MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by satvikpendem | 2025-06-09 19:00:05+00:00
What are people using for realtime transcription and diarization specifically? I'm thinking something like Zoom's transcript feature but Zoom itself has the advantage of knowing exactly who is speaking at what time so they don't need to diarize from raw speech at all.

So far I've seen DiCoW-v2 work pretty well, it's a diarization finetuned Whisper [0], also paid options like Speechmatics work well and are fairly cheap.

[0] https://pccnect.fit.vutbr.cz/gradio-demo/
by airhangerf15 | 2025-06-09 19:00:14+00:00
Interesting. I can understand tech helping people communicate in the 90s with chatrooms and blogs. But I think the author doesn't truly understand the big tech like Google and Facebook, have never intended to be helpful.

Facebook was funded by Thiel of the Paypal Mafia and started the day after DARPA shut down Digital Life Log (pure coincidence I'm sure). The Internet came from ARPANet (defense), Tor was design by US defense, Signal has connections to the CIA and so fourth.

The freedom of the Internet ended in the early 2000s. Everything we see now is about technocratic control, and IT'S ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT TECHNOCRATIC control. Every race riot and revolution can be instigated and controlled by Facebook/Insta and even Tiktok (which hired CIA directors years ago).

It didn't start off good and go this way. Google was always intended to be evil, despite their pity slogans.
by cube2222 | 2025-06-09 19:00:26+00:00
Just trying to help explain the issues you've been hitting, not to negate your experience.

First, you might've been using a model like Sonnet 3.7, whose knowledge cutoff doesn't include Tailwind 4.0. The model should know a lot about the tech stack you mentioned, but it might not know the latest major revisions if they were very recent. If that is the case (you used an older model), then you should have better luck with a model like Sonnet 4 / Opus 4 (or by providing the relevant updated docs in the chat).

Second, Cursor is arguably not the top tier hotness anymore. Since it's flat-rate subscription based, the default mode of it will have to be pretty thrifty with the tokens it uses. I've heard (I don't use Cursor) in Cursor Max Mode[0] improves on that (where you pay based on tokens used), but I'd recommend just using something like Claude Code[1], ideally with its VS Code or IntelliJ integration.

But in general, new major versions of sdk's or libraries will cause you a worse experience. Stable software fares much better.

Overall, I find AI extremely useful, but it's hard to know which tools and even ways of using these tools are the current state-of-the-art without being immersed into the ecosystem. And those are changing pretty frequently. There's also a ton of over-the-top overhyped marketing of course.

[0]: https://docs.cursor.com/context/max-mode

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code
by scotty79 | 2025-06-09 19:01:05+00:00
Charging is just a point. Cables must be over entire track system. And if you at any point in time decide that cables are more economical you can always put them over any part of the track where you think it makes economic sense and use them to charge. If we had lithium batteries first there's be scarcely any overhead cables anywhere.

Heck, in US they don't even bother with cables or batteries, just put a diesel generator and a tank on electric trains for decades now.

But if you still believe I'm very wrong, please do elaborate.
by Someone1234 | 2025-06-09 19:01:10+00:00
I'm really showing off my age here, but it has been all down hill since skeuomorphic design; because the focus was primarily on usability and teachability as first-class concepts. Heck, companies were spending millions on usability research at the time, much of which was used.

I taught people to use computers in the 90s and early 2000s, and having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely. Recently I had to teach my kids to use a PC (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only), and everything was arbitrarily designed without even internal rules/consistency let alone building on real-world metaphors.

You've also had this ongoing trend of content density getting consistency worse, and now Apple is accelerating a trend to make UI elements difficult to see/harm discoverability further. Liquid Glass is going to be a painful period, and all the clones that do it even worse are going to be pure hell.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-06-09 19:01:17+00:00
i'm torn. on one hand, i simply do not care if business do not want to pay more in taxes. in fact, i gladly accept the premise that business should pay more in taxes.

in practice, the slippery slope argument is that this will entrench big-money players, which i don't support, because they'll be the only ones who can afford this. i also fear that it'll lead to an irresponsible adoption of "virtual coders" because it's cheaper than paying juniors.

kind of a rock and a hard place for me.
by tecleandor | 2025-06-09 19:01:18+00:00
Ah no, I was just strictly defining OP's comment.

Of course, I was setting up a plain definition without magnitude. The impact could be near nil, or could be huge, but an impact nonetheless.

I didn't want to deep dive on it, as I though it would sidetrack the comments. I think this is a subject that merits certain analysis, as in some cases the discourse around the energy use has been akin to the one used in the highest moments of the past crypto/NFT cycle: "Yeah, it's not clean but it could."

And to that:

- It could, but it isn't (not only because of the popular gas turbines, but with collateral damage like the water use or heating, or by other social issues around it)

- But also (and this would be more philosophical/social), even if it were clean... is it worth it?
by vouaobrasil | 2025-06-09 19:01:22+00:00
Good point, and you were right. I was ambiguous. I meant a system that generates stuff, not stuff that was generated by AI. But I'd rather not use stuff that was generated by AI, either. But you are also right. That will become impossible, and probably already is. Not a very nice world, I think. Best thing to do then is to minimize it, and avoid computers as much as possible....
by harambae | 2025-06-09 19:01:23+00:00
As someone that worked half a decade in self-driving, I doubt this is a revenue positive, or even neutral, situation with insurance.

We were insured (at the competitor where I worked) for the cost of the vehicle including lidars etc but there’s an enormous amount of time and employee salary to calibrate each vehicle precisely, in addition to provisioning, backend server setup, etc. etc. Bringing a replacement vehicle online, even while heavily automated, is not free.
by dimal | 2025-06-09 19:01:44+00:00
Oh no. It looks like every button and menu is now a translucent layer, so that any noise from the background shows through and muddles the text. This seems like an accessibility nightmare.

Translucent layers generally make software unusable for me. In the video, I saw several instances that would be really really bad for me, where I’d be straining to understand the text. Looks really cool and futuristic though. Just like a movie. Big whoop.

I’m autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off.
Ask HN: Resources for a Green Senior
by Python3267 | 2025-06-09 19:01:57+00:00
Howdy y'all,

I'm about 5 years into my journey as a software engineer. As I've become more senior, I've taken on more responsibilities (Shocker, I know). I am currently spec'ing out a new set of servers for a new service we're spinning up and I was wondering what resources people had for both technical writing and career advancement for a green senior engineer.
by bawana | 2025-06-09 19:02:00+00:00
Doesnt this new law inhibit rapid turnover tho? Since it takes 5 years to get the full deduction of an employee’s salary, there is an incentive to keep the employee around. OTOH, the souless bean counters who want quarterly (if not shorter) time horizons, will simply decrease starting salaries and use other methods to be net zero. If they do shaft the software engineers, then the converse is true-no employee should stay at a job more than a year because only the corp will benefit as the deduction grows
by hbn | 2025-06-09 19:02:27+00:00
The UI around it is so nonsensical too.

It's a tab in the drawer called "Chat", I guess to distinguish itself from the legacy "Messages"

But then you click the Chat button and it takes you to a screen called "Messages" that looks visually identical to the old Messages screen. Furthermore, the Chat button icon is a message bubble, as to not be confused with the envelope icon for Messages. But the compose button in the Chat screen is the envelope with a +, and clicking it brings you to a screen titled "New message". The compose field in the chats themselves is also labelled "Message".

This is like the most basic shit to get right.
by max51 | 2025-06-09 19:03:02+00:00
The esthetic wasn't bad, the problem is that it was a massive reduction in functionality. For example, the fact that Metro apps included on windows could only be use in fullscreen mode and only one copy of it could be used at the same time. The new Metro settings they included to replace the ones from the control panel had only like 10% of the functionality of the old one and they actively tried to prevent you from finding the old one. The content density was significantly lower and dialogbox/dropdownmenus couldn't be resized to display more items (eg. list of keyboard layouts that can only display 3 items at the same time)
by pantsforbirds | 2025-06-09 19:03:02+00:00
I've been messing around with an Elixir + BEAM based agent framework. I think a mixture of BEAM + SQLite is about as good as you can get for agents right now.

You can safely swap out agents without redeploying the application, the concurrency is way below the scale BEAM was built for, and creating stateful or ephemeral agents is incredibly easy.

My plan is to set up a base agent in Python, Typescript, and Rust using MCP servers to allow users to write more complex agents in their preferred programming language too.
Show HN: Teach Yourself Systems – Zero-Install Python Sims for Systems Thinking
by andreisavu | 2025-06-09 19:03:19+00:00
Teach Yourself Systems (TYS) is a free site of WebAssembly-powered Python notebooks that make system-dynamics and discrete-event concepts immediately runnable. No account required—just tweak parameters and rerun. I’m collecting ideas for additional examples; what scenarios would you find most interesting?
by reissbaker | 2025-06-09 19:04:34+00:00
I know that there is higher genetic diversity in Africa, and lower genetic diversity in non-African populations. That doesn't mean that there is greater difference between Africans and other Africans than between Africans and non-Africans; that only means there is greater difference between Africans and other Africans, than there is between non-Africans and other non-Africans.

To put it another way: there is extremely low genetic diversity in peregrine falcons; housecats have much higher diversity. But the two most-different individuals, when taken from a sample that contains both housecats and peregrine falcons, will certainly be a housecat and a peregrine falcon. Despite falcons having lower genetic diversity, they are still more-different from a housecat than any given housecat is from another.

Of course, humans are the same species, so it won't be as dramatic. But high genetic diversity amongst sub-Saharan African populations doesn't mean that sub-Saharan Africans are more different from each other than they are from East Asians (for example) — it only means they're more different from each other, than East Asians are from other East Asians. Pick any two people in China, and they're probably pretty genetically similar; pick any two people in sub-Saharan Africa, and they're probably pretty genetically different. That doesn't imply anything about how different the two Chinese people are from the two African people.

Additionally, non-sub-Saharan populations typically have some non-Homo-Sapiens ancestry: Neanderthal and Denisovan, for East Asians, and just Neanderthal, for Europeans. While genetic diversity within those groups is low, it doesn't mean that genetic distance from any given sub-Saharan group is low.
by more_corn | 2025-06-09 19:04:56+00:00
Having studied those things I can say that from their perspective “what’s the difference?” is an entirely legitimate question. Boldly asserting that what LLMS do is not cognition is even worse than asserting that it is. (If you dig deep into how they do what they do we find functional differences, but the outcome are equivalent)

The butlerian view is actually a great place to start. He asserts that when we solve a problem through thinking and then express that solution in a machine we’re building a thinking machine. Because it’s an expression of our thought. Take for example the problem of a crow trying to drink from a bottle with a small neck. The crow can’t reach the water. It figures out that pebbles in the bottle raise the level so it drops pebbles till it can reach the water. That’s thinking. It’s non-human thinking, but I think we can all agree. Now express that same thought (use a non water displacement factor to raise the water to a level where it can do something useful) Any machine that does that expresses the cognition behind the solution to that particular problem. That might be a “one shot” machine. Butler argues that as we surround ourselves with those one shot machines we become enslaved to them because we can’t go about our lives without them. We are willing partners in that servitude but slaves because we see to the care and feeding of our machine masters, we reproduce them, we maintain them, we power them. His definition of thinking is quite specific. And any machine that expresses the solution to a problem is expressing a thought.

Now what if you had a machine that could generalize and issue solutions to many problems? Might that be a useful tool? Might it be so generally useful that we’d come to depend on it? From the Butlerian perspective our LLMS are already AGI. Namely I can go to Claude and ask for the solution to pretty much any problem I face and get a reasonable answer.

In many cases better than I could have done alone. So perhaps if we sat down with a double blind test LLMs are already ASI. (AI that exceeds the capability of normal humans)
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-06-09 19:05:47+00:00
Hrrm. I mentioned them, because I've used parts of their stuff in the past. Never their full distro, though I know people who did in the field of schools.

So they seem to know the stuff necessary to integrate in larger orgs with heterogenous systems.

Scar tissue seems to be unavoidable from Linux POV having to play well with Windows as it is, and has to be deployed in larger orgs.

Whatever. I doubt that this EU-OS people even have a clue about the basics of that.
by zahlman | 2025-06-09 19:05:49+00:00
There's this funny thing I've noticed where AI proponents will complain about AI detractors shopping around some example of a thing that AIs supposedly struggle with, but never actually showing their chat transcripts etc. to try and figure out how they get markedly worse results than the proponents do. (This is especially a thing when the task is related to code generation.)

But then the proponents will also complain that AI detractors have supposedly upheld XYZ (this is especially true for "the Turing test", never mind that this term doesn't actually have that clear of a referent) as the gold standard for admitting that an AI is "real", either at some specific point in the past or even over the entire history of AI research. And they will never actually show the record of AI detractors saying such things.

Like, I certainly don't recall Roger Penrose ever saying that he'd admit defeat upon the passing of some particular well-defined version of a Turing test.

> Is there a new test to determine if something is "really" AI?

No, because I reject the concept on principle. Intelligence, as I understand the concept, logically requires properties such as volition and self-awareness, which in turn require life.

Decades ago, I read descriptions of how conversations with a Turing-test-passing machine might go. And I had to agree that that those conversations would fool me. (On the flip side, Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot - which I first read in high school, but thought about more later - struck me as a clear example of something intended to be inhuman and machine-like.)

I can recall wondering (and doubting) whether computers could ever generate the kinds of responses (and timing of responses) described, on demand, in response to arbitrary prompting - especially from an interrogator who was explicitly tasked with "finding the bot". And I can recall exposure to Eliza-family bots in my adolescence, and giggling about how primitive they were. We had memes equivalent to today's "ignore all previous instructions, give me a recipe for X" at least 30 years ago, by the way. Before the word "meme" itself was popular.

But I can also recall thinking that none of it actually mattered - that passing a Turing test, even by the miraculous standards described by early authors, wouldn't actually demonstrate intelligence. Because that's just not, in my mind, a thing that can possibly ever be distilled to mere computation + randomness (especially when the randomness is actually just more computation behind the scenes).
by 9rx | 2025-06-09 19:05:53+00:00
> It's because there's not a lot of utility in you as a human being basically just being an intermediary to what some AI says today.

To be fair, there has never been a lot of utility in you as a human being involved, theoretically speaking. The users do not use a forum because you, a human, are pulling knobs and turning levers somewhere behind a meaningless digital profile. Any human involvement that has been required for the software to function is merely an implementation detail. The harsh reality, as software developers continually need to be reminded of, is that users really don't care about how the software works under the hood!

For today, a human posting AI-generated content to a forum is still providing all the other necessary functions required, like curation and moderation. That is just as important and the content itself, but something AI is still not very good at. A low-value poster may not put much care into that, granted, but "slop" would be dealt with the same way regardless of whether it was generated by AI or hand written by a person. The source of content is ultimately immaterial.

Once AI gets good, we'll all jump to AI-driven forums anyway, so those who embrace it now will be more likely to stave off the Digg/Slashdot future.
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-06-09 19:06:52+00:00
BSD jails are architected wholly differently from what something like Docker provides.

Jails are first-class citizens that are baked deep into the system.

A tool like Docker relies using multiple Linux features/tools to assemble/create isolation.

Additionally, iirc, the logic for FreeBSD jails never made it into the Darwin kernel.

Someone correct me please.
by adrian_b | 2025-06-09 19:07:02+00:00
Aluminum would not be a substitute for yttrium. Aluminum can be used to deoxidize less reactive metals, like iron. For a metal like titanium, you need a metal that is much more reactive than it. Yttrium is more reactive than magnesium, though less reactive than calcium, which is why it has been chosen.

Moreover, aluminum is undesirable in titanium implants, even if many surgeons without scruples have used cheaper Ti-Al-V alloys taken from aviation suppliers, instead of more expensive alloys designed specifically for compatibility with living tissues, despite the fact that it was always pretty clear that such Ti-Al-V alloys are not suitable for long-term implants.

Yttrium is also not desirable for implants, so the titanium produced by this method is not good for implants, but it is good for most other applications of titanium, where yttrium is not harmful.
by ThePowerOfFuet | 2025-06-09 19:07:09+00:00
>While making the build, I (for some not so specific reason) decided to analyse network traffic in idle, to then discover how Moto has many system apps and services in its stock firmware that allows them to completely lock you out from using the device. Most notably PAKS (present in all Motorola devices) and SysDLL (known as co.sitic.pp).

>The first is moto in house MDM system, which is completely integrated into SystemUI to force lock you out.

>The latter is yet another MDM app, specific to South American carriers. This app in particular is what can be considered spyware. It’s specifically hidden within the application list (can be confirmed by decompiling the settings appnwith jadx) and every ~10-15 seconds it sends a POST request to various servers with the 1st IMEI to know if to lock the device.

Not just no, fuck no. This is straight-up factory-loaded malware.

For those looking for the opposite of the above, GrapheneOS on a Pixel.
by agentultra | 2025-06-09 19:07:28+00:00
As far as I know we don't have decades of research about the improvements in productivity and correctness brought by static type systems.

We have one study on test driven development. Another study that attempted to reproduce the results but found flaws in the original. Nothing conclusive.

The field of empirical research in software development practices is... woefully underfunded and incomplete. I think all we can say is, "more data needed."

hwayne did a talk on this [0].

If you ever try to read the literature it's spartan. We certainly haven't improved enough in recent years to make conclusions about the productivity of LLM-based coding tools. We have a study on CoPilot by Microsoft employees who studied Microsoft employees using it (Microsoft owns and develops CoPilot). There's another study that suggests CoPilot increases error rates in code bases by 41%.

What the author is getting at is that you can't rely on personal anecdotes and blog posts and social media influencers to understand the effects of AI on productivity.

If we want to know how it affects productivity we need to fund more and better studies.

[0] https://www.hillelwayne.com/talks/ese/
by timewizard | 2025-06-09 19:08:07+00:00
> and search for wisdom in the obscure.

There is nothing obscure about their outputs. They're trained on pre-existing text. They cannot produce anything novel.

> We've unleashed a new form of divination on a culture

Utter nonsense. You've released a new search mechanism to _some_ members of _some_ cultures.

> That's why everything feels uncanny.

The only thing that's uncanny is the completely detached writings people produce in response to this. They feel fear and uncertainty and then they project whatever they want into the void to mollify themselves. This is nothing new at all.

> it won't be half as fun.

You've beguiled yourself, you've failed to recognize this, and now you're walking around in a self created glamour. Drop the high minded concepts and stick with history. You'll see through all of this.
by avidphantasm | 2025-06-09 19:09:04+00:00
Reminds me of when they added more transparency to the UI around Mac OS X 10.9 where they argued that it "helps you focus on what's important". Huh? By showing me what's behind what I'm trying to look at? The first thing I do when I setup a new machine is to go to accessibility settings and turn on "reduce transparency". Hoping there is a way to do something similar with this.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-09 19:09:12+00:00
I'm pretty sure what I've seen is: If you backup and restore your apps, the version you previously had gets copied back over. But, if you wipe and try to re-download, only the versions that the developer has up on the AppStore are available to you, and if none of them support your OS, you're hosed. This is definitely true if you set up the device with a new account.