MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zelphirkalt | 2025-06-30 12:07:40+00:00
Hi! Not sure you are still reading this, but gonna write feedback here.

I tried the trial and it doesn't work for me. Even though I allowed it to access my mic, it never picks up my voice input. I am on Librewolf. It is also a little bit unclear in the trial, when one is supposed to speak, if one is using the app the first time. The generated voice speaks, and then there is no visual indication of when it is ones turn to speak. Of course one can infer it from the things that the generated voice says, but this made me feel unsure, whether everything is working. But yeah, I cannot reply to the AI generated voice, because it doesn't pick up my input, even after reloading several times. I noticed, that on Librewolf the app doesn't recognize the mic and speakers properly.

On Chromium it seems to work.

I think some work is needed to get everything working cross browser.

I got some other actual usage issues:

- When speaking I also have pauses, but the pauses are then mis-recognized as me having finished my phrase, and then the AI already answers, which is of course annoying and counterproductive. A human would realize, that I am not done speaking and with a little bit of common sense wait a bit longer before speaking. At other times it somehow doesn't get, that I am already done speaking. This happened to me, when I replied only in one word.

- Sometimes it recognizes words completely wrong. (I tried Mandarin.) For example I said "柏林" and it understood some random characters, that did not even sound anything like "bo2lin2".

- The AI sometimes uses quite long phrases and sometimes vocabulary I don't know. If I take too long time to look up characters or reply, then the call might time out.

- Sometimes the AI really butchers the pronunciation of Mandarin.

- Sometimes there are pauses between parts of phrases in the AI output. When I start answering, and then the AI continues, changing the overall meaning or expectation of its message. Then I continue speaking after it is really done, but in my response both parts of what I said are included. The premature reply and the actual reply. This then changes my reply to be nonsensical, as if I did not understand what the AI said.

- The font size is really small for Mandarin, at least in my opinion. Especially in the tool tips when hovering over the words that I don't know.

- I actually didn't get to test learning anything, because the AI kept going on about 介绍 and 做计划 for learning and so on. When I finally said 让我们开始学习, the time was up and the test call closed. So I cannot actually say anything about how well one can learn some grammar with it.

That said, I am surprised, by how well it understands me most of the time. Sometimes though it reinterprets what I have said to fit more as a reply to the questions it asked, rather than taking simply what I have said.
by fiatjaf | 2025-06-30 12:07:43+00:00
You have demonstrated you have no idea of what Drivechain is, you probably never spent the time to learn how it works, and yet you feel entitled to call it "idiotic".

I get it, it's fine to not want to learn things, but that comes with the burden of not being allowed to comment on it.

Apparently you have not carefully read my criticism of the big block proposal above. I've included some numbers. A proper response would have to address those. But thank you for trying.
by whizzter | 2025-06-30 12:10:05+00:00
Having written small compilers or other code-generators targeting both the JVM and .NET runtimes, i can say that the .NET equivalents have some extra simple options for scenarios like this.

Both have always supported building libraries/assemblies and loading them (the ASM library+custom classloaders for Java and AssemblyBuilder in .NET are about equally capable).

However .NET also has DynamicMethod that is specifically built to quickly build just small functions that aren't tied to larger contexts (similar API to asm/assemblybuilder).

But an even easier option for stuff exactly like in the article that people don't widely really seem to know about is that Linq (yes that "sql-like" stuff) actually contains parts for deferred method building that can be easily leveraged to quickly produce customized native code methods.

The neat part about the Linq-code generator is that you can just drop in plain C# code-blocks to be translataed by the C# compiler into Linq snippets and then with some helpers transform everything to Linq-tree's that can then be compiled.

The benefit over Asm/AssemblyBuilder/DynamicMethod is that Linq nodes are basically an built-in AST that can be directly leveraged whereas the other API's requires some mapping of your own AST's to the respective stack-machines.

https://asm.ow2.io/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.reflecti...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.reflecti...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.linq.exp...
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-30 12:10:29+00:00
That's like the people saying retina/HiDPI displays would only be niche, or that portable computing devices would only be niche. Good outside usable displays would revolutionize the world – especially in places that get a lot of sun. And Apple is probably the only company which would be able to capitalize on that with a "new" category of product. It's not different than people needing clothes for cold weather and for warm weather. Right now we only have indoor clothes...
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-06-30 12:12:20+00:00
Newly Registered Domain block lists for PiHole[0]. This has worked hands-off for the last two days after a couple of weeks of tweaking. My PiHole blocklist is currently a bit over 14 million domains, of which around 8 million are NRDs.

My next item is to add AbuseIPDB IP addresses to my "Uninvited Activity"[1] IP address blocking system, implementing xRuffKez's script here: https://github.com/xRuffKez/AbuseIPDB-to-Blackhole

Unfortunately, but also understandably, AbuseIPDB limit their free-access (account required) API to 10,000 IP address records. So I might be putting it into a database to hopefully aggregate multiples of the 10k results if they're not always the same 10k.

[0]: https://github.com/UninvitedActivity/PiHoleLists

[1]: https://github.com/UninvitedActivity/UninvitedActivity
by Zigurd | 2025-06-30 12:12:23+00:00
Tesla supposedly has a $37 billion cash pile, but no autonomous vehicle comparable to a Waymo, nor a successor to the Model 3 and Model Y. No New Roadster. No production Semis. The robot is lame compared to Atlas. They've got the resources to do all of these things right. Elon might be the most notable case of that stingy boss who starves all projects and complains about everything being expensive.
by unaindz | 2025-06-30 12:12:24+00:00
Valve's approach was to avoid the cat and mouse game knowing it doesn't lead anywhere. You can always cheat using DMA or reading the monitor with another computer that simulates a hardware mouse to get aimbot abilities. They wanted a machine learning to detect, flag and ban suspicious behaviour. This didn't work out and I'm not sure they are still trying but there's a few conferences talking about it.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-30 12:12:28+00:00
Tesla made a little under 3% of its 2024 revenue from carbon credits.

It made those credits because it sells electric cars in volume.

I get the Musk bashing, and think the guy's an asshat, but isn't this literally what carbon credits are supposed to do -- funnel cash from dirty industries to carbon negative ones, as another channel of funding for them?
by barrell | 2025-06-30 12:12:40+00:00
I’ve built the best way to learn over 120 languages to advanced levels (optimized for studying multiple languages in parallel): https://phrasing.app

I got the demo video produced, and a blog set up and seeded. You can see some of the science behind learning multiple languages at https://phrasing.app/blog/multiple-languages or follow my progress using Phrasing to learn 18+ languages at https://phrasing.app/blog/language-log-000

Now I’m working on the onboarding process, which I’m very excited about on both a product and a technical level. On the product level, it dovetails nicely into most of the shortcomings of the app. One solution to a dozen problems.

On the technical level, I’m starting to migrate away from reagent (ClojureScript react wrapper). The first step was adapting preact/signals-react to support r/atom, r/cursor, and r/reaction. This has worked beautifully so far and the whole module, with helpers, is less than 100 LoC. I’m irrationally excited about it, and every time I use any method it brings me a stupid amount of joy… especially since it’s exactly the same API as reagent.

For those curious, the next steps in the migration will be: upgrading to React 19 support once reagent ships with it (in alpha currently), then replacing the leaf components with hsx and working my way up the tree. No real code changes, just a lot of testing needed. Maybe at the end of it all, I can switch the whole app over to preact — will be interesting to test the performance differences.

As far as ideas I’m thinking about, I’m currently planning the next task in my head. This will be an (internal) clojure library that will hopefully have ClojErl (erlang), ClojureScript (js), and jank (C) interfaces, which means I’ll be able to write clojure once, and run on the server, browser, and mobile — all in their native environment. Needless to say, being able to write isomorphic clojure without running JavaScript everywhere has me almost as excited as my signals wrapper :D
by threetonesun | 2025-06-30 12:13:50+00:00
Tire sensors and backup cameras are dirt cheap though. Maybe lane warning and collision avoidance are a bit more but they’re both 10+ year old technology, they can’t cost that much. Also all of these things are good. Redoing the steering wheel or using 22” wheels or adding heating for each individual ass cheek… that I don’t need, and it adds to the cost.
by jchw | 2025-06-30 12:14:20+00:00
I definitely won't forget the cheap MP3 player I had when I was younger, a Sandisk Sansa Clip+, running Rockbox for much of its life. That thing was crazy small, had great audio quality (something something frequency response,) could play DOOM (on a tiny monochrome screen) and pretty much whatever audio files you cared about, had a decent battery life, and to top it off, it was expandable via microSD.

Certainly iPods were slicker and cooler, but I definitely didn't care. No SD card slot, had to be synced with iTunes, etc. Was not for me.
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-06-30 12:15:00+00:00
To that add the increased costs of logistics, because above some latitude you can only survive with a vegan diet with "exotic" produce brought to you with.. huge ass trucks.

The northerners did not all converge to meat eating diet out of taste, but because very few things grow up there.

I don't have the numbers but even then, 60% is simply funny.
by bArray | 2025-06-30 12:15:32+00:00
I remember the Apple store in my local area being the most elegant of the available stores, well lit and surrounded with glass windows, being exceptionally clean inside and always busy. The staff were well dressed and the atmosphere pleasant.

I ventured inside a few times to checkout the latest technological offerings of Apple, and was impressed. None of the sales staff ever approached me, but I was able to afford the devices, despite perhaps being dressed as though I couldn't. The irony is that even some of the poorest people in the UK I see walking around with iPhones and their children use iPads.

I never purchased or owned an Apple device to this day, but I did appreciate the well built hardware and snappy software.
by astrolink | 2025-06-30 12:15:49+00:00
I built AstroLink (https://astrolink.io) after getting frustrated with how bloated link-in-bio tools have become.

What started as simple landing pages now take seconds to load with unnecessary animations, pop-ups, and feature creep.

AstroLink strips everything back to what actually matters: your links, presented cleanly, loading instantly.

No distractions. No bloat. No waiting.

Your audience visits your page to find your links, not to navigate through cluttered interfaces or wait for pages to load. AstroLink focuses entirely on that core need.

The result: pages that load in milliseconds and put your content first. Try it yourself and compare the experience to existing solutions.

Would love feedback from the HN community on this back-to-basics approach.

https://astrolink.io

(Use ASTROLINK at checkout for your first month off our Pro tier)
by azeirah | 2025-06-30 12:15:52+00:00
I'm active in the /r/localllama community and on the llama.cpp GitHub. For this use-case you absolutely do not need a big LLM. Even an 8B model will suffice, smaller models perform extremely well when the task is very clear and you provide a few shot prompt.

I've experimented in the past with running an LLM like this on a CPU-only VPS, and that actually just works.

If you host it on a server with a single GPU, you'll likely be able to easily fulfil all generation tasks for all customers. What many people don't know about inference is that it's _heavily_ memory bottlenecked, meaning that there is a lot of spare compute left over. What this means in practice is that even on a single GPU, you can serve many parallel chats at once. Think 10 "threads" of inference at 20 Tok/s.

Not only that, but there are also LLMs trained only on commons data.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-06-30 12:16:05+00:00
This is a better description of what it's doing:

SR-IOV: https://cdrdv2-public.intel.com/321211/pci-sig-sr-iov-primer...

S-IOV: https://cdrdv2-public.intel.com/671403/intel-scalable-io-vir...

What they are doing is "technically" giving direct bus access, however the bus access they are giving is restricted such that the VM's accesses are all tagged and if they access anything outside the bounds they are permitted (as defined by access controls on the hardware during configuration), then you get a fault instead of the VM successfully touching anything.

This is similar to how VT-d and other CPU virt extensions allow direct access to RAM but with permissioning and access control through the IOMMU.

And then the other major component of SR-IOV and S-IOV is that they virtualise the interface on the PCI-E hardware itself (called virtual functions) and all of the context associated, the registers, the BAR, etc. This is akin to how VT-x and similar instructions virtualise the CPU (and registers, etc). And notably these virtual functions can be restricted via access controls, quotas, etc in hardware.

So your existing VT-x extension virtualises the CPU, your existing VT-d extension virtualises the IOMMU and RAM, your existing VT-c virtualises network interfaces (but not PCI-E in general). Now SR-IOV and S-IOV virtualise the PCI-E bus w/ access control over the lanes. And now SR-IOV and S-IOV virtualise the PCI-E device hardware and their functions/interface on the bus (akin to VT-x and VT-d).

Now notably S-IOV should be seen as a "SR-IOV 2.0" rather than an accompanying feature. It essentially moves the virtual function to physical function translation from the CPU or hardware in the chipset directly into the PCI-E device itself.
by sofixa | 2025-06-30 12:16:19+00:00
> Standard plan is £5.99 in UK, €7.99 in france, $7.99 in the US. So the US is the cheapest of those after currency conversion

Standard with ads, which is distorting because ads have a different cost and benefit (more expensive and lucrative in the US). Standard Standard is 14.99€ in France, £12.99 in the UK, $17.99 in the US.

> US median price in 2022: $10.53. In the UK, £7.69 == $10.54 (uncanny tbh)

2022 is distorted due to Covid.

> > groceries

> https://www.lovemoney.com/gallerylist/360768/what-a-basket-o... puts the US at $52.80, France at $51.08.

I like how you picked France, not Poland at $27, Spain at $35, UK at $35, Ireland at $39, Belgium at $42, Italy at $44, Germany at $46, etc.

> I'm genuinely struggling to understand where you are pulling these conclusions from because they don't fit the trivially searchable data, nor do they fit the anecdotal conclusions that I think most people would make from spending time in these places.

From visiting the US multiple times over relatively extended periods (few weeks at a time) over the past few years, while living and travelling extensively over the EU. Plus anecdotes from the internet. A lot of things are more expensive, when you count everything (tax, tips, etc).

> Yes, they're more favorable

You said they're favourable, not more favourable than e.g. in the UK. What's the average APR?

> You were the first person in this thread to bring up GDP per capita! The person you are replying to said "richer".

The only metric by which Mississipi is "richer" than France is GDP/GDP per capita.
by rolandog | 2025-06-30 12:16:41+00:00
> One more thing: I am well aware that Skype was also used to make calls to landlines and mobile phones across borders, but this is a feature that is hard to replicate, and somewhat of an add-on. If you need that kind of feature, you will have to rely on other apps on phone or websites that propose such services. Consider this out of scope for the present discussion.

Not sure about other people, but this was the only feature that I used Skype for (i.e. cheap calls to home country landlines while residing abroad).

Does anyone have a trustworthy recommendation that's similar to what Skype offered?
by skybrian | 2025-06-30 12:17:07+00:00
At first glance, it sounds like they reproduced the basic result of the emergent alignment paper [1], discussed previously [2]. Is there more to it than that?

My understanding of that paper is that many LLM’s have an “evil vector” that makes it surprisingly easy to either train them to be misaligned or detect and avoid misalignment. This website seems to be making a different claim?

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17424

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43176553
by moooo99 | 2025-06-30 12:17:12+00:00
First of all, that statement is entirely untrue. These cars aren‘t 10k in most (all?) of the EU for example. As far as I know, these 10k cars are really only a thing in china and some SEA markets (I am not sure if these cars are really that cheap adjusted to purchasing power in these markets).

Beyond that, the chinese EV brands are in market capture mode right now. The competition is cut throat and the margins are extremely thin.

It‘s a market skimming strategy that will presumably be a last man standing scenario. If the winner(s) are decided, prices will definitely not remain as low as they are right now in some places.
by pfdietz | 2025-06-30 12:17:51+00:00
Thank you for link.

As an aside there: the blog post briefly talks about birds. It turns out that membrane wings are much easier to evolve than feathered wings. There have been lots of membrane winged creatures (including "birds" with membrane wings in the Jurassic) but not nearly as many appearances of feathered wings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxA38gH8Gj4
by VGHN7XDuOXPAzol | 2025-06-30 12:17:51+00:00
This claim just seems like sensationalist marketing BS. If you find the real quote:

> “I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software,” Nadella said during a conversation before a live audience with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

— https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...

'maybe', 'probably', 'some of our projects', 'by software'

'software' would include many sorts of tools that are not AI.

Either the CEO talks like a primary school child unintentionally or it's on purpose to drive some clicks without saying anything 'technically' wrong.

And this is the CEO of a company that benefits from the doubt.

Am I too cynical?
by szszrk | 2025-06-30 12:18:01+00:00
Do you have some links to their financial reports for last years? I'd love to see that.

> Why not?

Because I believe it is "sickening" expressing how "sickening (...) it is that large companies don't support open source/free initiative" when discussing one of the projects that do global-scale operations purely on corporate and personal donations. Somehow Let's Encrypt themself don't express that sickening in their blogs and websites. They do thank their sponsors, though.
by spacephysics | 2025-06-30 12:18:02+00:00
Unfortunately many people don’t see cost, debt, and cars that way.

Imagine you get your first car, it’s used and a bit run down but you’re paying $250/month on a modest loan. Nothing crazy but you needed a loan and a car that was modestly reliable.

You get a couple of small raises, eventually the car is in the shop more and you feel you deserve a better car because of the hard work and long hours. You see ads for a new car at just another $100 per month on TV. $350/month would be tight, but you feel you’ve earned it.

You go to the dealership only to find the car you really want is closer to $500/month which you can’t afford.

The salesman says “let me see what i can do,” comes back from the finance office, and voila! Got the payment down to $375/month. It’s more than you initially expected but maybe you just don’t go out to eat as much. You’re sick of your old rust box, always in the shop. And you’ll probably get a raise soon too. So you sign.

And bam, you got a 6, 7, or even 9 year car loan. You don’t realize how much insurance will increase. You haven’t had a new car yet so you didn’t even think excise tax would be that much (for the first year of a new car its typically a lot) and now you’re struggling in debt with a new car that lost 20-35% of it’s value right off the lot, so you’re underwater on the loan.

Long winded story to say for many people a car is an emotional extension of themselves. Identity even, and it’s difficult to break that into a more utilitarian mindset. Thus justifying the high cost and debt is easier than if you were looking at it as just a way to get to point A and B
by diggan | 2025-06-30 12:18:15+00:00
The Seagull (aka "Dolphin Surf" in other countries) seems to cost 18560 GBP in the UK, or 11.780€ in Spain. Haven't checked out other countries, but clearly "Chinese EVs (BYD Seagull/Dolphin Surf/Dolphin Mini) are $10k worldwide except USA" isn't 100% correct.

Seems fine to leave something like that unmentioned, as a quick check reveals it not to be true at all.
by metalman | 2025-06-30 12:18:53+00:00
structural batteries that have competitive power densities will require precision 3D manufacturing at the same level as silicone processors, and is altogether theoretical for the forseable future. what we are seeing with huawaei is an example of excess engineering capacity of a large high tech company, much like Honda, when it gets bored, and starts making jets, or robots, or rockets...instead of mini bikes huawei is a bit different in that there big business of phones,routers, and cell infrastucture equipment got largely shut down, and so they are returning serve with a vengance in order to redeem there place as a player in high tech infrastructure industry.
by BirAdam | 2025-06-30 12:19:05+00:00
Honestly, there are two different main drivers of US automobile pricing. The first was a combination of fuel efficiency and safety regulations that when combined were difficult to meet. One side effect is that all vehicles got larger so they could be in a different vehicle class and therefore have a lower fuel efficiency standard, and then in other cases the engines were made smaller with turbos added to make up the horsepower loss. The second driving force is just consumer expectations. Many companies did make cheaper vehicles that still met the regulatory burdens and people simply didn't want them.

With inflation pressures, layoffs, and other downward pricing pressures, we should expect consumer preferences to change, but I also expect that the global vehicle fleet will continue to age (especially as most vehicles are of sufficient quality that they needn't be replaced).