MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ragazzina | 2025-06-26 16:59:21+00:00
> Word length - At least in English and French (the languages I know best), longer words are generally considered harder.

I think in a language with a lot of similar sounds or even homophones, longer words are easier. For a beginner Chinese speaker that knows both words, hearing "chē" will probably be ambiguous, but "chūzūchē" will be parsed immediately.
by ge96 | 2025-06-26 16:59:56+00:00
yeah it's pro con, I also hear my coworkers saying "I don't know how it works" or there are methods in the code that don't exist

But anyway I'm at the point in my career where I am not learning to code/can already do it. Sure languages are new/can help there for syntax

edit: other thing I'll add, I can see the throughput thing, it's like a person has never used opensearch before and it's a rabbithole, anything new there's that wall you have to overcome, but it's like we'll get the feature done, but did we really understand how it works... do we need to? Idk. I know this person can barely code but because they use something like chatGPT they're able to crap out walls of code and with tweaking it will work eventually -- I am aware this sounds like gatekeeping from my part

Ultimately personally I don't want to do software professionaly/trying to save/invest enough then get out just because the job part sucks the fun out of development. I've been in it for about 10 years now, should have been plenty of time to save but I'm dumb/too generous.

I think there is healthy skepticism too vs. just jumping on the bandwagon that everyone else is doing and really my problem is just I'm insecure/indecisive, I don't need everyone to accept me especially if I don't need money

Last rant, I will be experimenting with agentic stuff as I do like Jarvis, make my own voice rec model/locally runs.
by silverquiet | 2025-06-26 17:00:07+00:00
I would say worse than that, we are doing the opposite of large-scale terraforming to create a planet that will be rather inhospitable towards the end of this century and even less so in the centuries that follow. I think the sci-fi delusion is a hold over from a better time; the heyday was probably the 50's-60's when scientific progress seems like it was much greater and was actually able to translate into benefits for people that were noticeable.
by 55555 | 2025-06-26 17:00:28+00:00
I'm glad someone is building this! I was using this in Thai. I expected it to be awful. But it's actually very good. I only used it for a few minutes but will try to use it more later. It's possibly good enough for me to stop paying my tutor. However, please use a different Text to Speech model because the current Thai one sounds robotic, like the old (current?) Google Translate. This seems like a great product.
by nextos | 2025-06-26 17:00:47+00:00
I found it disappointing that they ignored one of the biggest problems in the field, i.e. distinguishing between causal and non-causal variants among highly correlated DNA loci. In genetics jargon, this is called fine mapping. Perhaps, this is something for the next version, but it is really important to design effective drugs that target key regulatory regions.

One interesting example of such a problem and why it is important to solve it was recently published in Nature and has led to interesting drug candidates for modulating macrophage function in autoimmunity: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07501-1
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-26 17:02:32+00:00
> We never can have total trust in LLM output, but we can certainly sanitize it and limit it's destructive range

Can we really do this reliably? LLMs are non-deterministic, right, so how do we validate the output in a deterministic way?

We can validate things like shape of data being returned, but how do we validate correctness without an independent human in the loop to verify?
Show HN: Generate custom, branded illustrations using text
by samarthzalte905 | 2025-06-26 17:02:50+00:00
I’ve been building illustrationsai.app for the past month.

I made it because I was using stock art on my own website, and hated how generic and off-brand it felt. Figured I couldn’t be the only one cringing at mismatched illustrations.

I’d love your honest take on this, I’m all ears.

No more stock illustrations.
by 55555 | 2025-06-26 17:02:52+00:00
I'm an advanced learner but I stopped after a few moments because it's boring. It's asking me questions that you'd ask a beginner (although a beginner wouldn't understand the questions). It just asked what food I like to eat, where I like to travel, whether I like the weather, etc. I have a language tutor IRL and I have found that we run out of things to talk about too. So we often find ourselves just discussing the latest events from the news. I think you should feed fresh conversation topics daily from a data source like the news, localized to the user. There are global news APIs you can subscribe to.
by bloppe | 2025-06-26 17:03:03+00:00
It matters so much that the BIPM decided to abolish the leap second starting in 2035. See this post for a lot of the reasoning: https://engineering.fb.com/2022/07/25/production-engineering...

It makes a lot of sense until you realize what we're doing. We're just turning UTC into a shittier version of TAI. After 2035, they will forevermore have a constant offset, but UTC will keep it's historical discontinuities. Why not just switch to TAI, which already exists, instead of destroying UTC to make a more-or-less redundant version of TAI?
by jphelan | 2025-06-26 17:03:48+00:00
I tried the app. I love that you’re tackling this and I’m rooting for you. I’ll tell you about myself, my experience, and my thoughts.

I’m currently learning French as a beginner and I’ve learned other languages in the past. I’ve trued Duolingo as well as italki and frantasic as well as just ChatGPT. I am very familiar with Anki and I think it’s critical to make your own flashcards by choosing images and sounds. I don’t want auto cards.

My experience with Issen:

* it’s frustrating when the conversation partner doesn’t remember what it just said - it means I can’t get a chance to ask que c’est que ça veut dire.

* it’s frustrating (just like with ChatGPT) that the conversation partner tends to interrupt and jump in while I’m thinking. I think many learners speak slowly and spend extra time thinking. ChatGPT allows you to hold the glowing circle and it won’t interrupt while you do.

I’d love to see the chat bubbles have more in depth features like:

* much clearer indicator of hover or click words for translation, and more features like example sentences or click to pronounce

* an option to ask for an explanation of some or all the text

* for my own text I’d love to see feedback with more UI native elements about how accurately I pronounced each word and any grammatical mistakes I made. The text summary is a great start

I found myself ignoring the features of the chat bubbles and only in writing this feedback did I notice them! They could maybe use more contrast and clear UI emphasis. Duolingo does a good job of making their UI very clear with this kind of feedback.

I think it’s important to build features that augment the app to work around LLM limitations. My guess is a lot of the settings change the prompt and that’s great but I think it leaves too much room for hallucinations to nosedive the experience.

I’d also love to see some way to have a hold to talk or something similar.

I’m very conscious at this point about the cost of these lessons and I have a hard time finding the price. Frantastic is absurdly expensive and it made me switch to italki where human conversation is literally cheaper. Without differentiating more from ChatGPT I would have a hard time justifying an additional subscription to my wife!

Edit: I found the pricing and it’s a tough sell! ChatGPT is cheaper.

I think you can both differentiate further from ChatGPT and keep cost down. I’d recommend to try to get more value out of each API call, so learners are more aligned with the cost per interaction- like make it so I’m enticed to spend a little longer reviewing the chat bubbles. My suggestions are mostly about how I want more engagement with each utterance anyway. Right now it’s very tempting to just keep making more and more utterances and IMHO that drives up costs while being frustrating for me.

I’d be happy to discuss! I wish you success.
Show HN: Pocket2Linkding – Migrate from Mozilla Pocket to Linkding
by kc3 | 2025-06-26 17:03:48+00:00
With the Mozilla Pocket shutdown coming up in about two weeks, I thought I'd share this quick tool to migrate to linkding in case it's helpful to others.

After reviewing self-hosted options to Pocket, I decided linkding has the best combination of features. (The creator/author of linkding has done a great job -- however, I plan to eventually create a new tool that is based on linkding but adds some new features that the author has indicated he doesn't want to include [I’m currently using a fork, but I want to expand on it further].)

HN thread about shutdown announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063662

Mozilla announcement: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/future-of-pocket

linkding: https://linkding.link/

Note that Pocket is shutting down July 8, 2025, but the export service will remain available until October 8, 2025.

[edit] fix typo in title & formatting
by raymondgh | 2025-06-26 17:04:41+00:00
Thanks for sharing! I tried using it for Thai language coming from English and found that the app understands me well! But I couldn’t understand it at all. It replied to my turns with very long messages (20+ syllables) in pure Thai and spoke with an unnatural rhythm which made it hard to pick out words or phrases. The foreign alphabet made it really difficult too. I tried changing some settings in the bottom left menu and it started speaking English to me too, but I found it unbearably slow. At one point it asked me if I wanted it to speak in pure Thai or a mix and then ignored my answer. Ultimately as a beginner I don’t think Issen will work for me very well as-is. Happy to check back in the future!
by 55555 | 2025-06-26 17:05:09+00:00
I disagree because of how AI is progressing and because there's tons of neglected language markets they can pick up. Obviously your approach can work too, perhaps better. But 95% of language learning tools don't support Thai (my target language) for example so I am an eager user for that reason alone. I think they'll be able to make a generalized curriculum and have the AI use it in all languages.
by 5555624 | 2025-06-26 17:05:32+00:00
While I don't really use either, my problem with Copilot is that it's censored. Oops, not censored; but, it does not display results that don't fit it's "ethical guidelines or safety filters" and I don't have a good feeling as to those constraints.

For example, "Who is Stormy Daniels?" A question one might have upon learning Donald Trump was convicted in the hush money scandal. Copilot: "I'd really like to help, but it seems this topic is off-limits for me. Sorry about that!" ChatGPT mentions she's in adult entertainment, some other background, and the Trump issue.
by trod1234 | 2025-06-26 17:05:41+00:00
Informed consent is the cornerstone of modern medicine, and when its no longer given because information is withheld evil things happen.

I've worked in pharma too, and I'd rather have the final say regardless of what some expert may say. Experts today are often wrong more often than they are right in the things that matter because they have this blindness to them where they often favor looking at things in isolation instead of the full context seeking knowledge/truth. It is a rare person that bucks this trend, inquisitive objective methodical without pre-concieved notion, and I've met some of them but they are so incredibly rare (1 in 1M).

The Tuskegee trials were run by experts, would you rather have those specific experts decide what amounts to a short life and descent into madness for you just so they can collect data? They won't be telling you that they've infected you with syphilis.

When you seek medical help: "Nothing is wrong with you, you just have bad blood."

The point is, there is a lot of history that is extremely unpleasant, in some cases unbelievable, but the fact that it happened is not in dispute, and that fact shaped why we do the things the way we do today and why its important to keep doing them a certain way.

Many states up to the 80s iirc publicly ran and had eugenics-style programs that sterilized the mentally ill and indigenous women surgically without their consent.

The certification for that was simply the say so of an expert, and anyone (as a victim) could easily meet those requirements with a false diagnosis from the same or another cooperative person.

There were many innocent people sterilized permanently, and there were many more that simply went missing.

If this has happened in the past, what makes you think this isn't happening under the cover of the more recently round ups of undesired individuals (for deportation).

Its important to have a firm understanding of the reality of these things.
by munificent | 2025-06-26 17:05:54+00:00
Easy fix, just have the LLM generate:

{ "reasoning": "`cfg` can be nil on line 42; dereferenced without check on line 47", "finding": "Possible nil‑pointer dereference", "confidence": 0.81, "confidence_in_confidence_rating": 0.54, "confidence_in_confidence_rating_in_confidence_rating": 0.12, "confidence_in_confidence_rating_in_confidence_rating_in_confidence_rating": 0.98, // Etc... }
by _wire_ | 2025-06-26 17:06:21+00:00
//I have a professional interest in the philosophical issues raised by the problem of global climate change. I wrote a book on the subject, I give lectures, attend conferences, speak on panels, etc.//

Can debunking misinformation be just another form of disinformation?

//The report, unfortunately, follows the general trend of focusing exclusively on right-wing disinformation, while ignoring completely the possibility of left-wing disinformation.//

Both sides do it!

...Philosophically speaking.
by jrm4 | 2025-06-26 17:07:23+00:00
Yup. I'm no programmer by any stretch, but I wrote my own crappy little thing years ago and I still use it nearly daily. One thing I realized is that everything else I used had too many features; one I really never ever wanted was a count of what I had and hadn't read. I'd rather use RSS really as "maybe some days I pick up the newspaper and some I don't"

https://gitlab.com/jrm4/mahrss (I don't even remember if this is the last version and make no guarantees about any kind of functionality, but you can get an idea)
by kridsdale1 | 2025-06-26 17:07:47+00:00
Truthfully China is the source for a huge amount of “legitimate” generic and brand name patent protected drugs.

China produces things. Of high quality as well as low. More and more, it’s the only source for high quality things.

The OP’s conniption is about intellectual property and monopoly protection, not health.

Everyone in the world (almost) would be far healthier with weekly injections of Chinese chemicals.
by susam | 2025-06-26 17:07:58+00:00
I did pretty much the same thing last weekend. I have a small Common Lisp program that generates my website. Last weekend, I wrote a new program to generate a blogroll page from a list of feed URLs. You can see the code and the resulting blogroll here:

https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/roll.lisp

https://susam.net/roll.html

This program was directly inspired by @matklad's idea of using a blogroll as an RSS reader. It's only been a few days, but I already feel like I can finally stay on top of my feeds!
by al_borland | 2025-06-26 17:08:39+00:00
Strategies can be shared for free as well.

Ryder Carroll is a good example. He created the bullet journal through trial and error to manage his own ADHD. He shared it for free. While he did write a book and partnered with a company to design a notebook (due to popular demand), he still gives away everything someone needs for free, and will be the first one to tell people you don’t need a special notebook.
by nerdjon | 2025-06-26 17:09:42+00:00
Not only that, but it would also raise significant concerns about how any of the recommendations, treatments, blog posts, etc are made. Like are the different people for those blog posts real people?

This is particularly concerning for a tool like this, you already took shortcuts on images why should we expect anything less for the rest of the app? Has anyone that knows anything about ADHD actually ever looked at anything this app is saying?
by jajko | 2025-06-26 17:10:16+00:00
While generally true, you are not the only one aging around you, and some sickness/accident stuff can happen with higher probability as years add up.

The chance you will need to take care of both your kids and your parents in your 50s is pretty high (not even going into you and your partner), while facing declining health yourself.

Could be easily manageable, or not. Ask me in a decade.

But one thing is darn true - if a good long term stable match is not there, no point pushing for kids. World really doesnt need more damaged folks struggling their whole lives to overcome shitty childhood. And thats fine, parenthood is not for everybody and there can be an amazing life to be had instead (and I mean it in best way possible, but that life shouod not be spent behind the desk and on the couch)
by clarkalistair | 2025-06-26 17:10:26+00:00
Ok, so feedback from me.

It asks me for my level; I'm half way through this audiobook (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Next-Steps-Spanish-Paul-Noble/dp/B0...), and have listened to the book before it a number of times, so I'd say I'm between beginner and intermediate. I think you could do better than a "what level are you, pick from 3 options" and throw you straight into a chat - ask some basic Spanish questions, and then try and figure out where the user is from there.

Next I chose Blanca from Barcelona, and she said an awful lot of words and I understood very little of them, so I think I'm not ready. Half the grammar lessons have both a Spanish and English explanation, and half don't.

I'll keep the feedback coming, but I'm on a train now and the questionable internet is not good enough for an actual conversation.

(not at all relevant but I work for Devyce, from the YC S22 batch!)
by somat | 2025-06-26 17:10:47+00:00
I think the fundamental design flaw with the scale all screens approach that wayland(and mac and X11 when set that way) employs is that your application is unable to have better dpi aware rendering. however that may actually be an advantage because it means your application does not need a better dpi aware rendering engine, that is things just work everywhere, it may look theoretically worse in it's scaled context, but at least the application writer does not have to do anything so everything just works.
by telllikeitisguy | 2025-06-26 17:10:54+00:00
Your responses are filled with non-specific references to online memes that suggest that you don't actually understand the problem in any deep sense (i.e you just have a gripe). I'm not going to defend ANCs policy decisions, but you can just point to specific decisions they made and the resulting outcome. You can't just handwave and repeat socialism/capitalism/Trotskyites like some mantra and expect everyone to take you seriously.
Show HN: Inworld TTS – high-quality, affordable, and low-latency TTS
by rogilop | 2025-06-26 17:11:11+00:00
Hi HN, Igor here, one of the engineers behind this project.

High-quality voice APIs are usually either expensive, slow, or both. Cheaper and faster solutions very often lack realism. We decided to build Inworld TTS to bridge this gap.

We just released two multilingual models. Our small model, named TTS-1, is on par with SOTA models quality-wise given objective metrics WER/SIM/DNSMOS. A larger model, TTS-1-Max, is even better. It can produce more nuanced speech and has ~3.5% better WER across all 11 supported languages averaged. Both models also support markup tags (e.g. prepend "[happy]" to the text to make the generation more enthusiastic, etc).

The models are built with LLaMA 1B and 8B being the SpeechLM backbones for TTS-1 and TTS-1-Max respectively. We up-trained both models on a mixture of text and audio, then finetuned on text-audio pairs and polished final checkpoints with GRPO on a small high-quality dataset. Our Speech Lab team (4 MLEs) started to work on collecting audio data around late February and exploring different audio codec architectures. We got inspired by the simplicity of the single vector quantization Xcodec2 neural audio codec architecture used and decided to use a similar idea. We started the training early April. Once codec was ready, SpeechLMs’ training took another month and a half. We finished mid-June, all - using 32 H100 GPUs.

To make models real-time ready during serving, we collaborated with Modular to migrate from vanilla vLLM solution to Mojo- written MAX server. Our bet of keeping serving architecture as simple as possible played out well: both models turned out to be really fast. TTS-1, which can be accessed via streaming API, has ~500ms p90 latency for returning the first ~2 seconds of audio. The pricing is simple, pay $5/1M characters. A larger model’s API access will be opened soon. We’ll share more details about serving performance optimizations made in the coming weeks.

We are also about to release all the training, modeling, and benchmarking code on GitHub to be transparent about how we made it. This repo is very flexible and can easily be adjusted to train an arbitrary neural net, but we’ll release the code with the focus on speech modeling. By the way, we’ve used PyTorch Lightning as the framework for multi-node/multi-GPU training as it proved to be very easy-to-use and reliable.

--

Check the TTS out at https://inworld.ai/tts

Happy to answer any questions you have!
by danans | 2025-06-26 17:11:13+00:00
> But then you're right back to it being regular city — exactly what the people in the suburbs (supposedly) want to avoid when they choose to live in the suburbs.

They don't have to have the density of Manhattan or SF to be better for walkability than they are now.

After all, the walkable boroughs of some of the world's biggest cities were at one point a lot like suburbs (albeit minus the car-centered planning).

Many people who move to suburbs do so because they are priced out of the affluent parts of cities, but often still want to live in a more walkable and mixed-use environment than most suburbs offer today. Suburbs can evolve to meet those preferences. It's not an easy process though, and in many places it is triggering inter-generational conflicts over zoning laws.

And yes, they could potentially meet some of these preferences in a small town like yours - many have - but small town life isn't for everyone for all kinds of reasons as we've discussed.
by smcameron | 2025-06-26 17:11:16+00:00
> If this type of pre-aborted mission is included in the total, the success rate drops to between 20 and 30 percent. On the face of it, this success rate is bad ...

I disagree with this premise. I suspect that 20 to 30% success rate is not at all bad, but rather excellent. Compare to artillery with shells costing a few thousand each on the low end, to $100k+ for more advanced rounds, with 100s or 1000s fired per casualty.
by 83 | 2025-06-26 17:11:26+00:00
>>Just feels like 'skimming' a real book instead of actually reading it.

That's the goal for me lately. I primarily use Youtube for technical assistance (where are the screws to adjust this carburetor?, how do I remove this brake hub?, etc). There used to be short 1 to 2m videos on this kind of stuff but nowadays I have to suffer through a 10-15 minute video with multiple ad breaks.

So now I always watch youtube at 2x speed while rapidly jumping the slider forward to find relevant portions.