MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eigenspace | 2025-05-26 19:25:51+00:00
For me, the problem with Duolingo has always been that the content is just too lowest-common-denominator, and this will just bring it down even lower.

I switched a while ago to Seedlang (https://www.seedlang.com/), and while it only supports French, German, and Spanish, I can at least say that the German course is everything I actually wanted from Duolingo.

Every exercise involves a real video of a real German speaker speaking in German. You get to hear them at the same time as you see their face, which is not something you'd think is a big deal, but absolutely does make a big difference.

When it's your turn to say a phrase, it records your voice and plays it back to you, rather than use some shitty model to try and guess if you spoke correctly. By listening to your own voice you can clearly hear when you're getting things right versus when you're getting things wrong. Early on, German speakers would often comment on how my accent was quite good for my level, and I think this is big part of that.

IMO Duolingo's attempt to try and scale to every language as fast as possible just makes it a worse product than something 'artisanal' like Seedlang (though of course, if there's no artisanal resources, then Duolingo might have some value to offer)
by theoreticalmal | 2025-05-26 19:25:57+00:00
My Duolingo streak is 37 days and I just jumped on to do a lesson and retain my position on the leaderboard. I feel like the app itself is right on the cusp of being a valuable learning tool compared to being a silly game. I am okay with the idea of paying for “just okay” teaching if it helps me stay motivated and interested in the content. That may change in the future, I guess we’ll see!
by DeonRob | 2025-05-26 19:26:43+00:00
*Sashi: AI-Powered Workflows from Your Own Codebase* https://www.usesashi.com/

Sashi is an open-source workflow automation system that lets you turn real backend functions into reusable, shareable workflows—created with AI, validated by code, and executed from a secure dashboard.

*What makes Sashi different?*

- *Real Code, Not Just Integrations:* Register your actual backend functions (Node/TypeScript) with a lightweight library. Sashi uses Zod for type-safe validation and auto-generates UIs based on your return types.

- *AI-Generated Workflows:* Describe what you want in plain English—Sashi’s AI chat interface builds and validates multi-step workflows, connecting your registered functions in powerful sequences.

- *No Admin Panels to Build:* Sashi provides a secure, auto-generated dashboard for your team to run, manage, and visualize workflows. No more custom admin UIs or glue code.

- *Secure by Design:* All execution happens server-side, with scoped API tokens and session management. You control your stack and infra—no vendor lock-in.

- *For All Teams:* Support, product, DevOps, and engineering can automate internal tasks, trigger backend logic, and collaborate—without waiting on developer cycles.

*How it works:*

1. *Register Functions:* Use the Sashi library to expose backend functions with type-safe schemas.

2. *Create Workflows:* Use the chat or flow builder to compose workflows—AI helps connect steps and validate data flow.

3. *Execute & Visualize:* Run workflows from a central dashboard, see results in real time, and auto-generate UIs (tables, cards, graphs, etc.) based on your data.

*Example Use Cases:*

- Support: “Refund a user” or “Reset password” via dashboard, no SQL or custom tools.

- Product: “Send weekly usage report to Slack” or “Find users who abandoned signup.”

- DevOps: “Spin up preview envs” or “Rotate API keys” as repeatable, auditable workflows.

*Try it or learn more:* https://www.usesashi.com/
by galaxyLogic | 2025-05-26 19:26:53+00:00
User-style-sheets sound great in theory, but CSS is Cascading Style Sheets which means it would be very easy for users to break functionality of web-sites. For instance make the cascade cascade so that the text-color is same as background color on some widget on some website and you might be missing a button.

A user's custom style-sheet might be good for one web-site, but not for every website.

The original web was much about self-expression of developer-users, but now the web is all about apps, which must not break because a user might want to use different colors.

And why should you need to customize colors? I can understand that different users need larger fonts which you can do by zooming in the browser. Colors should be good to go if the website is well-styled to begin with.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-05-26 19:26:58+00:00
that's really not what it means, it means that if you owe the bank enough money (which is probably more than 100 million nowadays for any significant bank) then it is you in the position of power in relation to the bank, when the bank comes and says hey we need the money sure you have the "problem" that you need to pay it, but let's say you can pay it no sweat, but you'd rather not because reasons so you say hmm, I think I would like to renegotiate the interest and wait a year before paying, and unless things are very extreme the bank will probably have to acquiesce, if they don't they are basically letting the world know hey, we have a 100 million dollar problem, but until they make that announcement that 100 million is just another asset the bank has.

If you owe the bank enough money, you have the power in the relationship in most cases.
by genocidicbunny | 2025-05-26 19:27:02+00:00
I'm thinking more of people living in an apartment in a little town of 10000 people surrounded by 30mi of farmland in all directions. Something like the central valley in CA, or maybe some of the hill/mountain towns in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Even in CA where the vast majority of the state's population lives in the LA, SF or Sacramento metros where you could potentially avoid the need for a car on most days, there are still millions of people who live in these smaller places where without much improved EV infrastructure, you would be severely limited being forced to have an EV vs an ICE car.
by trinix912 | 2025-05-26 19:27:06+00:00
> Those old houses look great in instagram photos but they're not very fun to actually live in. Young people are rightly prioritising places that are good to live instead of the boomer square feet fetish.

How practical is raising kids in a 20m2 studio? Especially if you've got multiple. I'd bet not nearly as practical as in a house. Plus the recent trend of building lots of smaller apartments instead of a bit bigger and way more practical ones.
by neilv | 2025-05-26 19:27:15+00:00
> When you can add "I like this tech because it helps me build an identity I aspire to" as an item in the pros column, you realize you no longer have to.

But, for many of the cases of using-obscure-thing-instead-of-popular-thing, that's not a factor.

Not everything divergent is hipster impulse. Nor is everything about slotting yourself into a clique category in high school.

Which is why I asked for clarification on what was being said.

FWIW, I use a vintage ThinkPad mainly because I can type all day on it without problem. The serviceability is also nice. I also own a sleek high-end last-year's P1 and an X1, both of which I think would look more attractive in cafes and in some ways fit my ideal self-image better than the T520 that I choose to use instead. Currently, due to the inferior keyboards, I might use the P1 or X1 only if I need to do a startup meeting with a 20-something who doesn't already know I'm good despite being over-30. That choice would be the image one, and it's not about validation or aspirational identity, but pragmatic gaining of acceptance despite prejudice.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-26 19:27:15+00:00
A Chinese Room has no attention model. The operator can look up symbolic and syntactical equivalences in both directions, English to Chinese and Chinese back to English, but they can't associate Chinese words with each other or arrive at broader inferences from doing so. An LLM can.

If I were to ask a Chinese room operator, "What would happen if gravity suddenly became half as strong while I'm drinking tea?," what would you expect as an answer?

Another question: if I were to ask "What would be an example of something a Chinese room's operator could not handle, that an actual Chinese human could?", what would you expect in response?

Claude gave me the first question in response to the second. That alone takes Chinese Rooms out of the realm of any discussion regarding LLMs, and vice versa. The thought experiment didn't prove anything when Searle came up with it, and it hasn't exactly aged well. Neither Searle nor Chomsky had any earthly idea that language was this powerful.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-05-26 19:27:32+00:00
This might be a nice time for me to plug the FOSS software I've been quietly building over the last ~3 years for English speaking learners of Finnish specifically. I've recently collected them all onto a little landing page at https://finbug.xyz/ .

I run into other immigrants to this country semi-regularly now who say they've used at least one of these tools, most commonly the frequency deck or reverse-conjugator/decliner. It's been a surprisingly fruitful way to make professional connections here.
by intended | 2025-05-26 19:27:43+00:00
Forgive this weirdly philosophical comment: In a year of dark thoughts I found yet another horror to contemplate, after reading a legal paper on the idea of the marketplace of ideas.

A core concept underpinning our shared market place, is that its not about facts, its about ideas being exchanged.

Critically, that exchange creates friction, debate and downstream of all that - society. I've commented elsewhere how the marketplace is broken today, and why.

But with GenAI, theres a new, twist, that I can barely contemplate.

See, our conception of this liberal democracy based society, exists in that exchange between people. Even a crappy exchange, is part of the process of learning and building our ideas. My half formed ideas, your half formed ideas, everyones ideas.

We have considered what happens when your ideas don't get heard.

But in no place, did we consider what happens when we bounce our ideas into a machine, and that machine talks back. And if that machine talks back in a manner thats can be as good as what a person might write or text. Your half baked idea goes into the machine, you get text back that helps you get to a fully baked idea.

But the counter party is the machine. Not a person. The way those ideas have been bouncing around, has changed.
by alganet | 2025-05-26 19:28:28+00:00
https://github.com/shellfire-dev

https://github.com/shellspec

https://oils.pub/

There's probably more.

The shell has a ____wide____ userbase with many kinds of users. Depending on your goal, the rabbit hole can go very deep (how portable across interpreters, how dependant on other binaries, how early can it work in a bootstrap scenario, etc).

These are mine:

https://github.com/alganet/coral

https://github.com/alganet/shell-versions

https://github.com/Mosai/workshop
by sanderjd | 2025-05-26 19:29:06+00:00
I probably should have specified: I didn't list those in the order of what I put most weight on. I agree with you that I more heavily weight the one I wrote as #2.

I think you and I probably mostly agree on where things are heading, except that just inferring from your comment, I might be more bullish than you on how much AIs will help us develop those "much better tools".
by _aavaa_ | 2025-05-26 19:29:17+00:00
I disagree with this in principle. Gamification is something we should be very wary of because it is inherently bad. It reduces what you care about in an activity to points and a progress bar.

Instead of sticking with language learning because you have some intrinsic reason to want to learn it (or even a external one such as wanting a new job) you're substituting that with whatever Duolingo puts for their gamification. To the degree you engage with and are motivated by the gamification you are substituting your own metrics of success and progress for points and streaks.

And soon enough we end up here, where Duolingo has gamified their internal numbers and in doing so gamified your "learning".
by littlestymaar | 2025-05-26 19:29:41+00:00
> If you are wrong, then existing data centers are able to jack up their prices a ton, and will, and make a lot more money not because they are providing a better service, but because there's an artificial shortage.

Your econ 101-based argument is seducing and all, but it's not like there is a competitive market in here, we're talking about a handful of players with a dominant position over a segment of the market. They are already jacking prices up because they thrive over an artificial walled garden.
by thenberlin | 2025-05-26 19:29:43+00:00
If an LLM is what's going to teach me a new language, why would I ever pay some middleman $100-200 a year for an app wrapper? This guy doesn't seem to realize that embracing AI-first doesn't just put his employees on the chopping block, it actually suggests his whole company is unnecessary.

This is what I don't think the "AI-first" business crowd understands -- in many cases, the moment you admit the humans in your organization can be wholesale replaced by AI, that's a sign it's possible your whole ass business case could be unnecessary LLM middleware.
by zugi | 2025-05-26 19:29:46+00:00
That seems about right. Hacker News was once a more reasonable alternative to reddit, but these days sometimes it's reasonable, and sometimes it displays the same hive-mind reactions, depending on the thread.

The app is absolutely gamified, but I've never paid them a dollar, waste about 1.5 minutes a day ignoring ads, and in exchange for nothing I get moderately useful foreign language learning. The gamification keeps me at it, where past study approaches eventually petered out.

The use of AI in this and other tools is inevitable. The CEO certainly oversold it in his initial announcement, but the weird reaction of people stopping using the app because Due Lingo is going "AI first" seems inconsistent. Are people going to stop using Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia because they're all-in on AI too?
by telchior | 2025-05-26 19:30:26+00:00
When I returned to Duolingo recently -- I used to use it heavily but set it aside for 2 years -- I counted 14 gamification popups in a row after my first lesson in a new language.

14! The damned popups lasted longer than the lesson had!

I switched over to Busuu, which has blatantly copied some of Duolingo's mechanics but at least uses them with a modicum of restraint.
by Archonical | 2025-05-26 19:30:59+00:00
I studied German for 3 years in university, dabbled in German duo-lingo, and completed all German courses on Memrise.

I don't see how one can learn German fluently using Duolingo (or even Memrise, which I think is much better). It's great for vocabulary, but I think understanding the grammar requires understanding the theory which I didn't see when I used these applications.
by jrockway | 2025-05-26 19:31:10+00:00
I liked the "friends" and "foes" system that Slashdot had, though I would say generally the "foes" here just get banned which is convenient.

I also thought Slashdot's moderation system was kind of fun. I am not sure it was useful but I enjoyed the annotations (+5 Funny when serious, +5 Insightful when inciteful, etc.) Meta-moderation was also neat?
Ask HN: How did you make money while working on a pre-revenue startup?
by julvon | 2025-05-26 19:31:30+00:00
Hey

To give you some background, I’m a product leader based in Montreal with over 10 years of experience in the tech industry, working with companies of various sizes. Recently, I faced a layoff and, as the primary breadwinner for my family, it’s a critical situation since they rely on my income. I’ve managed to save enough to buy us some time until next year while I explore a new venture.

Since then, I’ve been working full-time on an idea. Although it's still in the early stages and hasn’t generated revenue yet, I’m starting to see some traction. Right now, I’m bootstrapping it on my own.

I’d love to tap into the collective wisdom of this community: what strategies do you use to support yourself financially while pursuing your idea? Do you recommend consulting, freelancing, a part-time job, or even something more out-of-the-box?

I’m looking for practical ideas that can generate income in the short term while allowing me to maintain momentum with my startup. Extra points if your side hustle ended up benefiting your main project in some way!

Would love to hear what worked (or didn’t) for you!

I appreciate any insights you can share. Thanks in advance!
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-05-26 19:31:59+00:00
Not quite- from a strictly financial perspective, it means we should care 0.002% as much as we care about an intervention that doubles the GDP or eliminates 100% it. Neither exists, so we're better off comparing to other theft- this is about 15% of numbers for retail shrink, 50% of reported personal theft, so this suggests we should care proportionally.

But I don't know about the strict financial analysis. I'm pretty sure it would tell us to have negative care about a serial killer that targets the homeless.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-05-26 19:32:04+00:00
Chipotle already doesn't manufacture the vast majority of their ingredients. Their business consists of delivering supplier-originated ingredients to a standardized storefront in your city and consistently assembling them into a quality burrito, with small amounts of prep work for things which can't be consistently sourced locally and in-store cooking for things which must be prepared fresh. I don't know where people get this idea that packaging and assembly are trivial tasks you can't build a business around.
by Draiken | 2025-05-26 19:32:52+00:00
How is it bullshit?

> but to claim that companies can't behave ethically removes responsibility from the people who are, primarily, responsible.

That's literally what happens today everywhere. Companies are downright evil everywhere and nobody's held responsible.

But what I think GP means is that companies don't inherently have any ethics since they are not people.

If a company behaves ethically it's because its owners and employees are doing so, but the company can't have any ethics of its own.

Regular people doing their day to day jobs on these criminal health insurance companies, for example, will perform acts that are extremely unethical as an individual, but since they're representing "the company" all that goes out of the window.

> we should call them out and not only say "it's the government's fault for not making/enforcing laws about this!"

We can call them out but we, the people, can't enforce anything. Maybe we could collectively try to sue them, but at best that's a civil lawsuit and they'll have to pay a bit of money (likely an already accounted cost for businesses that use shady tactics). But to make that criminal, as many times it should, then only the government is empowered to.

But we should never forget that we are the ones that keep the government accountable. If they don't do their job and we let them, it's all of our faults.

I mean, one of the reasons companies exist in the first place is to allow individuals to behave unethically IMO. Anyone can do bat shit crazy things that they would never get away with when they're behind the protection of a company.
by jecel | 2025-05-26 19:33:38+00:00
He was: he pointed out that the world of computing he (we) knew back then is illustrated in all the ads. Note that August 1981 is also the month the original IBM PC came out. In contrast the articles showed a world of computing with mice, overlapping windows, menus, cut/copy/paste.

A comment in the video pointed out that the mouse had been invented back in 1964 and claiming it was not common is a cop out. The author of the video didn't know about it before this issue and I didn't know about it. But now we knew, and for how many others was this true?
by teeray | 2025-05-26 19:33:47+00:00
I don’t understand why we can’t do the propane tank model at grocery stores. Reusable bags that I drop off on the way in, I get some token for N bags so I don’t have to carry them around the store, then I get cleaned bags on the way out (deducted from my credit). If I need more, I buy more immediately and more bags are on my account. Stores could even partner to share bag programs (again, like Blue Rhino).
by olejorgenb | 2025-05-26 19:33:50+00:00
This is pyrolysis based recycling (also called chemical recycling I think). My impression is that it's fairly energy intensive and can still be hard to purify. Some companies claim to be able to to it relatively effective. https://www.quantafuel.com/ claims to have a catalyst which improves the efficiency for instance. They are now privately owned and the amount of news they publish has become limited. This makes me believe they still struggle to make optimize the process.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-26 19:34:19+00:00
What problem(s) does Nix solve that macOS's .app format does not? For that matter, that ad-hoc Linux packaging solutions involving LD_LIBRARY_PATH and included dependencies?

Put differently, doesn't the fundamental complexity of Nix come down to the combination of (a) "every app should get its own dependencies" and (b) "don't include dependencies with each app" ?
by foxfired | 2025-05-26 19:34:27+00:00
Slight tangent. I remember many jobs ago when our CEO went on a mobile-first campaign. I literally watched him talk about the type of innovations we were making to cater to our customers, while I was writing a regex to redirect mobile to m.example.com.

Before the year was over, the campaign had switched to Big Data. We signed up for some big data services, the CEO talked to the media about it, but we never did anything with the service. The thing is, it worked. The company was sold for over a billion dollars.

I've written about Duolingo being a game first before anything else. I still get the occasional email that "Exposes" me and asked me to retract the article. But for Duolingo's CEO, none of this matters because it's a PR stunt that either works or doesn't. And right now, it looks like it didn't work. But that's ok, because quantum is going to change the game.
by colinnordin | 2025-05-26 19:35:04+00:00
Let me know how it goes! I'm not always very happy with how the cards turn out, will see what I can do with some LLM prompt tuning.

Yeah, it's very barebones at the moment, if you swipe the name of a deck left on the list of decks, you should be able to delete it, and I haven't added the ability to delete individual cards yet. Shuffling is not possible, adding it to the backlog.
by motohagiography | 2025-05-26 19:35:57+00:00
- work all day at cool job for smart people

- applying ML/AI to some security research with some defence or product possibilities

- impementing a test for a quant'ish trading idea that just won't leave me alone

- preludio en mi menor by augustin barrios mangore

- piaffe to canter transitions on a horse

- still figuring out what I actually want to do, but mostly who I want to make something for
by gotoeleven | 2025-05-26 19:36:20+00:00
Enforcing laws consistently would be great but of course one great tactic of tyrannical governments is to have a lot of laws, but only enforce them against disfavored groups.

One San Francisco flavor of this to get charged for bribing officials to do their jobs.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/three-construction-plan...