MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by runjake | 2025-06-25 16:30:29+00:00
I'm glad I'm not the only one who had a similar disagreement with the article.

I try to frame it in my head that people aren't generally stupid, but that we do a lot of stupid things. Or we don't do things (eg. read, or think critically) that adds to our level of stupidity.

It's perhaps a privilege of being above-average intelligence, but these days I try to focus less on being smarter and more on being less stupid. I seem to get more bang for the buck.

I'm still pretty stupid, though.

My own anecdote:

I worked with a guy on military aircraft. He was a radar technician. He went to school for it. I also went to school for it. The school was pretty hard with a decently high washout rate, including a lot of 2 year EE graduates, for some reason.

One day, we're working on the flight line on a radar issue and he says something pretty stupid, but we're kind of buddies, so I ask him to elaborate.

Long story short, his belief was that radar tracked other (jet) aircraft airspeed by reading the reflections bounced off of the other jets' turning pistons and calculating airspeed by how fast their piston assembly rotated.

I was completely taken aback by the multiple levels of stupidity. If you think through it a little, there are multiple levels of fail there. I then had to explain how this particular system actually worked and work him through the ludicrousness of each step of his beliefs.

How he 1.) fabricated this elaborate theory from the relatively simple section of training ("measure latency of returned energy transmissions"), and 2.) made it through tech school without washing out, I'll never know.
by mandevil | 2025-06-25 16:31:12+00:00
The point of the video game was to have a better model for naval damage control than the classic, Star Trek-style "10% damage" that you normally see in naval games. To do that I wanted to model actual WW2 ships, room by room, with the free-surface effect, meta-centric height, etc. respected, and then put you into the role of a DC officer on a ship that was attacked in various scenarios.

That level of detail is impossible to get without these primary sources- and the only people who would be interested in a game like this would be the ones for whom that accuracy is a selling point.

This is just one of my side projects, but it is one that shows the wide variety of projects that NARA II supported, beyond just historians.
by rob | 2025-06-25 16:31:23+00:00
There's a tool that uses YouTube's unofficial APIs to get them if they're available:

https://github.com/jdepoix/youtube-transcript-api

For our internal tool that transcribes local city council meetings on YouTube (often 1-3 hours long), we found that these automatic ones were never available though.

(Our tool usually 'processes' the videos within ~5-30 mins of being uploaded, so that's also why none are probably available 'officially' yet.)

So we use yt-dlp to download the highest quality audio and then process them with whisper via Groq, which is way cheaper (~$0.02-0.04/hr with Groq compared to $0.36/hr via OpenAI's API.) Sometimes groq errors out so there's built-in support for Replicate and Deepgram as well.

We run yt-dlp on our remote Linode server and I have a Python script I created that will automatically login to YouTube with a "clean" account and extract the proper cookies.txt file, and we also generate a 'po token' using another tool:

https://github.com/iv-org/youtube-trusted-session-generator

Both cookies.txt and the "po token" get passed to yt-dlp when running on the Linode server and I haven't had to re-generate anything in over a month. Runs smoothly every day.

(Note that I don't use cookies/po_token when running locally at home, it usually works fine there.)
by riobard | 2025-06-25 16:31:37+00:00
That's only one of the reasons. 8K 10-bit RGB requires ~60Gbps while HDMI 2.1 can carry at most 42Gbps. So video has to be compressed somehow and it's mostly likely YCbCr with subsampling (coz that's how most video is encoded anyway). HDMI 2.1 also supports DSC so it's an option but I doubt any non-computer-monitor-oriented TV will support that.

Another reason is PPI. macOS works best ~220PPI for 2x HiDPI mode so 8K would be about 40". But current batch of 8K TV comes in sizes over 60", which is too big for most desks.

There're also convenience factors like DDC control (where you can control brightness and volume using software on your computer) which most modern computer monitors support but I've never seen any TV supporting that. Without HDMI CEC on the computer side, you can't even auto wakeup the TV when you wake up the computer.
by vel0city | 2025-06-25 16:31:45+00:00
You're wondering why Americans make the housing decisions they do but then use assumptions which aren't based on the realities Americans live in and berate those who actually try and show your assumptions aren't valid in describing why those Americans are making the choices they make in America.

You were wondering:

> Yes, but why would anyone want to live on what is effectively a farm, but without the benefit of separation from other people or land (read: income) that a farm offers?

> I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I question why people are doing it.

I gave lots of data and analysis as to why Americans seem to make this choice. You berated me for giving an actual analysis, gave conjectures not grounded in reality for those people making these choices explaining why my analysis is wrong, and continued to wonder why people would make these choices. Your conjectures weren't valid for the people in question. They weren't based in their reality. But you seem to not want to actually engage in the reality of it.

> Colloquially, what we call the place you are looking for is "school".

People can learn new things and be corrected on their false preconceptions without necessarily being in a school building with a teacher.
by treetalker | 2025-06-25 16:31:48+00:00
Kagi Translate.

Kagi Summarizer (via bookmarklet) to help weed out articles that won't be worth reading (even here on HN) or to get the one sentence that matters.

Kagi Assistant. This I use for random things, like pasting a webpage's source and having it figure out what to fill in on this form to make an RSS feed where none exists.[1] (This, in my current push to move most of my needed information updates both out of email and into RSS, as well as to reverse what I call "the arrow of information" [I want to batch-check information updates on a schedule instead of getting interrupted by incoming data piecemeal].)

Kagi Assistant (and the various LLM models) are also great when I realize that I don't understand a particular grammar or usage point in a foreign language that I'm learning: the models usually create clear explanations and then a few practice exercises for me to do.

[1]: https://feedmaker.fly.dev/
by lbreakjai | 2025-06-25 16:31:51+00:00
I haven't tried with lovable, but gemini studio is fully capable of following a styleguide based on a screenshot, which is probably the crudest and least refined protocol I could think of.

I'm sure there's already integrations somewhere that could allow a designer to specify a bunch of brand colours, to generate a styleguide out of it in plain english, and get a working prototype out of it.
by georgemandis | 2025-06-25 16:32:12+00:00
Yeah, I'd like to do a more formal analysis of the outputs if I can carve out the time.

I don't think a simple diff is the way to go, at least for what I'm interested in. What I care about more is the overall accuracy of the summary—not the word-for-word transcription.

The test I want to setup is using LLMs to evaluate the summarized output and see if the primary themes/topics persist. That's more interesting and useful to me for this exercise.
by walthamstow | 2025-06-25 16:32:38+00:00
The third sentence is where it tells me how they taste different and what they are ordered for (meze vs accompaniment) which is what I wanted.

My answer from ChatGPT was much better, and I didn't have to gamble on it being in the Wikipedia article, or which one to search for (cacik has nothing).

So, anyway, about that other complex stuff?
by petercooper | 2025-06-25 16:32:59+00:00
The GDPR isn't mentioned, but as one of the more stringent privacy regulation regimes, its 'right to erasure' has all sorts of conditions attached to it where a customer might be told that all of their data has been deleted, but some legally has to be (or can be) stored.

For example, you can store a record that an erased user requested erasure so you can prove it later on if needed in a legal situation (article 17.3.e). Updating such users about legal policies that apply to such retained data may still be subject to would seem rather inane but I could easily believe it existing as a policy at companies adopting a very eager interpretation of the regulations.
by salawat | 2025-06-25 16:33:03+00:00
>I guess you’re being sarcastic, but I think it’s perfectly fine that only the middleman handling the transaction and skimming off the top knows who the customer is.

It isn't fine. Third Party Doctrine. You don't have expectation of privacy or protections from search and seizure. You waived them by using the middleman.

Yes. There is some surface sarcasm, but also complete, genuine, resigned sincerity. You have to take in and appreciate a lot of non-statutory law, which no one tends to explain to the populace in a general and succinct way to inform them of how the world (in this case, the U.S. financial system) is architected.

It has been hewn, unambiguously, into a tool that functions primarily to make law enforcement tractable by plugging into the end objective of the vast majority of criminal activity: financial gain. This means arbitrary middlemen, lack of KYC, non-presence of AML precludes the existence of low friction, anonymous finance.

I didn't want the status quo, I don't believe it's right. I've dug into how it works, and I stepped away from what had hitherto been a productive and lucrative career because I can't support it through positive action anymore. It isn't right. Don't know what's more right, but I damn well know we shouldn't have the financial system acting as a surveillance device.
by pc86 | 2025-06-25 16:34:02+00:00
I don't think its as much "corroding society" as it is a symptom of scale and corporate consolidation.

The mom and pop store making $200k/yr revenue selling physical goods gives regulars a deal because if their $100/mo spend goes elsewhere it is a demonstrably negative business impact, and there are 2 or 3 other mom and pop stores close by. The owner's kids also probably go to school with the regular's kids or there's some similar relationship. Plus, even if they wanted to maximize profit - they probably don't based on the previous point - they simply don't have enough data points to figure out how exactly to do it.

The multinational corporation has billions or tens of billions in revenue, tens or hundreds of thousands of locations, and so many data points they can test any price discrimination scheme they want and get data almost instantly. But this by itself isn't a problem (IMO, certainly some here would disagree). The root of the problem IMO is that there's no relationship. The manager of the location has no power, the district manager is in a city an hour away, the people making these pricing decisions live in another state or country, and they are judged on making the graph go up and to the right. Their bonuses depend on it, their livelihood depends on it.

In the mom and pop scenario, the customer interacts with someone whose livelihood depends on them being happy and has the power to make sure they are. With the multinational, they interact with someone who doesn't give a shit if they're happy or not, and has no power whatsoever, and the lowest person with power doesn't have any idea who they are and is actively incentivized to screw them.
by fragmede | 2025-06-25 16:34:12+00:00
> and as long as you don't severely undersize your initial RAM choice

That's the problem though. when dealing with used machines (because new ones are beyond your budget), you get cheaper hand me downs, and those are going to be of your undersized RAM variety. In the socketed days, you could get a five year old laptop, replace the existing RAM with the biggest sticks you cloud get your hands on, and get a few more years of life out of the machine. A laptop stuck at four gigs of ram these days isn't going to be great for much web browsing, but is also basically stuck at four gigs.
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-25 16:34:52+00:00
> Replace USDA with 18F or (pre Doge) USDS and the insanity of your agreement is laid bare for even the most uncritical reader to identify.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F

"In 2024, 18F consisted of approximately 91 distributed employees working remotely across the United States."

They wouldn't have wanted to all relocate to KC either.
by charcircuit | 2025-06-25 16:34:57+00:00
>How much can these behavioral patterns be spoofed? This remains an ongoing question, but the evidence to date is optimistic. Academic studies have found behavioral biometrics to be robust against attacks under adversarial conditions, and industry validation from top financial institutions demonstrates real-world resilience

I have the opposite view. This already played out in the Minecraft community and it turns out ghost clients are effective in spoofing such behavioral signals and avoiding anticheat. Also I doubt you can get any meaningful signal from the couple of a seconds a user's ai agent is scrolling through a site.
by runako | 2025-06-25 16:34:58+00:00
To their credit, they did get this part correct. "ChatGPT" is the user-facing apps. The models have terrible names that do not include "ChatGPT".

Anthropic, by contrast, uses the same name for the user-facing app and the models. This is confusing, because the user-facing apps have capabilities not native to the models themselves.
by hbn | 2025-06-25 16:35:05+00:00
Yeah I'm not sure why they'd think my point was that LLMs are useless. Clearly I'm integrating them into my work, I just think Copilot is the dumbest. It's given me the most nonsensical answers like the example I provided, and it's the one I use the least. Which is even crazier when you consider we're on a paid version of Copilot and I just use free ChatGPT and Claude.
by georgemandis | 2025-06-25 16:35:17+00:00
Interesting! At $0.02 to $0.04 an hour I don't suspect you've been hunting for optimizations, but I wonder if this "speed up the audio" trick would save you even more.

> We do this internally with our tool that automatically transcribes local government council meetings right when they get uploaded to YouTube

Doesn't YouTube do this for you automatically these days within a day or so?
by ameliaquining | 2025-06-25 16:35:24+00:00
The article explains that this feature uses a small (up to 22 GB) language model that runs on-device.

That said, the "simple way around the paid API" problem is something Google has to deal with anyway, because there are a bunch of ways to use Google Translate without paying for it (e.g., the translate.google.com web UI, or the non-JavaScript-exposed "Translate to [language]" feature built into Chrome), and any action that can be taken by a human can in principle also be taken by a script. The only thing to do about it is use secret-sauce server-side abuse detection to block as much of this activity as they can; they can't get all of it but they can get enough to push enough people onto the paid API that the economics pencil out.
by crazylogger | 2025-06-25 16:35:31+00:00
Ask the AI to document each module in a 100-line markdown. These should be very high level, don't contain any detail, but just include pointers to relevant files for AI to find out by itself. With a doc as the starting point, AI will have context to work on any module.

If the module just can't be documented in this way in under 100 lines, it's a good time to refactor. Chances are if Claude's context window is not enough to work with a particular module, a human dev can't either. It's all about pointing your LLM precisely at the context that matters.
by 9rx | 2025-06-25 16:35:32+00:00
> but ultimately if everyone is using the same roads then you will eventually sit in the same traffic if you're trying to get to the same places?

Once you get to the arterial roads that take the traffic to the amenities that's true, but it is often slow going just to get that far.

Fair to say that is less true if you are on the edge of the suburbs, but, for the sake of this discussion, are you really living in the suburbs if you are right beside the action? I think that goes against the premise presented in the beginning.

> my family moved to the countryside in my teens

Not to diminish or dismiss your experience, but can a teenager really give something like that a fair shake? Like you indicate, you ended up there because your family brought you there, not because you chose to go there to make your own life. Typically, teenagers have limited autonomy and really can't experience it for what it is. You had an experience, but don't you think it would be an entirely different experience if you moved to the countryside now when you can fully shape the experience into being what you want it to be, not what your parents (or equivalent) wanted it to be?
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-25 16:35:48+00:00
It’s technically also covered by Mint and kinda (not as well) Ubuntu, but one thing that pop gets right in my view is bundling in the Nvidia drivers that a huge chunk of people are going to need, as well as enabling non-free repos by default, neither of which Fedora or Debian do (not to mention, a lot of users will find Debian’s user-facing packages too old [yes, even with Testing]). I say this even as someone who generally doesn’t use pop and favors Fedora.
by nand4011 | 2025-06-25 16:35:59+00:00
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594

Apparently human language conveys information at around 39 bits/s. You could use a similar technique as that paper to determine the information rate of a speaker and then correct it to 39 bits/s by changing the speed of the video.
by mjuarez | 2025-06-25 16:36:00+00:00
By default, Snowflake doesn't seem to use any crytographic hash algorithms, so that's not completely unexpected. Based on (1) this link, it uses a proprietary 64-bit hash, and has this tidbit: "Do not use HASH to create unique keys."

(1) https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/functions/hash
by toast0 | 2025-06-25 16:36:03+00:00
IMHO, that's not really 'pig butchering', that's another category; FTC calls it 'family emergency scamming'.

To me, pig butchering is a long term process where the victim is convinced that a new contact is a trusted friend, and then the trusted friend needs money for (transportation, investment, living arrangements, etc). The symbolism being that the victim is a pig that is fattened up via building up a relationship, and then butchered via the demand for money.
by simplyinfinity | 2025-06-25 16:36:26+00:00
low income countries don't have the money for iPads. My parents run on a 300 Euro computer bought 5 years ago. My dad is technical enough to get around a computer, but he's in his 60s now. My mom can open Facebook and youtube. Sometimes either of them downloads stuff, and opens them. So your solution is "make millions consumers spend $$ on overpriced hardware and even more closed off system, so few hundred open source devs don't spend 500$ to verify their app (which they will have to do if they want to release on the iOS platform either way)" Ain't no way.
by joshmarinacci | 2025-06-25 16:36:48+00:00
I feel like we are fighting the wrong battle here. Eventually AI bot behavior online will be indistinguishable from human, but so what?! We've had teams of underpaid humans being paid to be organic bots for years now.

Whether the person interacting with your website is human or not isn't relevant anymore. What matters is what they are doing; be they human, bot, or AI agent.
by saltcured | 2025-06-25 16:37:15+00:00
Hah, this is too close to the joke that popped into my head:

Sure, we can explain how this works, you just need to subscribe to our educational series on the topic...

It's all about framing the con in a way that gets past the defense mechanisms the OP assumes. Whether this is done with synthetic intimacy, urgency, exclusivity, high-mindedness, etc. depends on the target victim profile.

But, it's always social engineering. The only 100% defense is to assume a deeply untrusting posture that makes social living nearly impossible.
by logifail | 2025-06-25 16:37:32+00:00
> Government IT spending doesn't follow the same fiscal rules as your basic household budget. It's not the case that the government has a finite pot of money to spend and when it's gone it's gone.

Assuming that government spending is inherently productive is a deeply flawed view. Every pound the UK government spends is a pound it had to tax, borrow, or inflate.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-25 16:37:45+00:00
Unfortunately that is something Microsoft seems incapable of.

MFC was already relatively bad versus OWL. Borland[0] kept improving it with VCL and nowadays FireMonkey.

There there is Qt as well.

Microsoft instead came up with ATL, and when they finally had something that could rival C++ Builder, with C++/CX, a small group managed to replace it with C++/WinRT because they didn't like extensions, the irony.

With complete lack of respect for paying customers, as C++/WinRT never ever had the same Visual Studio tooling experience as C++/CX.

Nowadays it is in maintenance, stuck in C++17, working just good enough for WinUI 3.0 and WinAppSDK implementation work, and the riot group is having fun with Rust's Windows bindings.

So don't expect anything good coming from Microsoft in regards to modern C++ GUI frameworks.

[0] - Yes nowadays others are at the steering wheel.
Show HN: MCP Generator for Your API
by sagivo | 2025-06-25 16:38:07+00:00
Hey HN, Sagiv from liblab is here.

We've been deep in the world of API tooling for years at liblab, primarily focusing on generating SDKs and documentation from OpenAPI specs. Recently, we kept running into a recurring frustration: connecting AI tools to existing APIs is way more complex than it should be.

You start with a simple goal – let an LLM talk to your API – and suddenly you're neck-deep in spinning up infrastructure, wrestling with authentication, and writing a ton of custom glue code just to translate natural language into structured API calls. Then you have to maintain it all.

To scratch our own itch, we built the MCP Generator.

It takes your API specification and generates a fully functional MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that's deployed to the cloud and ready to use in about 30 seconds. You can also download the server for free local usage. The idea is to cut out all the boilerplate and manual integration work. You just drop the generated URL into your AI tool, and you can start interacting with your API through natural language right away.

This builds on our existing SDK code generation engine, but extends it to support the MCP protocol. This means that as your API evolves, your MCP server can be regenerated to stay in sync without you needing to touch a thing.

We've seen some interesting early uses, and thought the HN community might have some cool ideas too:

- Building devtools that allow LLMs to perform actions against your internal or external APIs. - Querying internal metrics or services using natural language questions. - Surfacing structured documentation and content through conversational AI interfaces. - Speaking with your API service instead of coding functions.

We just launched and would genuinely love to get your feedback, thoughts, and even your most challenging edge cases. We're here to dive into the technical details and answer any questions.

You can try it out here: https://mcp.liblab.com/

Looking forward to hearing what you think!