MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ebagsnave | 2025-06-01 15:38:50+00:00
Hi everyone – I’m the creator of Smart Silence. Thank you for all the thoughtful feedback and questions — I really appreciate it. I wanted to respond to some of the points raised and share a bit about where the app is headed.

⸻

“Doesn’t iOS already support this?”

You’re right — iOS offers Focus Modes with location-based triggers and automation via Shortcuts. But in practice, these are underused because they’re not easy to configure or manage. Smart Silence builds on that by making the process simpler, more flexible, and community-oriented.

Here’s how it’s different: • Quick Silent Zone setup: Add any location (house of worship, library, classroom, etc.) and the app handles the rest — no need to mess with Focus Mode automations. • Silent Zone Sharing: You can share a Silent Zone with others, so groups (like schools or religious organizations) can all use the same settings. • Smart Reminders: It sends a prompt (or runs a Shortcut) when you enter/leave a Silent Zone — keeping you in control, while avoiding disruption. • Easy Reversion: When you leave a Silent Zone, it reminds you to turn sound back on, avoiding the classic “why am I missing calls?” issue.

⸻

New: Scheduled Silent Sessions

In addition to location-based detection, Smart Silence also supports scheduled quiet times in those locations.

You can set silent hours for things like: • Classes • Meetings • Services • Daily focus blocks (like 9–11 AM “deep work”)

This is especially helpful if you work or study in one place, but need silence at specific times.

⸻

Coming Soon: Focus Points System

One of the most exciting features I’m working on is Focus Points: • While Do Not Disturb is active in a Silent Zone, Smart Silence uses motion data to see if your phone stays still. • If you don’t pick it up or use it, you earn Focus Points. • These points contribute to daily or weekly focus scores, with streak tracking and possible rewards later on.

It’s a lightweight way to encourage discipline and reduce unnecessary phone use during important moments.

⸻

Not Just for Houses of Worship

The original inspiration came from watching someone’s phone go off during a quiet moment in a house of worship. They were clearly embarrassed, and it disrupted everyone else too. But this app isn’t just for religious settings — it works anywhere silence and focus are important: • Libraries • Classrooms • Meetings • Meditation groups • Study blocks • Movie theaters

⸻

*“Do people still need this?”*

Yes — many people still forget to silence their phones or get distracted by notifications. Smart Silence is about reducing friction and making it easy to be present, whether out of respect for others or to improve your own focus.

⸻

Thanks again for all the feedback. I’m continuing to improve the app and would love more input. Let me know what you’d want it to do — or if you think something could be done better.

– Gabe
by Hilift | 2025-06-01 15:39:10+00:00
> LLMs have nothing to contribute to political discourse

A non-trivial percentage of the population is easily influenced, which is leveraged by social media being there 24x7. It's likely that LLMs will be there to craft political messages, themes, and campaigns, perhaps as early as the US mid term elections. Look at JD Vance traveling the globe stating that the US will be the world leader in AI, with none of the limits/guardrails that were discussed in Europe in February. AI-driven discourse, AI-created discourse.

https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/jd-vance-ai-speech
by bigyabai | 2025-06-01 15:39:39+00:00
My brother in Christ, CoreML only exists because Apple saw Tensorflow and wanted the featureset without cooperating on a common standard. TF was like 2 years old (and fairly successful) by the point CoreML was announced. To this day CoreML is little more than a proprietary BLAS interface, with nearly zero industry buy-in.

Terrifying what being an iOS dev does to a feller.
by bjackman | 2025-06-01 15:40:10+00:00
Yeah I have had some luck with vibe coding Nix but also I've found you have to be extremely cautious. It bullshits a LOT more than with other coding things I use LLMs for. This has led me on a couple of wild goose chases.

I think it helps to have comments like

# AN AI WROTE THIS BIT, REUSE WITH CAUTION
by h2zizzle | 2025-06-01 15:41:08+00:00
>The reality is it was an entirely fake constructed world designed by advertisers, and to some lesser degree, the political class

This applies to American car culture also, as mentioned in this video on Tempe, AZ's "Cul De Sac" carless community: https://youtu.be/4UAZMEpOKTI

Something important to remember on this matter is that the American car industry almost collapsed during the GFC and had to be bailed out. Ford, GM, et al. exist today largely because their potential failure represented a national security concern, not because they make products that people desire (at least, at volume), or because those products enable a way of life that people desire.

>My great concern with the "YT is being TV" direction is that this history repeats. Just as facebook (etc.) centralised and ad-santisied the "local, independent" internet -- so will, YT/spotify/etc. just return the mass media back into advertiser hands.

Likewise, it would be nice if our realization that forced car ownership is bad for society didn't push us into a world where public transit was the only option, and owning a car too expensive to justify. In all, sociocultural monopolies seem like the thing to avoid. Not just a matter of not allowing one company to own a market, but not allowing one notion to monopolize our imaginations and ideals. Choice and competition in a capitalist society, whodathunk?
by jongjong | 2025-06-01 15:41:11+00:00
This is an interesting idea. I solved this problem in a different way by loading each resource/JSON individually, using foreign keys to link them on the front end. This can add latency/delays with deeply nested child resources but it was not a problem for any of the use cases I came across (pages/screens rarely display parent/child resources connected by more than 3 hops; and if they do, they almost never need them to be loaded all at once).

But anyway this is a different custom framework which follows the principle of resource atomicity and a totally different direction than GraphQL approach which follows the principle of aggregating all the data into a big nested JSON. The big JSON approach is convenient but it's not optimized for this kind of lazy loading flexibility.

IMO, resource atomicity is a superior philosophy. Field-level atomicity is a great way to avoid conflicts when supporting real-time updates. Unfortunately nobody has shown any interest or is even aware of its existence as an alternative.

We are yet to figure out that maybe the real issue with REST is that it's not granular enough (should be field granularity, not whole resource)... Everyone knows HTTP has heavy header overheads, hence you can't load fields individually (there would be too many heavy HTTP requests)... This is not a limitation for WebSockets however... But still, people are clutching onto HTTP; a transfer protocol originally designed for hypertext content, as their data transport.
by vikramkr | 2025-06-01 15:41:17+00:00
I don't think it's obvious that any of these model providers are even profitable right now. I'm also not sure what there is to "figure out" - it's an expensive technology where the cost scales per token, so they charge per token? would you rather they burned even more money giving it away for free until everyone was dependent on it and then hyper enshittified to try and not go broke like so much of the rest of tech?
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-01 15:41:34+00:00
Do you think LLMs don't further the propaganda emanating from the US? I don't even know how you would start to excise that, especially if you don't agree with foreigners on what's propaganda vs just "news" or whatever.

I have quite a few Chinese friends, both on mainland and throughout south-east asia, and I can speak a little mandarin, and I can read quite a bit of Chinese. My friends complain about the PRC quite a bit. But I find it telling that this complaint specifically—authoritarian political oppression—seems to mostly come from the west, and especially from the US. And it's true that we can say obscene things to the president's face and not get locked up. I don't think that's necessarily the "gotcha" you think it is, though—we're really good at complaining, but not so good at actually fixing. Which feels increasingly more embarrassing than restrictions on speech.

Edit: I suppose I'm a bit unfair. A lot of folks in our sphere of influence in east asia say stuff like this, too. But the contrast between the folks I know who literally live in china and americans feels striking to me.

> But revolutionary socialism has always devoted a lot of words to justifying violence against dissidents.

It is very difficult to take the political opinions of people who talk like this seriously.

> LLMs should be well-positioned to make advances in political science, game theory, and related topics.

I'm struggling to understand what this might look like, and I find the argument that nuclear warfare being related to game theory to be extremely dubious. Cuz if it really held that strongly, we should be handing out nukes like candy.
by dataflow | 2025-06-01 15:41:38+00:00
I suspect this reasonable ad-free pricing will only last as long as needed to gain the majority of users on board. Video hosting costs will have to rise (there are ever more videos being created; you can't host all of them indefinitely available at everyone's fingertips at low cost) and they will have to increase prices to keep up.

Not that this implies you shouldn't get premium, but just worth keeping in mind I think.
by immibis | 2025-06-01 15:41:43+00:00
That's fine when it's a megacorp with a team of analysts to pick the best price. Business is cutthroat, and in exchange for a business sometimes getting to win against its competitors, sometimes their competitors also win against them.

It's not fine for grandma. She doesn't have a team of analysts, she just wants her house. The main criticism of capitalism is that it's bad for the little people. Replacing it with something else that's also bad for the little people isn't really any better.

You could try to find compromises like locking the family home until death or voluntary sale... then you have extra complications like making it legal for someone to start a small business at their family home without also creating a grey market for people to rent their family homes for other people to start businesses in (or just to live in) and getting the system we already have.
by benmccann | 2025-06-01 15:42:14+00:00
It's neither true that Svelte has few users or that we can easily break things. Tons of sites are built with Svelte like Yahoo Finance and Apple Music. Svelte 5 was the only big change in syntax in the past five years and we made sure that there's a good migration tool, etc. to minimize the amount of hardship and upgrade might cause. As a result the majority of users have already upgraded to Svelte 5.

That being said, Svelte absolutely does continue to innovate. We'll be introducing a new async primitive, RPC mechanism, etc. in the near future: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1dATE70wlHc
by hollerith | 2025-06-01 15:42:20+00:00
Either that or they are a very profitable class of drugs and their owners have spent heavily to amplify the perception of benefits while downplaying the adverse effects.

I urge anyone considering a psych drug to do some research, and you can do a lot worse than watching some of the following YT channel, in which a psychiatrist conducts many interviews with people who claim to have been damaged by psych drugs including SSRIs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxZccQ7J-XA
by anon7000 | 2025-06-01 15:43:12+00:00
We’ll labor under web until users are so unhappy with it that the business financial benefit of “write once, run everywhere with a team of less specialized, cheaper engineers” is negated by users leaving the platform. But since users broadly don’t care, and it’s a lot cheaper & faster, we’ll keep using web. So it’s just so accessible, that more people will try to use your project in the web as opposed to an app.

End user experience is not what drives technical decisions in tech; money does.

Anyways, it’s not like apps are dead simple to get right either. It’s still very easy for a team to write a shitty native app. And if you’re writing N apps for N operating systems, without N teams of experienced developers, odds are at least one of those apps will suck. Similarly, a team of experts on the web, given the time & incentive to care about performance, can make incredibly performant web apps. (Not caring about performance and optimizing the experience is a problem with what companies prioritize financially, not with what developers care about.)
by GuestFAUniverse | 2025-06-01 15:43:21+00:00
Somehow that trait was evolutionary helpful (groupwise, not necessarily for a single being)?

E.g. low LDL, which is an anti-toxant to certain bacterial toxins, leads to a higher risks of sepsis.

In general just lowering _any_ cholesterol without understanding _all_ the cons and pros won't cut it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8886946/
by zozbot234 | 2025-06-01 15:43:32+00:00
You can have low latency and low jitter today, but you will need to use a microcontroller not a general-purpose CPU. The old 16/32 bit retro machines are essentially microcontroller architecture devices with general-purpose computer peripherals, for pretty much the reasons you mention. But there are many cheap microcontrollers available today, such as the Raspberry Pico series.
by erkt | 2025-06-01 15:43:56+00:00
That is not what we were talking about though. We were talking about how much discount you can force out of a retailer via price matching which is a function of its Gross Margin. a 25% discount at the register doesn't mean a bottom line 25% subtraction from Net Margin. Those numbers are distantly connected and most operating costs (minus COGS) are fixed.
by zdragnar | 2025-06-01 15:44:37+00:00
> It has not been my experience that having to write apps in 3 different computer language styles spread across at least two maybe connected CPUs will end up a better overall end user experience

Invert this for developers, and now you know why people do it. There simply are very few better cross-platform UI tools and compliers. If you want the same fidelity everywhere, you pretty much have to rewrite it everywhere.
by breuleux | 2025-06-01 15:45:06+00:00
I use it quite a lot (having made it), most often when I need to recursively process complex heterogeneous data structures. Merging two data structures, treemap, processing a Python AST, etc. Also in any situation where you want to be able to register new behavior.

One case where I'm finding it extremely useful is that I'm currently using ovld to implement a serialization library (https://github.com/breuleux/serieux, but I haven't documented anything yet). The arguments for deserialization are (declared_type, value, context). With multimethods, I can define

* deserialize(type[int], str, Any) to deserialize a string into an int

* deserialize(type[str], Regexp[r"^\$"], Environment) to deserialize $XYZ as an environment variable lookup but only if the context has the Environment type

* deserialize(type[Any], Path, WorkingDirectory) to deserialize from a file

That's one situation where ovld's performance and codegen capabilities come in handy: the overhead is low enough to remain in the same performance ballpark as Pydantic v2.
by Findecanor | 2025-06-01 15:45:30+00:00
I think that it also having preemptive multitasking also made a huge difference to make the system responsive and feel fast. The GUI, with its windows and gadgets (= "widgets"/"controls") ran in Intuition's task. The mouse pointer was moved by a vblank interrupt and could thus never lag.

On Macintosh, the whole GUI ran practically in the active app's event loop. The whole system could be held up by an app waiting for something.

Microsoft made the mistake of copying Apple when they designed MS-Windows. Even this day, on the latest Windows, which although it has had preemptive multitasking since 1995, a slow app can still effectively hold up the user interface thus preventing you from doing anything but wait for it.

When Apple in the late '80s wanted to make their OS have preemptive multitasking, they hired the guy who had written Amiga's "exec" kernel: Carl Sassenrath.
by rpozarickij | 2025-06-01 15:45:57+00:00
I haven't heard about fiber optic drones [0] before and it turns the fiber optic used by them is much stronger [1] than I initially suspected.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_optic_drone

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh7SYWl79no
by ComputerGuru | 2025-06-01 15:46:50+00:00
The (compromised) Linux decides whether to load the “compromised mode” code or the mp1 secure system? Sounds like an avenue to explore. It says the bootloader itself is secure, but that doesn’t mean much if it’s being loaded into a compromised environment, depending on where it is actually being executed. I guess the coprocessor could be considered a Secure Enclave of Sorts, but the fact that Linux could load a separate bootloader and run that (somehow) is of concern.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-01 15:46:54+00:00
That'd get you the PIN quite easily, but if they're designed the same way (with all the important bits being handed off to a secure secondary processor) you still wouldn't be able to do much with the card as modern cards do a whole load of cryptography on-card to prevent stuff like this.

The attack would only work on terminals where every payment option but the magnetic card reader is broken, but those should give off skimmer alert alarm bells before you ever see a PIN prompt.
by api | 2025-06-01 15:46:55+00:00
This is the joy of physical reality as opposed to software. Atoms vs bits.

Software is different because digital systems are messes of rigid causality. If reality were like software moving a table could trigger the elevator to stop working and birds to fly upside down by breaking DNS by way of a change in server load triggering Kubernetes to get into a weird state where it kills and restarts DNS too fast to allow it to properly initialize and serve requests, but only when it is raining in Bangalore, India on a Tuesday.

The other nice thing about reality is reusability. A table used in one movie set could be used in a different movie without rebuilding the table.

There has been a ton of work on good system design to avoid this, like well done (not enterprise Java) OOP, and we were getting there until the web and cloud hit and we decided to trash all that and go back to piles of slop on Unix servers. Still wouldn’t have been as inherently causally ordered as physics but it might have been nicer.
by nyjah | 2025-06-01 15:48:33+00:00
One of my handful of follows puts out multiple 2 hour videos a day sometimes, almost every day. I hardly watch, but I always throw it on and let it play through, and will replay it on mute while doing other things, just so this guy with 1.8k views is getting a bigger share of my youtube premium money. I don't participate in the channel, like I said, I really hardly watch, but monthly I have been getting free memberships to his channel since I started doing it.
by qmarchi | 2025-06-01 15:49:34+00:00
Disc: Former Visa Employee

Generally, these devices will use the mp1 to do all of the cryptographic operations around the devices.

The biggest part of this is the keys defined between the terminal and the acceptance gateway (something like CyberSource or Authorize.net).

When the temper protection is tripped the keys that are used are immediately dropped from RAM and you can't recover them, they have to manually be input into the device again to reset the tamper protection.

(Side Note: keys are specific to a merchant. If you're able to extract them, it limits the blowback.)
by Barrin92 | 2025-06-01 15:49:46+00:00
>and other media can be reviewed by people who share the tastes of their audiences -- rather than have their tastes "made" by the nominated ad-friendly elite.

There's nothing wrong with taste-making, having criticism structured and communicated in an intelligent way that gives an audience a way to look at things is valuable when engaging with art, including popular art. What you have instead now is entirely audience captured creators who will just produce viral and controversial content and tell audiences exactly what they want to hear. A literal echo chamber where any critic that would say something unpopular is immediately dropped because they can never offend their audience.

The advertisement is of course as omnipresent, and in addition without shame or guard rails. Now you have mainstreamed bogus medical advice, VPN ads, nutrition pills, cam and porn sites, and stuff you'd otherwise only found at the bottom of a email spam folder.

There's basically a complete collapse in audience and discourse quality. Very practical example, I came across an interview with Frank Herbert, and funnily enough almost every youtube comment on the interview mentions how articulate it is (https://youtu.be/26GPaMoeiu4).

That's what you had when culture was still discussed at a level that wasn't a Joe Rogan podcast. On TV we used to have interviewers who were at least intelligent enough to comprehend the topic they were interviewing on, instead of just sitting there stoned.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-01 15:49:48+00:00
I was interested to see which idiots would choose to advertise during the new Black Mirror episode "Common People" but it seems Netflix got no takers (at least in my territory) and so it didn't happen.

[In Common People an apparently life-changing medical intervention is gradually monetised, jacking up fees, adding new "premium" tiers that degrade until they're no better than the old baseline and eventually by inserting advertisements directly into the patient's actions any time they aren't paying everything they have ...]
by like_any_other | 2025-06-01 15:50:13+00:00
> It is reasonable for society to set standards. Enforcing online standards is appropriate in my opinion.

What those standards are, and how they are enforced, matters. We got a glimpse of what can happen with the UK online safety act, as websites went offline or left the UK - even when their content was as mild as a bicycling forum, they couldn't handle the burdensome bureaucracy and vague demands [1] imposed on them. Laws have consequences beyond their stated intentions. And this seems ripe for such abuse - corporations will be falling over themselves to keep the under-18 market, and the call-out to "harmful content" tells me they'll do their best to ban topics that whoever is in power currently could deem "harmful".

You don't trust parents to enable a filter on their kids' devices. I don't trust the EU to shape online discourse and determine what is harmful information, to act as censor for the coming generation's upbringing.

[1] They don't tell you exactly what to do or what is banned, but give vague outlines, forcing you to guess. If you guess wrong and censor too little, you are liable. If you guess wrong and censor too much, no problems.