MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Handy – Free open-source speech-to-text app written in Rust
by sipjca | 2025-06-17 18:44:20+00:00
Hey Folks!

Handy is a free and open source speech to text application that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

I built it because I broke my finger and was put in a cast, which made doing my day job really difficult trying to type with just one hand. I tried applications like MacWhisper and SuperWhisper, but I really needed something more extensible so I could play with accessibility features for my particular situation. I also love open source software and wanted to contribute something that other people can build on top of.

The app is pretty simple – you hold down a keyboard shortcut while speaking (or press once to start/stop recording), and it transcribes what you said and pastes it directly into whatever text field you're using. It's built on whisper.cpp, runs completely offline with GPU acceleration, and doesn't require any subscriptions or cloud services.

This is my first Rust project, and since I built it mostly one-handed, a lot of it was written with help from LLMs. The code definitely shows it, there are bugs and rough edges.

What I'm really hoping for from the HN community is Rust contributors who want to help fix bugs and clean up the codebase. The goal is to make this a solid foundation that people can fork and extend for their own needs, whether that's accessibility features, voice computing experiments, or just having speech-to-text software you actually own and control. I do hope that Handy can be a nice simple, clean, code base, for speech-to-text that is easily extensible for people to try what's next. And I really would love your help in making that possible.

If you've been looking for something like this, give it a try. And if you're a Rustacean who wants to help make it better, I'd love the help, or any advice.

GitHub: https://github.com/cjpais/Handy
by wand3r | 2025-06-17 18:44:34+00:00
Yeah, understandable. The problem for me is the desktop app sucks. I need both for browsing sync, passwords and adblock and 3rd party search. Brave works best for me on Mac and iPhone. Most of the extensions I would use are built in, but I dont think it fully supports 3rd party extensions. I am not sure, is that possible on iPhone?
by gpm | 2025-06-17 18:44:40+00:00
Because knowingly helping people commit crimes generally counts the same as committing the crime yourself. I.e. federally in the U.S. under 18 USC 2a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2 The software you're running being "simple" isn't a defence for doing illegal things with it - like aiding others commit crimes.

There are a few internet/copyright safe harbor provisions (in the US) that might maybe (probably not) make it not a crime, I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. But your general thought when you hear "helping someone else commit a crime" ought to be "that's probably a crime itself".
by tweetle_beetle | 2025-06-17 18:44:42+00:00
I'd suggest that while /e/ can work at a basic level, the list of cons is larger than you make out when I looked at it. The Murena team seems small and unable to keep up. As an example, look at the hoops users were jumping through for over a year just to attempt to use the camera at the advertised pixel count without the stock OS:

https://forum.fairphone.com/t/for-a-better-camera-on-degoogl...
by xyst | 2025-06-17 18:44:57+00:00
Not illegal. But most people without resources to fight off the thinly veiled, strongly worded legal letters would probably fold under this light pressure.

Interesting, but I suppose it’s not surprising to see clients still holding references to old/defunct trackers. Those peers this person discovered once the tracker was resurrected are more than likely to be seed boxes. Maybe a few real clients if they found an old .torrent link and have left it open.

Thanks to DHT (trackerless peering), trackers have become mostly defunct.
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-06-17 18:45:02+00:00
It's not a trap the left falls into. If anything, the left is overzealous in internal tone policing, to the point where activists and organizers wish it would become less of a distraction. You have organizations and individuals of prominence in the US political sphere who are openly and actively try to promote bigoted and fascist talking points and implement them in government, often using long-debunked arguments or outright lies, and the people insisting that these ideas are not bigoted or fascist are either being duped or arguing in bad faith. I do not and will not attribute good faith to reactionary, white-supremacist, ultra-nationalist right-wing movements as we have in the US.
by Marsymars | 2025-06-17 18:45:09+00:00
I'm not much of a socialist either, and I wish that social media was frivolous enough that I didn't see their regulation as a reasonable proposition.

The problem isn't access to memes, it's that for various categories of services/interactions, Meta (and presumably WeChat and/or others in other locales) properties effectively are the internet. I've seen all of the following use social media services as their sole method of communication or online presence: amateur sports teams/leagues, gyms, local governments, government agencies, parent/school groups, local service providers (barbers, farmers' markets, restaurants, etc.), online classifieds, community food boxes.

The fact that Meta has intermingled its meme factory with its hosting of the informational/communication platforms for a wide array of local groups/organizations/businesses is something they chose to do, and I'm not willing to accept the excuse of "we make a lot of money from our ad-serving brainrot algorithms so we couldn't possibly charge less than that amount of money for access to the non-algorithmic features on which we've gotten people hooked."
by danans | 2025-06-17 18:45:42+00:00
> But Elon has killed his brand with his politics, and the robotaxi initiative is a desperate attempt to gain ground. But it's going to kill someone and it will be 100% on him because he's the one pushing this when there's no way it will ever be ready for real world situations the way Waymo is.

What if his political allies allow and enable him to push this upon the populace despite it killing people.

After all, other industries have been allowed to kill plenty of people if it makes money and lines the pockets of friendly politicians of all stripes.

Maybe nobody is forcing you to get in a robotaxi, but behavior normalization based on availability is a powerful force.
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-06-17 18:45:56+00:00
Passport card is made for you! They're not officially accepted for enough things in USA that losing it is a major stress, it doesn't have your address on the front, and big plus: foreign countries who want to see a "national id" (because they have one and think this is normal) who don't accept a passport will happily accept a passport card (source: my own experience living in South Asia)
by ahartmetz | 2025-06-17 18:46:11+00:00
Zen was actually, in a way, a conservative design. They specifically mentioned "performance compatibility" with Intel - they couldn't be weirdly slow in some workloads because of an exotic design. You could say that they had the luxury of not having to aim for the moon because Intel was pretty much parked on the ground, with a failing new process and no ambition to increase core count. Against the original SV ethos, against Andy Grove, just plain old greed and complacency.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-06-17 18:46:15+00:00
Many of the hardest problems facing rocket engines are about temperature, heat and thermal density, not structural strength.

This means that 3d-printed copper (alloy) is an amazing process and material for them. You can build the kind of structurally integrated cooling channels that the people building rockets in the 60's could only dream about, and it's not a gold-plated part that required a million labor hours to build, it's something you can just print overnight.
by 6510 | 2025-06-17 18:46:33+00:00
I use to know a gamer who used a phone for something like a decade. He got stuck doing something and I had to point out the burger to him. The thing he was looking for was interestingly enough not there. Apparently all websites he used were perfectly usable without knowing the button exists.

In contrast, some people can't not-read something and it being a button is automatically parsed out. Symbols and icons have to be learned which is a more gradual process. The other day I didn't recognize the flower icon for settings.
by Zardoz84 | 2025-06-17 18:47:19+00:00
I sorry to say that you are wrong about this.

> Key features of the JPEG XL codec are: > lossless JPEG transcoding,

> Moreover, JPEG XL includes several features that help transition from the legacy JPEG coding format. Existing JPEG files can be losslessly transcoded to JPEG XL files, significantly reducing their size (Fig. 1). These can be reconstructed to the exact same JPEG file, ensuring backward compatibility with legacy applications. Both transcoding and reconstruction are computationally efficient. Migrating to JPEG XL reduces storage costs because servers can store a single JPEG XL file to serve both JPEG and JPEG XL clients. This provides a smooth transition path from legacy JPEG platforms to the modern JPEG XL.

https://ds.jpeg.org/whitepapers/jpeg-xl-whitepaper.pdf

If you need more profs, you could transcode a JPEG to JPEG XL and convert against to JPEG. The result image would be BINARY IDENTICAL to the original image.

However, perhaps are you talking about an image on JPEG XL, using features only in JPEG XL (24 bit, HDR, etc...) that obviously couldn't be converted in a lossless way to a JPEG.
by throw18376 | 2025-06-17 18:47:20+00:00
some people should never take psychedelics.

in the last few years' surge of popularity, I found that your typical psychedelic advocate* would never admit this category of people exists. they were committed to the idea that everyone can, should, and must take these drugs.

this attitude is currently on a downturn, which is a good thing. people now admit that these drugs are not for everyone.

however, there's little solid understanding of exactly who should avoid psychedelics. it would be good to have a more solid scientific understanding of this. i imagine psychedelic advocates (which includes many scientists working on the topic) would be wary of such research, because it seems to similar to the history of government-sponsored propaganda "science" finding exaggerated harms of various illegal drugs.

however, scientific knowledge about who most likely will have adverse effects would be useful. that way people at low risk could use psychedelic drugs with the confidence that they are very likely safe. people at high risk can avoid them. this would be a great outcome.

The only problem here would be that if someone chooses not to use psychedelics, this might mark them as having certain traits that most people judge negatively. For example, history of severe trauma, family or personal history of psychotic disorders, and so on.

Given this, I think anyone who wants to normalize psychedelic drug use in their local community, ought to really fight to destigmatize such traits (and most communities won't accept this), or else more practically, promote an extreme commitment to privacy and personal choice.

*: I don't just mean people who do drugs, I mean people who think that doing drugs is mandatory to fix various spiritual/mental problems that prevent you from being a fully ethical being.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-06-17 18:47:35+00:00
> That only made the world better

Did it?

people now stand around on dance floors taking photos and videos of themselves instead of getting on dancing and enjoying the music. to the point where clubs put stickers on phones to stop people from doing it.

people taking their phone out and videoing / photographing something awful happening, instead of doing something helpful.

people travel to remote areas where the population has been separated from humanity and do stupid things like leave a can of coke there, for view count.

it’s not made things better, it just made things different. whether that’s better or worse depends on your individual perspective for a given example.

so, i disagree. it hasn’t only made things better. it made some things easier. some things better. some things worse. some things harder.

someone always loses, something is always lost. would be good if more people in tech remembered that progress comes at a cost.
by GloriousKoji | 2025-06-17 18:47:39+00:00
I've seen too many variants of icons for "general" menu. Three bars, three dots, square, square in square, tall rectangle, gear, company logo and probably a few more.

And if we want to focus on just three bars let's not leave out the skeuomorphism trend where three bars meant the "grip" area, something to use to rearrange items or windows.
by frollogaston | 2025-06-17 18:47:47+00:00
A lot of these are non-exe files, like images/video, crafted to execute arbitrary code through some bug in outdated software that opens them. Could be a web browser or something else. It does take a while for an OS to be so old that browsers don't support it anymore, but sufficiently old ones are vulnerable to known spectre exploits breaking out of the JS sandbox for example. Or random other browser features can be exploited.

Also, Wannacry is a good example of a LAN attack reaching further than you might expect. Or there are various conditional ways to breach the NAT, one of them simply being NATless ipv6 with a misconfigured firewall.

Microsoft might bluff a bit and actually backport fixes for very serious issues, like how Wannacry was patched all the way back to XP. Maybe Win10 is fine for several years, but the real problem is that you don't know how vulnerable you are with each passing year.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 18:48:28+00:00
Yup, same here. But it's also super painful to watch it being neutered by people who tried to force-fit MCP to their usual smelly business models, and then started to make a fuss about "security issues" that are actually core features of MCP and LLMs in general. In most cases, it's not MCP that was a problem, it's someone's -as-a-Service business model they cling to.
by jjani | 2025-06-17 18:49:01+00:00
> When regular software declines in quality, it’s usually noticeable through UI changes, release notes, or other signals.

Counterexample: 99% of average Joes have no idea how incredibly enshittified Google Maps has become, to just name one app. These companies intentionally boil the frog very slowly, and most people are incredibly bad at noticing gradual changes (see global warming).

Sure, they could know by comparing, but you could also know whether models are changing behind the scenes by having sets of evals.
by imiric | 2025-06-17 18:49:04+00:00
If your team takes a disproportionately shorter amount of time to review PRs than to write them, I guarantee that your code base has many issues that would've been caught by a more thorough reviewer. Reviewing code doesn't mean slapping a quick "LGTM!" because you trust the author.

> How long does it take to review a test case and run it vs write the implementation under test?

If you blindly trust a passing test and don't review it as production code, I have a bridge to sell you.

> How long does it take to evaluate a performance optimization vs write it?

Factoring in the time to review that the optimization didn't introduce a regression, and isn't a hack that will cause other issues later: the difference shouldn't be too large.

Yes, code usually takes more time and effort to write, but if it's not thoroughly read, understood, and reviewed, it can cause havoc someone will have to deal with later.

This idea that just because LLMs help you write code quicker will make you or the team more productive is delusional. It's just kicking the can down the road. You can ignore it, but sooner or later someone will have to handle it. And you better hope that it happens before it impacts your users.
by 999900000999 | 2025-06-17 18:49:10+00:00
Leica is obviously social signalling.

He gets to let us know he REALLY cares about photography.

Photography is ultimately subjective anyway, if he feels a 10k camera worth it that's cool.

IMO if your new wait for a sale or buy someone else's failed ambitions off eBay. I'm no pro but plenty of very capable cameras can be had under 1000$. The lenses are the expensive parts
by munificent | 2025-06-17 18:49:35+00:00
> That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers.

I disagree with the "only" part here. Imagine a distribution curve of photos with shitty photos on the left and masterpieces on the right and the height at the curve is how many photos there are to be seen at that quality.

The digital camera transition massively increased the height of the curve at all points. And thanks to things like better autofocus, better low light performance, and a radically faster iteration loop, it probably shift the low and middle ends to the right.

It even certainly increased the number number of breathtaking, life-changing photos out there. Digital cameras are game-changes for photographic journalists traveling in difficult locations.

However... the curve is so high now, the sheer volume of tolerably good photos so overwhelming, that I suspect that average person actually sees fewer great photos than they did twenty years ago. We all spend hours scrolling past nice-but-forgottable sunset shots on Instagram and miss out on the amazing stuff.

We are drowning in a sea of "pretty good". It is possible for there to be too much media. Ultimately, we all have a finite amount of attention to spend before we die.
by ungreased0675 | 2025-06-17 18:50:04+00:00
Very weak argument. The purpose of attending Stanford for an MBA is to network. A self-taught entrepreneur can’t even get into the room where it happens.

Listing a bunch of web-based educational resources is irrelevant. Business schools have never had secret knowledge only available on campus. Anyone can buy textbooks, just like anyone can use ChatGPT. It’s the brand and the connections that people pay for.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 18:50:07+00:00
> but you will always be able to say to your AI to open your email and search whatever.

Can you actually even do that today? Not on iOS, I presume, definitely not on Android, at least not without hacking it six ways to Sunday with Tasker and Termux and API access to LLM providers.

(And no, firing Gemini and asking it to kindly maybe search your GMail doesn't count - because GMail is not the only e-mail provider, and GMail app is not the only e-mail client. If I want this to be possible with FastMail as provider and FairEmail as the app, it's hack o'clock again.)

Vendors all across the board really hate to give users useful features, because useful features tend to side-step their monetization efforts. And if history is any lesson, they'll find ways to constrain and shut down general-purpose use of LLMs. "Security" and "privacy" were the main fig leafs used in the past, so watch out for any new "improvements" there.
Show HN: RauGen AI Math Solver, Concept Explainer, and More
by raugen | 2025-06-17 18:50:12+00:00
We add more education tools to RauGen AI Math Solver: https://raugen.com/ai-tools/math-solver AI Homework Helper: https://raugen.com/ai-tools/homework-helper AI Concept Explainer: https://raugen.com/ai-tools/concept-explainer
by nemomarx | 2025-06-17 18:50:33+00:00
The cops personally agree with them, and so wouldn't intervene in any case.

I do think there's precedent that it's self defense to fire on an unidentified stranger who knocks on your door or tries to arrest you without showing ID, but you need to make it to court to press that defense and I can't say it's a great strategy for that reason
by riobard | 2025-06-17 18:50:35+00:00
That mentality gets us fragmentation of Linux DE for the past few decades with none winning majority mindshare and no commitment from major commercial developers. Sure with a capable browser most use cases can be covered but then there will not be a Year of Linux DE. It would be a Year of Chromium-based Browsers where DE is mostly irrelevant.

Those abstracted away details matter a lot if you care about user experience. Just watch how painfully a task both Apple and Microsoft are enduring to try to improve their consumer OS.
by Veserv | 2025-06-17 18:50:41+00:00
That is entirely untrue. Fred Lambert was one of the most full-throated supporters of Tesla just a few years ago. He personally referred around 15 million dollars of sales [1] to Tesla. If even Tesla's most fervent supporters now call them liars and dangerous, you should probably listen.

[1] https://electrek.co/2019/01/17/tesla-roadster-free-killed-re...
by darkotodoric | 2025-06-17 18:51:04+00:00
Hi,

I have created a database of movies and series, the site has data from several sources, the data is formatted and organized as it should be. Data is downloaded on a daily basis, some data is downloaded even several times a day.

We currently have a free API package of 1000 requests per month.

The plan is to create open source scripts (on our GitHub) that will update data on JellyFin, Plex, automatically download movies as part of Radarr and Sonarr, and similar things.

If you have any suggestions or criticism, feel free to write here!
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-06-17 18:51:13+00:00
This is exciting, and probably a subtle admission from Apple that states aren't playing ball with their Drivers ID in Wallet approach. Even Apple's home state California initially limited digital IDs to their bottom of the barrel, garbage grade ID app (seriously go look at "mDL California"/"CA DMV Wallet" app, even the splash image is pixelated garbage) before finally allowing IDs to be added to Wallet the Apple way.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-17 18:51:27+00:00
If you open a browser, you expose yourself to other servers. Same with opening files you download. Plus, with exploits like NAT slipstreaming, your computer can be exposed to arbitrary packets from anywhere on the internet as soon as any device you own loads and ad.

Microsoft at some point had a bug where a single packet could take over the entire kernel. I think it was a bug somewhere in the IP stack (something related to fragmentation in IPv6 I think?). Linux had similar issues.

If the built-in JPEG viewer or h.264 decoder or whatever component you use contains a bug, your computer can get infected. That also goes for things like preview generators and file indexers that run even if you don't open the file.

As much as the web seems to have consumed everything, there are still plenty of files people open.

In practice, you'll probably be fine as long as you keep your browser up to date and use up-to-date third-party software to open most files. At some point Chrome and Firefox stop supporting your system, though, and that's when infection suddenly becomes real easy.
by extr | 2025-06-17 18:51:48+00:00
Gemini Flash 2.0 is an absolute workhorse of a model at extremely low cost. It's obviously not going to measure up to frontier models in terms of intelligence but the combination of low cost, extreme speed, and highly reliable structured output generation make it really pleasant to develop with. I'll probably test against 2.5 Lite for an upgrade here.
by gpm | 2025-06-17 18:52:41+00:00
This guy didn't just buy the haunted house that previously had signs directing serial killers to where the victims are, he also reinstalled the signs and opened it back up to the public knowing that the serial killers were still around and reading the signs.

I mean, it's a bit absurd to compare copyright infringement to murder, but that's where your analogy started. He didn't just by the domain and do something innocent, he actually started running the software that helps people pirate things strongly suspecting that pirates would use it to help them pirate things... and then when he observed that was reality he (smartly IMO) shut it down.