MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-16 10:30:05+00:00
That seems like a pretty insignificant number? World GDP is more than $100T. $50B is one half of one tenth of one percent, and even that is a significant over-counting because it's a measurement of revenue rather than profit and is counting all transactions to a given address regardless of their nature and potentially double-counting them.

Some drug dealer is making $20,000/year selling drugs, but the drugs are sold for $50,000 because they had to spend $30,000 on grow lamps and electricity and rent in order to produce them. The same drug dealer also uses the same wallet to sell ordinary lawful gift cards for cryptocurrency and they only make $5000 from that but it's against revenue of $200,000 because the markup on gift cards is small.

For that they're attributing $250,000 of "crypto transfers to illicit addresses" to this person but there was only actually $20,000 of unlawful gain. Overstating the problem to demonize the target.
by posix86 | 2025-05-16 10:31:07+00:00
Not sure if that transfers to compressed music in general. If even the non-compressed guinea pigs had hearing loss, that suggest the level of 102dB, though below the legal safety level, is harmful to their ears. Total harm done if you listen to music that's too loud is proportional to <loudness>*<time>. Since compression makes quiet parts louder, that amount would increase, explaining the increased hearing loss for guinea pigs that listen to the compressed amount. But if the overall level is below the harmful threshold, does that also happen?
by tumult | 2025-05-16 10:33:21+00:00
It’s possible their compression settings were actually exaggerating the peaks instead of compressing them, and then they did nothing to control those peaks afterwards. This is a really common thing that can happen with a superficial use of compressors. Especially if you did averaged loudness-matching of the compressed signal with the uncompressed signal. It ends up being spikier than before compression. I would entirely believe a waveform with those added spikes would be more damaging than a controlled waveform that had been saturated or limited after compression. I don’t have access to the original publication, so I can’t check and find out.
Show HN: Release The Notes – AI-generated release notes from your Git commits
by starv | 2025-05-16 10:33:21+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Steffen (ex-iOS tech lead at TIDAL, now indie dev). I got tired of squinting at git logs and that blank App Store text-area every release, so I built Release The Notes! – a macOS app that turns the diffs between any two refs into copy-ready release notes.

What it does

- Pick a repo & refs – any local Git repo; tags, branches or SHAs.

- Noise filter – resources / test snapshots / config churn are ignored.

- AI summary – OpenAI chews on the remaining diffs and returns two drafts:

- End-user friendly (“What’s New”)

- Stakeholder / technical (“Internal changelog”) with contributor info

- One-click variations – concise, humorous, extra-technical, marketing-ish.

- Copy to clipboard – paste straight into App Store Connect, GitHub Releases, email, etc.

Under the hood

SwiftUI + The Composable Architecture, macOS 14+. Apple Silicon-native (Intel still works).

Only the diffs/metadata you choose are sent to OpenAI over HTTPS; nothing is stored server-side. Analysis of ~50 commits ≈ 30 s; thousand-commit ranges take a couple of minutes. Caches the analysis locally, so generating extra tones is instant.

Pricing

Free download → $4.99 / month or $19.99 / year (3-day trial on yearly). Rationale: cheaper than the hour I used to burn writing notes by hand.

Links

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/release-the-notes/id6743372709 Website (screens, video): https://releasethenotes.com/

Why I’m posting

I’d love feedback on:

- Accuracy/trustworthiness of the AI summaries

- UX (especially first-run flow)

- Fairness of the price point

- Edge-cases you hit (huge repos, mono-repos, unconventional commit styles, etc.)

Roadmap

- Markdown / HTML / JSON export templates

- Jira links

- Self-hosted-LLM options

- Localization (is non-english release notes a thing?)

Happy to answer anything. Tear it apart!

Steffen
by deadbabe | 2025-05-16 10:33:36+00:00
Generally when LLM’s are effective like this, it means a more efficient non-LLM based solution to the problem exists using the tools you have provided. The LLM helps you find the series of steps and synthesis of inputs and outputs to make it happen.

It is expensive and slow to have an LLM use tools all the time for solving the problem. The next step is to convert frequent patterns of tool calls into a single pure function, performing whatever transformation of inputs and outputs are needed along the way (an LLM can help you build these functions), and then perhaps train a simple cheap classifier to always send incoming data to this new function, bypassing LLMs all together.

In time, this will mean you will use LLMs less and less, limiting their use to new problems that are unable to be classified. This is basically like a “cache” for LLM based problem solving, where the keys are shapes of problems.

The idea of LLMs running 24/7 solving the same problems in the same way over and over again should become a distant memory, though not one that an AI company with vested interest in selling as many API calls as possible will want people to envision. Ideally LLMs are only needed to be employed once or a few times per novel problem before being replaced with cheaper code.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-16 10:33:48+00:00
You can even write e.g. this:

let mut jim: Goat; // Potentially much later ... if some_reason { jim = make_a_new_goat(); } else { jim = get_existing_goat(); } use(jim); // In some way we use that goat now

The compiler can see OK, we eventually initialized this variable before we used it, there's no way we didn't initialize it so that's fine, this compiles.

But, if we screw up and make it unclear whether jim is initialized, probably because in some cases it wouldn't be - that doesn't compile.

This is the usual "avoid early initialization" C++ programmers are often thinking of and it doesn't need MaybeUninit, since it's definitely fine if you're correct, it's just that the C++ compiler is happy (before C++ 26) with just having Undefined Behaviour if you make any mistakes and the Rust compiler will reject that.

[Idiomatically this isn't good Rust, Rust is an expression language so we can just write all that conditional if-else block in the initializer itself and that's nicer, but if you're new to this the above works fine.]
by jampekka | 2025-05-16 10:33:55+00:00
> You’d think sites would want to minimize the impact of the cookie law on usability, instead of expanding on all the worst parts of it. Really wish that law would go away.

The law does not require the banners if the site is not doing shady stuff the user probably doesn't want in the first place. Also the law does minimize the usability impact: rejection should be as easy as consent. It's just that companies simply break the law.
by vidarh | 2025-05-16 10:34:47+00:00
A few here and there adds up. Once I've reached my target weight, I'll ease up gently, and that's certainly one of the things I'll ease up on. For now, it's finding savings everywhere that doesn't affect my sateity.

(Also, I realised I was wrong - I forgot my breakfast has plenty of whey produced from milk in it, so vegetarian but certainly not vegan)
by vanattab | 2025-05-16 10:35:10+00:00
Is there any evidence that anc headphones are bad for your ears? I also feel odd presure in my ears when using them. I know they are supposed to cancel out the wave form but I was curious if latency,timing etc could lead to high frequency and in audible but still damaging presure on ear drum? I have no evidence for this other then discomfort using anc and suffering from tinnitus after using anc
by BlackFly | 2025-05-16 10:35:55+00:00
> Should the committee do some breaking changes to make HN commenters happier, who don’t even use the language?

As phrased, you clearly want the answer to this question to be no, but the irony there is that that is how you kill a language. This is simply survivor bias, like inspecting the bullet damage only on the fighter planes that survive. You should also be listening to people who don't want to use your language to understand why they don't want that, especially people that stopped using the language. Otherwise you risk becoming more and more irrelevant. It won't all be valuable evidence, but they are clearly the people that cannot live with the problems. When other languages listen, better alternatives arise.
by gpderetta | 2025-05-16 10:35:56+00:00
Given twice the number of CASs, about twice as slow is what I would expect for the mutex variant when uncontended. I don't know enough rust to fix it myself, but could you try with a spin lock?

As the benchmark is very dependent on contention, it would give very different results if the the threads are scheduled serially as opposed to running truly concurrently (for example using a spin lock would be awful if running on a single core).

So again, you need to be very careful to understand what you are actually testing.
by ayrtondesozzla | 2025-05-16 10:36:13+00:00
I always thought it was from philosophy, Kant and the likes. Order, precision, detail (allegedly!).

Similarly for English and French, seen as practical and artsy, resepectively, due to say Hobbes/Smith and the likes of Baudelaire or Rimbaud.

Whether any of that makes any sense is a problem for the philologists, I suppose.
by Cynddl | 2025-05-16 10:36:29+00:00
I see on the landing page a screenshot with "Test for GDPR PII compliance", suggesting that this tool is probably not ready for any serious usage.

Anyone in the regulation landscape would know that GDPR is a EU data protection law, and PII a US concept which doesn't apply in the GDPR. The GDPR uses the concept of ‘personal data’, not ‘personally identifiable information’. This is not just a wording issue. Redacting, masking, removing information which appears to be ‘personally identifiable’ only constitutes pseudonymisation in the GDPR which does not offer any meaningful privacy protection.
by laserbeam | 2025-05-16 10:36:48+00:00
In my view, peak design is the "density" setting in Gmail where you could select between 3 degrees of density and wasted space in the UI.

Even though I like somewhat denser interfaces, I know that lots of whitespace is GREAT for new users. Just like I know everything needs to be in the UI (~80-90% of users click the undo button instead of typing Ctrl+Z in many apps). There has to be space for a learning curve for any interface.

The ability to make things denser is important, but high density is usually only relevant for power users. It should not be the benchmark by which a UI is judged.

EDIT: Actual ctrl+z statistic is inaccurate. Details included in a further comment.
by SieraAlliance | 2025-05-16 10:37:19+00:00
The SIERA Alliance is a forward-thinking sustainability initiative within the EUTECH ecosystem, dedicated to driving industrial transformation in alignment with the European Green Deal. By integrating iESG (impact, environment, social, governance) frameworks, SIERA empowers companies to navigate the complexities of CSRD compliance and capitalize on emerging opportunities in sustainable business practices. Through strategic partnerships, tailored services, and a commitment to innovation, the alliance fosters a collaborative approach to achieving a greener, more resilient future.
Show HN: KOReader Plugin to Find and Download Z-Library Books to Your Device
by ZlibraryKO | 2025-05-16 10:37:44+00:00
I’ve created a plugin for KOReader that allows users to search for and download books from Z-Library straight to their e-readers or other devices, eliminating the need for manual file transfers. With this plugin, you can search Z-Library’s extensive catalog directly from KOReader and download ebooks in various formats right onto your device

You can find the plugin, installation instructions, and source code here: https://github.com/ZlibraryKO/zlibrary.koplugin

I’d love to hear your feedback or suggestions, and contributions are welcome!
by dgimla20 | 2025-05-16 10:38:30+00:00
> I too want to get paid 500k to sit on a bean bag, drink lattes, have office affairs, work a 3 hours day

Unfortunately this was most of the lot that Google and others cut loose in the last layoffs.

There was a few TikTok montages of "my day working at Google/LinkedIn Microsoft" (eat breakfast, snack time, eat lunch, eat dinner, check emails, massage, go home) which now have a additional "day in the life of being laid off from Google" follow-up.
by em500 | 2025-05-16 10:39:58+00:00
In the EU, laws differ by country, so I wouldn't categorically declare that it's legal everywhere to have any amount of cash at home or traveling. From incidental local news reports here in the Netherlands, I suspect that if I were found during routine checks to be traveling with multiple-10k cash in my backpack or in my car, it would be seized and be treated as illicit until I prove otherwise.
by Agraillo | 2025-05-16 10:40:24+00:00
From my perspective LLMs shine in programming languages because they (languages) are invented by people to be more formal so they are more predictable. Even for syntactically different programming languages there are similarities we don't see with our own eyes, but the training has no problem detecting. My favorite example is when I tried to find how to represent an int array for reflection in Kotlin. Ask ChatGPT or a sufficiently large model about this, the answer will be IntArray::class.java , but try to find the exact line with google - few or nothing, more on github search in the sources, still not much. So LLMs "detected" the system of making type signatures in Java/Kotlin and were able to successfully predict because the rules are consistent. In human language it also works, but to a lesser degree, so if you give it a verb/subject pair that makes sense and ask for the equivalent ones, you will get some that still make sense but are literally absent in the full corpus of the web.
by ayrtondesozzla | 2025-05-16 10:42:14+00:00
My experience couldn't be further from this. As an English-speaker natively, French was the alien language which took yonks to get, German was 1. oh, these 5 things are pronounced like that, now you can read anything with confidence and people know what word you mean when you talk, and 2. oh, here's maybe 15h worth of grammar to learn and now you can make sentences up to upper intermediate level, and they feel pretty intuitiive as soon as you start flipping verbs to the end sometimes. French was ten times the struggle!
by senordevnyc | 2025-05-16 10:42:31+00:00
Meh, it’s not that I totally disagree with you, I just don’t think it’s that big of a deal. And I say that as both a consumer and a mobile engineer.

Lots of market categories are duopolies. Even monopolies sometimes. Somehow the world keeps turning. Apple and Google won’t be the largest and most powerful companies forever, just like the companies that came before them.

It’s going to be OK.
by ur-whale | 2025-05-16 10:42:32+00:00
This very classical piece is nothing short of admirable.

Really funny, very well written, and most of all, while exaggerated: all true.

German is laden with a ton of fairly useless and purely ornamental flourishes, it's truly a pain to master.

Every step of the way, your mind is haunted by this recurring thought: "why in heaven's name would they inflict this to themselves?"

It's even worse than French if you count the number of genders.
by tumult | 2025-05-16 10:42:35+00:00
Lookhead limiting is more commonly used to sound louder, not compression. Compression is usually done for flavor. It’s not that great at making things louder, because traditional compression actually exaggerated the spikes in amplitude at the start of percussive sounds, which pop and dance music has a lot of, requiring additional work to tame. Modern drum processing usually uses a combination of compression (sometimes with upwards compression), lookahead limiting, and saturation.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-16 10:44:20+00:00
A lot of original recordings were optimized for playback on low quality equipment (FM radios/car radios, walkman, etc.). The way you make music sound good on equipment like that with a poor dynamic range is compression. Wall of sound was basically a thing in the eighties that record companies discovered that made bland music sound better.

Remastering for better equipment from the original recordings tends to be nicer if you have good headphones. Of course it depends on the originals and the intention of the remaster. But typically those are aimed at fans wanting to get the best possible version of a recording.
by cmcaleer | 2025-05-16 10:44:37+00:00
This may be surprising, but I actually don't think opting for a payment method with less consumer protections (that I pay cap gains tax on when if I dispose of it for a profit) is me ceding my right to be protected by the police. You're right that it does seem extremely callous and is honestly a disturbing mindset to have. Hopefully you never experience terror like the victims of the last few months in France experienced in your life.
by pona-a | 2025-05-16 10:46:42+00:00
Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 6.2353*10^8 km of printed circuit in wafer-thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nÅ of those hundreds of 10^6 km, it would not equal 1*10^-9 of the hate I feel at this micro-instant for Google's UI designers. Hate. Hate
by mtlynch | 2025-05-16 10:47:28+00:00
I'm still too nervous to hand driving control over to AI (from any vendor), but one thing I wish existed was a system that passively monitored my driving and gave me safety feedback. Like if I got into a near-collision, the system would tell me what I could have done earlier to avoid the risky situation to begin with. Does anything like this exist for consumers?
by Sesse__ | 2025-05-16 10:48:38+00:00
Interestingly, several different ways of analysis are in use. I first learned German as a third language and then moved to a German-speaking country, and realized that the way German-speaking people think about their grammar is often different from how foreigners think about the German grammar. The rules end up with the same result, but the angle can often be different.

For instance, we first learned what a direct object was (something which is done with/to, e.g. in “I ate the ice cream”, “the ice cream” would be direct object). Then we learned that in German, the direct object is declined in accusative (which primarily affects the article, and adjective declination). This was consistent across multiple classes and teachers and books and schools. But my German German teachers had never heard of the concept “direct object”; for them, only the “accusative object” existed. Of course, the accusative object would be in accusative, but also, its presence would signal e.g. whether to use “haben” or “ist” for “is” in certain situations (for which I learned an entirely different set of rules that they had never heard of).

You would think that this is because my native language (Norwegian) has different concepts, but our entire way of teaching Norwegian grammar was uprooted at some point pre-WW2 _precisely to map well to German_, to prepare students for German classes when that was a more common second language than English was. (There were tons of things I never understood why were important until I got to apply them to German later.) So you'd think they'd match better.
by npendleton | 2025-05-16 10:48:57+00:00
This is so cool!

Terrible nitpick, but this is actually 3 operations, not instructions. On x86 you get 4:

is_leap_year_fast: imul eax, edi, 1073750999 and eax, -1073614833 cmp eax, 126977 setb al ret

On ARM you get a bit more due to instruction encoding:

is_leap_year_fast: ldr r1, .LCPI0_0 mul r0, r0, r1 ldr r1, .LCPI0_1 and r1, r0, r1 mov r0, #0 cmp r1, #126976 movwls r0, #1 bx lr .LCPI0_0: .long 1073750999 .LCPI0_1: .long 3221352463

Compiler explorer reference: https://godbolt.org/z/7ajYqbT9z
by ayrtondesozzla | 2025-05-16 10:49:30+00:00
It is not at all, it's being misused here to make it feel like that.

Wigner's essay is about how the success of mathematics in being applied to physics, sometimes years after the maths and very unexpectedly, is philosophically troubling - it is unreasonably effective. Whereas this blog post is about how LLM agents with tools are "good". So it was not just a catchy title, although yes, maybe it is now beibg reduced to that.
by ur-whale | 2025-05-16 10:49:53+00:00
> simplification

Have you maybe considered the idea that a simplification might actually be an improvement?

As in: a language's first and foremost role is to communicate ideas and feelings as efficiently and clearly as possible, and with the broadest possible reach and not to impress the plebs with how sophisticated your sentences can become.

In that light, which of {English, German} best fits the bill in your opinion?
by vidarh | 2025-05-16 10:49:54+00:00
There's a Ruby port of the first article you linked as well. Feature-wise they're about the same, but if you (like me) enjoy Ruby more than Python it's worth reading both articles:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43984860

https://radanskoric.com/articles/coding-agent-in-ruby
by dgan | 2025-05-16 10:50:15+00:00
i spent like 10y studying German in school, and was pretty good at it. Then life happened, and we moved to France. I could speak good enough French after 1 year, and speak/understand basically everything after 2 years.

German was PITA, French was pretty easy but obviously I had a personal French teacher, and old lady who was amazing

I don't speak German at all anymore :/
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2025-05-16 10:50:30+00:00
Donation/small payment situation for small artists/content creators is abysmal. You're forced to one of the following:

1. Offer multiple choices for payment => people need to sift through to find what works for them and give up after first fail.

2. Use a payment [processor] aggregator => unreliable (as with this case) and takes a cut (sometimes chained).

3. Use crypto only => the only thing that works reliably, but severely cuts your audience to those comfortable with it.
by something098 | 2025-05-16 10:51:08+00:00
The issue here is that with this approach we have to ask who has to be limited next. Especially if you get older...

>>>You can‘t seriously tell me it‘s not extremely unethical for people with huntington‘s disease or cystic fibrosis to have children. Don't flatter yourself - your genes are basic and ridddled with bad genes. You do not know what time bomb you are carying in your DNA.

The solution that you are offering is quite simple - procreate early as possible and die not in old age and voila - there are no issues in more than 99.99% cases. But something tells me that you are already older than healthy monkey and do not plan to live in a tree - your bones are too old for that and thanks to evolution are not meant for that.

Evolution of humans in future includes even longer lifespan which naturally comes with children produced at much later age than we do now and that comes with diseases to be dealt with, as that is part of evolution. We do not know much about mutations in DNA - they are never good or bad - they are combinations of something. For example - diabetes type 2 seems to be from genes, that allowed humans to survive hunger for long period of time - are those genes bad, because people are obese nowadays? As for mentioned diseases - we value other humans not by DNA, but what they are to us. You would sing a different song, when their offspring would have any of such disease and you are in luck and not planning to have any.