MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kouteiheika | 2025-05-18 08:04:22+00:00
> As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.

She was lucky to be able to retire when she did, as the job of a translator is definitely going to become extinct.

You can already get higher quality translations from machine learning models than you get from the majority of commercial human translations (sans occasional mistakes for which you still need editors to fix), and it's only going to get better. And unlike human translators LLMs don't mangle the translations because they're too lazy to actually translate so they just rewrite the text as that's easier, or (unfortunately this is starting to become more and more common lately) deliberately mistranslate because of their personal political beliefs.
A curated list of fun and flashy text animation libraries
by CoderLim | 2025-05-18 08:05:29+00:00
I came across a few visually satisfying text animation libraries and wanted to share:

- https://github.com/jschr/textillate - https://github.com/alexmacarthur/typeit - https://animejs.com/ - https://lukepeavey.com/split-type (SplitType + GSAP combo)

They're great for landing pages, micro-interactions, or just for fun.

Let me know if you’ve seen other cool text animation projects — especially ones that feel lightweight and easy to plug into a basic site.
by chronid | 2025-05-18 08:06:41+00:00
This is what home automation was supposed to be. You shouldn't be looking at it, it should just help you silently and reduce the amount of things you have to care about.

Turning lights off, closing shutters when it goes dark, handling temperature and CO2 concentrations, etc.

I feel people have a need to look at dashboards, have screens, etc (maybe it's some sort of sympathetic reaction about looking at dashboards all day at work?) instead of letting go. Dashboards should be looked at if something is wrong and automation is failing.
by xlii | 2025-05-18 08:06:51+00:00
I find the article interesting and well written. There might be some theory crafting but it resonates with my personal experience, especially this:

> The expert’s intuition is often formidable, but rarely comprehensible. This inability to clearly explain their decisions is what makes it so useful for novices to spend time with experts.

I really like spending time with novices, especially if they are truly interested in the domain. It’s symbiotic because it also challenges my own opinions and judgements and the boost often is for everyone.

It’s not surprising though that it is hard to explain rationale. How one can fit 2 years of pain in a sentence, a paragraph or even day long story?

Direct interaction allows to shorten distance because it aligns on exact personal level. We find the efficient channels of communication based on prior experience, so it’s not building one filar from ground up to have a bridge, but instead use the almost-same-level and build upon it on both sides.
by procaryote | 2025-05-18 08:06:52+00:00
Python has compounding problems that make it extremely tricky though.

If it was just slow because it was interpreted they could easily have added a good JIT or transpiler by now, but it's also extremely dynamic so anything can change at any time, and the type mess doesn't help.

If it was just slow one could parallelise, but it has a GIL (although they're finally trying to fix it), so one needs multiple processes.

If it just had a GIL but was somewhat fast, multiple processes would be OK, but as it is also terribly slow, any single process can easily hit its performance limit if one request or task is slow. If you make the code async to fix that you either get threads or extremely complex cooperative multitasking code that keeps breaking when there's some bit of slow performance or blocking you missed

If the problem was just the GIL, but it was OK fast and had a good async model, you could run enough processes to cope, but it's slow so you need a ridiculous number, which has knock-on effects on needing a silly number of database/api connections

I've tried very hard to make this work, but when you can replace 100 servers struggling to serve the load on python with 3 servers running Java (and you only have 3 because of redundancy as a single one can deal with the load), you kinda give up on using python for a web context

If you want a dynamic web backend language that's fast to write, typescript is a much better option, if you can cope with the dependency mess

If it's a tiny thing that won't need to scale or is easy to rewrite if it does, I guess python is ok
by int_19h | 2025-05-18 08:07:04+00:00
The reason why it's not unreasonable for German is because those digraphs were the origin of umlaut.

You have a vowel that is roughly in between "o" and "e" as used by Latin, so you start by writing it thus: oe

That feels too long, so you make it a digraph: œ

Some people still think that's too long, so you start putting "e" on top instead: oͤ

That tiny "e" on top is kinda tricky to write in full, though, and slows things down, so handwriting eventually trims it down to just two vertical strokes: ő

Lastly the strokes themselves become shorter and shorter until they become points: ö

But since it's been "e" all along, the old convention still remains, and is arguably just as German as the umlaut diacritic. It's not something imposed on the language from the outside, as is usually the case with latinization of non-Latin-based scripts.

Coincidentally, this is also the origin of Swedish å (literally "o" over "a") and Spanish ñ (literally double "n", with one written on top of another)
by sahndhamzani | 2025-05-18 08:07:44+00:00
I built NodeFlow AI (https://get.nodeflowai.com) at 18 because I was drowning in content research—dozens of tabs, scattered notes, and disconnected ideas.

NodeFlow is a visual AI workspace where you can:

Connect multiple content sources in one visual canvas: • YouTube videos (automatically transcribed) • TikTok and Instagram content • Websites and articles • PDF documents and Google Drive files • Images and screenshots • Voice notes and recordings • LinkedIn posts and profiles • Twitter/X threads • Facebook Ads and more

Create visual relationships between different sources by connecting them on the canvas

Group related content into clusters that provide context for AI

Let AI analyze your sources to identify patterns, trends, and insights

Generate content that maintains your authentic voice while incorporating viral elements

The key insight: While most AI tools are text-prompt based, NodeFlow creates a visual environment where you can see relationships between ideas—similar to how your brain actually works. This visual approach helps uncover connections that text-only tools miss.

Content creators are using NodeFlow to generate a month of content in hours instead of weeks. Marketers are creating high-converting sales copy by visually mapping customer testimonials, competitor messaging, and product benefits. Researchers are organizing complex information from multiple sources and discovering insights they'd miss with linear note-taking.

Our approach combines the visual thinking of tools like Miro with the AI capabilities of ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepSeek—all in one workspace designed specifically for content creation.

Would love feedback from the HN community on our approach to visual AI workspaces and content creation. What other use cases do you see for this type of visual + AI integration?
by nonrandomstring | 2025-05-18 08:08:23+00:00
Notable line:

"framing the narrative around the technology is far more important than the technology itself"

We're on the umpteenth cycle of this and we all seem very slow to learn the pattern. I tried to express it in "Chindogu" [0] but since then "AI" hype has taken the fake technological narrative to a whole new level.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/chindogu/
by verisimi | 2025-05-18 08:10:58+00:00
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.

I tend to think that humans historically have had very isolated, independent experiences. It is only recently with mass media that we all share a collective experience.

I take your point that kids today are not having a shared one-directional (tv to person) experience. However, they are sharing apps, with that data being intermediated. It is uni-directional too, so more immersive.

I tend to see technology, and the direction of travel, as highly collectivising rather less of a shared cultural experience. Everyone is endlessly exposed to exciting ideas and content that are not self-generated.

So, collectivised thinking UP, independent thinking DOWN.
by int_19h | 2025-05-18 08:11:09+00:00
Wait until you hear about adjective and verb gendering. ~

On a more serious note, it's a backwards compatibility thing. Taking a language with grammatical gender and removing it changes the way it looks and sounds rather drastically - more so for some than others. Needless to say, existing speakers are unlikely to appreciate it even if they don't care for gender qua gender.

(See also: numerous polls on how native Spanish speakers react to "Latinx" etc)
by whilenot-dev | 2025-05-18 08:13:38+00:00
I wasn't referring to the cinematography. While that one's certainly noticeable, I think the way the shows narrative is structured and builds up over time is the true leap. The X-Files or Twin Peaks were maybe more cohesive, but that's also because mystery box shows wouldn't work very well any other way. Maybe that's it... cohesiveness found its way into TV productions, and it took mystery box shows to make that quality really obvious as a recipe?
by lhl | 2025-05-18 08:13:46+00:00
On my shotengai there are many cash only shops and some cashless shops right next to it. I've also seen a lot of shops that are cash except for PayPay (presumably incentivized, or maybe they can support it without additional hardware). While it's a bit annoying, it's still better than the alternative (payment monopolies). The only thing that does irk me a little is that JR stations only support swipe, not touch pay for credit cards. I'm a bit undecided if that's just due to legacy hardware or as a subtle nudge to get people to use Suica instead.

For Japanese payments, what's far worse is that so many shops and chains continue to have point systems that require their own point cards (and even the ones with apps seem to have awful slow UIs, at least on my iPhone).
by hacker_v_s | 2025-05-18 08:14:50+00:00
At IdeaboxAI, As an AI startup we have firsthand experience in architecting solutions for various customer use cases. In fact, we find that 4 out of 5 such use cases directly or indirectly require the integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to generate SQL queries. We believe this is primarily because structured data sources have consistently dominated the market for several decades and you can’t just ignore them. One of the main challenges we have faced is moving from POC stage to productionizing these solution.
by Symbiote | 2025-05-18 08:14:57+00:00
I've had the opposite: I entered a large station at the west entrance as a transfer from a local train run by a different company. The platform I needed was next to the east entrance. Fine. On the platform was a sign (in English!) reminding tourists they needed a seat reservation, which I hadn't purchased.

The sign said the machine to issue the seat supplements was at the east entrance — the other side of the gates from me, of course.

The guard at the gates understood me, but said I must exit back the way I came, i.e. all the way back to the west entrance. That side of the station 'belonged' to the other railway company, and there wasn't a machine to sell the ticket I needed. I could either walk the really long way around by road (not through the station) or queue at the general ticket office.

So I missed that train.

In general, I found the train ticketing system for regional or long-distance trains needlessly complicated compared to Europe, with base tickets, express supplements and seat reservations all separate fees, and coming as 1, 2 or 3 bits of paper depending on I know not what.

On one occasion a journey with a transfer came on 7 separate tickets. (Of course, the Japanese approach to this problem is not to simplify the ticketing system, but to invent a machine that can suck in all 7 tickets, cancel the relevant ones, and discharge them neatly arranged.)
by mondrian | 2025-05-18 08:15:05+00:00
Also in the vicinity: https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...

There's also distillation, where you can drastically improve a small model by training it on chains of thoughts of larger models. You can't achieve the same performance by training on original human texts. This suggests that those chains of thoughts reliably contain "densely packed reasoning", meaning the LLM probably has developed internal clusters of "reasoning circuitry", loosely speaking.
by DavidPiper | 2025-05-18 08:15:12+00:00
I agree with you that it's becoming the new normal. I just don't think the new normal is better, and the old normal still exists.

We opine the enshittification of social media platforms, but seem to largely ignore the enshittification of our in-person social norms and culture by those same platforms.

One of the reasons you have to get people in young (to any product) is so that they forget or just don't even realise/consider what life is could be like without it.

EDIT: There are definitely cultural norms and situations that the current norm improves upon too - perhaps regression to the mean is a better descriptor than enshittification depending on the incoming perspective.
by yorwba | 2025-05-18 08:15:26+00:00
OpenAI doesn't have an existing business based on licensing Studio Ghibli content, so the only option Studio Ghibli has to stop them is to sue them and hope that OpenAI is found to have infringed their copyright.

Bilibili does have an existing business based on licensing Studio Ghibli content, so Studio Ghibli can threaten to refuse to sell them distribution rights for future releases, even without a lawsuit.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-05-18 08:16:00+00:00
Honestly, the problem is, in most of the cities, people who drive almost never bike. If everyone biked, while driving, you would somewhat understand how the person on the bike reacts to their surroundings.

Tokyo is pretty sweet to bike around right now, despite the lack of dedicated bike lanes. It’s not as great as my times in Netherlands / Denmark, but it’s great nevertheless. It’s a bit weird, because almost everyone switches between roads and sidewalks, but you get used to it. For that, you need to make biking the superior mode of transportation for certain trips. With e-bikes, that is the case for a lot of activities within Tokyo.
by eterm | 2025-05-18 08:16:16+00:00
I very much agree to get to work tackling the things no-one else enjoys, especially if you find you enjoy it.

I learned fairly early on that I enjoy debugging and fixing bugs far more than I enjoy greenfield development. This seems to be less common than yearning for fresh projects to work on, but it also makes me valuable to have on a team.

Debugging is an absolute joy, it's like a two-layer puzzle.

There's the immediate puzzle of "What's causing this errant behaviour", in which you mechanically dissect the code. You figure out the state the program needs to be in to trip the reported fault. This can be easy or difficult.

There's also a secondary puzzle of, "What was the programmer# who wrote this thinking?". This is the enjoyable part. The root cause isn't "Here on line 53, we were multiplying Foo by Bar when we should have been Scrobbling Foo". The root cause is that someone thought that's what needed to happen ( and with PRs, someone else signed it off ).

That secondary aspect is fascinating, because it can shine a light on misunderstandings about the product or the API. It'll also lead to reflection and introspection because occassionally you must stop to think, "What if they were right?".

Every bug in a program is a learning opportunity. It's an opporunity to expand the understanding of the system, an opportunity to fix procedures or approaches to writing code so it doesn't slip through next time.

One of the sad things about the march of AI, is that there's no longer any of that psychology or learning. The answer to, "Why was it written this way?" becomes, "Because the LLM said so".

# That programmer might be your past self, but as they say, "the past is a foreign country", and it can sometimes be harder to put yourself in your past mindset than someone elses.
by anovikov | 2025-05-18 08:17:23+00:00
In case of India vs Pakistan, isn't the situation clear? India and Pakistan are sworn enemies and the conflict between them will never cease for as long as both nations exist. And a clean victory of India over Pakistan, is possible, even if somewhat costly. It's not like Russia vs Ukraine situation because no one will be seriously hurt or feel threatened if Pakistan ceases - India is a more civilised country and Pakistan's current neighbours will feel safer if it is replaced by India, so no one is likely to help Pakistan. So why not just go for it?
by cgio | 2025-05-18 08:17:24+00:00
I know many push batch systems, e.g. all the csv type pushed onto s3 and processed in an event based pipeline. Even for non event based, the fact that I schedule a batch does not make a pipeline pull. Pull is when I control the timing AND query. In my view the dichotomy stream vs batch is meaningful. The fact that there are also combinations where a stream is supported by batch does not invalidate the differences.
by riffraff | 2025-05-18 08:17:31+00:00
I think Taylor Swift is actually a perfect example, it's quite common to hear people say "I don't know any song by her beyond shake it off".

I challenge anyone from the '80s not to know of a few songs by Madonna or Michael Jackson.

Taylor is huge with some fans and completely unknown to her not-fans and there seem to be a steel transition between the two states.
by Izkata | 2025-05-18 08:18:05+00:00
> Yeah that's my goal -- basically I want to be able to control the devices from anything web connected (and ideally, the same program running in multiple places).

HomeAssistant provides a REST API for all devices connected to it. I don't even use its automation features, I just use it for the API to control my ZWave devices from other stuff.

https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/api/rest/ (POST to /api/services/ to control remotely)

(Granted it's pretty heavy if that's the only feature you want, but hey, what you want does exist)
by throwaway290 | 2025-05-18 08:18:50+00:00
Do you think that when you are making something non-physical that can be copied with zero effort (like a programmer who makes a cool little app) then you can only do this for a living and fairly if there is some ability to restrict copying?

if you can pass it to your kids then it also breaks the above. I have some nice non-appstore indie apps I bought as one time purchase, they still call some billing API. they work if I block them with a firewall but they probably will stop working after a reinstall and if billing api dies they are forever in trial mode. do I blame the dev for make a living?
by 10000truths | 2025-05-18 08:18:59+00:00
"latency" and "throughput" are only mentioned in passing in the article, but that is really the crux of the whole "streaming vs. batch" thing. You can implement a stream-like thing with small, frequent batches of data, and you can implement a batch-like thing with a large-buffered stream that is infrequently flushed. What matters is how much you prioritize latency over throughput, or vice versa. More importantly, this can be quantified - multiply latency and throughput, and you get buffer/batch size. Congratulations, you've stumbled across Little's Law, one of the fundamental tenets of queuing theory!
by baq | 2025-05-18 08:21:55+00:00
> Second when HA decided that their supported Python version was greater, than Debian Stable's and FreeBSD stable's Python version.

This is a Python problem, inelegantly solved by docker. Nowadays you could probably use uv, but see below...

> HA might be a great system when set up once and left alone, but nobody seems to be doing that.

Everybody except tinkerers do exactly that, they just don't run Debian stable or FreeBSD and don't really comment about anything anywhere. They run HAOS or Ubuntu+Docker.
by microtonal | 2025-05-18 08:22:05+00:00
Agreed. We used to use Homekit, then we switched to SmartThings because it supports Z-Wave and Zigbee and that's about it. I rarely look at the app at all, but it does useful things like warning me when the humidity is too low (which is an issue in our apartment), automatically switches off the infrared heat panel when I leave home and I forgot to turn it off, and something SmartThings or Hue changes the light intensity/tint based on the time of the day. The robovac also works from SmartThings (which is nice, because I don't have to deal with another platform).

For most people that I know that use HA, it's more of an hobby than a thing you set up once and then blends away in the background.

I tried HA a few times and it was way too much effort for something that I do not want to spend a lot of time on.
by deepsun | 2025-05-18 08:22:14+00:00
Good question, for me it was always the focus, e.g. systems programming is an infrastructure to build applications, in contrast to applications themselves. In server applications we really don't care if something takes 100 bytes of RAM when it could take 1 byte. RAM is cheap, engineers are expensive. So something like Rust doesn't make sense to use.

Maybe I'm using the terminology wrong, and it's actually Applications Programming, but it's easy to confuse with mobile/desktop applications, where RAM does matter. In servers we pay for RAM/CPUs ourselves.
by jrs235 | 2025-05-18 08:22:54+00:00
They may have been been "fully staffed" according to the "new" "fully staffed" number which could be not enough to perform all the duties and responsibilities reliably and without disruptions. I've been on teams that ought to have 5-10 people minimally wearing all the hats but are only by budgeted for and allow 3 by upper management. Those teams, according to the decision makers are fully staffed, even though they are inadequate.

Edit: and during death marches those can be worked overtime on weekends to make a deadline. They're "fully staffed" and work for the short-term until burnout and turnover begins. Then those projects are always behind.
by jononor | 2025-05-18 08:24:24+00:00
I love decision trees. Conceptually simple, computational efficient and giving very good results for a lot of tasks. I especially use them on microcontroller grade system, via emlearn - which converts scikit-learn models to embedded friendly C code.

These articles are a good and pretty comprehensive introduction. I would have loved to have even more examples around the bias/variance trade off for forests, it is a key concept that not all practitioners have integrated.
by alok-g | 2025-05-18 08:25:28+00:00
More than a decade back, I used to do this using firewall rules. Ot used to be a single-click firewall setting to disable all apps by default, have a pop-up show up when an app not already in the rule set would try to access the Internet, and thus keep building / refining the rules.

One workaround apps had was to open a browser window to send information over.

There's no reason I would want mouse / keyboard / pen-tablet / printer, etc. drivers to be accessing the Internet, not even for checking for updates. And there's no real reason for these drivers to be more than a kew KB in size, leave alone 100+ MBs like these have been since ages.
by SafeDusk | 2025-05-18 08:27:20+00:00
Exciting to see a fellow builder in the space! Love how memory management and observability is built-in.

Today, I just re-implemented Google's AlphaEvolve for Perlin noises using my own minimal agentic framework (https://toolkami.com/alphaevolve-toolkami-style/), will probably steal a trick or two from you.