MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
How do we make web accessibility doable for devs with zero a11y budget?
by lalithaar | 2025-12-02 14:02:54+00:00
Most of us don’t work at companies that can afford dedicated accessibility teams or weeks of audits. We still want the app/blog/tool we ship to be readable by actual humans, but opening WCAG feels like drowning. Big companies build their own ships across the accessibility ocean. The rest of us are standing on the shore with a hammer and some planks. What tools, checks, or one-line fixes would actually let you cross that gap without derailing your weekend project? Real answers only — no “just hire a consultant” replies please
Show HN: deck – Create Google Slides Presentations from Markdown
by k1low | 2025-12-02 14:03:14+00:00
Hi HN, we built "deck" to solve our frustration with slide creation workflow.

Key features:

- Write slides in Markdown, design in Google Slides (separation of concerns)

- Iterative updates with `deck apply --watch`

- Use existing Google Slides templates/themes

- Supports images and code blocks (with external commands)

We wanted to write slides in our favorite text editor and version control presentation content, while leveraging Google Slides' design capabilities.

Feedback welcome!
by adrian_b | 2025-12-02 14:03:32+00:00
The modern Intel/AMD CPUs have distinct ALUs (arithmetic-logic units, where additions and other integer operations are done; usually between 4 ALUs and 8 ALUs in recent CPUs) and AGUs (address generation units, where the complex addressing modes used in load/store/LEA are computed; usually 3 to 5 AGUs in recent CPUs).

Modern CPUs can execute up to between 6 and 10 instructions within a clock cycle, and up to between 3 and 5 of those may be load and store instructions.

So they have a set of execution units that allow the concurrent execution of a typical mix of instructions. Because a large fraction of the instructions generate load or store micro-operations, there are dedicated units for address computation, to not interfere with other concurrent operations.
by specialist | 2025-12-02 14:03:35+00:00
The thesis has no predictive power, no explanatory power. Merely descriptive.

That "change is inevitable and we all better adapt or die" is somewhere between axiomatic and cliché.

What is "innovation"? How do you define it? (Am honestly asking.) How do we get more of it? (I know this is an area of active research.)

I forced myself to reread and revisit Christensen a year or two back. I may not have looked hard enough, but I didn't find any evidence that he'd updated or expanded his thesis, corpus. IIRC, no mention of Everett's diffusion of innovation, of thesis from Design Rules: the Power of Modularity (an adjacent topic), no engagement with ongoing innovation research.

FWIW, my still poorly formed hunch is that "innovation" is where policy meets the cost learning curve meets financial accounting. With maybe a dash of rentier capitalism.

But I'm noob. Not an academic, not an economist. Deep down on my to do list is to learn how DARPA (and others) places their bets, their emerging formalisms (like technology readiness levels), how emerging tech makes the jump from govt funded to private finance (VC).

Enough of my babble. In closing, I'd like to read some case studies for the two most "disruptive technologies" of our times: solar and batteries.
by bradly | 2025-12-02 14:03:59+00:00
A lot of great recs in this thread, but I'll a couple others I didn't see listed yet:

Mort Garson: Mother Earth's Plantasia

Hiroshi Yoshimura: Surround

Satoshi Ashikawa: Still Way (Wave Notation 2)

Shameless plug... Search BirdyMusic.com in Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube Music to hear some ambient music algo generated based on realtime Birdnet detections and weather in my backyard.
by rkomorn | 2025-12-02 14:04:58+00:00
This is painfully true. I went to a US university after high school in France and had a really hard time adjusting to the American style of essays. So many paragraphs with sentences crossed off for being too long, in particular. Hitting word limits when, in a French dissertation, you'd just be getting started (an exaggeration, yes, but still).

It wasn't a "language" problem because I was already a fluent American English speaker. It was all style-related.

I've recently started reading 19th century French literature again and sometimes I have to reread sentences multiple times because they're so long I come to the wrong conclusion too early.
by wjnc | 2025-12-02 14:05:11+00:00
Great advice. This works in companies as well! What is the goal of your writing and who is the target audience? Memos (they still exist) can be drastically different for different audiences. Mess this up and you end up on the wrong end of the stick.

A detailed memo is not meant for (most) senior management. They will all individually find a hook to hang up their coat of the week and you will go home a thousand questions, but without the decision you need. Give a senior management memo to technical staff and they will cry for months because you lack the technical skills to understand the problems they face. Give a sales memo to technical people, or the reverse and it will probably be flat out ignored. The key is differentiation. Differentiation is only possible if you practise writing the smallest set of convincing arguments in each memo you deliver.
by ben_w | 2025-12-02 14:05:15+00:00
I can get on board with most of that, but part of the issue here is the battle over "what resources it is using up" is focusing on the wrong resource.

Assume unabated growth of AI data centers in the USA: in general, you'll stop being able to afford the electricity to run your AC and your freezer before feeling pain from the extra stress on water supplies.

The water issues in the USA have many causes and do exist, but blaming DCs for them or expecting their absence/removal to fix anything is like blaming climate change on residential driveways and trying to reverse it by planting a few lawns in their place.
by 0x5FC3 | 2025-12-02 14:05:30+00:00
> Impartiality factors less when the entire Federal government apparatus is used to investigate some one for more than a decade. Also, by that reasoning should we start believing in the principle "guilty before proven otherwise"?

No, it was a 3 member "Special Investigation Team" and not the "entire federal apparatus" that acquitted him. [0]

"According to R. B. Sreekumar, police officers who followed the rule of law and helped prevent the riots from spreading were punished by the Modi government. They were subjected to disciplinary proceedings and transfers with some having to leave the state. Sreekumar also claims it is common practice to intimidate whistleblowers and otherwise subvert the justice system, and that the state government issued "unconstitutional directives", with officials asking him to kill Muslims involved in rioting or disrupting a Hindu religious event." [1]

> Who decided that those riots were a progrom? That term itself is misleading.

Hundreds of historians and scholars. [2]

> I am not fan of this step but the problems it's designed to tackle are huge in India and it's very much an option unless there are solid alternatives.

There are students jailed from 2020 without a trail for protesting against CAA-NRC with the explicit purpose of a "chilling effect" against dissent. People are constantly jailed for simple memes, "hurting religious sentiments" and other vapid reasons on a daily basis and you think this is an end to the means type of situation?

If I had to wager a guess, you don't live in India, advocating for oppression you don't have to go through.

[0][1][2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-12-02 14:05:37+00:00
> man LLMs are the future

They are. I know a lot of people don't want to admit this, but they are. They're getting better with each release.

> But we're learning it's not economical--this is some of the costliest slop we've ever made.

Huh? How on earth would you know whether my usage of LLM's has been worth it or not?

> Sometimes slop can be useful; maybe you can shape it into something useful

Man, I just spent the last 2 weeks with a CEO who got a Bolt.new subscription to be able to generate some high-level mocks ups for me to utilize that just saved us months of back and forth.

You know what's the best part? Those same mockups can be used to gather user feedback with a functioning UI without me having to spend weeks building it and it ending up wrong anyway.

Sometimes it irks me, but now I've sorta come to embrace devs like you. You're guaranteeing I have a job because you refuse to acknowledge the very obvious thing that's happening.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-02 14:06:01+00:00
What I've learned is that the fewer flags is the best path for any long lived project.

-O2 is basically all you usually need. As you update your compiler, it'll end up tweaking exactly what that general optimization does based on what they know today.

Because that's the thing about these flags, you'll generally set them once at the beginning of a project. Compiler authors will reevaluate them way more than you will.

Also, a trap I've observed is setting flags based on bad benchmarks. This applies more to the JVM than a C++ compiler, but never the less, a system's current state is somewhat random. 1->2% fluctuations in performance for even the same app is normal. A lot of people won't realize that and ultimately add flags based on those fluctuations.

But further, how code is currently layed out can affect performance. You may see a speed boost not because you tweaked the loop unrolling variable, but rather your tweak may have relocated a hot path to be slightly more cache friendly. A change in the code structure can eliminate that benefit.
by SkyPuncher | 2025-12-02 14:06:05+00:00
Holy crap! I’ve been considering nearly the exact same project.

We live under the flight path for the local airport. I’ve wanted to build exactly this. Like, literally exactly this. This is just way more polished than I could have built.

Future product would be cool to stick this behind a mirror to make it a bit more interior decor approved.
by bilekas | 2025-12-02 14:06:17+00:00
>With more than 5 million downloads since its launch, the app has helped block more than 3.7 million stolen or lost mobile phones

Ah yes, so because someone has stolen MY phone, I should give up all my right to privacy and allow the government to have their claws in my phone.

Logic. What a silly point to make when 'findmyphone' services, which are OPT-IN litterally do the same thing.
by nameless912 | 2025-12-02 14:06:23+00:00
I had a hilarious experience the other day with an (HP) laptop that I thought might be fun to share here.

I've been getting into astrophotography recently, so I went out to my local Astronomy club's dark site in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Ohio, star tracker, DSLR, lens and nearly brand new HP Gaming Laptop I bought specifically for this purpose in tow.

It was cold as shit outside - 25 with a wind chill of just under 15 degrees. But I came prepared, and the club has a small heated clubhouse on the grounds of the site, so I set up all my equipment, did my polar alignment, and left my laptop plugged into a power outlet and remoted into it on my iPad so I could monitor the data capture from inside where it was warm.

About 20 minutes later, I lost remote access to my laptop suddenly. No problem, I thought. I headed outside to go debug what was going on, to find that the laptop had shut down randomly. That's weird. I tried to turn the laptop on, and it spun on the windows logo for over 5 minutes. I got worried that somehow out of all this gear I brought out to the middle of nowhere in the freezing cold, somehow the laptop was what had died. I try force-resetting a few times, to the point where I get the windows recovery environment, and it boots _so slowly_ that I think something is seriously wrong. Then the CMOS battery reset screen comes up (what the fuck?) and I finally get it to boot after about 8 attempts. However, it's so slow it's completely unusable - the CPU is pegged at the lowest possible frequency and just opening up the controller software for my star tracker takes nearly 5 minutes. decide to pack it in for the night, assuming my laptop is dying.

I bring all my equipment inside to tear it down, and leave the laptop in the warmth for 15 or so minutes while I tear everything else down. Then I hear the familiar Windows 11 startup chime behind me. I turn around and the laptop happily boots up, running at full speed, as if nothing was wrong.

Friends, the laptop got _too cold_. I have never experienced this before in my life, and I have put laptops through similarly extreme conditions in the past for other projects, let alone all the Raspberry Pi's I've left to bake in the sun and freeze in the cold. I am so done with modern technology, I want to return to 2011 when Thinkpads were good, Macbooks were great, and phones couldn't break my brain's dopamine circuits. I'm so tired.
by stusmall | 2025-12-02 14:06:26+00:00
I had the same experience in 2021 when the mobo died on a laptop that I bought slightly less than a year before. I was bothered by the failure but understand sometimes things just break. The service quality was good.

I'm not dealing with the scale other people are in here. We should take the ancedotes of personal laptops with a grain of salt. Anyone pushing the scale that Dell does will have incidents where service runs totally off the rails. I don't know how they stack up at scale but I'm reading this thread with interest. When I'm due for a laptop upgrade Dell will still be in the running but right now Framework might be the one to get my business.
by trq01758 | 2025-12-02 14:07:34+00:00
Yeah, everything's interconnected as Tangerine Dream got to work on GTA V soundtrack. There is this note about that track on Wikipedia:

The track "5:23" is included in the 2008 video game Grand Theft Auto IV and appears on the soundtrack album The Music of Grand Theft Auto IV. In the digital release it is listed as "Maiden Voyage". This track is very similar to, but does not credit, the song "Love on a Real Train" by Tangerine Dream from the Risky Business soundtrack. They had remixed the song for a then upcoming Tangerine Dream remix album but had their effort rejected so released it as 5'23 instead.
by fithisux | 2025-12-02 14:08:04+00:00
My take is that this is a discovery by luck.

i am not a doctor but maybe the stem cell transplant just removed something dormant.

But needing a cell transplant to remove the HIV sounds inhuman to me. It is an intervention but I am not convinced you need all this pain to cure him from HIV.

Was he already on antiviral drugs? I think so.

Also the subtitle of the article is pretty revealing

"A handful of people with HIV have been cured after receiving HIV-resistant stem cells – but a man who received non-resistant stem cells is also now HIV-free"

HN has become downvoting machine. So sad. I wonder how many people could have been cured from their malladies if people were less aggressive.
by jawns | 2025-12-02 14:08:08+00:00
I bought a second-hand unicycle with my own money in eighth grade and spent nearly all of high school trying to ride it well.

At my best, I could ride forward with no problem, but never quite mastered how to remain in one spot by rocking back and forth.

The answer to the "Does it hurt?" question is very accurate. There's just no getting around the fact that the saddle is going to be mildly uncomfortable all the time, and more than mildly uncomfortable the longer you ride.

But I was surprised that one question does not appear among his FAQs, because it is one that comes readily to mind to me.

"Does it help with the ladies?"

The answer is a resounding no. It does not help with the ladies.
by commandlinefan | 2025-12-02 14:08:11+00:00
I started going down that road decades ago myself. I had a degree in computer science already, but I'd only learned just enough math to graduate and then forgotten everything, deliberately.

Years after I graduated, I was browsing comp.lang.java (I think it was) and somebody asked for help developing an applet that could draw a 3-D arrow that could orient itself in any direction. For some reason, that sounded interesting to me, so I started trying to work on it and I realized I needed to go back and re-learn all of that "point-slope" stuff that I'd made a point of learning just enough of to squeak through college.

That sent me down the path of re-learning all the things I now wish I'd put more effort into learning when I was a teenager. I ended up working through my old undergraduate calculus textbook a few times and I understand undergraduate calculus _really_ well now. I was able to coach both of my kids through high school calculus and they both remarked that none of their friends parents were able to help them beyond algebra.

It makes me wonder how many people are great (or even adequate) at math and how many are just faking it - as interesting as I now find it, math skills aren't actually very practically useful.
by masfoobar | 2025-12-02 14:08:26+00:00
I made a lot of uses for the Push-Pull pattern in ZeroMQ.. but there was others used as well here and there (Pub-Sub, etc)

However -- I cannot praise the use of ROUTER-DEALER !! What a GREAT pattern for sending large chunks of data without waiting for a reply for each.

HTTP is not fit for such a task.

However - I totally get you! Trying to explain certain decisions really does take up time and effort. Before you know it, I have lost 4 hours one day, a few another, etc.

In the end you ask if I should have done something mediocre... but everyone understands.

("mediocre" is not the correct word to use. I mean I could have gone with Kafka or RabbitMQ. It's just an extra layer which would have involved infrastructure and further delays (at that time))
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-02 14:08:38+00:00
> So many ideas better than the current regime.

Almost every idea is better than the current regime. Maybe even completely cancelling the concept. The same applies to patents, where there's no "maybe", cancelling the concept is clearly better than what we have.

The governments all over the world have been so incredibly corrupt since the 80s, that they managed to confiscate almost every public good in existence.
by omnicognate | 2025-12-02 14:10:11+00:00
If by "we" you mean US popular culture, yes. It's not universal, and definitely varies by country.

In the UK we don't tend to idolise the rich so much. Not to say it doesn't happen, but in popular culture positive depictions tend to be limited to period portrayals of idealised aristocracy (and even then it's rarely shown as heroic), with contemporary wealth usually treated as a dubious virtue.
by gus_massa | 2025-12-02 14:10:16+00:00
Note that this is not standard physics, so any "understanding" may be wrong.

In particular:

> Within each orbital slice, electron density will almost certainly be highest at the center of the face of each orbital, and will decrease toward the nodal regions that ‘divide’ the orbitals, where electron density will be lowest (though not zero).

Experimentally, the probability density is uniform. The four sp3 orbitals are just a mathematical construct. They have overlapping densities that sum to a uniform spherical density.

> As a result of this model, we can now make far more significant conjectures about the source of its properties, like charge and mass, and even of quantization itself. More significantly, this proposed topology allows the elementary charge — the charge of the electron — to be calculated.

It would be nice to see a calculation that shows a 1/137 that is the equivalent of the charge of the electron in some nice units. I don't expect this to be possible because in mainstream physics it's an arbitrary number that is a property of the universe and it looks hard to derive from others.

(I will not be surprised if for example someone in the future calculate the mass of the muon and tauon using the mass of the electron and a combination of other constants. It looks possible, in spite there is currently no hint that this is possible.)
by dist-epoch | 2025-12-02 14:10:22+00:00
But can the frontend direct these computations based on what's available? If it sees 10 LEA instructions in a row, and it has 5 AGU units, can it dispatch 5 of those LEA instructions to other ALUs?

Or is it guaranteed that a LEA instruction will always execute on an AGU, and an ADD instruction always on an ALU?
by jlokier | 2025-12-02 14:10:28+00:00
> 5% above their requested pay with

Not enough to move the needle. 25% would move the needle.

> with mentions that I could double it in one year

They didn't believe you, or didn't after a short time working there. So it didn't move the needle.

More so if they're experienced. Similar mentions of prospects are common in interviews, and rarely followed through. You eventually learn to be skeptical of them, while rolling with it, just in case.

Also, if you might be willing to pay double their requested salary, they start realising their value on the open market is much higher than they'd previously thought, or could be with a little presentation and experience.

On the other hand, if you'd put it in the contract that their salary will double after 1 year, subject to well-defined criteria and a history of actually doing it with existing employees, then they'd believe you, and that would move the needle a lot.

From your story I speculate you were right to fire them, but you never figured our how to get the best out of them. In recent years it's possible you were subject to employment fraud, as clarity of analysis can disappear if it's a different person doing the work than the person answering interview questions.

Progress that's entirely stalled or negative can happen for many other reasons than moonlighting, and many other reasons than not putting enough time.
by saberience | 2025-12-02 14:11:10+00:00
The average consumer has no idea what Gemini is, just ask some random people on the street or in your grocery store.

I would make a bet than if you asked 100 random people, only 10 would even know what Gemini is. I know amongst my friendship group who are all fairly technical, white-collar type educated workers, everyone uses ChatGPT, no one uses Anthropic or Gemini. I am the only one who uses all three.

The app downloads are meaningless honestly. As far as the consumer market and awareness goes OpenAI won, and I don't see anyone else getting close, which is why Anthropic is just doubling down on the coding/enterprise market.
by iamnothere | 2025-12-02 14:12:01+00:00
> For devices already in the supply chain, manufacturers should push the app to phones via software updates, the ministry said in its order, which was not made public and was sent privately to select companies.

As this sort of nonsense spreads, I await the inevitable first instance of a smartphone manufacturer accidentally pushing one of these spyware apps to users in a different national market.