MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-17 08:39:12+00:00
I haven't studied many languages, but there's something about the flavor of so-called "foreign" language learning which is culturally anchored to the language of the teaching materials themselves. I wonder if these issues you have about comparisons that don't make sense and so on are about your own personal context and point of view, or if the issues reveal some differences between native Japanese teaching methods versus Japanese as she is taught to typical English language learners.
by hatefulmoron | 2025-06-17 08:39:18+00:00
> If you let it paint you into a corner, why are you doing so?

What do you mean? If it were as simple as not letting it do so, I would do as you suggest. I may as well stop letting it be incorrect in general. Lots of guidance helps avoid it.

> Maybe I just naturally do that, but to me there's not been much change in the level of guidance I need to give Claude Code or my own agent vs. what I'd give developers working for me.

Well yeah. You need to give it lots of guidance, like someone who works for you.

> the cost of telling it to just throw out the code it builds later and redo it with additional architectural guidance keeps dropping.

It's a moving target for sure. My confidence with this in more complex scenarios is much smaller.
by jonplackett | 2025-06-17 08:41:38+00:00
I think we need to shift our idea of what LLMs do and stop thinking they are ‘thinking’ in any human way.

The best mental description I have come up with is they are “Concept Processors”. Which is still awesome. Computers couldn’t understand concepts before. And now they can, and they can process and transform them in really interesting and amazing ways.

You can transform the concept of ‘a website that does X’ into code that expresses a website X.

But it’s not thinking. We still gotta do the thinking. And actually that’s good.
Show HN: FrameNet – Free AI Subtitle Generator for Creators (No Watermark)
by ajith_pinninti | 2025-06-17 08:41:50+00:00
Hey HN

I built [FrameNet](https://www.framenet.ai/tools/free-subtitle-generator) — a 100% free AI subtitle generator built for content creators. You upload your video, and it auto-generates accurate, editable subtitles with no watermark. It works across 16:9, 1:1, and 9:16 formats.

A few features: - Fast processing (tested on 1GB+ videos) - Multilanguage support - Clean UI designed to feel like a mini video editor

Most subtitle tools are either paid or watermark your videos. I built this as part of a broader AI video editing suite we're working on at FrameNet.

Would love your feedback — especially from fellow builders, indie hackers, and anyone who's worked with AI + video. I'm around to answer anything

Cheers, Ajith
by jasonalbert | 2025-06-17 08:42:21+00:00
Over the past two weeks I try my best to not just learn how to write the code and how to promote my open source. I am not seeking for monetarist (at least not now !) but I want everyone to have more than one option and an option that's better than most application currently has. So I decided to build my own one. Yes indeed it's so so so difficult but with many motivations from reddit I kinda make it though. Once again thx a lot for you guys and I will never give up cause I will not loss if I don't
by bitwize | 2025-06-17 08:43:41+00:00
> It's still inconceivable to me how people developed for these platforms.

Well, we didn't have Visual Studio Code, and we couldn't summon Claude to help us through the tricky bits. We used whatever tools were available and a LOT of trial and error in order to master the machine. Because computers were amazing, and having one on your desk you could play with was even more amazing.

I didn't have a Spectrum, because I'm a bloody Yank. I had a VIC-20 and later a TI-99/4A. In the States we had Apple, IBM, Tandy, TI, and Commodore, with Apple pretty much the dominant force in home computing until PCs got cheap enough. Everybody else was pretty niche, so even when affordable computers came out -- like the Timex Sinclair and Timex Sinclair 2068 (which was based on, but not broadly compatible with the Spectrum), there wasn't a huge library of software nor a large programmer/hobbyist community like there was with the Spectrum in the UK. The "bedroom coder" phenomenon was still a thing, but I think the wide availability and low price of the Spectrum enabled more Brits from a variety of backgrounds and socioeconomic strata to become "bedroom coders" than Americans, for whom home computers were pretty much expensive toys.
Show HN: FaynoSync Self-Hosted API for Automatic App Updates
by ku9n | 2025-06-17 08:44:27+00:00
faynoSync is a lightweight, open-source API server that gives you full control over application updates. Whether it’s desktop software, mobile apps, browser extensions, or custom binaries for metrics or monitoring — faynoSync helps you deliver updates easily, securely, and reliably. No external dependencies. Just pure control.
by dzonga | 2025-06-17 08:45:15+00:00
I worry about the adverse effects of LLM on already disfranchised populations - you know the poor etc - that usually would have to pull themselves up using hard work etc studying n reading hard.

now if you don't have a mentor to tell you in the age of LLM you still have to do things the hard / old school way to develop critical thinking - you might end up taking shortcuts and have the LLMs "think" for you. hence again leaving huge swaths of the population behind in critical thinking which is already in shortage.

LLMs are bad that they might show you the sources but also hallucinate about the sources. & most people won't bother going to check source material and question it.
by rester324 | 2025-06-17 08:46:15+00:00
I am a dull man by every measure. I don't have interesting hobbies, I am not an influencer, I don't post interesting posts on social media and I don't travel a lot, I don't do extreme things, I barely have any money at the moment, I bore others, in fact when I try to amuse my colleagues or the opposite sex, my jokes regularly fall flat and even my voice is dull I believe.

But after my kids were born I noticed something: my kids loved my voice, they listened to every sentence I made, they laughed at my quirky jokes I made and they loved when I sang to them or I brought them to the park or to the nursery and when I sat them on my neck. My wife took all that from me though, so now I need to fight to get my kids back.

But the moral of the story is: dullness is a matter of perspective. Even if you think you are dull, chances are you are not. It's just the world such a place now that the bar is raised too high that most ordinary people can't cross even by jumping over the moon.

So I don't care any more what others think of me. I came to accept my dullness and embraced it. If it bores others, I don't care.
Show HN: I built an AI tool to analyze and reply to reviews
by thayerquinlan | 2025-06-17 08:47:14+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Thayer, a 27-year-old indie hacker from Switzerland. Over the last few months, I’ve been working on SentimReview — a tool that helps businesses collect, analyze, and respond to customer reviews at scale.

It automatically scrapes reviews from platforms like TripAdvisor or Trustpilot, detects sentiment, extracts recurring themes, and even suggests personalized, GPT-powered replies — all in a clean visual dashboard.

The goal is simple: help small and mid-sized businesses actually understand what their customers are saying, without spending hours reading through every review manually.

I built it with: • FastAPI (backend) • React + Tailwind (frontend) • Firecrawl for web scraping • OpenAI API for analysis & replies • MongoDB + Vercel

This is my first time posting on Hacker News and I’d love your honest feedback. Does this solve a real problem? Is the positioning clear? Also happy to answer any questions about the tech stack or challenges I ran into while building.

Thanks for reading!

– Thayer
by alias_neo | 2025-06-17 08:47:16+00:00
I moved my family over to Signal years ago.

Anyone new who wants to message me, I simply say "I'm on Signal" and if it's important enough, they go and install it; it's been fairly frictionless, after all how hard is it to download an app and go through the fairly minimal registration process; and for someone already using WhatsApp, "one more account" probably isn't a major concern.

I tried various steps in the past to retain access to WhatsApp for a couple of people who didn't move, by having a work account on my phone, with a second SIM, but a one-click mistake one time gave WhatsApp my entire contact list from the "Personal" sandbox account, and I've decided not to even bother again.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-17 08:48:26+00:00
> The paper does not focus on disease-causing mosquitoes in the Americas

The paper looks for the effects of eradicating all mosquitoes and fails to find evidence it would be ecologically catastrophic. That isn’t an argument for doing it. (Nor, as you say, evidence of its absence.) But it helps constrain the blast radius of more-limited actions, such as wiping out only invasive, disease-spreading ones, all Anopheles varieties or even all human-biting varieties. (And somewhat suggests “frogs and swallows” going extinct as a result is hyperbole.)
by metalman | 2025-06-17 08:49:16+00:00
not all humans are brief, and not all situations are amenable to brevity, but I get the point, as brevity can be be exceptionaly informationaly dense, but like in humor(sports), it only works if someone else plays the strait guy or set up artist. Also true masters will switch up, happy to join ingeneral blather, and then drop a subtle, brief comment that is the bridge piece for an otherwise huge informational set.Another thing many performers and writers describe is the finding of the voice or stage/writing persona....perhaps quite different from the one that they inhabit at home. The topic at hand leaves out the trap of standing behind a persona, that the person cant then inhabit, and then can be caught out in a real world situation as an imposter, ha!
by Magmalgebra | 2025-06-17 08:50:24+00:00
As someone who used to teach, this does not worry me (also, they mention skill atrophy - inherently less concerning).

Putting ChatGPT in front of a child and asking them to do existing tasks is an obviously disasterous pedagogical choice for the reasons the article outlines. But it's not that hard to create a more constrained environment for the LLM to assist in a way that doesn't allow the student to escape thinking.

For writing - it's clear that finding the balance on how much time you ordering your thoughts and getting the LLM to write things is its own skillset, this will be its own skill we want to teach independent of "can you structure your thoughts in an essay"
by thrance | 2025-06-17 08:50:39+00:00
DOGE was never meant to cut "waste, fraud and abuse". It only existed to provide "plausible" reasons as to why they should cut essential programs like medicaid, medicare, social security... So they can now redistribute the stolen wealth to oligarchs through tax cuts and defense contracts.

So, more waste, fraud and abuse, less equality, more debt for the poor, worse quality of life for almost everyone, and a national debt increasing exponentially. Can't believe people thought Trump would be good for the economy.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-06-17 08:50:47+00:00
Line messaging app that is popular in Japan has had adverts for years. They aren't very intrusive. I am fine with it. They also sell "stickers" (elaborate emojis) as an alternative revenue stream. They are surprisingly popular amoung all ages. If WhatsApp takes a page from their book, I will be fine with it. I have never paid a penny to FaceBook/Meta for running this amazing, free service. Nothing is free in this world.
by darkwater | 2025-06-17 08:51:11+00:00
Love this study because it reinforces my own biases but also love that a study was done to actually check it.

With that said, would be a study that finds out that people using motorcycles or cars to move around exclusively gets their leg and body atrophied in comparison to people who walk all the day to do their things. Totally. It's just plain obvious. The gist is in the trade-offs: can I do more things or things I wasn't able to do before commuting by car? Sure. Am I going to be exposed to health issues if I never walk day in, day out? Most probably.

The exact same thing will happen with LLM, we are in the hype phase and any criticism is downplayed with "you are being left behind if you don't drink rocket fuel like we do" but in 10-15 years we will be complaining as a society that LLMs dumbed down our kids.
by wickedsight | 2025-06-17 08:51:12+00:00
> It's one of the great pleasures of being alive

Had one once. It was not a pleasure at all. Best I can say is that it was interesting and that I did 'experience' interesting stuff. But that has no profound effect on me, since I consider it, like a dream, to have no basis in reality.

Generic statements like this are dangerous since different people may respond VERY differently to the same substance. This can depend on long term traits like personality or short term like the current state of mind. People reading such statements might think there's no way it can go wrong. If it isn't a profound experience, they might also think there's something wrong with them, which isn't the case.
by zanfr | 2025-06-17 08:51:16+00:00
This is a naive and very basic implementation of the paper https://github.com/eth-siplab/Nightbeat since the authors haven't published their version.

There is no guarantee this works IRL, I tested on myself at rest but there is body movement rejection to be implemented and fine tuning to be done. I lack data from more IRL users and have merely experimented on myself and synthetic data.
Show HN: I wrapped Apple's new on-device models in an OpenAI-compatible API
by channingdai | 2025-06-17 08:51:22+00:00
I spent the weekend vibe-coding in Cursor and ended up with a small Swift app that turns the new macOS 26 on-device Apple Intelligence models into a local server you can hit with standard OpenAI /v1/chat/completions calls. Point any client you like at http://127.0.0.1:11535.

* Works with any OpenAI-compatible client * Nothing leaves your Mac * Open source, MIT-licensed

Repo’s here → https://github.com/gety-ai/apple-on-device-openai

It was a fun hack—let me know if you try it out or run into any weirdness. Cheers!
by rsynnott | 2025-06-17 08:51:48+00:00
> Apple’s new paper, The Illusion of Thinking, quietly released ahead of WWDC 2025, challenges many of the assumptions we’ve come to rely on in the LLM space.

So... wait, were people _really_ assuming that these things were reasoning? Why? Like, because the marketing said so? I had the idea that that was generally viewed as puffery; obviously they're not reasoning.

It's an interesting paper, but its outcome is completely unsurprising. What would have been surprising is if it had shown something different.

> Perhaps the most unsettling finding is what failure looks like. Even when models are completely wrong, they sound persuasive.

Again... This has been a fairly well-known problem with LLMs since GPT-3 or so. I'm not sure why anyone would find it unsettling at this point; they're confident-sounding bullshit engines.
by seydor | 2025-06-17 08:51:57+00:00
I m optimistic, because LLMs can understand plain language. MCP won't last as the article correctly states, but you will always be able to say to your AI to open your email and search whatever. And companies cannot block you from doing that as long as it is your own PC / Phone.

If we do allow companies to block AI agents from accessing our own computers and data, then the users are to blame for falling again into another BigTech trap.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-06-17 08:52:09+00:00
… No, it's not the continuum fallacy: I'm saying that "the fixation index", and other such metrics, are irrelevant, except as far as people are racist. The sociological theory of "homogeneous population" is false, to the extent it was ever even meaningful.

More broadly, scientific racism is bunk. (This is a generalisation: I didn't establish it in my previous comment, but it's true nonetheless.)
by dzonga | 2025-06-17 08:52:24+00:00
in a lot of countries not called America / Western Europe SMS costs are high. Hence why Whatsapp took off. Even phone calls there's nothing called unlimited mins / unlimted sms everything is metered - off-net / on-net data sold by bundles etc with some carriers you can even buy whatsapp "bundle" where you can access whatsapp but not regular data
by shiomiru | 2025-06-17 08:53:35+00:00
chawan has a custom terminal module, so my knowledge about the standard X/Open curses is not that great.

That said, for the actual escape sequences, XTerm's ctlseqs.ms[1] is an invaluable resource. I also took many ideas from nick black's notcurses[2], and I especially recommend his notes on "sprixels".[3]

[1]: https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html

[2]: https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Notcurses

[3]: https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Theory_and_Practic...
by sensanaty | 2025-06-17 08:53:35+00:00
I'm fast at reviewing PRs because I know the person on the other end and can trust that they got things correctly. I'll focus on the meaty, tricky parts of their PR, but I can rest assured that they matched the design, for example, and not have to verify every line of CSS they wrote.

This is a recipe for disaster with AI agents. You have to read every single line carefully, and this is much more difficult for the large majority of people out there than if you had written it yourself. It's like reviewing a Junior's work, except I don't mind reviewing my Junior colleague's work because I know they'll at least learn from the mistakes and they're not a black box that just spews bullshit.
by BlackFly | 2025-06-17 08:53:39+00:00
One of the many ways that search got worse over time was the promotion of blog spam over actual documentation. Generally, I would rather have good API documentation or a user guide that leads me through the problem so that next time I know how to help myself. Reading through good API documentation often also educates you about the overall design and associated functionality that you may need to use later. Reading the manual for technology that you will be regularly using is generally quite profitable.

Sometimes, a function doesn't work as advertised or you need to do something tricky, you get a weird error message, etc. For those things, stackoverflow could be great if you could find someone who had a similar problem. But the tutorial level examples on most blogs might solve the immediate problem without actually improving your education.

It would be similar to someone solving your homework problems for you. Sure you finished your homework, but that wasn't really learning. From this perspective, ChatGPT isn't helping you learn.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-06-17 08:54:32+00:00
The Trump administration is proposing cutting more than half of NASA's scientific research. Calling NASA science "bloat" is absurd.

If the proposed budget cuts go through, NASA's scientific research will be eviscerated. Nearly every planned telescope will be canceled. Most grants for students, postdocs and professors - the people analyzing the data from NASA's missions - will be cut.

We're talking the end of astrophysics and planetary science in the United States. It will just cease to exist.
by purerandomness | 2025-06-17 08:54:55+00:00
A compiler produces the same, deterministic output, every single time.

A stochastic parrot can never be trusted, let alone one that tweaks its model every other night.

I totally get that not all code ever written needs to be correct.

Some throw-away experiments can totally be one-shot by AI, nothing wrong with that. Depending on the industry one works in, people might be on different points of the expectation spectrum for correctness, and so their experience with LLMs vary.

It's the RAD tool discussion of the 2000s, or the "No-Code" tools debate of the last decade, all over again.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-06-17 08:55:44+00:00
I mean, I try every now and then to get someone to write me on Signal, because they won't find me on Whatsapp, but even once close friends don't seem to find it necessary and continue to use Whatsapp. Guess I am not important enough in their life. Others are a little misinformed, they think using Signal is just a German thing, but are willing to try. Others have their entrenched messenger being Whatsapp and they will take that to their grave with them, before they try anything else for a person they don't know well yet.

With some people it worked though and we are using Signal for some time now. Maybe it is too much to expect a 100% success rate for switching.
by nobunaga | 2025-06-17 08:56:05+00:00
ITT: People who think LLMs are AGI and can produce output that the LLM has come up with out of thin air or by doing research. Go speak with someone who is actually an expert in this field how LLMs work and why the training data is so important. Im amazed that people in the CS industry seem to talk like they know everything about a tech after using it but never even writing a line of code for an LLM. Our indsutry is doomed with people like this.
by jrflowers | 2025-06-17 08:56:15+00:00
> This is a system for substituting thinking itself with non-thinking

One of my favorite developments on the internet in the past few years is the rise of the “I don’t think/won’t think/didn’t think” brag posts

On its own it would be a funny internet culture phenomenon but paired with the fact that you can’t confidently assume that anybody even wrote what you’re reading it is hilarious
by palata | 2025-06-17 08:56:28+00:00
> True, but they are a much smaller service.

I wonder how it scales. It is an order of magnitude smaller but it's not exactly "small": I read it had 70M users in 2024. If you can relay messages between 70M messages without storing metadata, it feels like it shouldn't be too hard to scale, right?

Not sure if they get enough donations, but assuming they do: with 10x the number of users, if they get 10x the donations, it feels like it may work.

> Meta payed 19B for WhatsApp in 2014. They need a juicy ROI.

I think they paid for the metadata (I know that back then it wasn't E2EE but they moved to the Signal protocol in 2016), and now they are just enshittifying.

I have seen criticisms of Signal's crypto stuff (which I just disabled) and trademark, but I don't get it. It's okay to not use the crypto stuff (I personally don't like it) as long as it doesn't clutter the UI. Sponsored content says "for those who like this feature, they will now see ads". It's pretty different from saying "if you don't like the feature, don't use it", IMHO.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-17 08:56:59+00:00
This is all a meandering way of saying something better quoted in full, so I shall do so below [sic]:

> Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Audre_Lorde
by Ekaros | 2025-06-17 08:57:32+00:00
> I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people

Now one like me might go and ask how much of communication is actually worthwhile? Sometimes I consider that there is lot of communication that might not actually be. It is still done, but if no one actually reads it, why not automate generation.

Not to say there is not significant amount of stuff you actually want to get right.