MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by genocidicbunny | 2025-05-19 11:40:12+00:00
Not only the titles, but also the audio track. There's a few youtubers I regularly watch who are trying to branch out into some additional languages by providing fan-made translated audio tracks, and english is sometimes one of those. Every single time I watch one of those videos, I have to manually set the language back to the original because often the translations lose some of the word play or hidden meaning in the original language. Often it also means I need to rewind the video because it started playing before all the controls have loaded (because youtube hates FF with youtube-related extensions) and I could swap the language track back.

One of the sister replies linked to an extension to help with that, which I'm going to give a try, but it's annoying that there's not a simple toggle in the youtube settings to tell it to always use the original language. On the rare occasion that I want to use the translated audio track, I can do _that_ on my own; I speak enough languages that this is a very rare occasion with the type of content I watch.

This isn't even something I can understand as them being hostile to ad blocking or wanting to push ads. This is a 'convenience' feature that is just poorly implemented. But I'm sure there's some PM that got a pat on the back for it.
by dkjaudyeqooe | 2025-05-19 11:40:27+00:00
Indeed, somehow Google is the worst offender with this.

Lately they've decided that auto translating the local language into English in Maps reviews is the wrong thing to do. They translate every other language into English but somehow since I live in this place I must speak the local language too, so I don't need that in English.

Ditto for search results. Surely you want Wikipedia in the local language! I mean you've been there for so long! You search for things in the local language, surely that's a sign of your preference and not the fact that searching for things locally requires use of the local language.

This also applies to so much other "we must make our software so smart and guess all your preferences". Google fails so consistently at this I cannot understand why they persist other than some sort of misplaced corporate self regard.
Show HN: Open-source dashboard for your domain experts to improve your AI Agents
by mellowcookie | 2025-05-19 11:40:34+00:00
Hey HN! We built EvalKit, a library you embed to capture agent actions and a UI where domain experts give feedback, evaluate and improve AI agents.

We experienced, in large agentic systems, prompt-engineering or auto-prompt improvement tool can get accuracy from 0 to 50% but for increasing accuracy to 100% we had to work with domain experts. Example -> In a law ai agent, lawyers are needed because law is complex and lawyers have a deeper context compared to non-lawyers.

Other evaluation tools in the market focus on the experience of the developer and we are focusing on making as easy as possible for your domain experts to improve agentic systems on their own. Each agent action automatically routes a feedback request to the appropriate domain expert; once they respond, the system pinpoints the responsible agent and applies the necessary change which they can test.

We’re borrowing our OSS business model from Supabase who makes it easy to self-host with features reserved for enterprise and a paid version for managed cloud service. Right now, all of our code is available under a permissive license (MIT).

We’re admittedly early, and many features are in the process of being built. We would really appreciate a star and feedback on how we can make it useful to you. Thanks!
by exabrial | 2025-05-19 11:41:58+00:00
I’m going to have to disagree. What happened what national ids are expanded to include letters? Or extra digits? I’ve lived through this mess a few times in the migrations are painful and take a ton of time away from solving actual business problems. For example: us telephone numbers. The exchange (middle 3 digits), used to physically Geolocate a consumer, because everybody had land lines. I worked on a project and an investment firm that was using it as a primary key to identify a users’s location. Holy old macro was that an unbelievably expensive and painful migration. Don’t do this.

Instead, follow this principle: never ever use an externally assigned identifier as a primary key in your database.

Instead: link tables with simple integers. Do not use these integers for any other purpose and assume unordered. Never let these integers leave the app. When exchanging information between systems or third parties generate a suitable external identifier with a alphabetical prefix.
by dijit | 2025-05-19 11:42:02+00:00
I think thats bad logic on the server side and not to do with the concept of Accept-Language though.

I would think the ideal prioritisation should probably be:

* Exact (en_GB)

* Exact (fr_CA)

* Soft (en_*) // Any variant of English you might have available

* Soft (fr_*) // Any variant of French you might have available

* Translated. (to first preferred)

for Accept-Language: “en_GB,fr_CA”
by throw0101b | 2025-05-19 11:42:26+00:00
> California should just place an excise carbon tax on gas and diesel cars.

They already have cap-and-trade:

* https://www.c2es.org/content/california-cap-and-trade/

* https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/cap-and-trade-progr...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_policy_of_Calif...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_policy_of_Calif...
by naikrovek | 2025-05-19 11:43:35+00:00
I agree with everything you said.

I remember a time when people in this field were in this field because they wanted to be in this field. They wanted to do a good job. They learned on their own time, and practiced on their own time. They brought those skills into their employer and used those skills to make things better.

Now we have people who view IT as a route to management, and nothing more. They do shit work. They do a lot of it. They don't care.

I long for the time I remember when people actually cared. I feel like I'm one of the remaining sane people in the world.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-05-19 11:43:57+00:00
I still have an old 3930K which is 6 cores at about 3.6Ghz with 16GB of RAM, it was used as a game server for years but its not on now. It consumes about 110Watts at idle, there is no GPU of note (710GT or something like that) but its mostly all the CPU and lack of power control. A newer desktop however with 32GB DDR5 and a 9800X3D will idle at 40Watts with a lot more drives and a modern GPU etc. New machines use considerably less power at idle and when you go back as far as a Pentium 4 those things used 100Watts all the time just for the CPU whether in use or not.

Anything since about the Core 9th gen does behave fairly well as do all the modern era Ryzen processors. There is definitely some CPUs in the middle that had a bunch of issues with power management and had performance issues ramping clockspeed up which was felt on the desktop as latency. Its been for me a major advance of the past 10 generations of CPUs the power management behaviour has improved significantly.
by os2warpman | 2025-05-19 11:44:01+00:00
The kids are alright.

But this is thinly-veiled AI slop vomited onto the web to sell a shitty "Cassette Tape Player, Maypott Portable Cassette Player Cassette Tape Recorder Audio Cassette to Digital Converter via USB, Compatible with PC/Laptops, Built-in Speaker&Headphone, Full Stereo" and that is not alright.
by sikiladho | 2025-05-19 11:45:14+00:00
I’m glad someone said this. As someone from Pakistan whose first language is Sindhi and who detests the imposition of Urdu as a ‘lingua franca,’ I find it very frustrating when Google forces Urdu on Gmail, YouTube, and Search.

It also flips the entire user interface to a right-to-left layout to match Urdu’s writing direction, which feels completely unfamiliar and disorienting to me.
by mobilemidget | 2025-05-19 11:45:23+00:00
Even setting up your own couchdb + livesync should be a small task if one can consider to 'write a whole app' to replace obsidian

edit note, if you want to build something :) please expand livesync or a new plugin to allow easily sharing of self hosted obsidian notes :) All the ones I tried use some 3rd party hosting which I don't like even if its encrypted.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-05-19 11:45:27+00:00
Another annoying version of this is localized google results. I'm originally from country A, live in country B, but work in English, which is not the language of either place.

But google will then localize results to where I am, which typically deprioritizes English results because I'm not in an English speaking country.

You can set your google settings to act as if you're in the US permanently, but then googling anything local/regional will serve results aimed at people a continent away.

All this "guessing what the user wants" has become detrimental to actual UX.
by ramses0 | 2025-05-19 11:46:02+00:00
I'm always happy to find a Colophon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colophon_(publishing)

...it gives a bit of history and behind the scenes of something that is trivial to consume (book, website), but technical to produce.

My grandpa had his own printing company back in the day, and that was one of the the original broadcast technologies. Books, periodicals, businesses, menus, invitations, professional directories... they all filtered through one of the local printing presses.

Practically as well, you'd take a million individual letter pieces, arrange them into plates with pressure-fit clamps, then run 1000 (or more) copies of each page or whatever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting

For bigger runs, they'd "lock" the page into slugs (lines of text) or plates (full pages).

At the end of the job, they'd melt the plates back down, so the colophon could also be considered "hey, this is how you reproduce it for the second printing run... it was Garamond, not Baskerville, and 25% cotton paper, not bond."

In a way, the colophon contains the original spirit of open source, and "opening the HTML pages to see how it's done."
by skybrian | 2025-05-19 11:46:16+00:00
I don’t share the author’s concern about a corporate takeover of mathematics. Most mathematics isn’t of commercial interest. Even when it is, it seems like there would often good reason to share it, like any other source code. Is Lean so different from other programming languages?

Such libraries would need documentation, or nobody would know when to use them, and then sharing is pointless.

If corporations build them, they would have to decide what to contribute to the commons and what to keep private. But that’s no different than any other language.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-19 11:46:34+00:00
> Will it really?

Yes, it will. As they are currently drafted, the EU energy regulation forces France to invest in renewable and shift away from nuclear it already has to avoid missing the mandated European target as nuclear is not considered renewable. Currently France is being routinely fined despite providing Europe with a ton of clean energy.

The situation is beyond silly.
by nottorp | 2025-05-19 11:47:15+00:00
160 W is less than Intel, but still a lot.

And I bet that even with AMD you get 85% of the performance with 50% of the power consumption on any current silicon...

And 85% of the current performance is a lot.

I have an AMD box that I temperature limited from the BIOS (because I was too lazy to look where the power limits were). It never uses more than 100W and it's fast enough.
by kergonath | 2025-05-19 11:47:17+00:00
That’s not quite true. Sure, there is still a lot of proprietary software, but there is also a lot of effort put into going to the right direction. A lot of agencies publish data openly, code for major things like taxes is getting published. Trump helped significantly, but there are audits being done right now on the different kind of proprietary foreign software, with different levels of importance, and shuffling what we can to open alternatives (or closed but European, depending on the field).

The Office365 subscriptions are probably going to go last, because the effort to deploy alternatives and retrain the 200,000 people using them is enormous. It is a very visible aspect that won’t change anytime soon, but it does not mean that there is nothing else happening.

For example, the Renater tools are getting more and more use from all the research and higher education institutions. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it is shifting.
by dp-hackernews | 2025-05-19 11:47:48+00:00
"For five years I ran a guerrilla school program where I had every kid, rich and poor, smart and dipsy, give 320 hours a year of hard community service. Dozens of those kids came back to me years later and told me that this one experience had changed their lives, had taught them to see in new ways, to rethink goals and values. It happened when they were thirteen, in my Lab School program — made possible only because my rich school district was in chaos. When “stability” returned, the lab closed. It was too successful, at too small a cost, to be allowed to continue; we made the expensive, elite programs look bad."
by Saigonautica | 2025-05-19 11:48:24+00:00
I live in a developing Asian country so the numbers and brands in the equation are a bit different.

Anyway:

1. Good midrange Japanese cooking knives. I got one on a steep discount, and now I understand why people pay a premium for them. I even bought a second one.

2. Good brands of Chinese engineering equipment. I bought a Siglent oscilloscope instead of a Hantek / Uni-T one. Before that, I had only bought the cheapest tool sufficient for the job.

I found as I've reached middle-age, I just have a bit less energy to spend struggling with things I use daily. So in these roles I appreciate something that's better quality than I strictly need. I don't come from wealth, and am a notorious cheapskate even by local standards -- but those two things were able to change my mind!
by PaulKeeble | 2025-05-19 11:48:31+00:00
I suspect in CO2e if performance is the limitation of what you are doing then an SSD is going to be less CO2e emitted because you can do it on fewer devices. However if you are just looking for space and the performance isn't an issue then the HDD will be the less CO2e emitting solution for now.

This i think will change however as more of the grid uses renewable energy, there is nothing instrinsic in the silicon process that must be burning CO2, its all electricity based and while it uses a lot of energy it doesn't require burning fuel like making Iron does (at the moment).
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-19 11:48:35+00:00
You'd think that there'd be a robust secondary market for treated rot resistant timber that's "too rotten for trains, but perfect for landscaping". Sure, there's chemicals in it but if it's safe enough to be embedded in untold miles of rail bed then surely it's safe enough for comparable landscaping use.

Like everything else there's probably some 2nd/3rd order consequence of regulatory perversion that prevents it. Like because of the circumstances it wrongly gets classified as hazmat or something.
by npodbielski | 2025-05-19 11:49:27+00:00
I think people like author are positive about us, humanity, being able to build AI or something being very close to that.

I am not.

From the energy efficiency perspective human brain is very, very effective computational machine. Computers are not. Thinking about scale of infrastructure of network of computers being able to achieve similar capabilities and its energy consumption... it would be enormous. With big infrastructure comes high need of maintenance. This is costly and requires a lot of people just to prevent it from breaking down. With a lot of people being in one place, there socioeconomical cost, production, transportation needs to be build around such center. If you have centralized system, you are prone to attack from adversaries. In short I do not think we even close to what author is afraid of. We just closer to beginning to understand what is the need to actually start to think about building AI - if ever possible at all.
by ijustlovemath | 2025-05-19 11:49:35+00:00
have you tried showing them LabVIEW? it ticks tons of boxes:

- graphical

- more advanced (inherently parallel, more useful async data structures like events and queues)

- interfaces with tons of cool hardware

- built in network programming

- pretty powerful debugging

- free with community edition

Once they have the basics down, you could transition them out to a text based language slowly, even using the c/Matlab based text nodes to start
Show HN: A bundle of 270 commercial PNGs for creators – is this valuable?
by minelbu | 2025-05-19 11:50:19+00:00
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Would love your honest feedback: → Is this kind of asset useful? → What would make it more valuable to you?

Thanks for checking it out
by _heimdall | 2025-05-19 11:51:00+00:00
"Huge" may be an overstatement. They laid off 6,000 people which is obviously a lot of individuals losing their jobs but only represents 3% of the company. In today's market a 3% layoff is comparatively small.

I've never heard of a company doing a layoff in the way you describe, eliminating thousands of roles and immediately moving those people into open roles throughout the company. It assumes the employees are fungible and will be a good fit for any open position and would lead to everyone knowing the layoff is coming well before its announced.
by geye1234 | 2025-05-19 11:51:34+00:00
As St. John Henry Newman put it:

"Contemplate the objects of this people's praise, survey their standards, ponder their ideas and judgments, and then tell me whether it is not most evident, from their very notion of the desirable and the excellent, that greatness, and goodness, and sanctity, and sublimity, and truth are unknown to them; and that they not only do not pursue, but do not even admire, those high attributes of the Divine Nature. This is what I am insisting on, not what they actually do or what they are, but what they revere, what they adore, what their gods are. Their god is mammon; I do not mean to say that all seek to be wealthy, but that all bow down before wealth. Wealth is that to which the multitude of men pay an instinctive homage. They measure happiness by wealth; and by wealth they measure respectability. Numbers, I say, there are who never dream that they shall ever be rich themselves, but who still at the sight of wealth feel an involuntary reverence and awe, just as if a rich man must be a good man. They like to be noticed by some particular rich man; they like on some occasion to have spoken with him; they like to know those who know him, to be intimate with his dependants, to have entered his house, nay, to know him by sight. Not, I repeat, that it ever comes into their mind that the like wealth will one day be theirs; not that they see the wealth, for the man who has it may dress, and live, and look like other men; not that they expect to gain some benefit from it: no, theirs is a disinterested homage, it is a homage resulting from an honest, genuine, hearty admiration of wealth for its own sake, such as that pure love which holy men feel for the Maker of all; it is a homage resulting from a profound faith in wealth, from the intimate sentiment of their hearts, that, however a man may look,—poor, mean, starved, decrepit, vulgar; or again, though he may be ignorant, or diseased, or feeble-minded, though he have the character of being a tyrant or a profligate, yet, if he be rich, he differs from all others; if he be rich, he has a gift, a spell, an omnipotence;—that with wealth he may do all things."[0]

There is a reason that money specifically, and not sex or knowledge or socializing or other good things that can get out of hand, is worshiped as a god by so many.

[0] https://www.newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse5.htm...
by astura | 2025-05-19 11:52:24+00:00
>But everyone knows Britney Spears, even if you were never in her target demographic.

You probably think this because you were a child or young adult at the height of her fame.

My parents, who were middle aged at the time, certainly don't know who Brittney Spears is. They may have heard of her, but they couldn't recognize her or name any of her songs.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-05-19 11:52:28+00:00
One of the estimates my Solar system gives me is the amount of CO2 saved from using the system. I save about 6 Tonnes a year for having a 5.5KWp system. That is about 2.2 Tonnes of coal not burnt but its also only about 3 trees worth!

Its quite staggering the amount of CO2 our energy use is actually producing. KGs of CO2 for an items manufacture is pretty normal.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-19 11:52:52+00:00
The referenced reply covers several tiers of wealth and, to be sure, can be simplified to: as you move up in wealth so to does your access to real estate, luxury and political power.

But your comment on Meile, nice kitchen cabinets, sounds like you're looking only for what the next tier above you is enjoying. (And go Bosch for the dishwasher, BTW.)
by decimalenough | 2025-05-19 11:53:30+00:00
I'm generally quite skeptical of AI, but this overstates its case. Two things stand out:

> what LLMs do is string together words in a statistically highly probable manner.

This is not incorrect, but it's no longer a sufficient mental model for reasoning models. For example, while researching new monitors today, I told Gemini to compare $NEW_MODEL_1 with $NEW_MODEL_2. Its training data did not contain information about either model, but it was capable of searching the Internet to find information about both and provide me with a factual (and, yes, I checked, accurate) comparison of the differences in the specs of the models as well as a summary of sentiment for reliability etc for the two brands.

> Currently available software may very well make human drivers both more comfortable and safe, but the hype has promised completely autonomous cars reliably zipping about in rush hour traffic.

And this is already not hype, it's reality anywhere Waymo operates.
by Fraterkes | 2025-05-19 11:54:33+00:00
I love reading, I enjoy long-form articles, but I really wish technical bloggers especially would practice distilling their point into shorter posts. I notice it a lot with (older) scott alexander articles, this implicit assumption that your writing is informative/entertaining enough that you can stretch a simple idea to many pages.

I want to reitterate that I don't want dull, minimal, writing. I don't subscribe to the "reduce your wordcount until it can't be reduced any further" style of writing advice. I just think that many people have very similar ideas about ai (and written very similar things), and if you have something to say that you haven't seen expressed before, it is worthwile (imo) to express it without preamble.
by al2o3cr | 2025-05-19 11:55:04+00:00
There are growing signs that artificial intelligence poses a real threat to a substantial number of the entry-level jobs

Correction: growing signs that MANAGERS pose a threat of using LLMs to replace these entry-level jobs, regardless of if the replacement is equally effective.

This isn't a technology problem, it's a people problem. As ever, NYT breaks out the passive voice to make a smokescreen for the people who are actually doing the breaking.