Hacker News: Kavelach

New comment by Kavelach in "What happens to an economy when it's too hot to work?"

Kavelach — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 09:54:26 +0000

A couple of years ago I was read news articles about heat waves so severe that birds were falling down the sky. Pretty apocalyptic.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...

New comment by Kavelach in "Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust""

Kavelach — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:45:34 +0000

From what I read from the PR comments, the case is that the unsafe blocks behave in a way that allows for UB.

This is expected, because unsafe rust can leave your program in an unhealthy state, since the language doesn't doesn't hold your hand anymore.

New comment by Kavelach in "Iran hit more U.S. military targets than has been reported, satellite images"

Kavelach — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:58:38 +0000

Iran has had access [0] to a satellite capable of capturing images with 0.5 m resolution [1] since 2024.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/iran-used-chinese-spy-sa...

[1] https://thedefensewatch.com/product/tee-01b-earth-observatio...

New comment by Kavelach in "Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor"

Kavelach — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 19:57:40 +0000

I used window managers for years, but the hurdle of actually configuring stuff not-related to the WM itself (like setting up dark mode) made me switch to a full-fledged desktop environment. Thanks for mentioning Noctalia - it looks like exactly what I needed!

New comment by Kavelach in "Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?"

Kavelach — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:48:23 +0000

This is an insightful comment, but I feel like you omit the fact that LLMs often give out verifiably false information that can hurt the user or other people.

It is true that this also happens on the Internet, but! When I encounter an article about a topic and it is clearly LLM generated, I can expect it doesn't contain much valuable information, only rehashes of what is already out there. On the other hand, when it is clearly written by a human, I can expect to learn something new, even though the author has some bias.

New comment by Kavelach in "Incident with Webhooks"

Kavelach — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 16:10:27 +0000

I wish the most popular software forge didn't include a bunch of other software solutions like issue tracking or forums.

Having everything in one service definitely increases interoperability between those solutions, but it definitely decreases stability. In addition, each of the other systems is not the best in their class (I really detest GH Actions for example).

Why do so many solutions grow so big? Is it done to increase enterprise adoption?

New comment by Kavelach in "Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic"

Kavelach — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 17:54:21 +0000

Massive strikes that are hard to contain got use the 8 hour work day, weekends and a lot of labor rights. Civil right movements won only because a huge portion of them were militant (back then even the National Rifle Association supported banning guns). A violent status quo necessitates violence to achieve change.

New comment by Kavelach in "GPT 4.5 level for 1% of the price"

Kavelach — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:15:59 +0000

How is Sweden, Finland or Norway in any way socialist? I haven't heard anything about seizing the means of production or overthrowing of the capitalist class from them. Unless you treat governments doings stuff as socialism, then I guess they may be.

New comment by Kavelach in "GPT 4.5 level for 1% of the price"

Kavelach — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 23:48:37 +0000

IMF forces countries to adopt austerity politics[1], causing lower economic activity and often leading to economy shrinkage[2], and forces countries to open their markets to foreign capital, which leads to surplus extraction abroad. Both of those measures lead to impoverishing the country that is taking the loan.

[1] https://www.bu.edu/gdp/2021/04/05/imf-austerity-is-alive-and... and https://academic.oup.com/book/11959?login=false

[2] https://accountinginsights.org/austerity-principles-economic...

New comment by Kavelach in "Apple mobile processors are now made in America by TSMC"

Kavelach — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 07:14:36 +0000

Very true, let's look at some of the strategic partners of the US: Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, Israel, a state currently committing genocide.

New comment by Kavelach in "0% of the phrases of the original Wikipedia "Ship of Theseus" article remain"

Kavelach — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 09:32:37 +0000

Start with the City Watch series of Discworld. If you like Guards! Guards! then you'll like the next books. After reading a couple of them I'd start branching into other series.

New comment by Kavelach in "Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun"

Kavelach — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 12:08:37 +0000

I definitely didn't expect this in a HN thread

New comment by Kavelach in "A decade of major cache incidents at Twitter"

Kavelach — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 17:01:35 +0000

There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: there's one joke, and it's not even funny

New comment by Kavelach in "Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022"

Kavelach — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 10:43:17 +0000

They could use the heuristics to build a list of domains to block and then have someone review it. After doing it for a long time, they could build a neural model on top of that, and automate it.

As I have said, the reason they don't do it is not because they don't have the skills and know-how.

New comment by Kavelach in "“Latinx” is lexical imperialism"

Kavelach — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 12:12:48 +0000

The issue with the 97% percent you arrived at is the implicit assumption that only people from the US read the article.

New comment by Kavelach in "Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022"

Kavelach — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 09:00:31 +0000

Just block the domain. At first, you can block manually, but we know Google doesn't like doing things that way. Fortunately, they have a lot of heuristics to find sites like that; usually the content is just copied from another source. And since they scrape the web all the time, they should know which content has appeared first where.

But the issue isn't that they can't; the issue is that they don't want that. Why the sites with copied content exists? To earn money through ads. What earns Google money? Ads!

New comment by Kavelach in "What NPM should do to stop a new colors attack"

Kavelach — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 08:14:57 +0000

At first, I upovted zepolen's comment about there being no social contract, only license, but something bugged me about that, and I felt that I wasn't right.

After thinking about it for a while, I think that you are right, there is an implicit social contract when using open source software, and a part of this contract would be to expect the maintaining people to provide the best quality software they can create.

But the thing about contracts is that they work between multiple parties, and not just the maintainer(s) and some void. And consumers of the library didn't do their due diligence, that is, supporting the code that they rely on.

New comment by Kavelach in "Reddit ‘antiwork’ forum booms as millions of Americans quit jobs"

Kavelach — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 09:24:58 +0000

Sorry for the off-topic, but your name an anagram for the word "throwaway" with letters sorted from alphabetically, while the other person you're talking with has the word "throwaway" in their nickname. I just wanted to point that out

New comment by Kavelach in "Reddit ‘antiwork’ forum booms as millions of Americans quit jobs"

Kavelach — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 09:16:47 +0000

I wholeheartedly agree with you. The importance of those people has been proven when, during the first waves of COVID, they stopped being called low wage workers, and instead words like essential workers were used much more often.

I worked as an essential worker when I was in high-school, and the amount of shit I had to put up was insane. Your boss is screwing you over, one way or another, the people you service demand you treat them like they are the most important being in the world. I don't say it happens to everybody, but for a lot of people, this is the reality of wage labor.

New comment by Kavelach in "Use spacer components instead of CSS margins (2020)"

Kavelach — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 18:05:24 +0000

As I mentioned above - one or two clauses like that won't hurt performance, but I have seen situations, when bad CSS (a lot of *'s, too long selectors, a lot of dead and unused clauses) actually had a measurable impact on websites' performance.

This especially comes into play, if you deal with a lot of nested HTML elements or when you modify the site's HTML a lot.