MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Near-perfect English AI translation of a classic of Japanese literature
by sunwood | 2025-05-20 01:25:06+00:00
Recently I launched BookTranslate.ai but at launch there wasn't really anything to see on the site. I should have thought about creating public demos before I launched, but now I added a few, including this one.

I ran a blind analysis on the translation with Gemini: https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts/1ZqeijNulqinp7D7wK1J...

This is huge, in my opinion. I don't mean it to brag or sell, I mean it as a matter of fact that no other software can produce this level of quality right now and people thought machine translation will never be capable of this. I'm constantly amazed by how good the output of this system is and I have barely been able to sleep because of the excitement for days haha

There is another full book demo on the site too, a non-fiction french to english translation of a 19th century political philosophy book which is similarly amazing in terms of quality: https://www.booktranslate.ai/public-translations/u9cj7ld46vf...

It rivals any human translation, and frankly, I've been in the publishing business for a decade and I can say it blows away half of them because there is so many bad translation out there in the bookstores.

Sorry if I sound salesy. I don't think ppl here are much interested in buying book translations anyway, its just that I genuinely think this is a gamechanger for the whole industry.

A translation like this takes about an hour or two btw.
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-05-20 01:25:42+00:00
Oh, yeah, duh. Sorry about that. The file picker route is generally fine*, though I still think the edge cases where I want a program to be able to modify another program's files in-place are numerous enough that I don't think it should become a "soft-standard" on desktop environments.

*As long as it isn't GTK browser on Windows, which absolutely should be a U.N. matter.
by 6510 | 2025-05-20 01:25:47+00:00
Jack Ma had a fun perspective[1] (2017)

Not precisely his words but something like:

US companies made a shit ton of money. Then in 30 years the US spend 14.2 T$ on 13 wars.

What if they spend part of that money on infrastructure, helping the white collars and the blue collars - no matter how strategically good it is you are suppose to spend money on your own people.[...]

The money goes to Wallstreet and in 2008 the financial crisis wiped out 19.2 T$

What if that money was in stead spend on developing industry?

China did not steal US jobs, the US didn't distribute the money in a proper way.

[1]- https://youtu.be/0jfYSncSTEY?t=43
by Falkon1313 | 2025-05-20 01:26:14+00:00
Yeah, I don't even do that. I just copy the files over if/when I want to. (Do people really not know how to use a basic filesystem to copy files these days?)

But mostly I don't. My work notes are on my work laptop and my personal notes are on my PC. I might copy them onto a mobile device if I'm traveling, but I might not bother. Mobile devices don't have the good keyboard and large screen to really be useful for stuff like that. But I have copied them over before just in case I wanted to find something in them.
by incompatible | 2025-05-20 01:26:54+00:00
This is about deciding for ourselves how we want to live. Evidently, people have different ideas about what sort of society they want. I think it would be best if different communities were permitted to find their own way, with their own systems and rules, instead of trying to impose a "morality" on others. It just turns things into a zero-sum game of power and control, and we know how that turns out.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-20 01:27:55+00:00
subsidies are bad but they are there not for big solar, but for big not smart brains which need to see freaking solar panels on neighbors roof to want that too.

solar + 12 hour LiFePO storage is cheaper than nuclear TCO, in all US territories south of canada. today ( except tariffs, so... who benefits? big solar or big russia, big UAE ? ) get ......! XD

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/24/elon-musk...
by tuatoru | 2025-05-20 01:28:23+00:00
Neal was referring to Tom Nagel's famous essay, "What is it Like to be a Bat?".

From wikipedia: "The paper presents several difficulties posed by phenomenal consciousness, including the potential insolubility of the mind–body problem owing to "facts beyond the reach of human concepts", the limits of objectivity and reductionism, the "phenomenological features" of subjective experience, the limits of human imagination, and what it means to be a particular, conscious thing."

It would be taken for granted by nearly all participants in such bunfights that all of the others are familiar with that essay and the discussion it provoked.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
by DangitBobby | 2025-05-20 01:29:54+00:00
I am sure anti-intellectualism plays no small part, but I believe it's more that we have adopted a culture of greed at all levels, not just at the top of the income distribution. We are not willing to make even small sacrifices to make things better for other (present and future) Americans. I don't think that's always been true.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-20 01:32:00+00:00
It takes practice, skill, and self-actualization, to become a really good listener. I know I’m not there, yet, and I’ve been at it, a long time. I suspect most folks aren’t so good at it.

It’s entirely possible that LLMs could make it so that people expect superhuman patience from other people.

I think there was a post, here, a few days ago, about people being “lost” to LLMs.
by naikrovek | 2025-05-20 01:32:18+00:00
People that comment things like this probably have their heart in the right place, but they do not understand just how aggressive Microsoft is about backwards compatibility.

The only way to get this compatibility in Linux would be to port those features all over to Linux and if that happened the entire planet would implode because everyone would say “I knew it! Embrace Extend Extinguish!” At the same time.
by csa | 2025-05-20 01:32:35+00:00
> When did stakeholder capitalism magically pop up and made industrialization not "downright inhumane"?

When socialism and communism were perceived as legitimate ideological threats/alternatives to democracy and capitalism.

While we know now that communism as an ideology (at least as it was practiced in the mid-20th century at the nation-state level) is not long-term viable, this was not considered a certainty at that time.

So many of the updated social contracts (both explicit and implicit) that were put into place in the mid-20th century were done in an attempt to avoid/prevent a worker revolution.

Imho, another wave of mass discontent is brewing — the elites in the US are very much out of touch with or ambivalent to the needs of the rest of the country.
by trod1234 | 2025-05-20 01:32:52+00:00
> Who cares about ....

Secure shelter is a necessary pre-requisite to having and raising children. The low birth-rate is a direct result of disadvantaged capital formation, selection interference, and the chaotic and growingly insecure future economically.

Housing is a great and tax favored investment if you know what you are doing. Cash flow is king. That said, rent-seeking behavior is non-productive, and vile in a lot of ways, and equally regulation to address issues is so poorly written that it ends up destroying the market wholesale.

If you take a look at the demographics and trends, we may actually end up having a housing surplus within a decade.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-05-20 01:34:15+00:00
It's not good to exaggerate financial ups & downs but some things can get more foolish than that when people try to minimize it or paint over it.

As time goes by, more people seem to need more excuses to maintain a position that there was not irreversible devastating damage to the US economy, and in tandem the dollar itself. They want to believe that things like that can never be the direct result of Presidential malfeasance which can get out of hand.

If you were there at the time and had very much professional exposure to Wall Street at all, as a witness you would have observed 2008 as a non-event compared to 1973.

Without much advanced math very many people saw it coming right away in 1971 before the next logical events even began to unfold. There were still plenty of people born in the 19th century who could tell you exactly how it was going to be. They were just not the majority. The stock market did end up crashing like nothing had since 1929.

It was good to have advice from those with serious lived experiences to help navigate such turbulent times.
by mparis | 2025-05-20 01:36:01+00:00
This project resonates with me a lot. Call me old-fashioned, but I still appreciate a nice ole' deterministic program that I can fully understand and operate reliably.

With that said, there is undoubtedly still room to innovate on the long-tail of RPA. In the healthcare domain, for example, there are 1000s of sites that might need to be scraped occasionally, somewhat transactionally as e.g. a new patient comes in. However, there are other sites that need regular attention and even the smallest of errors can be catastrophic.

The combination of browser-use & workflow-use seems like a really natural fit for such use cases. Nice work!

We've also experimented with the self-healing ideas you are playing with here. In our case, we wrote a chrome extension that connects to an LLM of your choice as well as a process running locally on your machine. You write a description of the job to be done, click around the browser, and then click "go". The extension grabs all the context, asks the LLM to write a typescript program, sends that typescript program to the local process where it is compiled & type-checked against our internal workflow harness, and then immediately allows you to execute the program against your existing, open browser context.

We've found that even this basic loop is outrageously productive. If the script doesn't do what you expect, there is a big "FIX IT" button that lets you tweak and try again. For the record, we're not a competitor and have no intention of trying to sell/offer this extension externally.

I suspect one of the harder parts about this whole ordeal will be how to integrate with the rest of the workflow stack. For us, we've really appreciated the fact that our extension outputs typescript that seamlessly fits into our stack and that is more easily verifiable than JSON. The TS target also allows us to do nice things like tell the self-healing bot which libraries will be available so that e.g. it can use `date-fns` instead of `Date`. We've also thought about adopting more traditional workflow tools like Temporal to manage the core workflow logic, vending out the browser connectivity remotely. Curious how you guys are thinking about this?

Rooting for you guys, we will be sure to keep an eye on your progress and consider adopting the technology as it matures!

PS. If you like things like this, want to work at a growing health-tech startup, and live in Boston, we're hiring! Reach out here: https://wgwx7h7be0p.typeform.com/to/LV0t8OjI
by irjustin | 2025-05-20 01:37:15+00:00
> Energy comes from gradients

Way late, sorry, only just saw this. But, mmmm that's not true.

You can have lots of energy, but no differences in a system. If there's no differences you can't actually use any of that. Usable work comes from the gradients/differences in energy. Energy isn't a measure of usable work. It's a measure of capacity and confusingly, just because you have lots of capacity doesn't mean it's usable.

Maxwell's demon is a great example. There's lots of energy in the initial state because of particles bouncing around, but you can't extract anything from that until the demon separates the fast and slow moving particles.

Another example is the Quantum Vacuum field and it's zero-point energy[0]. It has a non-zero energy amount literally everywhere in it's ground state, but it's not usable. You can't make a device that extracts that energy, without paying for it someway else[1].

FYI, I know nothing - I just watch a lot of PBS Spacetime.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_vacuum_state#Non-zero_...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CgquHFM_O8
by jagged-chisel | 2025-05-20 01:38:20+00:00
I’ve been trying to use Copilot for a few days to get some help writing against code stored on GitHub.

Copilot has been pretty useless. It couldn’t maintain context for more than two exchanges.

Copilot: here’s some C code to do that

Me: convert that to $OTHER_LANGUAGE

Copilot: what code would you like me to convert?

Me: the code you just generated

Copilot: if you can upload a file or share a link to the code, I can help you translate it …

It points me in a direction that’s a minimum of 15 degrees off true north (“true north” being the goal for which I am coding), usually closer to 90 degrees. When I ask for code, it hallucinates over half of the API calls.
by fakedang | 2025-05-20 01:39:13+00:00
> You only need about 5-10% of them to do so to start hitting the numbers from my claim.

Dude, a bit more than 1% of Indians pay ANY form of income tax. Assuming that the number of corrupt politicians and people laundering black money is another 15 million (a very very far stretch), that's still 2% of the entire population.

> The number of businessmen who avoid taxes is a significant minority.

Thanks for proving my point.

> Based on the number of people I know who own multiple properties (which makes them dollar millionaires even if you ignore everything else they own), I find it VERY difficult to believe this figure.

Your anecdote means shit compared to statistical data that says otherwise.

> If 8% of the US population can be millionaires, I don't see why 1.5% of the Indian population cannot.

Because again, India is a highly unequal country, with very few opportunity for the brightest and most entrepreneurial. Why has India not manufactured even one hard tech startup yet? Why is it so hard to get even one manufacturing unit up without the blessings of some babus and Lalas? That's why India is poor and unequal. No surprise why people who move out of India tend to be more successful, especially those who migrate to the US.

> We may not agree upon a number, but I believe the figure is much, much larger than what the official figures state

By that respect, Switzerland would still have a lot more millionaires simply by virtue of the number of people parking their assets there. There are no official figures for that either.
by braiamp | 2025-05-20 01:40:20+00:00
Which makes sense depending on what the reach of the forecast is on geographical scales. In my country, you have 6-7 meteorological zones that needs predictions, but the forecasters would always say "area so-so will have rains", because those meteorological zones don't fit neatly into our administrative distributions. That also means that if a administrative area is split between two zones, is a 50-50 whenever or not the prediction will turn out to be accurate.
by fracus | 2025-05-20 01:40:21+00:00
This web site was so enlightening. I imagine it could often be difficult to put theory to practice as in real life there are so many variables to consider and many of them we can't quantify. Some of the demos illustrated complete opposite results due to a 1% change in the miscommunication variable. But I will say the 3 main takeaways they give you were more general and certainly applicable to real life.
by mlinhares | 2025-05-20 01:41:27+00:00
get-rich-quick schemes have been the bread and butter of the self-help/manosphere/conservative environment for quite a while. Its not a mistake that most "famous" people in these circles are either selling courses to make you "rich" or supplements to make you "strong".

and with a population desperate for any improvement in life these things end up finding a place, just like all the betting platforms all over the place. the only reason to bet is if you think you'll win.
by giantg2 | 2025-05-20 01:41:36+00:00
Depends on what you're doing with the jeans. I've never worn my normal jeans out I'm just a year. I also only wash them if they smell or are visibly dirty. If I'm doing something particularly messy or rough, I use my older jeans. It's similar to the old wisdom that two pairs of boots used together will last longer than two pairs consecutively, because you can "rest" the wet ones which puts less wear on them.

Someone else mentioned Carhart. I have some Duluth cool max pants that are also highly durable.
by robomartin | 2025-05-20 01:42:39+00:00
> For example, I use Solidworks, so I need to run windows.

Right. One of the things a lot of people don't get is the extent to which multidisciplinary workflows require Windows. This is particularly true of web-centric software engineers who simply do not have any exposure to the rest of the engineering universe.

Years ago this was the reason we had to drop using Raspberry Pi's little embedded microcontroller. The company is Linux-centric to such an extent that they simply could not comprehend how telling someone "Just switch to Linux" is in a range between impossible and nonsensical. They were, effectively, asking people to upend their PLM process just for the sake of using a little $0.50 part. You would have to do things like store entire OS images and configurations just to be able to reconstruct and maintain a design iteration from a few years ago.

WSL2 is pretty good. We still haven't fully integrated this into PLM workflows though. That said, what we've done on our machines was to install a separate SSD for WSL2. With that in place, backing-up and maintaining Linux distributions or distributions created in support of a project is much, much easier. This, effectively, in some ways, isolates WSL2 distributions from Windows. I can clone that drive and move it from a Windows 10 machine to a Windows 11 machine and life is good.

For AI workflows with NVIDIA GPU's WSL2 is less than ideal. I don't know if things have changed in this domain since I last looked. Our conclusion from a while back was that, if you have to do AI with the usual toolchains, you need to be on a machine running Linux natively rather than a VM running under Windows. It would be fantastic if this changed and one could run AI workflows on WSL2 without CUDA and other issues. Like I said, I have not checked in probably a year, maybe things are better now?

EDIT: The other reality is that one can have a nice powerful Linux machine next to the Windows box and simply SSH into it to work. Most good IDE's these days support remote development as well. If you are doing something serious, this is probably the best setup. This is what we do.
by gerdesj | 2025-05-20 01:42:51+00:00
Weather forecasts are based on models and extrapolation based on a lot of factors. I'm not too certain but I think that the smallest weather model cell size is about two miles squared or perhaps cubed - I don't know how the models work.

Weather forecast distribution is by "news". News is deployed at mostly fixed intervals.

Anecdote: In Yeovil, Somerset, UK. The topography here (its quite hilly here in a county with some fairly famous "levels") means that it can be pissing down with rain on one side of the town and be dry on the other side and so on.

Weather forecasting is a quite hard problem. The really hard problem is delivering it.
by naikrovek | 2025-05-20 01:42:59+00:00
WSL isn’t Linux implemented in Windows. WSL 1 was, but it is not the good version of WSL that most use.

WSL 2 is a special purpose VM which has ties into Windows in a few key ways to make interoperability easier. You can run a program on Windows and pipe its output to a Linux program for example. Windows and WSL can trade system RAM back and forth as needed. Networking between the two is very smooth.

You can recompile the kernel for WSL all you want, and many do. Microsoft make their changes public as required by the GPL. You can use your own kernel without anything from Microsoft. You can easily create your own WSL distributions, customized to your hearts content.

It’s more than the sum of its parts, really. Feels that way to me, anyway.
by gruez | 2025-05-20 01:43:22+00:00
>Sorry are you asking me to prove that stakeholder capitalism existed from the ~1940s to the ~1970s? I'm not going to give a 200 level Business History course in a Hacker News comment thread. You can use Google.

Given that the wikipedia article says that a 1984 book was "widely cited in the field as being the foundation of stakeholder theory", that the first mention was in 1912, and there's nothing about the post-war period or communism, I'm very skeptical that your "~1940s to the ~1970s" window for stakeholder capitalism was defined in a rigorous way. It seems far more likely you're committing the texas sharpshooter's fallacy by finding a period of american prosperity (ie. "~1940s to the ~1970s"), defining that to be "stakeholder capitalism", and concluding that it was a great success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_theory

>China doesn't have stakeholder capitalism.

You're not really refuting the point. "Common prosperity" sounds a lot like stakeholder capitalism, specifically improving the lives of other citizens/the country as a whole, rather than the company.
by gnabgib | 2025-05-20 01:43:34+00:00
Happened 6 days ago (22 points, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43973353

Since then: Coinbase says hackers bribed staff to steal customer data, demanding $20M ransom (417 points, 4 days ago, 517 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43996307
by crq-yml | 2025-05-20 01:44:00+00:00
I think the reason, if you had to pin it down to one instead of "confluence of factors", could be almost entirely demographics:

* The Boomers, an extremely large generation, enter the workforce in number in the 70's...

* Simultaneously, the older generations with more of the industrial and trades know-how that powered the mid-century economy are now retiring.

* The new focus of the economy in the 70's involved a restructuring around imported-goods, services, high tech, with corresponding winners and losers.

* Part of this restructuring also involved a revamped military to roll out the new "smart weapons" and run a professionalized military instead of the conscription troops that fought in Vietnam.

When you add those trends together, it will look like a stagnant graph: investing in high-tech doesn't come with immediate payoffs, and the new cohort is larger so they have to compete more intensively for top positions while not having the job experiences of the previous. DoD spending has an outsized influence on the balance sheet, and 1994 marks the start of the Internet boom, which reflects the tech sector's move away from defense contracts(the end of the Cold War came with major layoffs in defense) and towards VC moonshots, right around the same time that Gen X is entering - a much smaller generation. The Boomers are at that point entering more senior career roles; both cohorts are productive in the sense of facilitating deskilling, offshoring and cost-cutting, which make the balance sheets of the 90's look great, and reflective in many cases of genuine efficiencies that were now coming to fruition.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-20 01:44:51+00:00
So one of their servers had a /heapdump endpoint that publicly served a heap dump of the server? This whole saga is out of control.

This group didn’t really “publish” anything, though. They’re offering access to journalists through a request form. They’re also not saying how much actual message content they have because the 410GB of heap dumps makes for a bigger headline number.
by FrostKiwi | 2025-05-20 01:46:51+00:00
AFAIK, in Switzerland you can carry the Dr. title after completing medical school and (relatively) small additional thesis, whereas in Germany you need a full academic dissertation to be able to carry a Dr. title, easily adding a couple of years.

It's wild how different rules are from country to country, considering historically big pushes for standardization like the bologna process.