MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Falimonda | 2025-04-06 01:51:40+00:00
"All Books, All Languages", or ABAL for short, is a modern, web-based, parallel text language-learning application that I've been working on as a side project for about a year. I've already received a lot of great feedback about the application among language learners. In addition to what I hope is an intuitive UI/UX, one of the unique things about ABAL is the way that pronunciations are customized to a user's native and target languages.

Systems like IPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...) don't make pronunciation any easier to get right for a majority of - if not all - language learners. ABAL solves this by showing phonetic hints that are written in the user's native language script and are meant to be pronounced in the native language's voice.

The name All Books, All Languages is intentionally quixotic, as it serves to set the ambitious and unreachable goal of hosting all of humanity's written works while making them available to all language learners and readers across the globe!

Today, it hosts a number of generated short stories categorized by subject and CEFR level. I'm currently working on supporting (private) self-uploaded files, and works in the public domain. Work is also going into adding support for more languages, while evaluating and optimizing for cross-language translations accuracy.

It currently supports 56 languages (including Klingon and Latin!) - which comes out to 3080 permutations - or 3080 unique user profiles as I like to think of it. Both the marketing and application sites are fully internationalized - even response messages in 4xx responses use i18n. Quite a bit of work went into automating the i18n diff generation system to make sure I can release UI/UX changes quickly.

I hope you'll find it useful if you're learning a new language or need to practice one you already know. If you're not learning a new language, but wish you could read classics in a language you're fluent in, stay tuned!
by cloudbonsai | 2025-04-06 01:53:16+00:00
This novella is a masterpiece and needs rediscovery.

> The protagonist (P. Burke) is a lonely, severely depressed teenager. After a failed suicide attempt, an international telecommunication company offers her a new job -- to become a remote operator of a public celebrity. She is given a new persona "Delphi", and her new job is to buy products publicly to advertise them.

The protagonist is basically a Youtuber/Instagram influencer/TikTok streamer today.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-06 01:53:22+00:00
Legalities don't drive profits. If anything the US was simply lucky in thr 50s to not be war torn and rebuilding it's cities post war.

The only thing special is our geography and history. It's really hard to launch an attack unless you're in Canada and Mexico. So the US smartly made treaties and agreeemtns instead of repeating the bloody history Asia and the now EU went through as they constantly battled neighbors.

Only Australia has such a similar advantage and instead they had to war with nature's deadliest critters trying to kill them (they arguably lost).
by inkyoto | 2025-04-06 01:53:47+00:00
Sadly, that is not entirely correct.

Whilst all three BSDs (386BSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD; there was no OpenBSD in the beginning) did inherit the legacy Mach 2.5-style design, it did not live on in FreeBSD, whose core team started pretty quickly replacing all remaining vestiges of the Mach VM[0] with a complete, modern, and highly performant rewrite of the entire VM. FreeBSD 4 had none of the original Mach code left in the kernel codebase, and that happened in the late 1990s. Therefore, FreeBSD can't be referenced in a relationship to Mach apart from the initial separation/very early foundation stage.

NetBSD (and OpenBSD) went on for a while but also quickly hit the wall with the Mach design (performance, SMP/scalability, networking) and also set out on a complete rewrite with UVM (unified virtual memory) designed and led by Chuck Cranor, who wrote his dissertation on the UVM. OpenBSD later borrowed and adopted the UVM implementation, which remains in use today.

So out of all living BSD's[1], only XNU/Darwin continues to use Mach, and not Mach 2.5 but Mach 3. There have been Mach 2.5, 3 and 4 (GNU/Hurd uses Mach 4) in existence, and the compatibility between them is rather low, and remains mostly at the overall architectural level. They are better to be treated as distinct design with shared influence.

[0] Of which there were not that many to start off with.

[1] I am not sure whether DragonBSD is dead or alive today at all.
by credit_guy | 2025-04-06 01:54:44+00:00
> might be illegal

I don't know why they might be illegal. Legal and illegal things are on a spectrum. Some things are illegal in a fairly convoluted way, so convoluted that various judges can reach different conclusions. But some things are quite black and white and confiscation of private property is one of those. The 14th Amendment is quite clear on that.
by phire | 2025-04-06 01:55:13+00:00
The feature was clearly designed for the ray-tracing use case, where the waves are independent and really shouldn't run into deadlocks as long as one wave can continue. That's why they have the deadlock avoidance mode, it guarantees one wave will always continues.

I believe they are using this to store the BVH traversal stack in registers, with allocation size depending on traversal depth. Eventually all the rays in the wave will hit or miss and free those registers.

Busy waiting is only the naive solution. I bet they went with the software based solution so they can experiment with other approaches. Such as dynamically switching to the previous approach of a stack in shared-memory when registers run out. Or maybe they can sort the rays, moving the long-running rays out, grouping them together into waves dedicated for deep traversal.
Ask HN: Best AI IDE right now?
by funerr | 2025-04-06 01:55:14+00:00
I've been using Cursor for the last couple of months but I'm feeling like I might be hitting the limits of Cursor. I'm seeing a lot of forgetting and problems with my codebase getting larger, and it having problems with my mono repo structure.

1. Is there a better AI IDE that remembers when I correct it about structural issues I have with it? 2. Is there an AI IDE that is test-first? helping me see if I break something over time? 3. Any IDEs you recommend me checking out? or tips on fixing cursor?
by chris_wot | 2025-04-06 01:55:47+00:00
The OP asked for a steel man argument about why tariffs are a good thing. The response you are criticizing did actually answer the question, if you read the first paragraph.

The second paragraph is honest opinion. It’s also, IMO, a reasonable one given the people who surround Trump and his seeming inability to explain why he has levied the rates he has on a number of countries.
by zhyder | 2025-04-06 01:55:55+00:00
One of the things that bothers me most about advertising is that we sell attention to the highest bidder. It happened before online ads too but online ad networks 'perfected' the bidding process. And I say this as someone who's made much of my wealth indirectly off of such ad networks.

It means the expensive product/service gets your attention, coz it can afford a higher bid, instead of the one that's better for you. It also sets a high floor on prices.

To some extent the bidding process was needed when there was inherent scarcity of inventory to place information (e.g. billboards or the 1 local radio station), but there's no scarcity online. Why can't we just have a web where product/service info is listed, and people can seek that info through some search engine?
by mattl | 2025-04-06 01:55:59+00:00
At one point NeXT considered distributing GCC under the GPL with some proprietary parts linked at first boot into the binary.

Stallman after speaking with lawyers rejected this.

https://sourceforge.net/p/clisp/clisp/ci/default/tree/doc/Wh...

Look for "NeXT" on this page.
by hobs | 2025-04-06 01:56:45+00:00
3 companies in a row I got recruited by folks from other companies - skipped the degree and about to turn 40, so older is relative - the biggest diff I have had is I am obvious and honest that I am always looking and actively build the network, especially the youngins - I have gotten 4 jobs (and its accelerating given the last 3) from folks I helped teach or train in the past who went on to do something interesting.
by threeseed | 2025-04-06 01:56:58+00:00
1) We are talking about the late 90s, well before Ubuntu, where Desktop Linux was pretty poor in terms of features and polish.

2) Apple had no money or time to invest in rewriting NeXTStep for a completely new kernel they had no experience in. Especially when so many of the dev team was involved in sorting out Apple's engineering and tech strategy as well as all the features needed to make it more Mac like.

3) Apple was still using PowerPC at the time which NeXTStep supported but Linux did not. It took IBM a couple of years to get Linux running.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-06 01:57:02+00:00
I'd rather cap salaries than company sizes. The logistics of certain industries may naturally require more manpower than others and put them at a disadvantage.

But someone earning $10m a year while their workers are on food stamps is unacceptable. Having a dynamic limit of total comp would mean they either take less money and put it into the company, or raise the wages of those employees.
by mac-attack | 2025-04-06 01:57:52+00:00
Good luck! The first thing that comes to mind for me is how will you differentiate yourself from taskwarrior (it is also open source and based off of getting things done)

I'm assuming you won't have to understand or use the command line even if taskwarrior's utilization is pretty straightforward? Id imagine that simple cross-device synchronization might be a target area similarly? Just some random thoughts that come to mind
by wtallis | 2025-04-06 01:58:51+00:00
There was never a right time for Apple to make such a switch. NeXTSTEP predates Linux, and when it was adapted into Mac OS X, Apple couldn't afford a wholesale kernel replacement project on top of everything else, and Linux in the late 1990s was far from being an obviously superior choice. Once they were a few versions in to OS X and solidly established as the most successful UNIX-like OS for consumer PCs, switching to a Linux base would have been an expensive risk with very little short-term upside.

Maybe if Apple had been able to keep classic MacOS going five years longer, or Linux had matured five years earlier, the OS X transition could have been very different. But throwing out XNU in favor of a pre-2.6 Linux kernel wouldn't have made much sense.
by RandyOrion | 2025-04-06 02:01:21+00:00
I guess I have to say thank you Meta?

A somewhat sad rant below.

Deepseek starts a toxic trend of providing super, super large MoE. And MoE is famous for being parameter-inefficient, which is unfriendly to normal consumer hardware with limited vram.

The super large size of LLM also disables nearly every people from doing meaningful development on these models. R1-1776 is the only fine-tune variation of R1 that makes some noise, and it's by a corp not some random individual.

In this release, the smallest Llama 4 model is over 100B, which is not small by any means, and will prevent people from fine-tuning as well.

On top of that, to access llama models on hugging face has become notoriously hard because of 'permission' issues. See details in https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct/dis...

Yeah, I personally don't really see the point of releasing large MoEs. I'll stick to small and dense LLMs from Qwen, Mistral, Microsoft, Google and others.

Edit: This comment got downvoted, too. Please explain your reason before doing that.
by wdpk | 2025-04-06 02:02:14+00:00
During my several decades of translating businesses logic into code I never found a test that does not pay back the time spent to write it many times over, they are truly the super-power of the trade mainly because the can be completely automatized. Because of this automatic nature from a business perspective their marginal cost becomes almost zero (pretty much regardless of the initial cost and maintenance cost), the reason for this is that the value function of the business logic embedded in code, the reason for the code to even exist (i.e. the thing that gives a value to the piece of software), needs to account in the long run for the risk components, risks generated by defects or poorly aligned specifications, security risk, reputation risk, obsolescence, performance, etc. The way to manage risk at the business level is by somehow hedging and this hedge is precisely testing, again and again, hopefully automatically. Testing is then not a cost, it's precisely the instrument that allows to stop paying over and over for those risks and therefore in the end capture more value and reduce the variance of the outcomes.

People also mentioned side projects and testing. What I found personally is that tests are the best way to also document/encode ideas for later so that when you pause something for months because... life, getting back to a project becomes easier. I found very useful for instance to add some tests that would just fail for some feature easy to implement just to have an easy entry point back into the project.
by EGreg | 2025-04-06 02:03:17+00:00
Can we somehow load these inside node.js?

What is the easiest way to load them remotely? Huggingface Spaces? Google AI Studio?

I am teaching a course on AI to non-technical students, and I wanted the students to have a minimal setup: which in this case would be:

1) Browser with JS (simple folder of HTML, CSS) and Tensorflow.js that can run models like Blazeface for face recognition, eye tracking etc. (available since 2019)

2) Node.js with everything baked in (javascript) and use a CDN like CloudFront with tunnel to serve it to the web

3) So if they download models to their computer, how would they run them? Is it possible to run the smallest LLaMa locally? Or any GGUF models in JS? Or they have to have Python and PyTorch?

PS: Here is what the class looks like: https://vimeo.com/1060576298/c5693047e0?share=copy
by Teever | 2025-04-06 02:03:40+00:00
We already know where the bottlenecks are[0] -- it's in production of anti-ship missiles and then ships.

The lead-time in producing missiles is measured in months and years and war games predict that the supply of most of them will be depleted in an initial engagement with China over Taiwan that sees Japan/Taiwan/US win but lose many ships.

After it's anybody's guess but China has 260x the naval production capacity of America so they'll be able to come back faster than the US can.

[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargamin...
by noir_lord | 2025-04-06 02:05:20+00:00
That parallel between propaganda and advertising is why I have a pathological hatred of advertising, I block it in all forms possible, to the extent that if I can’t block it I won’t use the product.

I simply hate been manipulated.

So much so that I forget what the modern tech landscape is like for the average user til I use one of their devices.

We’ve (collectively we for techies) helped create a dystopia.
by bolognafairy | 2025-04-06 02:06:06+00:00
This is hilarious back-solving to somehow justify the general public’s supposed need / desire for an INCREDIBLY nerdy product that you yourself certainly happen to have wanted for some time now, and certainly at least in large part for pre-existing ideological / philosophical reasons.

If this solved any cost problem in any sort of compelling way, it would’ve happened at some point in the past ~20 years, during which the price of a smartphone, even against inflation, had absolutely skyrocketed.
by wk_end | 2025-04-06 02:07:08+00:00
In theory, anyway, billboards are prevalent sans regulation because they’re (among) the most efficient forms of advertising. That is, if the advertisers would only be spending some money on astroturf campaigns and product placement instead of billboards, it must be because they’re less effective than billboards - otherwise they’d just put that money towards the astroturf campaigns and product placement in the first place.

So banning billboards makes advertising less efficient. In theory, anyway.
by nico | 2025-04-06 02:07:09+00:00
My personal experience with pair programming is that I first was very intimidated by it and instinctively hated it

Then, it slowly creeped up at work, and I noticed that initially, most people seemed uncomfortable with it. But, if we were able to build trust and get to a place where we weren't judging each other, just trying to make progress with the task, then things would magically flow and we could solve things that each person individually had been stuck on

We then mostly kept it to a weekly activity, in which we could tackle either specific tickets from a certain list that no-one was actively working on, or on specific things that someone would bring up and needed help with

I believe it's probably not the way to work every single moment, but it is definitely a very powerful and useful tool
by abraae | 2025-04-06 02:08:17+00:00
I don't get the point.

If they were refactoring /cleaning up the code and porting to a modern platform - then yeah, that would be good for the future. But also a massive effort and well beyond anything that someone can parachute in and complete in weeks or months.

If it's an automated transformation from COBOL to say Java, then why? Any machine translated code is not going to be as clean as the source, which itself is probably not that clean if it is typical public sector code that has been mogrified repeatedly over the years to meet changing legislative needs.

There's no obvious reason why a machine translation to Java should be any more reliable than the original COBOL. The only obvious benefit is opening up to a greater number of coders who could make changes. But at the expense of losing the skills of the existing COBOL maintainers. My guess is it would be a wash.
by IncRnd | 2025-04-06 02:09:02+00:00
At first I read this as a typo for the 88c31 micro-controller that is used in buttons.

My stock answer was, "Good point, the 88c31 seems overkill for a button. But... AI isn't great for detecting button pushes."

Then, I realized the page was just a rant about web buttons and didn't actually show example web buttons.
by bolognafairy | 2025-04-06 02:10:50+00:00
Just because you don’t genuine value in an iPhone over a “cheaper Chinese” (presumably Android) phone, it doesn’t mean that those that do are “status-conscious” or whatever other thinly veiled negative value judgement / insult you’re going to throw out next.

Comments like this are akin to putting a big sign around your neck that says “snarky nerd that can’t see past their own nose”.
by ambicapter | 2025-04-06 02:11:16+00:00
> For example, it violates no rule to include valid Emergency Broadcast System/Emergency Alert System tones (the electronic, machine-interpretable "chirps") in a movie or TV show, or to publish that via streaming, DVD etc. But no one does this, because broadcasting spurious tones (and triggering spurious automated broadcast interruptions) carries serious first-instance fines to which FCC licensees (ie distributors via broadcast) agree as a condition of licensure.

Uh, what? You say there's no rule and then in the next sentence you talk about a rule.
by wavemode | 2025-04-06 02:12:12+00:00
What is at all strange about wanting to work near other people so you keep each other motivated to remain focused? It's not magic, and it's not a treatment for ADHD (nor a replacement for such). It's just a common sense response to living in an age where everyone works from home isolated. Some people just work better with company.

> If you doubt this, there is very little mention of body doubling in literature outside of blogs

Wow, I sure better stop doing everything in my life that there isn't literature on.
by jchw | 2025-04-06 02:12:21+00:00
As a long-time Linux user, it's also a pretty damn buggy area of Linux, although I have been much more fortunate with getting hardware that works decently enough with sleep on Linux over the years than some people have.

The main benefit of Linux, though, even though it's pretty clear it doesn't have the best support for suspend/resume, is that it won't yield the resume function against you to force you to run Windows Update and yeet all of the stuff you've been working on overnight or light your bag on fire. You'll still have to get hardware that works well, but that's it. And.. and hope the AMD driver doesn't break suspend again. I actually do like running Linux, even if it might be hard to tell sometimes :)
by HankB99 | 2025-04-06 02:13:23+00:00
> I'll take a Lexical editor with SQLite to store my data any day.

Do you have tools that do this or an example?

I'm pretty happy with Markdown and mkdocs (on Linux) to manage and format my notes. VS Code does a pretty good job with this providing both a preview and facilitating linking between documents (both file and heading links.) I'm always open to something better.
by lunarlull | 2025-04-06 02:13:41+00:00
So it's an issue of fundamentalism, maybe. Those areas like LA and Boston might be as religious in many ways as rust/bible belt places, depending on the metric, but they fundamentally are not confusing a day old zygote with a developed fetus, insisting the earth is literally 6000 years old and dismissing the idea we came from 'monkeys', they don't have issues with homosexualty to the same extent and maybe even belong to a church that is fine with it, etc etc.
by pythonguython | 2025-04-06 02:13:51+00:00
We’re talking about spending a couple of hours learning the basics of negotiation for a likely 10-20% increase in salary/equity. That’s certainly not making the difference in solving the world’s problems.

If you’re speaking more broadly than just salary negotiation - I’d just say that humans aren’t perfect machines. We care about solving problems but we also have desire for money, power, status and following random rules.
by jchw | 2025-04-06 02:14:53+00:00
I think I once accidentally stopped Windows from locking or dimming the screen by opening a context menu somewhere (maybe on the taskbar?) - Haven't recreated it so it could've been a freak accident but I thought that was surprising. (Who knows. If anyone can reproduce it, maybe it'll make a nice quick workaround to bypass org policies for whatever reason.)

On the other hand, on Linux, I have found that if I have YouTube fullscreen'd in Firefox, it's a crapshoot whether or not KDE Plasma will decide it's OK to sleep after the video ends. Not a big deal, but rather amusing nonetheless.
by drekipus | 2025-04-06 02:16:42+00:00
As the other commenters posted, "yes, this is just meditation"

I think the real value of this post is that it's almost like discovering from first principles. Building up the knowledge bit by bit.

Thankfully it also provides a reference that can get past initial barriers and apprehension.. "meditation? Sounds too wooey" or "tried it, didn't work" are both I've heard often.

It could be the message that somebody needs.
by anon373839 | 2025-04-06 02:17:04+00:00
Unless I'm missing something, I don't really think it looks that attractive. They're comparing it to Mistral Small 24B and Gemma 3 27B and post numbers showing that is a little better than those models. But at 4x the memory footprint, is it worth it? (Personally, I was hoping to see Meta's version of a 24-32B dense model since that size is clearly very capable, or something like an updated version of Mixtral 8x7B.)