MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by b450 | 2026-01-15 17:06:11+00:00
This is the most egregious one in my eyes, too. I've run A/B tests on a few signup forms and without fail it validates the standard practice: the lowest drop-off rate comes from removing every possible obstacle and distraction. I'd bet a few dollars (which is as much as I'll ever bet) that design update would perform worse. The tool is almost intriguing as a _reductio_ of certain design practices.

The "after" designs all replace the rather generic "SV startup with a tailwind UI" with this serif font, parchment color look. It looks very similar to Anthropic's branding. I guess it looks marginally more distinctive? Though it seems to replace one knock-off visual identity for another. But the claim is that the tool here is implementing best practices through a sophisticated "design vocabulary", and in that sense the examples strike me as manifest failures. I find the general legibility of the "before" designs to be much better.
by praptak | 2026-01-15 17:06:15+00:00
That's not my experience from the time I worked for Google. The popular sentiment was actually "We now work for a company that dropped 'don't be evil' and that sucks". See Manu Cornet comics - they are a pretty good reflection of the sentiment I'm talking about, a random example https://goomics.net/387

And it's not like everyone just complained for moral posturing and then continued to wipe the tears of disgust with wads of cash. Many people who left also mentioned the ethics part as why they left.
by montjoy | 2026-01-15 17:06:34+00:00
> Why are Americans so passive?

Because it’s cold? Here in Minnesota it’s 17F / -7C. Factoring in the wind chill it feels like 7F / -14C.

There are other reasons too of course (geography, lack of urban density, distrust of news, apathy, etc etc) but I think the weather is a definite factor right now.
by mifreewil | 2026-01-15 17:06:48+00:00
You'd want to get something like a RTX Pro 6000 (~ $8,500 - $10,000) or at least a RTX 5090 (~$3,000). That's the easiest thing to do or cluster of some lower-end GPUs. Or a DGX Spark (there are some better options by other manufacturers than just Nvidia) (~$3000).
by mock-possum | 2026-01-15 17:07:05+00:00
Because humans have already annotated diagrams and examples of what ‘too much’ and ‘too little’ look like, and these have been incorporated into the model. It tries to reproduce the content that is associated with humans indicating that they are taking greater care, and that content has the ‘not too much / not too little’ judgement already baked into it.
by convolvatron | 2026-01-15 17:07:16+00:00
sure. but to me it seems like the there was this vain hope that somehow we could thread the needle. that if we would accept to unjustice and stick it out, that eventually the courts and electoral process would be robust enough. that escalation would just lead to where we've already gotten, where peaceful protestors are being killed for 'disrepect'. that somehow pointing out all the obvious falsehood and gaslighting would be enough to convince people that this was going sideways. this was always going to end in martial law, but our complacency is generational.
by foobiekr | 2026-01-15 17:07:35+00:00
This take is so wrong it qualifies as delusional. The valley was all about money and nothing but money by any means by no later 1996 when the dotcom got under way. In 2001 I was at a company actively engaging in meetings with a certain three letter agency wanted us to build a secret project to tap oc192 cables at various service providers while talking about how the internet was bringing freedom and openness to society.

Tech has been a cesspool for thirty years.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-15 17:07:41+00:00
What physical government oppression have I missed now? I'm not trying to claim Spain is perfect, because it really isn't, especially considering "freedom of speech" (depending on your perspective of it) and some other things Americans might take for granted.

But I'd say that usually when there are large issues impacting large parts of the population, then you can be pretty sure that there will be country-wide protests against it, many times with smaller violent elements, because people here make their opinions and feelings known.
by Koffiepoeder | 2026-01-15 17:07:59+00:00
Additionally, solar panels can become too hot and that reduces their efficiency. Also, deserts are famously known for dust. Since it rarely rains, you get a dust buildup, further compromising solar efficiency in deserts.

I'm not saying that deserts are a bad place for solar. What I'm trying to say is - it's often worse than people think and it requires special infrastructure.
by ynac | 2026-01-15 17:08:08+00:00
I have to replicate the little shoes on the cassette mechanics of a Becker Grand Prix car stereo from 1985. The plastic shoes are brittle from age, heat, and wear. I've spent the last couple weeks finding about two dozen ways that almost work. Their tiny and need to fit on three even tinier feet that ride rails for loading the cassette. This morning, I found out that I can probably make several possible plans work - good enough. Which is to say, I found out I was delaying the project with hopes for the perfect solution when good enough was already there.
by dgllghr | 2026-01-15 17:08:11+00:00
It's unlikely that anyone will see this but I tried using Zed again after not using it for a while and the power draw is significantly lower! So I don't think it is related to those issues after all. I don't see much of a difference between Zed and VSCode in the amount of energy they use, but Zed is noticeably snappier (and not owned by MSFT)
by amluto | 2026-01-15 17:08:23+00:00
If by “special” you mean ordinary low-cost lugs, then sure.

Check it out:

https://lugsdirect.com/WhyAluminumOverCopperFAQ.htm

And you can browse that site for lugs, and they’re mostly rated for aluminum and copper. Copper-only lugs are actually rather unusual.

Sure, you can’t stick copper and aluminum wires into a wire nut, and finding terminations for smaller-gauge aluminum wire can be hard. But for larger wire, it’s really no problem.
by bpanahij | 2026-01-15 17:08:25+00:00
The response timing in the chart in the blog post shows that even with perfect precision/recall Sparrow-1 also has the fastest true positive response times.

The turn taking models were evaluated in a controlled environment with no additional cascaded steps: LLM, TTS, Phx. This matters to get apples to apples comparison: without the rest of the pipeline variability influencing the measurements.

The video conversation examples are sparrow-1 within the full pipeline. These responses aren’t as fast as sparrow itself because the LLM, TTS, facial rendering, and network transport also take time. Without Sparrow-1 they would be slower. Sparrow-1 enables the responses being as fast as they are, and with a faster CVI pipeline configuration the responses can be as fast as 430ms in my testing.
by superkuh | 2026-01-15 17:08:26+00:00
It's not a hypothetical. I was put off the entire language after it happened to me three times in a row with unrelated Rust written software. This was 1 month after Debian 12 was released (June 10, 2023) and I was running the brand new Debian 12 with rustc 1.63.0 from August 11, 2022. I ran into it with some web serial spidering and epub creation rust software (rust-wildbow-scraper). I ran into with a software defined radio spectrogram visualizer (plotsweep); I actually knew the author from IRC and he was able to edit it to not use bleeding edge rustc features and I managed to compile it. I can't recall the third. In the years since when I've stepped my toes into the "compile random rust programs with repo rust toolchain" and it's been the same.

But as you can see from my specific examples and dates: this is not a hypothetical. rust developer culture basically only writes for latest, having a 1 year old rustc is definitely not enough, and yes, installing compilers from a random website (curl site|sh) instead of my distro's repos is a problem.

Just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it isn't a problem. Rust is a rolling release only compiler.
by johnisgood | 2026-01-15 17:08:27+00:00
You cannot have it both ways though. Either these are meaningful examples of Rust's benefits, or they are not worth mentioning.

In a thread about Rust's concurrency advantages, these editors were cited as examples. "Don't block the UI thread" as justification only works if Rust actually provides something novel here. If it is just basic threading that every language has done for decades, it should not have been brought up as evidence in the first place.

Plus if things like work-stealing queues and complex synchronization are not relevant to editors, then editors are a poor example for demonstrating Rust's concurrency story in the first place anyway.
by pas | 2026-01-15 17:08:39+00:00
... yet still tens of millions of eligible voters don't even bother

the country is very low-density, there's no one obvious point to protest (there was Occupy Wall Street... and then the Seattle TAZ and .... that's it, oh and the Capitol January 6th), strikes and unions are legally neutered, it's just not the American way anymore

the country has a lot of experience "managing" internal unpleasantry, see the time leading up to the civil war, and then the reconstruction, and then there was a lull as the innovation in racism led to legalized economic racism (the usual walking while black "crimes", vagrancy laws, etc), and then the civil rights era, with the riots, and since then (and as always) police brutality is used as a substitute to training and funding
by pibaker | 2026-01-15 17:08:45+00:00
> I don't really understand the purpose of RPi 4 and 5. They're not cheap compared to the price nor very powerful in any measure.

They are good for commercial installations like smart displays in stores (think big screens with menus behind fast food counters) and information kiosks. The extra HDMI port lets you drive two screens with one pi and the extra processing power keeps the UI smooth on high resolution. They also have hardware acceleration video decoding for shops wishing to play hi res promo videos and hobbyists building media terminals.

Cost is not a major concern here because the installation volume is low and there are far bigger expenses anyway. Just take a look at how much commercial displays are. The Pi company’s future supply guarantee is also nice because you know that within a given number of years if something breaks or you need another screen, you can just buy another identical pi and be done with it. Good luck sourcing a Chinese mini pc with compatible footprints, port orientations etc five years down the road.
by mc32 | 2026-01-15 17:08:49+00:00
In fairness that sounds like extending capabilities of something that already exists. For personal use that should be okay. For commercial use, that would run afoul of IP -unless we’re talking about open source, though even then you might have obligations depending on the license.

If you want to start from square 1, using your own IP, you should be able to.

Now, sure it sucks that you can’t do those things you mention for ordinary use, which we should, but you are still able to come up with your own ground-up solution for commercial purposes.
by alex43578 | 2026-01-15 17:08:56+00:00
Don’t forget half the population (within polling MOE) supports this, believing ICE/ removal operations are making America safer by enforcing our existing, long standing immigration laws.

Obstructing feds in those operations, rioting outside government buildings, and driving cars at uniformed officers aren’t going to net you a ton of sympathy with people supporting law enforcement actions.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-15 17:09:17+00:00
The US has done this historically for allies, too, a small deployment along with a public reiteration of a defense commitment isn't saying the troops are intended to be sufficient to resist a threat, it is intended to show that going from threat to war means war with not just the territory attacked, but the power deploying (even small) forces, and potentially all of their available capabilities.

This is especially the case when the tripwire force is deployed by a nuclear power on the territory of a non-nuclear power facing a conventional threat from a nuclear power.
by Aachen | 2026-01-15 17:09:56+00:00
Checking it out locally, they go for 30€ here. That's cheap! I remember just a few years ago such products costing 80~100€ if you wanted it in a polished product (not a sensor from China, needing to write code to read it out). Is this a direct CO2 measurement, not one of these that uses VOC as a proxy measurement?
by FiveOhThree | 2026-01-15 17:09:57+00:00
> One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix.

This is where I would disagree, the model really doesn't work for politics and current events. In those topics Wikipedia may be better described as "The world according to a handful of (mostly US-based) news outlets". There's been a prolonged effort to deprecate sources, particularly those which lean to the right, so it's increasingly difficult to portray a neutral perspective reflecting multiple interpretations of the same topic. Instead excessive weight is given to what a majority of a select group of online sources say, and that's not necessarily trustworthy.

Most obviously it's a model which will fall flat when trying to document criticism of the press.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-15 17:10:07+00:00
I saw a "web browser" that was AI generated in maybe 2k lines of python based on tkinter that tried to support CSS and probably was able to render some test cases but didn't at all have the shape of a real web browser.

It reminds of having AI write me an MUI component the other day that implemented the "sx" prop [1] with some code that handles all the individual properties that were used by the component in that particular application, it might have been correct, the component at all was successful and well coded... but MUI provides a styled() function and a <Box> component, either one of which could have been used to make this component handle all the properties that "sx" is supposed to handle with as little as one line of code. I asked the agent "how would I do this using the tools that MUI provides to support sx" and had a great conversation and got a complete and clear understanding about the right way to do it but on the first try it wrote something crazy overcomplicated to handle the specific case as opposed to a general-purpose solution that was radically simple. That "web browser" was all like that.

[1] you can write something like sx={width: 4} and MUI multiplies 4 by the application scale and puts on, say, a width: 20px style
by observationist | 2026-01-15 17:10:10+00:00
Yeah, the good ones will use tools and give you a nice markdown table. Any claims like this anymore, I trust AI to go through it and give the numbers a reality check. With all the claims made about datacenter resources, power, and water usage, it's darkly funny how bad people are at understanding these things.

The math they do with their assumptions is usually pretty good, and you can tell when they put in the effort, but wow, the models and assumptions are all over the place.
by basket_horse | 2026-01-15 17:10:28+00:00
I don’t think it’s really this simple. Palantir is a major government contractor that enables it to be more tech savvy. It’s embedded through hundreds of teams / agencies. You can’t remain a credible partner if you play morality police on every workflow. Palantir has worked through multiple administrations of both parties and have to support whoever is in power to have a seat at the table.

Ultimately the question is just: would you prefer to have a competent or incompetent government?

Otherwise you can agree or disagree with government policies, but that shouldn’t be directed at tech vendors, it should be directed at politicians and people in government / at the voting booth.
by bpanahij | 2026-01-15 17:10:48+00:00
That’s unfortunate and certainly not what I spend my time dreaming about. My favorite use case for the elderly is as a sort of companion for sharing their story for future generations. One of our partners uses our technology to help elderly. But yeah, this kind of technology makes AI feel more natural, so we should be aware of that and make sure it’s used for good.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-15 17:11:10+00:00
Fair, avoiding violence is usually not the way to go, so fair point.

Protesting does do something though, the very least showing other people a direction to go in, to at least show something. It's hard to argue it does nothing, because images and videos do end up on social media and the news, and you really need the rest of the population on your side, if you actually want to change stuff.

You know what actually doesn't do a damn thing? Not doing a damn thing. Literally anything is better than nothing, just showing support is better than nothing. Talking about it is better than nothing.
by jasomill | 2026-01-15 17:11:13+00:00
Sure, but $200 on eBay will get you something along the lines of a Dell Latitude, with decent build quality, cost-optimized more than a flagship workstation-class laptop, but certainly not designed to squeeze out the last penny at the expense of reliability or repairability like the cheapest consumer models.

And if you buy a 5-year-old corporate laptop in very good condition with minimal visible wear on the keyboard and touchpad, it was likely only used as a desktop replacement connected to a dock, so unlikely to have suffered abuse not apparent from visual inspection alone.

If you're planning to use it as an actual laptop, price out a replacement battery before purchase, as battery capacity will degrade over time, even if the laptop is exclusively used on AC, so will always be something of a crapshoot.

Otherwise, I'd expect the rate of component failure to be no higher than for any other lightly-used laptop of similar vintage, which is low.
by PurpleRamen | 2026-01-15 17:11:19+00:00
> Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?

Facts are not neutral or "balanced".

And your whole phrasing smells of someone who doesn't want to be challenged with facts which are against you worldview, which is pretty much against the whole purpose of Wikipedia.

> Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"

Without giving the actual example, there seems nothing wrong with this in general. Could be important, could be overrated. But at least I assume it's true, because wrong claims would be a valid problem.
by xp84 | 2026-01-15 17:11:24+00:00
> die

Is the argument that Apple will go out of business? AAPL?

Wait,

> one player has a short-term ability to vastly outspending all the rest.

I assure you, Apple has the long-term and short-term ability to spend like a drunken sailor all day and all night, indefinitely, and still not go out of business. Of course they’d prefer not to. But there is no ‘ability to pay’ gap here between these multi-trillion-dollar companies.

Apple will be forced to match or beat the offer coming from whoever is paying more. It will cost them a little bit of their hilariously-high margins. If they don’t, they’ll have to build less advanced chips or something. But their survival is not in doubt and TSMC knows that.
by webstrand | 2026-01-15 17:11:26+00:00
This is anecdotal, America is geographically quite large. For a lot of people, where these events are happening are more than a days drive away (10 hours or more), it's not happening "here".

A lot of people here _enjoy_ the authoritarianism, judging by the votes, the voter turnout, and the private discussions I've had with my neighbors. They believe this is good for the country and that there'll be more opportunities for their kids.

A lot of other people are holding out for the midterm elections, to see if the will of the majority shifts, because otherwise its risks open civil war. And maybe just a touch of American exceptionalism—this can't actually be happening here, it'll all blow over—and distrust in the story that the media is feeding them is accurate.

And some are just fatalistic, this isn't really a surprising turn of events. America has been creeping toward this for more than a few decades, since Regan at the very least.
by rickstanley | 2026-01-15 17:11:39+00:00
I think I played Thief 1 & 2 over 15 times in total, no hyperbole. I really, really like the atmosphere, the world building and Hammerites old-english and tenets (https://youtu.be/1gnGITh1cw8)... all of it. I even created a question to understand a specific phrase construction: https://english.stackexchange.com/q/588796. Good times.
by diego_moita | 2026-01-15 17:11:44+00:00
Everyone in the world "supports" science, exactly the same way everyone "supports" healthy lifestyles, democracy and other "good things".

The problem is that everyone has a different idea of what these good things are.

For some, science is vaccines, understanding global warming and the theory of evolution.

Others will say that real science is denying global warming, creationism, anti-vaxers or homeopathy.
by pawelduda | 2026-01-15 17:11:46+00:00
You can get rid of all human enemies by knocking them unconscious (I play expert mostly so killing is forbidden anyway). But right, if you go rambo even on lower difficulty levels, you'll most likely get overwhelmed

For the rest, you're limited by supplies you buy or find but I believe it's possible to clear mostly everything if you don't miss. I know because I found myself running around the entire map to find the remaining 1% of the loot goal
by publicdebates | 2026-01-15 17:11:55+00:00
So your proposal is to start an ad hoc friend group with people who come up to me, and try to become friends with them personally?

I'm not sure I'm the right person for that. I live in a suburb, not the city that I do the surveys in. And I'm extraordinarily boring, and too old.

It seems that I should try to think bigger. Try to find a way to help these people connect with each other. Something in person, not an app like Hinge. Maybe, hold a sign that says ad hoc meet and greet at such and such time and place, after collecting a list of common interests and putting those interests on the same sign that says the time and date. That could work.
by nickcw | 2026-01-15 17:12:31+00:00
The C5 really was a marvel of design for 1985. Sinclair really went all in on it.

- Polypropylene injection-molded bodywork (largest of its kind in 1985)

- Lotus-designed suspension and handling geometry

- Electric motor based on a modified torpedo cooling fan design

- Handlebar-mounted electronics with LED range and load indicators

- Custom deep-cycle lead-acid battery technology with 'smart' charging

- Toothed-belt drive system for quiet operation

It really was like seeing a bit of design from the future. Commercially a failure, alas.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-15 17:13:03+00:00
> Personally, I think that needs to be a massive general strike across every major city.

Yes, this tends to be really effective, especially when you're fighting the upper-class, which is more or less what's happening here as far as I can tell.

Get all the cleaners, cooks, hotel workers and other "servants" to strike, pool up to fund a salary-light for them while they strike, and you'll see changes quickly as the upper-class can no longer enjoy their status.