benchmarks.

2. This whole idea of "You can DIY document parsing by screenshotting a page" is not new at all, lots of people have been talking about it! It's certainly fine as a baseline and does work better than standard OCR in many cases.

a. But from our experience there's still a long-tail of accuracy issues. b. It's missing metadata like confidence scores/bounding boxes etc. out of the box c. Honestly this is underrated, but creating a good screenshotting pipeline itself is non-trivial.

3. In general for retrieval, it's helpful to have both text and image representations. Image tokens are obviously much more powerful. Text tokens are way cheaper to store and let you do things like retrieval entire documents (instead of just chunks) and input that into the LLM.

(disclaimer: I am ceo of llamaindex, and we have worked on both document parsing and retrieval with LlamaCloud, but I hope my point stands in a general sense)
by Sayrus | 2025-07-22 16:24:38+00:00
Mozilla does sometimes. For instance 'Quick as a Fox: Firefox keeps getting faster'[2] from 2023 and the related articles in Mozilla Hacks[2]. They used to do that a lot more when Quantum was all the hype and had some marketing performance comparison[3] with Chrome a long time back. Recently, it feels like Mozilla is dropping that type of marketing to focus on the image of privacy and talk about some features.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/quick-as-a-fox-fir...

[2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/10/down-and-to-the-right-fire...

[3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-private-browsing...
by maybebyte | 2025-07-22 16:24:46+00:00
This is a fair question/critique. As I understand it, this is a particular consideration for coders and readers with dyslexia, as they flip the letters. The thought process is that by making the characters distinct, it reduces this problem.

I learned about mirror glyphs through a document linked in the Accessible Perceptual Contrast Algorithm (APCA) website. For context, APCA is the system that aims to supplant current color calculation methods in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

https://apcacontrast.com/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338149302_Evaluatin...
by eapressoandcats | 2025-07-22 16:24:48+00:00
I fully agree that America was very willing to commit atrocities, especially using atomic bombs (obviously) and firebombing civilian centers.

The key difference is that the US recognized that Japan could surrender, accepted that surrender, and instituted regime change with a goal of democratic prosperity.

I’m not convinced Israel would do the same. They certainly haven’t said anything about actual regime change and setting up a legitimate government.
by rglover | 2025-07-22 16:24:59+00:00
This is just going to lead to things not being done as nobody knows whether or not the TODO is resolved or not.

Personally, I tag my comments in one of two ways:

1. // TODO: <task> (if multiple things, I do a multiline comment with Markdown-style checkboxes next to each item in the list).

2. // NOTE: <explainer>

The former is what you'd expect (I routinely search for these to make sure I'm not missing minutiae) and the latter is for code that can't be refactored to make it clear and requires some explanation.

Doing this consistently has really saved my bacon over the years (both in terms of keeping track of tasks and remembering why I had to use that ridiculous chunk of code to get something to work).
by dijit | 2025-07-22 16:25:10+00:00
To be completely fair with you which mass murder should I be outraged at?

I was outraged with Uyghurs, I was outraged with Rwandans, I was outraged about the Tamils, Burma, the ISIL occupation, Boko Haram etc;etc;etc;

I’m old now, my outrage did nothing to prevent or assuage these conflicts and this conflict seems too muddy for me to get involved with, I can’t pick a side, both sides are killing each other and one is more successful than the other.

I don’t feel like beating people over the head with the conflict will actually stop anyone dying, even if we decided all of us together to bomb Israel off the map: that’s bad too. Nobody is coming to the table with anything even resembling a solution.

So, kindly, I will reserve my moral outrage to situations whereby I can make a difference, where I don’t have to watch both sides chanting death threats in schools about each other. I will not morally side with either.
by odiroot | 2025-07-22 16:25:31+00:00
> It's a little weird that, on the one hand, nobody much wants to read anything long, and on the other, hours long podcasts

No, thank you, I'd rather read a long book.

Podcasts are like torture to me, especially in this recent concept of an interview, as popularised by US creators.

Most Netflix content is also of questionable quality.
by floatrock | 2025-07-22 16:25:33+00:00
I don't disagree with you, and as with all things in life, answer is to find balance.

On the one hand, hype cycles and bubbles are almost always driven by FOMO (and sometimes the best strategy is to not play). On the other hand, LLMs are legitimately changing how we do coding.

There's always going to be people who need to have the latest iphone or be trying the latest framework. And they're needed -- that's how natural adoption should happen. If these tools tickle your fancy, go forth and scratch that itch. At the very least, everyone should be at least trying these things out -- history of technology is these things keep getting better over time, and eventually they'll become the norm. I think the main perspective to hold, though, is they're not quite the norm yet, and so don't feel like a schlub if you're not always all-in on the trending flavor of the week.

We still don't know the final form these will take. Learn what's out there, but be okay that any path you take might be a dead end or obsolete in a month. Use a critical eye, and place your effort chips appropriately for your needs.
by qsort | 2025-07-22 16:25:33+00:00
I'm obviously not qualified to judge the artistic value, but one of the picture has a diagram where an arrow labeled "Perestroika" connects a box labeled "Collapse of the Soviet Union" to the word "Corporate mercantilism", which is itself inside a box containing a triangular map of the world, several other words and the flag of the European Union.

Holy shit, AWS infra diagrams make more sense.
by jackdh | 2025-07-22 16:25:38+00:00
I used to be a naysayer of tailwind. However after getting practically forced into it I'm now drinking the koolaid. Yes things like having to duplicate styles using multi cursor is kind of silly, however for the vast majority of the time, having the styles written clearly each time, for me, makes it worth it.

There is also nothing stopping you mixing and matching.
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-22 16:25:53+00:00
>There's no lack of demand for longform content, but it's mostly not writing.

Because reading requires focus and attention on one thing over a prolonged amount of time, something a lot of people aren't able to do. Which speaks to one of the points the author made, what "tldr culture" does to people's brains, it robs them off the ability to focus on anything longer than fits into a handful of tweets.
by egberts1 | 2025-07-22 16:25:56+00:00
Virtual Machine Management tookit/library (libvirt, libvirtd daemon) makes intensive use of XML in its configuration files.

Virtual Machine Management CLI insulated the end-user of any XML.

Virtual Machine Manager GUI (virt-manager) too but also allows end-user to tweak XML directly as well as its GUI ease of use.

Only time that I direct-edit libvirt XML configuration file is to do a DMA passthru setting for NVIDIA CUDA for direct access by VMs.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Libvirt

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Virsh

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Virt-manager
by fitsumbelay | 2025-07-22 16:26:07+00:00
IMHO having "fuck you" money, as opposed to wealth, is vulnerable and emotional and therefore ripe for getting rugged, eg. You don't see Warren Buffet or even space enthusiasts like Bezos and Musk in this fray. At least not publicly. There is probably a happy middle between the two though but man I can't imagine being that rich and needy and setting off the Spidey-sense of every scammer within miles of you. Seriously? "Meteor" hunter? Come on, man ...
by lenkite | 2025-07-22 16:26:12+00:00
If you go even minimally outside the beaten path, the tailwind CSS declarations can mutate into a frankenstein monster that makes regular CSS look like a friendly, cute koala

Example: https://www.nikolailehbr.ink/blog/realistic-button-design-cs... shows an "old fashioned", 90's are back-in-vogue, 3d button.

Tailwind CSS for it becomes

<button class="relative cursor-pointer overflow-hidden rounded-md border border-neutral-950 bg-neutral-900 px-3 py-1.5 text-neutral-100 shadow-md inset-shadow-2xs inset-shadow-neutral-600 transition-all before:absolute before:inset-0 before:bg-linear-to-b before:from-white/20 before:to-transparent hover:bg-neutral-800 active:bg-neutral-950 active:shadow-none active:inset-shadow-neutral-800"> After </button>

I got eye-strain and headaches after taking over maintenance of a tailwind based website where the original developer had left the team. The class declarations are so huge with 15-30 class names in one line that you always forget where you are. Incidentally, also the top-voted discussion: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/7763
by rnxrx | 2025-07-22 16:26:14+00:00
The other side of this argument is that we're constantly fed lots of extraneous information along with the actual interesting content. The point about listening to the storyteller is completely valid, but that story teller wasn't full of advertisements, links to other stories or entreaties to smash a like button.

To an extent we're becoming wired to skim content because that content has been so deeply interleaved with items that aren't just extraneous, they're not even from the storyteller. I'd suggest this capability is even a kind of survival skill, akin to not only being able to spot motion in a dense jungle but to also instinctively focus on certain kinds of motion.
by cowlby | 2025-07-22 16:26:20+00:00
I personally "feel" the same way, but at least some mental models suggest otherwise.

As one example, this implies that everything has a high signal-to-noise ratio and we are now bad at paying attention to the signal. But the base rate of SnR I think is much worse. I think there has to be value in being able to skip a lot of the noise with better and better technology.

On "um"s and "uh"s, I read a good article recently how humans are good at turn taking (while AIs struggle) and that ums/uhs/like help signal we are not done with our turn. There is no turn taking when watching a video so I personally value removing these and providing a higher SnR.

So I'm stuck feeling and agreeing with these articles, yet rationally also finding good counter points.
by CWuestefeld | 2025-07-22 16:26:48+00:00
I think pretty much everyone acknowledges the cruft. They are always, for example, paying lip service to ending waste and corruption. But for all of their speechifying, nothing of note has ever been done in my lifetime[1].

The fact is that it's damned near impossible to build anything in America today, whether that's physical building or organizations. There is just too much vested interest, regulation, and unwillingness to just try something for fear of making a mistake (no politician can ever admit "I was wrong").

[1]actually, I guess I'm exaggerating. I can think of one significant thing: Clinton's changes to welfare. But the fact that there's only the one thing kinda underscores how vivid this is.
by jakubmazanec | 2025-07-22 16:26:55+00:00
How is this different from e.g. LAX? [1] From the article: "Drivers waited for hours to snare rides — “unicorns,” they called them — that would pay them a decent wage of more than $1.50 per mile."

I encounter this here in my city (in Czechia) too - especially at night, drivers will cancel on you whenever, or you simply wait and watch in the app (be it Uber or Bolt) how driver after driver simply ejects your request.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022305
by pkaye | 2025-07-22 16:27:00+00:00
Only five countries allow payment for plasma donations: US, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic and Hungary. The reality is the countries that don't allow payment for plasma donations don't produce enough plasma drug products for self sufficiency within their country. They have to import it from one of the other countries (primarily US because it has the biggest population of those five.) This is all due to a policy pushed by the WHO recommending countries not pay for plasma donations.
by orblivion | 2025-07-22 16:27:52+00:00
I deliberately did not answer your question. I refuse to get into the weeds because I reject your premise. I don't know anything about the inner workings of these organizations. (It's really not a "simple question" at all!) It's not my job, I'm just a voter. I have other things to do.

You seem to want me to assume that because of this, I have to default to YOUR position. I'm saying, that doesn't match my broad view of the world. I have the opposite default position.

I guess what I can say, broadly, is that the US Government has a MASSIVE budget. The cruft is in there somewhere. If there's one guy who says he's gonna try to slash it, I'll take that guy and hope for the best.
by conductr | 2025-07-22 16:28:04+00:00
> In a way, using tailwind can be like variablizing your CSS at compile time

Isn't this what SCSS or Sass did though? They were around long before tailwind. Is there a reason to pick Tailwind over those? I assume most projects were using them then decided to migrate to tailwind once it became popular, but why did that happen? Was it just keeping up with the cool kids or some actual differentiating features?

I still just handwrite my frontend code so I'm rather ignorant on this topic, it seems like a lot more extra hoops than just writing by hand which actually isn't very difficult (but I'm a single dev on rather smaller projects)
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-22 16:28:33+00:00
So there's a gap. So you say in this gap, it absolutely isn't consciousness. What evidence do you have for this? I'm saying something a different. I'm saying in this gap, ONE possibility is a flicker of consciousness.... but we simply do not know.

Read the above carefully because you just hallucinated a statement and attributed it to me. I never "filled" in a gap. I just stated a possibility. But you, like the LLM, went with your gut biases and attributed a false statement to me.

Think about it. The output and input of the text generator of humans and LLMs are extremely similar to the point where it passes a turing test.

So to say that a flicker of consciousness exists is reasonable. It's not unreasonable given that the observable inputs are EXACTLY the same.

The only parts that we know are different are hallucinations, and a constant stream of thought. LLMs aren't active when not analyzing a query and LLMs tend to hallucinate more than humans. Do these differences spell anything different for "consciousness" not really.

Given that these are the absolute ground truth observations... my guessed conclusion is unfortunately NOT unreasonable. What is unreasonable to to say anything definitive GIVEN that we don't know. So to say absolutely it's not conscious or absolutely it is, BOTH are are naive.

Think extremely logically. It is fundamental biases that lead people to come to absolute conclusions when no other information is available.
by blain | 2025-07-22 16:28:36+00:00
I'm sure many still like Tailwind but I never liked it, maybe because I worked with pure CSS or SCSS for many years before it.

In the end its just another library that if you learn it well it will work for you and it has as many downsides as any other library ever used.

By the way the article seems a bit like an advertising for vanilla-extract library.
by wredcoll | 2025-07-22 16:29:51+00:00
What's the alternative? Reading every single book humanity has produced so you can decide which ones to.. actually read?

Maybe there's some kind of a world this is feasible, but in the modern world, just talking about books, there are literally millions published every year. Hell, just trying to decide which movie to watch, there are probably several thousand "Real" movies produced every year, how do you decide which one to spend your precious 3 hours on?
by mohsen1 | 2025-07-22 16:29:57+00:00
I used to be against Tailwind. Now that I've used long enough I can tell you that code is perfectly fine. I can read it and easily modify it. You can comment it out if you care

<button class={cn( // layout & positioning "relative cursor-pointer overflow-hidden rounded-md", // border & background "border border-neutral-950 bg-neutral-900", // padding & text color "px-3 py-1.5 text-neutral-100", // shadows "shadow-md inset-shadow-2xs inset-shadow-neutral-600", // transition "transition-all", // background gradient positioning "before:absolute before:inset-0", // background gradient "bg-linear-to-b from-white/20 to-transparent", // hover "hover:bg-neutral-800" // active "active:bg-neutral-950 active:shadow-none active:inset-shadow-neutral-800" // disabled "disabled:opacity-50 disabled:cursor-not-allowed" )} > After </button>
by cormorant | 2025-07-22 16:30:18+00:00
It would be astonishingly hypocritical if the author (https://www.maalvikabhat.com/ who btw does academic research on societal influences of AI) wrote the following using AI (a quote from beyond the paywall follows). If anything I wonder whether she picked up a ChatGPT speech pattern herself from so much exposure to it.

"This is why AI can write but cannot create. It can remix existing patterns with mechanical precision, but it cannot sit in the fertile void where genuinely new ideas are born. It cannot endure the months of terrible drafts that make you question your sanity, the years of failure that feel like slow starvation, the decades of practice that transform a human into an artist through accumulated scar tissue and hard-won wisdom. AI has never stared at a blank page at 3 AM, coffee cold, wondering if anything will ever come. It has never had to choose between the easy metaphor and the one that makes your chest tight with recognition. It has never experienced the moment when disparate ideas suddenly fuse into something that didn't exist before, something that surprises even its creator. It can simulate the surface of creativity (the clever turns of phrase, the familiar structures), but it cannot access the underground rivers of human experience that feed genuine innovation. It writes like someone who has read about love but never been heartbroken, someone who can describe the ocean but has never tasted salt water."
by palata | 2025-07-22 16:30:20+00:00
I didn't mean it to sound like this.

I have been asking a few questions, and I have received many answers quickly. Which is usually great, but between the "those who don't use jj haven't seen the light and must be in a cult" and the "jj is better because git is impossible to use everyday", it's honestly been harder than anticipated :-).
by alexjplant | 2025-07-22 16:30:21+00:00
> A lot of people are religious about rebasing

Years and years ago I worked on a team where linear commit history was required so every time a merge happened you had to manually rebase and push to Bitbucket. I put a PR in halfway through the sprint, rebased it a dozen times as everybody else's work got merged, and had nothing to show during review because nobody bothered to check mine and the only coworker I had in the same physical office was out on vacation.

When I interview for new roles I always make a habit of asking how work gets done to avoid shops that engage in these types of shenanigans.
by bombdailer | 2025-07-22 16:30:23+00:00
Definitely seems like the whole thing has been given the AI treatment, but who knows, maybe people have just internalized the way it sounds by having too much dialectic with it. The sad thing is most people (even here) cannot detect AI writing anymore. In fact, I've seen some glaringly obvious posts which people in the comments even called the best writing they've seen. I guess ease of transmission is the basis for good writing now. I prefer for writing to have life in it, but I suppose I'm a dying breed.