MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toebee | 2025-04-21 17:07:07+00:00
Hey HN! We’re Toby and Jay, creators of Dia. Dia is 1.6B parameter open-weights model that generates dialogue directly from a transcript.

Unlike TTS models that generate each speaker turn and stitch them together, Dia generates the entire conversation in a single pass. This makes it faster, more natural, and easier to use for dialogue generation.

It also supports audio prompts — you can condition the output on a specific voice/emotion and it will continue in that style.

Demo page comparing it to ElevenLabs and Sesame-1B https://yummy-fir-7a4.notion.site/dia

We started this project after falling in love with NotebookLM’s podcast feature. But over time, the voices and content started to feel repetitive. We tried to replicate the podcast-feel with APIs but it did not sound like human conversations.

So we decided to train a model ourselves. We had no prior experience with speech models and had to learn everything from scratch — from large-scale training, to audio tokenization. It took us a bit over 3 months.

Our work is heavily inspired by SoundStorm and Parakeet. We plan to release a lightweight technical report to share what we learned and accelerate research.

We’d love to hear what you think! We are a tiny team, so open source contributions are extra-welcomed. Please feel free to check out the code, and share any thoughts or suggestions with us.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-21 17:07:11+00:00
It used to (pre-'08 or so) be possible to be "good at Google".

Most people were not. Most tech people were not, even.

Using LLMs feels a ton like working with Google back then, to me. I would therefore expect most people to be pretty bad at it.

(it didn't stop being possible to be "good at Google" because Google Search improved and made everyone good at Google, incidentally—it's because they tuned it to make being "bad at Google" somewhat better, but eliminated much of the behavior that made it possible to be "good at Google" in the process)
by fmxsh | 2025-04-21 17:07:12+00:00
It sounds more advanced than it is.

It's a function wrapping the functionality of its host environment. Then provides the caller with its own byte code language to execute instructions. The virtual machine translates those instructions to the corresponding real functionality of the host environment (Javascript) upon execution.

This particular case is sophisticated but the idea is simple.

Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not knowledgeable in this. This is my current understanding of it.
by ta1243 | 2025-04-21 17:08:31+00:00
Unless nuclear power can provide for 100% of the demand for 100% of the time there will be a need for dispatchable power.

In the UK that would mean 48GW of total capacity. Worst case Nuclear capacity (when plants are offline etc) currently generated by the 5.6GW peak is about 3.8GW (95% of the time nuclear generated more than 3GW, 85% at least 3.7GW)

So that would mean 13 times as much nuclear production in the UK as it currently has to reach 100% use.

Which would generate about 500TWh per year, for a demand of about 250TWh per year, and a peak amount of about 73GW of capacity.

That means the real cost of a nuclear only grid would be twice as much as nuclear currently costs per MWh. Given that nuclear isn't economical today that doesn't really sound sensible.

As both Nuclear and Renewable thus both need "peaker plants" to flex the grid, the "baseload" argument is rather meaningless.
by rikthevik | 2025-04-21 17:08:34+00:00
Came here for the Uniform function call syntax link. This is one of the little choices that has a big impact on a language! I love it!

I wrote a little pipeline macro in https://nim-lang.org/ for Advent of Code years ago and as far as I know it worked okay.

``` import macros

macro `|>`\* (left, right : expr): expr = result = newNimNode(nnkCall) case right.kind of nnkCall: result.add(right[0]) result.add(left) for i in 1..<right.len: result.add(right[i]) else: error("Unsupported node type")

```

Makes me want to go write more nim.
by palata | 2025-04-21 17:08:55+00:00
I'm all for going against leadership when they purposely abuse people (like Zuckerberg telling his engineers to torrent copyrighted data for their LLM).

I would be in favour of checking what small companies do with licences. In my experience, the vast majority of startups blatantly abuse open source all the time.

But here it seems like it's all about an engineer who did some kind of attribution, but didn't do it correctly. And people are happy to say that it's all part of a big evil plan by Microsoft to take over the world.
by dvektor | 2025-04-21 17:09:10+00:00
Reminds me of the scene in Silicon Valley where they team are excited to hear a VC interested in the details so they are explaining the technology on the whiteboard to the "investors" who were a team of engineers eager to copy their tech.

But seriously, it sounds like a weird version of "not invented here syndrome" where you are somehow OK with copy-pasting most of it.
by hammock | 2025-04-21 17:09:22+00:00
Multiply by .37 to get PERCENTILE change, not percent.

If you were average happiness, and you improve that by 1 stdev, you are now happier than 87% of your peers (when you were at 50%ile before). 0.6 stdev improvement would be vs 72% of your peers.

So to put it colloquially, if you have 7 friends, and you were in the middle of them (4th happiest), by quitting Facebook you are now happier than all but 1 one them.
by projectazorian | 2025-04-21 17:09:29+00:00
Same. Thanks Elon!

It wasn't without consequences though. I'd made some IRL connections through twitter that I thought would last for years - they migrated to bluesky and IG but I didn't. Suddenly they were not interested in speaking with me.

Lose your clout, don't be surprised if you get shunned by the clout obsessed.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-21 17:09:41+00:00
Won't you think of the poor trillionaire corporations? They are just poor developers with nothing to their names.

https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/

> No, this begging is particularly different because it capitalizes on the good will of open source developers.

> Microsoft, Apple, and Google are standing on the internet in their trillion dollar business suits with a sign that reads "Starving and homeless. Any free labor will help."

> They aren't holding people up at gun point. Rather they hold out their Rolex encrusted hand and beg, plead, and shame open source developers until they get free labor.

> Once they get this free labor they rarely give credit.

> They're ungrateful beggars that take their donated work hours, jump in their Teslas, and ride off to make more trillions proclaiming, "Haha! That open source idiot just gave me 10 hours of free labor. What a loser."
by dustbunny | 2025-04-21 17:09:48+00:00
Every kid that I know who was forced to do their 20 minutes of piano a day now doesn't play piano and can only play with sheet music in front of them. They can't improvise, they seem to take no joy in the music.

I was the kid who wanted a keyboard and guitar but didn't get one until I could afford one in my twenties, then I learned just enough to be able to be creative. People say I'm good at piano but technically I suck, I'm just creative and expressive with limited tools.

It's an interesting phenomenon, the adults who are technically great at piano, but can't play anything without it being written in sheet music.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-21 17:09:57+00:00
Interesting concept. What's your estimated TAM? How do you plan to expand? What are scaling challenges? What potential customers are you targeting currently? Do you plan on offering an API for getting capacity data and orchestrating storage? Is ownership and automation of facilities in your plans [1] [2]?.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcZSU40RBrg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs9bAbTX1iw
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-04-21 17:09:58+00:00
Multiply by .37 to get PERCENTILE ranking change, not percent. If you were average happiness, and you improve that by 1 stdev, you are now happier than 87% of your peers (when you were at 50%ile before). 0.6 stdev improvement would be vs 72% of your peers.

So to put it colloquially, if you have 4 friends, and you were in the middle of them (3rd happiest aka happier than 2 of them), by quitting Facebook you are now happier than all but 1 one them (aka happier than 3 of them).

AKA for every 4 friends you have you can jump ahead of 1 of them in the happiness race by quitting facebook.
by Tiktaalik | 2025-04-21 17:09:58+00:00
Oh absolutely all these rules came about by explicit lobbying from special interest groups. As much as it is the "government regulations" that is to blame, the government is us lol, elected by the people and servants of the people.

The root cause of these problems has been classism and racism and people trying to gate off their communities from "undesirable" people, via the zoning code.

Defacto banning apartments for example is a very effective way to eliminate everyone who can't afford a single family home from your neighbourhood. etc
by mbrumlow | 2025-04-21 17:10:20+00:00
I have always had the opposite problem.

In grade school had to go to all these classes during recess to get different pencils, pens, grips, wiring methods.

The reason was my hand could not keep up with my thoughts. So the result was skipped words, and merging of two words and all these other things.

I am still poor at spelling, but the solution was typing. Once I started typing well my grades went up and I no longer found doing the work a chore.
by everdrive | 2025-04-21 17:10:28+00:00
I was trying to solve the snaps problem right before I finally abandoned Ubuntu. I was running some Ubuntu de-crapifier script from GitHub, which sort of worked but also caused some weird problems. It occurred to me that if my first steps for a new OS installion were to get rid of all the vendor-forced crap, I was lurching towards a Microsoft experience. I bounced around to a few OSes before settling on Fedora, which as been good but not perfect.
by int_19h | 2025-04-21 17:11:01+00:00
From my past experience, it goes something like this.

If software is GPLv2, it's penalized relative to more permissive options when it comes to picking one. In practice it means that it's avoided unless it's "too big to avoid", or because the very nature of what you're doing requires it - this is the case for e.g. Linux and R.

If software is GPLv3, it's considered radioactive and is avoided at all costs, even if it means rewriting large amounts of code from scratch.
by Snuggly73 | 2025-04-21 17:11:43+00:00
I had the weirdest experience the other day. I wanted to write an Expo React Native application - something I have zero experience with (I’ve been writing code non-stop since I was a kid, starting with 6502 assembly). I’ve leaned heavily on Sonnet 3.7 and off we went.

By the end of the day (10-ish hours) all I got to show was about 3 screens with few buttons each… Something a normal React developer probably would’ve spat out in about a hour. On top of that, I can’t remember shit about the application itself - and I can practically recite most of the codebases that I’ve spent time on.

And here I read about people casually generating and erasing 20k lines of code. I dunno, I guess I am either holding it wrong, or most of the time developing software isn’t spent vomiting code.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-21 17:12:20+00:00
I don't see how it's incompatible.

The problem with Twitter (before the whole blue check system was gutted into meaninglessness) was that not enough verification badges were handed out. It's not exactly a dangerous situation.

Bluesky's idea of verified orgs granting verification badges to its own org members would be an example of a much more robust and hands off system than what Twitter had.

The dangerous scenario is what happened to Twitter after the Elon takeover: verification becomes meaningless overnight while users still give the same gravity to verification badges which causes a huge impersonation problem. But that possibility is not a reason to have zero verification.
by sandworm101 | 2025-04-21 17:12:28+00:00
There is zero piracy from projectors because there are a multitude of easier places to rip from. But close those doors, limit to only theatrical releases, and we will again see content pulled from projectors and underpaid projectionists.

The only way to prevent piracy, to actually prevent copying, is to keep content in a dark vault well away from public view.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-04-21 17:12:31+00:00
Causing a legal shitstorm is most likely not a sustainable way to get ahead at big corps.

If this is what happened, I suspect Microsoft will drop this person even quicker than a hot potato, and even quicker than if they told them to rewrite it from scratch but the person took a few shortcuts too many (which would be my guess).

If they wanted to fork it, they could - just keep the attribution and be done with it. The fact that they tried to rewrite it suggests that someone wanted it to be legally not a copy.
by skydhash | 2025-04-21 17:12:46+00:00
You can get a lot of stuff designed before having to start the loop, just like you can get the boilerplate code written (or use a framework), before writing any business logic.

Writing code to find specs is brute-forcing the solution. Which is only useful when there's no answer or data (kinda rare in most domains). Taking some time to plan and do research can resolve a lot of inconsistency in your starting design. If you have written the code before, then you'll have to refactor even if the program is correct, because it will be a pain to maintain.

In painting, even sketching is a lot of work. Which is why artists will collect references instead, mentally select the part they will extract. Once you start sketching, the end goal is always a final painting, even if you stop and redo midway. Actual prototyping is called a study and it's a separate activity.
by nyrikki | 2025-04-21 17:13:09+00:00
While probably not useful for everyone, the best method for myself actually leverages that.

I am using a modified form of TDD's red/green refactor, specifically with an LLM interface independent of my IDE.

While I error on good code over prompt engineering, I used the need to submit it to both refine the ADT and domain tests, after creating a draft of those I submit them to the local LLM, and continue on with my own code.

If I finish first I will quickly review the output to see if it produced simpler code or if my domain tests ADT are problematic. For me this avoids rat holes and head of line blocking.

If the LLM finishes first, I approach the output as a code base needing a full refactor, keeping myself engaged with the code.

While rarely is the produced code 'production ready' it often struggles when I haven't done my job.

You get some of the benefits of pair programming without the risk of demoralizing some poor Jr.

But yes, tradeoff analysis and choosing the least worst option is the part that LLM/LRMs will never be able to do IMHO.

Courses for horses and nuance, not "best practices" as anything more than reasonable defaults that adjust for real world needs.
by y33t | 2025-04-21 17:13:27+00:00
I read somewhere that he even programs on paper and punches it into a computer when he's done.

As for myself, I definitely understand the problem he's describing. I catch all my fleeting thoughts with a keyboard, but I always find my mind wandering into tangents and end up losing the focus of what I'm really getting at, or I end up in a cycle of endless micro revisions. When I started writing with pen and paper it enforced a certain economy into my writing process. By having a natural speed limiter, I have to focus more on the heart of what I'm getting at; being in the zone writing with pen and paper feels totally different to me than writing on a keyboard, you get into a much deeper state of focus.
by calibas | 2025-04-21 17:13:35+00:00
It's very simple, the reason people favor a more permissive license is generally the same reason they open source their code: You want other people to use your project.

Obviously, a more permissive license is going to let people do whatever they want with "your" code, as it doesn't really belong to you anymore. If you want tight control then it's a bad choice, but a more permissive license is almost always going to mean your project is more widely used, for better or worse.
by enragedcacti | 2025-04-21 17:14:30+00:00
just use this very sane pattern /s:

>>> match {'b': 45, 'c': None}|{'a': 234, 'xyz': 32456}: >>> case {'a': a, 'b': b, 'c': c, **d}: pass >>> print(a, b, c, d) 234 45 None {'xyz': 32456}
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-21 17:14:48+00:00
Hard to word that language to prevent a corporation from forking it, as you have to "fork" the project locally to make modifications and send patches back. I'm sure nobody here wants to stop a random engineer at a corporation from contributing to a community project?

If you want a corporation to avoid it like the plague, just make it GPLv3. If you really want to screw them, go with AGPLv3. This way you keep a true open source license, but don't have to worry about corporate control.
by rayiner | 2025-04-21 17:14:55+00:00
I think your argument is circular. Just a couple of decades ago, the Chinese government was euthanizing babies born in violation of the one-child policy. I think Americans look back on that policy with a degree of horror that outstrips how the Chinese view that history—a difference I think is traceable to the influence of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. versus more collectivist cultures in China. Individual human life, and individual freedoms, have always just been worth less in Asia than in the west.
by fads_go | 2025-04-21 17:15:00+00:00
Maybe you are missing the point made?

For many people (and other animals), memory is tied to a specific place. The poster knows that the note they made is i.e.

red notebook on top shelf, page 12, top left corner.

Searching in digital notes doesn't give that same sense of place.

And the sense of place, plus the "path" that connects items in the space, is an important part of memory and learning.
by throwup238 | 2025-04-21 17:15:43+00:00
IMO they’re already the best. Not only is the rate limit much higher (20/day instead of OpenAI’s 10/month) but Gemini is capable of looking at far more sources, on the order of 10x.

I just had a research report last night that looked at 400 sources when I asked it to help identify a first edition Origin of Species (it did a great job too, correctly explaining how to identify a true first edition from chimeral ones).
by brocket | 2025-04-21 17:16:00+00:00
I migrated all my notes to Joplin (including importing Evernote and OneNote) and have been using it for awhile but performance is it's biggest issue.

(1) Importing notes takes forever, I'm talking hours, even if you're pointing to a local notes folder.

(2) There is no background sync on mobile so every time it's open the app, wait a 10+ seconds to sync, then open the new note. I've found myself keeping important notes on Keep for quick access.

(3) All notes and resources are in a flat folder so if you have a large database filesystems will struggle and break in strange ways. I guess I hit some limits in OneDrive and it can't list all files so I started missing notes. I ended up doing an audit and found a couple dozen things not syncing. Now I'm paranoid I'll lose more notes and commit all changes to a git repo.

I still think there isn't a better alternative in my case and plan to make improvements to address my pain points.
by ivape | 2025-04-21 17:16:08+00:00
I know. The left has not seriously put thought into how to actually tighten and have a sane entrance/enforcement policy either. This is a bipartisan issue that requires a) humanity b) reality c) practicality. We don't have the political leadership to get us there yet, but it is at least grass roots to begin having the two reasonable sides even discussing it in far corners of the internet (maybe it'll bubble up). Obstinance on both sides certainly is getting us nowhere, because kicking out whoever Trump is going to kick out is going to be undone by the next Democrat, so back to square one, right?

I never thought I'd say Bush Jr had one of the best policies on this ever, and it was the Democrats that stopped it. So, I know the left isn't nearly correct on it. That I don't even think a whole wall is stupid if we humanely incorporate whoever already built a life here.
by akudha | 2025-04-21 17:16:13+00:00
The most depressing thing about such behavior from MegaCorp is that they are too lazy to even pretend to care. We meet lots of people in life who would appear sincere, talk sweetly etc, but it is all just a show, just acting. Now it is a different discussion on which is worse (acting like you care or just flat out being a dick) but acting takes some effort. These companies with near infinite money can't be bothered to even put in the slightest bit of effort - how much effort would it be to give a shout out to Keivan when they copied AppGet to make WinGet?
by WalterBright | 2025-04-21 17:16:56+00:00
True, but consider that Forth and Lisp started out as interpreted languages, meaning the whole thing can be done at compile time. I haven't seen this feature before in a language that was designed to be compiled to machine code, such as C, Pascal, Fortran, etc.

BTW, D's ImportC C compiler does CTFE, too!! CTFE is a natural fit for C, and works like a champ. Standard C should embrace it.
by zak-mandhro | 2025-04-21 17:17:10+00:00
It makes sense that corporate teams would have preferred a "real" do-not-track standard, but had no incentive (or legal cover) to push it further.

It's wild how much of today’s cookie UX mess was an accidental regulatory artifact, not deliberate design.

Curious from your perspective: what do you think the EU's real motivation was behind mandating consent banners instead of pushing for proper browser-level control?

And second: what kind of pressure (technical, political, economic) would it actually take for the EU to update the rules to allow something cleaner now?

Would love to hear your take, since it sounds like you've seen how these decisions happen from inside.
by true_blue | 2025-04-21 17:17:35+00:00
That new Rhombus language that was featured here recently has an interesting feature where you can use `_` in a function call to act as a "placeholder" for an argument. Essentially it's an easy way to partially apply a function. This works very well with piping because it allows you to pipe into any argument of a function (including optional arguments iirc) rather than just the first like many pipe implementations have. It seems really cool!
by bufferoverflow | 2025-04-21 17:17:52+00:00
For many developers the first couple of items isn't a thing, we're just given requirements and the designs. At most, you can point out issues and do time estimates.

For my current job coding is 90% of my time. The rest is meetings, deployments, ticket management. Most of the time coding isn't particularly hard, but it sure consumes lots of time. I've had many days with 1000+ line diffs.