MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tetha | 2025-06-30 16:36:46+00:00
This might be a bit off-topic, but I've been working on my drum sounds. I was pretty unhappy that snares + kickdrum ended up being really loud, so I'd turn down the drum sounds, so the hihat and cymbals also went down and couldn't compete with the guitars... Ended up splitting the drums into a bus per function, so I could control and possibly compress or effect the snare and kick separately.

Now I have wonderful crashes and hihats cutting through the guitars and bass, without the snare and kick overpowering everything. This also taught me some insights about balancing relative volume levels and/or lowering dominating buses against each other and compensating upwards on some upstream bus as necessary, which I think also improved the balance of the entire rhythm section.

Except, now I'm kind of unhappy with my kickdrum sound. Some of the bands I listen to and saw at the festival I just was on have some amazing, epic kick drum sounds. It's like a giant mountain troll hammering into the gates of a castle and - on the right PA - kicks you right in the gut, literally. We had a good laugh a few days that some dudes jacket moved with the kickdrum. My kickdrum currently sounds more like wet cardboard flopping against a wall though.

Besides that, I'm however looking at moving some of my notes on audio engineering on linux onto a blog to end up with something like Protondb at a smaller scale, as well as some of the steps and things to do to get audio plugins working on linux, what audio plugins work well, which I could not get to work. I am just realizing, I need to learn quite a bit more about wine, architectures and such to write good articles and ideas about this. But maybe that's my perfectionism speaking.

If you're reading this and are yelling "But what is the magic?", the magic is largely called yabridge. Many simpler plugins just work with that. It may not be up for professional audio engineering, but it certainly is up for home recording and dabbling around.
by hbn | 2025-06-30 16:36:55+00:00
I read the first few paragraphs but when I saw the size of my scrollbar, I decided the author is putting way too much thought and effort into owning a VC-funded tech CEO playing the game you play when you're running a a VC-funded tech company.

"Our product is the second coming of Christ and if you give me money now you'll 100000x your investment!" is the correct answer to all questions when you're in that position. I'm not saying it's admirable, but it's what you do to keep money coming in for the time being. It's not that deep.
by duxup | 2025-06-30 16:37:01+00:00
>According to the memo, those subjected to civil proceedings are not entitled to an attorney like they are in criminal cases. And the government has a lighter burden of proof in civil cases than they do in criminal ones.

All the resources of the US government vs ... rando person not entitled to representation.

Sounds like a recipe for abuse and injustice.

But what do I know, SCOTUS has declared the POTUS more equal than others and effectively immune from from the limits on power our constitution and laws claim to provide.
by avsm | 2025-06-30 16:37:17+00:00
Applications to graduate school typically surge during times of economic downturns when industry is on its back foot. So...yes?

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/feb/17/rise-appli... (16 years ago) and more recently https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-12/grad-scho...
by cjbgkagh | 2025-06-30 16:37:22+00:00
That did help the make the premise more believable, the problem occurs when a low cost laptop of $500 and lasting 5 years would result in $500 for the cost of the operating system (5 * $100), instead of the OEM cost $20-60 once off. It's difficult to market segment along this axis because the way the low end of the market lowers the cost is by stretching out the upgrades. It's hard to segment on the p.a. cost basis because it causes the people paying the higher rates rightfully want to know why - and there really isn't a good answer beyond they have more money.

Allowing forever upgrades without a subscription would mean that Microsoft would basically be giving up most of the money on the low end market segment, which would have been a nice principled thing to do. There are strategic reasons why this could be a good thing to do but it's hard to say no to giant piles of money even if you already have giant piles of money so we were certain Microsoft wasn't going to stick to this principle.
by eqvinox | 2025-06-30 16:37:26+00:00
Yes but also no. The thing about software is that 90% of it is not culturally bound. If you're writing, say, some tax reporting tool, a grammar reference, or something religious… sure, it makes sense to write that in your language. So, yeah, C should support that.

However, everything else, from spreadsheet software to CAD tools to OS kernels to JavaScript frameworks is universal across cultures and languages. And for better or for worse (I'm not a native English speaker either), the world has gone with English for a lot of code commons.

And the thing with the examples in that post isn't about supporting language diversity, it's math symbols which are noone's native language. And you pretty much can't type them on any keyboard. Which really makes it a rather poor flex IMHO. Did the author reconfigure their keyboard layout for that specific math use case? It can't generically cover "all of math" either. Or did they copy&paste it around? That's just silly.

[…could some of the downvoters explain why they're downvoting?]
by cs_throwaway | 2025-06-30 16:37:47+00:00
We in computer science departments are very happy to send our students to industry, whether or not they bother finishing their degree.

The article lists a bunch of old-timers, like Page and Brin. Right now, everyone is talking about the "$100M offers" from Meta, for people who completed (or dropped out) of their computer science PhDs.

What does "not standing for industry" mean to you?
by pbrum | 2025-06-30 16:38:03+00:00
My team and I are building a web app that enables any business to chat with any other business in any language. Details:

It's B2B only - can't register with a free email provider, gotta own a real domain -Therefore identities are collective - companies, not company employees --Therefore all interactions are persisted at the org level rather than assigned to individual inboxes

-It allows you not just to talk but also to work together on contracts. We built a contract parser that turns contract clauses into smart, plain language objects

We're calling it Geneva and doing a friends/family/acquaintances exploratory release as I type this.

http://genevabm.com http://x.com/genevab2b https://www.linkedin.com/company/genevabm/
by Glyptodon | 2025-06-30 16:38:14+00:00
I can't speak to the specific years, but there's no doubt that a fair number of small, less expensive, cars have been knocked off - the Rio, the Prius C, the Fiesta... I think there are more than just those (though maybe some of it is lineup consolidation, considering the eventual Kia K3). At the same time, some of the remaining options have had (IMO) huge MSRP hikes.

But you are right that a lot of the price increases relatively track inflation. It may just be that cars going up at the rate of inflation and used cars depreciating less, combined with uneven wage growth and high maintenance and repair costs is leaving a lot of consumers feeling pressured.

Though it's hard to track this down in a way that seems accurate, cars that are under 10 years old and 100k miles always seem remarkably close to MSRP to me, while those that are over those thresholds often seem massively depreciated, but that's anecdote and I haven't done a study. Interest rates me be another piece of the story. When I last bought a car they were basically zero or 1% I think. It gave the latitude to use debt w/o much thought. Very different now.

Which is to say, I do think it's plausible that it's true that some segment of the car market is tracking inflation, and that cars aren't affordable any more.

If that's the case, there's probably more going on, and it may not all be on the cars. Once again, venturing into anecdote, I know multiple people who've had significant wage increases since prepandemic, don't have much if any lifestyle inflation, and somehow seem to be in the position of finding cars and homes less affordable despite making quite significantly more. I'm not really sure exactly what's going on, but the way people are feeling doesn't match the numbers for a fair number of folks with above average incomes, and I can only imagine it must be a lot worse for those w/ less.
by TFYS | 2025-06-30 16:39:09+00:00
Making a choice to consume as an individual is different from supporting a policy that would affect everyone. Taxing consumption and fossil fuels does have a lot of support. People are willing to reduce their quality of life if everyone else does as well, but their not willing to make the choice not to consume as an individual if everyone else can continue to do so.

A billionaire has the power to affect policy in a way that the average consumer doesn't, and is more likely to use that influence to make themselves richer than to push policies that benefit everyone.
by drillsteps5 | 2025-06-30 16:39:32+00:00
All: There's no valid use cases for local LLM, unless you're doing something illegal or unethical, you creepy pervert and/or criminal

Also all: How come LLM (and the company that runs it and provides a way for me to access and use it) knows so much about me? That's creepy. And there's just no way anybody could predict that would happen
by bumby | 2025-06-30 16:39:35+00:00
Ah, ok. I didn’t realize “series” is a specific term of art in the EV space. Thanks for clarifying. I was using it in the pure reliability domain sense (similar to the use in electrical circuits)

>less parts -> more reliability

This is the general heuristic but only true if the components in each system are equally reliable (and specific to the original claim about cost of ownership, equal in cost). I don’t think that’s true, and am asking for a nuanced breakdown.

For example, the hybrid ICE may be more reliable for good reasons (eg consistent RPM). Or the traditional battery may have half the reliability, but 1/50th the cost. All of that factors into cost of ownership.
by WorldMaker | 2025-06-30 16:39:45+00:00
DNS64 exists upstream in your ISP in the same way that CGNAT, does, in a central gateway someone along your rout path. If your CGNAT breaks, it's possible that was also your DNS64 fallback provider. For many ISPs, if you are using CGNAT still for IPv4, it probably means that they haven't even invested in DNS64+NAT64, because you can force devices to be IPv6-only and especially with most consumer devices entirely replace a CGNAT with DNS654+NAT64 today, and it is probably cheaper to do so.
by georgeburdell | 2025-06-30 16:39:52+00:00
>Before we go any further, let me be clear: this isn’t about sides or ideologies. Support for education and research should be as fundamental as clean air or safe roads. It is part of the shared infrastructure that holds society together. When that foundation cracks, the consequences ripple far beyond the lab.

Acknowledging that I was supported by an NSF graduate research fellowship, so I benefitted from the thing I malign, but NSF, academia, and the whole federal government pissed off a good chunk of the country with DEI initiatives, codified by affirmative action, extra grant requirements, and ideological purity statements. Some anti-science folks tapped into this anger and now we’re here, reading this Op-Ed.

I do fear this is the end of America’s post-WW2 STEM hegemony, but at the same time, it feels a little good
by janalsncm | 2025-06-30 16:40:05+00:00
Most of that is already happening under the hood. A lot of performance-sensitive code is already written in C or cython. For example numpy, scikit learn, pandas. Lots of torch code is either C or CUDA.

ML researchers aren’t using python because they are dumb. They use it because what takes 8 lines in Java can be done with 2 or 3 (including import json) in python for example.
by dogleash | 2025-06-30 16:40:16+00:00
> I'm sorry, why do we trust these guys again?

Anyone who's attachment to gaming is low enough to let things like this effect their purchase decisions are already out. To the devs/pubs, those customers don't even exist in the category of potential customers. So they just worry about not pissing off the existing customerbase by changing the status quo too much or too fast.
Show HN: Human-Readable Privacy Policy Summaries Powered by LLMs
by pearinc | 2025-06-30 16:40:17+00:00
Most privacy policies are deliberately hard to read. I thought this would be a perfect and easy application of LLMs, to make privacy information transparent and actually understandable for real people, not just lawyers. It’s fair to trade data for free apps, but users should be able to understand what data is being collected.

For each app, I added the privacy policy URL to a database, then made a Perplexity Sonar API call to fetch the text and process it into a summary, then manually cleaned the result. Currently, I manually get the URL for the privacy policy and have cataloged the top 100 apps, but I plan to automate it further w/ web scrapers, which should allow for blitzscaling of the app database.

This is just a beta so far, let me know if anyone has any suggestions, and if anyone knows what web scraper is best to use? Currently, I'm thinking most likely ParseHub or Scrapy.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-30 16:40:27+00:00
Part of solving the US debt and deficit problem will require laws mandating balancing long-term (>4 years) expenditures / decreases in revenue with long-term revenue generation.

The "run deficits in my 4 years to pay for nice things, to be paid for by taxes once I'm out of office" shit has to stop.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-06-30 16:41:28+00:00
Bezo's wealth come on the back of unsafe products flooding the market. On the back of Amazon warehouse workers having to see in-house doctors for repetitive stress injury and getting biased opinions in order to protect the company. Amazon warehouse workers are treated so badly (to build Bezo's wealth) and paid so little (to build Bezo's wealth) that Amazon has to consider running out of people willing to work their facilities.

Velocity of money matters. Builds. Bezo's sucking up wealth instead of paying workers retards the economy.

There is a reason Smog the Dragon is 'villian' prototype told by humans since forever. I get modern American conservatives think it is a model to emulate and is actually the highest for of being, but it's not.
by Rebelgecko | 2025-06-30 16:41:32+00:00
YMMV but when my work area changed from "big pile of junk" to "semi-organized", it removed a lot of the friction I had for just starting projects. I need a tape measure? I know exactly where one is, it has a dedicated 3D printed holder on my pegboard which lets me get to work instead of spending 15 minutes digging through drawers and shelves.
by retrac | 2025-06-30 16:41:44+00:00
Most of them. Static RAM was (and still is) more expensive since it needs more transistors and chip area per bit stored. It it, however, also much easier to interface since it doesn't need refresh circuitry. This is why you see it in the earliest designs, and also why you see it in so many hobbyist designs. It's also why you tend to see it in the video systems even if the rest of the machine uses DRAM. Dealing with DRAM refresh while reading out the whole memory chip sequentially (while also having a second port to read/write from the CPU!) starts making things very complicated.

But still DRAM is what you would use for a "real" system. Wozniak's design for the Apple II used a clever hack where the system actually runs at 2 MHz with an effective CPU rate of 1 MHz. Any read from a DRAM row will refresh the entire row. Approximately every other cycle the video system steps incrementally through memory, refreshing as it goes.
by ilamont | 2025-06-30 16:42:18+00:00
> I would expect this prospect to be very appealing to conservative rural residents

I am in a conservative rural district right now. Here's the math: 20% are at or below the federal poverty line, and of the remainder there are a huge number of people on fixed incomes or sitting on major credit card or vehicle debts (people own trucks or farm equipment, often related to work). They have very little wiggle room on any major investments, not just clean energy.

Yet people understand the value of solar. There are households and even some farms with solar arrays here. They also know utilities are jacking up prices despite huge wind farms and hydro nearby (this is in part due to local crypto mining ventures that sprouted up 10 years ago, which will likely be joined by AI farms in the coming years.)

People aren't staying away solar because there is "huge support" for fossil fuels. They are staying away from solar (and heat pumps) because they simply cannot afford the cost. They don't have the cash on hand, they will never qualify for loans, and in many cases they are dealing with existing debt or emergency costs.
by the_af | 2025-06-30 16:42:28+00:00
> How so?

There are currently existing ideologies in power in some countries (e.g. in Argentina, not everything is about the US!) that stand for de-funding health, education and basic science and research, and anything that is not of immediate use for businesses. It's a self-defeating ideology (because business do benefit from basic research in the long term), but it does exist today.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-06-30 16:42:29+00:00
OP would be easier to take seriously if it made even a token attempt to paint a balanced picture.

It says "This is what system designers recognize as a pipeline stall." without acknowledging that research universities have billions of dollars in buffers.

It talks about talent pipeline without acknowledging that, for most students, colleges are mostly a gatekeeper (signaling device) and that, if the university system did not exist, the talents would still exist and mostly be developed to the same extent.

It talks about the transfer from basic research to industry, without talking about how industry has benefited universities.

It talks about the students who have gone on to do great things, without acknowledging that those students were pretty much forced by society to pay 5 or 6 figures to a top university, so that they could show an employer they are worth interviewing.

It doesn't talk about how top universities were found (by USSC) to have discriminated against applicants on the basis of race. There's credible evidence that (i) they're still doing this, and (ii) they've also done it during hiring and promotions.

IANAL, but AIUI it's illegal for the US government to fund institutions that discriminate based on race.
by vickipow | 2025-06-30 16:42:48+00:00
Thanks (1) You can join the waitlist for our hormone tracking device, the app is available for download today on TestFlight. Eventually the app will be used to show you the connection to your hormone balance (like cortisol etc.) and your light exposure. They are very tightly linked! (2) there is a light sensor in the display of the Apple Watch that automatically tracks it. It works ~80% of the time, but struggles if you have a big jacket
by rich_sasha | 2025-06-30 16:43:08+00:00
Exams were never the pinnacle of what a grad can do. They were an efficient test, under severe time constraints, that correlates well with overall ability in humans.

That AI can pass these tests doesn't mean it is as smart and capable as a grad. I mean, it might be, or if not today then in a few years, but not because it can pass exams, having digested past exams and sample solutions into its bellows.
by 0xb0565e486 | 2025-06-30 16:43:10+00:00
It’s getting there, but it does not handle permissions so you either have to add a bunch of rules through the database (such as RLS on Postgres) or define a permission schema.

Trying to see how far inference can go given that queries usually specify this information (ex: where(r => r.author == $SESSION.AUTHOR_ID)).
by monster_truck | 2025-06-30 16:44:01+00:00
Worst case disaster relief scenarios during the first weeks-months, before all of the gear shows up. Historically there have been some pretty big wins from using what's around to do stuff it's otherwise pretty bad at.

Have attended a few tech-focused talks from disaster relief people, I can't recall specific examples sadly. I only remember being surprised by the amount of time the first people to show up and help had to spend working under assumptions that needed to be made because of the complete lack of ability to communicate and coordinate. Very basic things like when and where helicopters/boats are going, and who has what. IIRC it was after a devastating tsunami
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-30 16:44:03+00:00
Before we gang up and downvote for the last statement, it's absolutely worth recognizing that the majority of the voting public (Or at least their candidates) seem to have made 2024 an indictment against these kinds of policies. Even I, a staunch dem, have to admit that the alleged purity statements got a little too close to being real.

On one research grant I led for NASA, the grant reviewer asked me to count the number of minority students on the team, from their picture displayed on one of my slides. That's just the kind of information I didn't gather because I was trying to run a research task and had employed the entire lab a professor led.

That's fine, but we should also recognize how weird it is.
by yayadarsh | 2025-06-30 16:44:05+00:00
More and more people are more cognizant of their alcohol consumption, and like calories - it can be hard to eyeball them compared to the "standard unit" (14g alcohol).

I build an iOS app (https://quenchai.app) that uses a carefully constructed Multimodal LLM workflow to convert photos to standard drinks and track consumption over time.

Did you know a standard margarita is ~2.5 standard drinks and a light beer is ~0.8?
by just_some_guy_2 | 2025-06-30 16:44:49+00:00
> I'm afraid your personal hopes are misguided and based only on wishful thinking

Oh, I knew somebody would go there. My personal hopes are at least as valid as the blanket statement that everybody will automatically fall to the lowest denominator and contribute as little as possible given the chance. I'm just honest enough to prefix my predictions with "I believe."

And of course the Danish education stipend is not a real UBI. Nobody has implemented a real ubiquitous and unlimited UBI. But there have been trials, like the one in Finland involving 2000 people over two years. Compared to that, I think the Danish "trial" may be closer to the real thing. It has run since 1970 and involves all students of higher education in the country in that entire time frame.

If I was a researcher trying to figure out what happens if you give a group of people a monthly stipend with very few requirements and no stipulations about how the money are going to be used, then I at least would regard that as valid data.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-30 16:45:02+00:00
…seriously? Cannot tell if you’re being serious or just shitposting.

Here, an old-fashioned LMGTFY: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2015/10/how-did-the-40-hour-...

Wikipedia has a far more gruesome and comprehensive history of the US Labor movement, like the history of the NLRB, anti-union efforts in the 1860-1930s, the Coal Wars, Battle of Blair Mountain, etc. Everyone should know this history, at the very least so they can understand the harm that comes from delaying action further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...