MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Sayso – We Fixed AI Phone Calls
by lschneider | 2025-04-06 17:03:34+00:00
Hi HN,

YC w24 company here. We just pivoted from drone delivery and on-demand GPU rental back to our original idea - using AI for language learning.

The Sayso app uses interactive Stories, really good AI Phone Calls and immersive community posts to create a fantastic Spanish learning experience.

Sayso lets you “shop around” for the lesson/story you want to do. Each story contains - well - a fun story that lets you see Spanish used in real world contexts, has you say a few useful sentences out loud so you practice pronunciation and ends with a short phone call that puts you on the spot. At the end, new words are added to an FSRS5-powered flashcard stack (most efficient memorization algorithm). I can tell you, it’s a lot of fun, words just stick and you gain a lot of knowledge quickly.

Stories and phone calls are made to be fun and useful. E.g., instead of “how to order a coffee”, we do something like “a waiter spills coffee on you” - you can choose to be nice or yell at him. This way, phrases just stick really well.

There are also community posts, which are short videos in or about Spanish with a short exercise that lets you say a sentence out loud in the end. And there are phone call scenarios that are a bit longer.

As additional motivation, there are Amazon gift vouchers for the leaderboard toppers every week!

How did we get here? We were part of YC w24. We applied to YC with AI language learning initially but decided to work on drone delivery during YC given our ML & engineering backgrounds. Turns out, no one needs that and the unit economics simply don’t work out. Then we launched gpudeploy.com and got #1 on HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40260259]! But this didn't work out either - we turned into glorified car (Nvidia GPU) salesmen which we were not good at. So we went back to our original idea, language learning. We launched an initial app last year and now took the learnings and recently launched SAYSO.

It is available on iOS only for now.

Enjoy and have a nice rest of the weekend!
by MaulingMonkey | 2025-04-06 17:04:11+00:00
My starting point would be Chromium's documentation, as - presumably - chrome is one of the most widely used and battle tested, user-facing, third party sandboxes running on end user machines.

Windows: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/d...

Linux: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/sandbo...

OS X: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/sandbo...

With the caveat that I wouldn't necessairly assume this is the cutting edge at this point, and there might be other resources to invest in for server-side sandboxing involving containers or hypervisors, and that I've only actually engaged with the Windows APIs based on that reading.

I wrote `firehazard` ( https://docs.rs/firehazard/ , https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/firehazard/tree/master/exam... ) to experiment with wrapping the Windows APIs, document edge cases, etc. - although if the long list of warnings in the readme doesn't scare you away, it'll hopefully at least confirm I hesitate to recommend my own code ;)
by contact9879 | 2025-04-06 17:04:49+00:00
i also don't think it needs debating. my point was that the issue, the too narrow leading in the online view, is just not going to be fixed unless someone points it out to someone that can fix it. if that's you, great! you can submit a PR to the git repo. or, if don't have the time or want to have to go find where the line height is defined, submitting a comment to the mailing list or noting it on the issue tracker will let a volunteer fix it

from my own experience, Alex is very amenable to improvements. the online view of the ebooks is just not used by probably anyone to actually read the books (just use an ereader app or device its a way better experience anyway) and because of that no one has cared to point it out until now
by Homer10 | 2025-04-06 17:04:58+00:00
The average human eye has 10,000,000 X the dynamic range of even the finest broadcast video camera. So, when the Sun is low on the horizon, all Teslas are effectively blind. Lidar is good, until you get more than one of them in an area. Then the lidars totally interfere with each other resulting in total chaos. Self driving anything is just not ready yet, and won't be for a long time.
by sudosysgen | 2025-04-06 17:05:13+00:00
But it won't with current camera technology. The mix of high acuity at the center, moveable camera, wide peripheral vision, object tracking and non-frame-based sensing that allows human eyes to sense the depth of moving objects in low light is not commercially available with camera systems under ~10000$. It's cheaper to install LIDAR than to install cameras which are uniformly as good as the human eye. To get the acuity of a human eye at the center you'd need ~400MPx, or have a gimbaled camera to point towards an object of interest, and tracking small fast objects with such a camera (and at night!) is very very expensive in hardware.
by stitched2gethr | 2025-04-06 17:06:28+00:00
I very much agree. I've been using Gemini 2.5 pro for coding and I've always given it a simple instruction. Never write comments. It will stop writing them for a time but it's nowhere near the 1M context window.

Now maybe this is more a lack of instruction following than context length but the fact that it works at first and then starts going downhill quickly makes me wary about how much it will pay attention to other details further back in the context.
by conductr | 2025-04-06 17:07:04+00:00
This is a bit extreme. I've worked in many industries where the word 'accrual' is kind of internal to the finance/accounting department. I'd estimate over 70% of very good functional department heads I've worked with in the past would ask for clarification too. If they were still confused after further clarification or weren't able to comeback with an answer, then there is a bigger problem potentially with their ability to own a budget/manage spend.

This is kind of like punishing someone for not knowing your preferred buzzword. I've seen dozens of times that when a new high ranking person joins, their language quickly starts to become the defacto language of the org. If they like the "headwind" "tailwind" terminology, then it becomes what people everywhere start writing in the slides and how they discuss items of risk. You shouldn't be punishing people for asking for clarification (and there certainly a whole group of people that like to ask versus sitting silently then looking it up later). Hopefully there was more too it.
by vitus | 2025-04-06 17:07:08+00:00
> The difference with the 737 Max crashes is that there was only one sensor feeding data to the system, not two.

That's fair. I was likely remembering that there were two sensors, since there's one for the pilot and one for the copilot, but not remembering that only one of them was in use.

The other lessons worth noting are that 1) you need to give the human some indicator that something's wrong, and 2) you need to give the human some way of overriding the system.

> And unlike planes, you can safely stop a car in almost all scenarios.

Agreed, mostly. We do have to be careful about how the vehicle disengages and comes to a safe stop, or else we risk repeating the incident where Cruise hit a pedestrian, then pulled to the side of the road while dragging the pedestrian under the vehicle.
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-06 17:07:23+00:00
The most mind numbing thing from that side are when leftists act confused that a minority or woman didn’t vote their way.

I’ve never seen greater confusion in my life from otherwise well adjusted people.

“Self interest” is the go to term. “They’re [an amorphous group all in a single socioeconomic bracket] voting against their self interest”.

the form of dominance is very apparent but it seems like that crowd is completely blind to it, they're saying “here are the prepackaged things your kind can vote for, leave fiscal foreign and monetary policy to the white man. it is impossible for you to be in a position where those matters are relevant to you and may have you evaluating parties based on those factors. stick with the availability of elective surgeries like we said”

The left in the US manifests as the Democrat party, that party will be better off when they realize their constituents don’t really like them and are not that liberal. They're just more cautious of some people on the right.
by forinti | 2025-04-06 17:08:30+00:00
> If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to blame, get Oracle.

I've twice offered fixes to Oracle (didn't even get a thank you); countless times I've had to find workarounds; and I've lost endless hours working with support to get things fixed.

I have no respect for Oracle software. It gives me nothing but headaches. I can't really just blame Oracle, because I have to keep my organisation working. I just wish I could get rid of it.
by hollerith | 2025-04-06 17:08:31+00:00
The trade deficit is not the main cause of Washington's borrowing. The deficit causes trillions of dollars to accumulate in the hands of Chinese manufacturers, much of which eventually ends up in the hands of the Chinese government (a sovereign wealth fund). The Chinese government keeps that money in dollars (rather than convert it to Chinese currency) because converting it would reduce the strength of the dollar relative to the Chinese currency, making Chinese imports more expensive to Americans, which Beijing does not want. Someone holding $trillions is motivated to invest it to avoid its being eaten away slowly by inflation, and in general, it is not easy to invest that much money especially when you are not located in the US, but US Treasury bonds are one easy way to invest a lot of money.

Accumulating $trillions in US Treasury bonds was never one of Beijing's goals: it is the side effect of Beijing's being eager to help its export industries, which is does to give as many Chinese as possible hope for the future, so they don't revolt.
by CarterATX | 2025-04-06 17:08:45+00:00
Kobo Libra 2 is a great e-reader. Works well one-handed (screen rotates for left/right hands), has buttons for page turns. Integrates with Overdrive (what Libby uses). Drawbacks are Kobo's bookstore is weaker than Amazon/Apple. Screen is also not flush which means some dust can collect in the recess.
by paxys | 2025-04-06 17:08:53+00:00
Buffett has been aggressive selling stock in the last year ($134 billion total in 2024) and Berkshire is right now sitting on $334 billion cash vs $272 billion in equities. Kinda funny because he's the first one who will tell you "don't time the market", but he definitely timed it to perfection.

"Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful".
by arionhardison | 2025-04-06 17:08:53+00:00
In 6th grade i stole my teachers car to go get a girl some lemon heads...this was just the latest such incident so my teachers said I had to stand in the corner for the rest of the year; but my computer teacher Ms. Melton said I could spend the time in the computer lab and she started teaching me JS. Then on work study day she sent me to her friends at a local ISP and they gave me an internship etc... etc... 30 years later and I am a software eng.
by kentonv | 2025-04-06 17:09:32+00:00
Hmm. The article's source is NHTSA data that goes up through February 2025 -- pretty recent.

The article cites 5 motorcycle fatalities in this data.

Four of the five were in 2022, when Tesla FSD was still closed beta.

The remaining incident was in April 2024.

(The article also cites one additional incident in 2023 where the injury severity was "unknown", but the author speculates it may have been fatal.)

I dunno, to me this specific data suggests a technology that has improved a lot. There are far more drivers on the road using FSD today than there were in 2022, and yet fewer incidents?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-06 17:09:51+00:00
It ignores your points completely because they aren't true. The White House has explicitly, consistently, and in great detail said that the tariffs are not a negotiation tactic but a targeted measure aiming to reduce bilateral trade deficits. The idea that the tariffs are really about something else or might be removed in return for something else is, as far as I can tell, invented from whole cloth by cross-pressured Trump supporters who believe strongly in free trade but can't admit they don't support one of his policies.
Show HN: I created a ELI5 Blockchain glossary, with also a bit of interactivity
by 95thoms | 2025-04-06 17:10:59+00:00
The reason is simply that I'm learning blockchain and i found myself searching and hardly recalling terminology. So I started building a glossary (that slowly i'm making interactive) in which the terms are explained with ELI5 analogies. AI helped me with that. Hope you find it useful. You can contribute to the data set here: https://github.com/thomscoder/blockchain-like-im-5
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-04-06 17:11:11+00:00
I'm not sure th article had a singular point, it was more like a book review with some topical references.

The author of the book suggested in a YouTube video (based on his contacts in the medical teams) that the sudden and unexpected cut of USAID funds led to people half way through TB treatment being abandoned which is entirely unnecessary even if you strongly politically believe that the US should not be doing this and increases the risk of new strains mutating.
by thirdgear209 | 2025-04-06 17:11:44+00:00
I started programming at the age of 10 on a commodore computer. Did not have any friends or family members in the field. A lot of hacking, experimentation, and continual improvement. I still take the same approach today.

I am a big believer that for many of us, curiosity, a desire to learn, and no fear of failure are key to learning. I happen to be work in the industry full time, however I apply the same skillset towards art, cooking, welding/fabrication. The ability to analyze and problem solve is really what it is about.

'Learn to learn' is the advice I give anyone entering the field, and oh yeah, drop the ego as that tends to hold you back from your potential; we are are continually learning...
Ask HN: Seveneves < Asteroid 2024 YR4
by ynac | 2025-04-06 17:11:51+00:00
Anyone want to share their opinion (backed by knowledge or not) on the probable effects of Asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the moon - and - whether Stephenson's /Seveneves/ is possible?

EarthSky: Asteroid 2024 YR4 now has a 3.8% chance of hitting the moon

https://earthsky.org/space/asteroid-2024-yr4-odds-hit-earth-torino-scale-2032/
by _heimdall | 2025-04-06 17:11:57+00:00
> tech is effectively the last “American made manufacturing”

Its at least the largest industry manufacturing here, I'd expect.

I have friends that work in manufacturing in the US though, it does happen.

One, for example, runs a family business making steel buildings and storm shelters. They use American made steel if I'm not mistaken, I'm less certain about other inputs like the paint or equipment used (certainly the welders, heavy equipment, etc are foreign).

Another works in the automotive industry. Parts come in from overseas and we largely just assemble vehicles here today, but I'm not so sure how different that is from software.

I write code on foreign hardware that runs in someone else's server farm also running foreign hardware.

Hell, when Microsoft was still shipping software on CDs you may have noticed a little fine print mentioning the Caribbean island on which the disc was technically manufactured. US employees designed the software, but for tax purposes the manufacturing technically happened offshore.

Software is a huge industry, but it is still heavily dependent on globalization.
by mbac32768 | 2025-04-06 17:12:14+00:00
> Kinda funny because he's the first one who will tell you "don't time the market", but he definitely timed it to perfection.

I don't know if he's specifically said this but I think a more accurate picture of his view is "unless you're an idiot savant like me whose skill for this would be useless at any other point in history, don't try to time the markets".
by throw0101d | 2025-04-06 17:12:15+00:00
> Would you argue that the period between 2003 and 2025 have strengthened or weakened the case for free trade?

For the US specifically, various considerations:

* https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1908189982789095677#m

* https://www.csis.org/analysis/do-not-blame-trade-decline-man...

* https://archive.is/https://www.wsj.com/opinion/free-trade-di...

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/when-are-tariffs-good

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now
by contact9879 | 2025-04-06 17:12:15+00:00
I think it's important to note that in the past, typesetters and printers had a much more editorial role than the process today. Authors would submit handwritten manuscripts and the typesetters in many cases would have to fix the author's mistakes, spelling, etc. to conform the manuscripts to printing standards with the author having limited communication or ability to proof the final plates

Today, it's much easier for authors to have a greater say in the final presentation due to the digital composition process
by drowsspa | 2025-04-06 17:12:52+00:00
Yeah, I find it specially frustrating to do it with a slow reader. Like, in 2 seconds I can scan the page and see that what I need isn't there, and the other person is there taking like 1 minute to read everything... Or the opposite, there is the keyword jumping at my eyes and the other person takes so long to even find it. There's also the whole issue of the person not wanting to discuss about anything deeper other than the task immediately at hand.

But when I do with someone faster and that actually likes to discuss the implications, philosophy behind what we're doing it's amazing
by darksaints | 2025-04-06 17:12:58+00:00
Oh that’s interesting, and I’m actually kinda peeved by any database-connected system that caches responses by default. Caching should be reserved as a performance optimization with serious correctness tradeoffs.

Regardless, I don’t think caching came into play here, at least according to how I’m reading this repository. I would expect cold caches for everything.
by Herring | 2025-04-06 17:12:59+00:00
If you're not being targeted, like from a distance, it looks like "anti-intellectualism and fear". He's just running "distractions", or "scapegoating" Mexicans or something. It's easy to minimize it. Up close though, if you're the one actually being targeted, there's a bit more urgency. It's more like an abusive/controlling relationship. How many lives were destroyed or otherwise ruined by Bush's useless wars in the Middle East?

Now imagine if Bush had instead built out a massive train network, like China did with close to the same amount of money.
by docmechanic | 2025-04-06 17:13:09+00:00
Yes, every release checklist for product documentation should include a box for a pretty printable version, such as a PDF. It covers several usability edge cases discussed here. Ideally, a technical writer acting as a user advocate would track this. However, this will often fall through the cracks in organizations without a full-time writer. Good advice here for developers and other non-writers tasked with documentation work.
by nicbou | 2025-04-06 17:13:12+00:00
This is a sensible approach. For me it's mainly a way to get away from the dreadful Berlin winters, to ride a motorcycle, and to see some beautiful landscapes.

It's not the best way to travel, but it's the best way to be away from Berlin for a longer period, since my friends rarely have the same amount of flexibility with regards to work.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-06 17:13:15+00:00
I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Your eyes aren't good enough, compared to if you had 360° LIDAR awareness, which is the comparison here.

You're listing all these other causes of accidents, which no one disputes. There's still a whole range of accidents caused by limitations in our spatial awareness because we can only ever be looking in one direction at a time.

You're talking about "normal, honest mistakes". That's what I'm talking about. There would be less of those if we had magic 360° LIDAR in our bodies. A lot less. Especially at night, but during the day too.

This isn't about blaming anybody. It's just the simple scientific fact that human senses are limited, and self-driving cars shouldn't limit themselves to human senses. Human senses aren't good enough for preventing all preventable accidents, no matter how "honest" drivers are.
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-04-06 17:13:55+00:00
Damn. As somebody who was in the “there needs to be an out of band way to denote user content from ‘system content’” camp, you do raise an interesting point I hadn’t considered. Part of the agent workflow is to act on the instructions found in “user content”.

I dunno though maybe the solution is like privilege levels or something more than something like parametrized SQL.

I guess rather than jumping to solutions the real issue is the actual problem needs to be clearly defined and I don’t think it has yet. Clearly you don’t want your “user generated content” to completely blow away your own instructions. But you also want that content to help guide the agent properly.
by daveguy | 2025-04-06 17:15:01+00:00
First, do not put words in my mouth. I did not claim he was "bypassing" federal reporting. Although he quite literally bypassed much more strict self driving reporting in CA by claiming it was ADAS instead of ADS. So maybe know the facts before calling someone a Luddite.

What I literally said was Tesla doesn't release all of the self-driving statistics, like time to disengagement. They are noticeably more cagey about releasing that kind of info claiming it as "trade secret". Did you see the data sets you pointed to before pointing to them? Full of Tesla crashes, and full of redactions.

I don't need to dunk on Elon. He dunks on himself. Some people just worship him too hard to realize it.
by smallmancontrov | 2025-04-06 17:15:04+00:00
The problem with "all" incidents is that reporting bias drowns the whole thing in noise. I clipped a curb the other year and didn't report it to anyone -- am I messing up the statistics? In contrast, hospitalizations and bodies are concrete enough to all but eliminate reporting bias.

Of course, at first this just substitutes one type of problem for another because even shitty drivers have to drive many lifetimes of distance before killing anyone so you wind up with the unfortunately named "shot noise" from small-N. But Tesla FSD drives so many miles that the statistics are no longer small-N. If supervised FSD was worse than human, we should be seeing many more bodies than we do, so supervised FSD is clearly better than human.

Of course, that number needs to be adjusted for critical interventions before we can say anything about unsupervised FSD, and in an ideal universe I wish Tesla was forced to disclose those figures. Unfortunately, we live in a universe where luddites are firmly in control of this conversation and I cannot deny that a forced disclosure would be heavily abused in a way that costs lives. Still, regulators get to see the numbers before approving unsupervised rollouts, and as a compromise this makes neither myself nor the luddites happy but I suppose it will do.
by mintplant | 2025-04-06 17:15:39+00:00
When I was around 4, my dad, an aerospace engineer, passed down his old Windows 95 computer to us. I loved rummaging through C:\Windows and finding all the little "hidden" utilities, it was like a toybox. When I was around 6, he brought home a binder of programming lessons and a worn copy of "Sams' Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 24 Hours" from work and started going through them with me. Eventually I moved on to reading every computer-related book I could get my hands on in the public library's small, very out-of-date collection.

I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten the early start that I did. I'd be a completely different person without that.