MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kposehn | 2025-07-23 23:48:51+00:00
Unfortunately no. The main difference is mass - US trains are vastly heavier than anything in the UK so by the time you make a tram crashworthy it isn't a tram any longer.

That said, I believe the FRA did allow lighter designs such as the Siemens FLIRT for commuter lines so the rules are definitely less onerous.
by gapeleon | 2025-07-23 23:49:38+00:00
You guys need to fact check your AI-generated blog posts:

https://blog.mozilla.ai/introducing-any-llm-a-unified-api-to...

> One popular solution, LiteLLM, is highly valued for its wide support of different providers and modalities, making it a great choice for many developers. However, it re-implements provider interfaces rather than leveraging SDKs that are managed and released by the providers themselves. As a result, the approach can lead to compatibility issues and unexpected modifications in behavior, making it difficult to keep up with the changes happening among all the providers.

LiteLLM is rock-solid in practice. The underlying API providers announce breaking changes well in advance, and LiteLLM has never been caught out by this. LLMs will come up with hypothetical cons like this upon request.

> Lastly, proxy/gateway solutions like OpenRouter and Portkey require users to set up a hosted proxy server to act as an intermediary between their code and the LLM provider. Although this can effectively abstract away the complicated logic from the developer, it adds an extra layer of complexity and a dependency on external services, which might not be ideal for all use cases.

OpenRouter is a hosted service that provides the proxy/gateway infrastructure. Users don't "set up a hosted proxy server" themselves; they just make API calls to OpenRouter's endpoints. But older LLMs don't know what OpenRouter is and will assume it's a self-hosted proxy server.

> Another option, AISuite, was created by Andrew NG and offers a clean and modular design. However, it is not actively maintained (its last release was in December of 2024) and lacks consistent Python-typed interfaces.

Okay so you clicked the "releases" tab and saw December 2024. Next time check https://github.com/andrewyng/aisuite/commits/main/ Small, fast moving community projects like this, exllamav2, etc don't necessarily tag releases.

I've got nothing against using AI to write posts like this, but at least take the time to fact check before dumping on other people's work.

If not for the Mozilla branding, I'd have assumed this was a scam/malware - especially since it's name is so similar to Anything-LLM.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-23 23:49:59+00:00
Noah Smith always comes off as a very smart guy trying to mask the dark traits in his personality (or personal ideology)

The emotions he tries to express in his blog are no doubt mildly to very positive, in contrast to the stridently critical (uncooperative+nonconstructive) undertones

I'll admit, tho, rationalistic disses of Japan always get me. If you visit Tokyo often you'll notice that fashion trends are subject to hyperintense Darwinian competition (>> NYC). American trends failing to show up in Japan immediately is very much not evidence of their evolutionary fitness

>So the Sanseito backlash is still among a minority of Japanese people

Premise seems not quite right

https://youtu.be/racSKd7nv2k

In my humble opinion, any constructive blabber about JP need to mention Switzerland. They should be the ISO standard in handling both skilled and underskilled "assimilation", for a uh post-growth economy. (Norway if things are any healthier) We don't even know if immigration is all we need to stave off inflation here ;)
by leafmeal | 2025-07-23 23:50:20+00:00
Points taken about benefits of run scripts for portability, reproducibility, CI, etc. I'm mostly just trying to find a way to debug arbitrary programs and run tests in the IDE.

It looks like this should be possible with tasks https://zed.dev/docs/tasks#variables but I haven't put enough time into figuring it out yet.

Maybe my use case is too specific, but I'll spell it out just in case: I try and open a Django project in Zed. I go to a test file. There's a > arrow next to the test to run or debug, but it will only run it with PyTest (I use unittest, but PyTest is backwards compatible, so w/e). When I try to run it, it fails because some environment variables I need are not set. I don't see how to configure them so I'm dead in the water.

I'd also love to run the Django server with a debugger attached. It's not clear to me how to do that. I haven't found the rights docs. Dead in the water again.

Maybe I need to spend more time exploring and reading the docs :)
Show HN: Zest – AI Agents for Slack
by kakaly040390 | 2025-07-23 23:51:28+00:00
Hi HN,

A few months ago, I started experimenting with building AI agents as Slack bots. What began as a fun weekend project has now evolved into a core part of how our team works every day. These bots live in Slack and handle real, non-trivial workflows such as:

- When a new signup comes in, one of them enriches the lead via Apollo, drafts a personalized email, and drops it into my mailbox.

- If someone mentions a new task in any channel, the bot jumps in, asks a few clarifying questions, and files a Linear ticket.

- Collecting customer info from Stripe for transaction failures and bringing it into the slack thread automatically.

- Scouring the web and drafting blog posts - sure you can do this with ChatGPT. But doing it collaboratively on Slack gives a different overall experience.

- We even made them proactive. For example, if someone talks about sprint planning, the bot jumps into the thread and asks if it should help break things down into tasks.

At first, this felt like "just automation." But what surprised us was how collaborative it became.

Since the agents live in public Slack threads, teammates started observing how others interacted with them — how people phrased prompts, tagged bots, corrected outputs. It turned into a sort of lightweight, social learning system. Everyone got better at prompting and thinking in “agentic workflows” just by being part of the conversation.

We also built a lightweight dashboard to help anyone on the team spin up and deploy new bots, manage access, customize behavior, and attach tools.

Demo: Here’s a short video of one of our bots in action — it self-corrects, navigates tools like Linear and internal APIs, and finishes the task end-to-end.

Stack:

- Vercel AI SDK

- axllm.dev(DSPy for typescript) for the agentic loop

- Composio for tool integrations

We are now running a closed beta for anyone interested in deploying Slack bots as agents. If interested, join our waitlist - https://heyzest.ai/
by imoverclocked | 2025-07-23 23:51:30+00:00
They have caused a lot of mayhem for federal employees. They have suppressed a ton of information and research. They have kept a significant amount of the public in the dark about their actions.

Yeah, they have done things we would both deem as "dumb" but their internal motive is what decides whether or not they have a clue. Furthering our motives has nothing to do with that.
by gradstudent | 2025-07-23 23:52:09+00:00
Works for me? (typos and all)

> What happened in 1989 in Tianeman Square?

> The events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square, often referred to as the Tiananmen Square Massacre or the June Fourth Massacre, were a series of protests and subsequent government crackdown in Beijing, China. Here’s a concise overview:

EDIT:

OK, this is interesting. When I ran the above query I already had a chat history. When I start a new chat I get the results you describe.

wtf Proton?
by wakawaka28 | 2025-07-23 23:52:48+00:00
I thought I was done but I suppose we have reached the heart of the matter.

>There are assumptions on both sides. I would say that a big one on your part is just assuming that everyone with a CS degree is by default a competent and capable developer because of their education.

I would never assume such a thing. But for sure, the odds are good.

>Every CS program, professor, and student are not the same and that variance eliminates any self evidence of credibility of a CS degree.

Well, every accredited program passes certain criteria evaluated on a regular basis. Any student who graduates from one meets the minimum requirements. What are the minimum requirements to claim to be self-taught? There literally aren't any. You just have to bullshit your way into the job. We could potentially accept a lot of self-taught people in other fields. Do you want to drive on a bridge made by a self-taught civil engineer, have your blood drawn by a self-taught nurse, or deal with self-taught drivers on your way to work in the morning? We have credentials for good reasons, even if it may not be strictly necessary to do the job on a logical level.

I am beginning to think that your good luck with self-taught colleagues is potentially evidence that only adequately talented self-taught people can make it in the field, in the long run. And software is far more welcoming of self-taught people than just about any other field, certainly among the hard technical fields. People in the arts are very often self-taught, of course.
by bpt3 | 2025-07-23 23:53:14+00:00
The gap is much smaller for private sector workers, and it's somewhat self-selecting by the fields where a union exists at all.

If I'm one of many types of service worker, sure I very well might join a union because I'm pretty replaceable and my income has little to do with my individual performance. I'll do better by forcing my employer to collectively bargain on terms that are relatively favorable to me by law.

That doesn't mean that all tech workers should support unions entering their field.
by richvdh | 2025-07-23 23:54:02+00:00
We certainly haven't ruled out Postgres or kernel bugs here.

> If you ran into a problem like this on ZFS, for example, you'd have very high confidence about whether the disk was at fault

Would we, though? I'll admit to not being that familiar with ZFS's internals, but I'd be a bit surprised if its checksums can detect lost writes. More generally, I'm not entirely sure how practical it would be to add verification at all layers of the stack, as you seem to be suggesting.

We'd certainly be open to considering ZFS in future if it can help track down this sort of problem.
by doubled112 | 2025-07-23 23:54:05+00:00
I vividly remember the desk holding my 15" Trinitron slowly bending under the load, but I don't know what it would have weighed. I'd imagine that 20" was a bear to get out of the car and make your way inside with.

Similarly, I'm not sure how 13 or 14 year old me got a 27" Trinitron TV downstairs by myself. 34 year old me would need an entire bottle of Advil for sure.
by mindslight | 2025-07-23 23:54:10+00:00
How are you continuing to thump this simplistic debt narrative, when it's painfully clear that the actual goals of the current administration are to balloon the debt and to destroy US soft power and stability that encourage people loaning money to our government at lower interest rates?

Surely you can see that if you earnestly want to talk about principled shrinking of our government's debt burden, the first step is to oust the current regime so that such editorial decisions can be made with the intent of helping our country rather than as a movement to destroy us.
by eurleif | 2025-07-23 23:54:18+00:00
Is there a feasible way to turn noisy cell phone temperature data into reliable weather data? Cell phones can be indoors; they can be in someone's pocket next to their body heat; they can be in direct sunlight; and they can generate a lot of heat themselves under load. And it's not just outlier phones that aren't in a position to accurately measure outdoor temperature; it's probably the majority of phones at any given time.
by debugnik | 2025-07-23 23:55:01+00:00
> Then we have Spain, that after the blackout, suddenly burns a lot more gas (41% more).

The Spain blackout wasn't a problem inherent to renewables, our grid simply lacks the storage and voltage control needed for the mix we intend. So, to keep the grid stable until we solve it, we'll need a more realistic mix for our current grid, burning more gas, yes.

Engineers apparently knew this was needed for years, but our industries are experts at kicking cans down the road. The blackout could have been preventable with the right investments.
by 999900000999 | 2025-07-23 23:56:25+00:00
If you stay in the Apple Box of supported use cases it's fine.

The customer support story is also much better. Instead of dealing with IRC channels and Reddit post trying to figure out why the latest kernel ruined everything, you go to the Apple Store.

I literally run Tumbleweed on my second laptop, I like Linux.

It's just not for people who don't want to invest time into understanding how computers work.
by kentonv | 2025-07-23 23:56:27+00:00
The Workers platform uses Cap'n Proto extensively, as one might expect (with me being the author of Cap'n Proto and the lead dev on Workers). Some other parts of Cloudflare use it (including the logging pipeline, which used it before I even joined), but there are also many services using gRPC or just JSON. Each team makes their own decisions.

I have it on my TODO list to write a blog post about Workers' use of Cap'n Proto. By far the biggest wins for us are from the RPC system -- the serialization honestly doesn't matter so much.

That said, the ecosystem around Cap'n Proto is obviously lacking compared to protobuf. For the Cloudflare Workers Runtime team specifically, the fact that we own it and can make any changes we need to balances this out. But I'm hesitant to recommend it to people at other companies, unless you are eager to jump into the source code whenever there's a problem.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-23 23:56:28+00:00
Velti used to be one of the largest Ad platforms globally - a direct competitor of Google AdSense and outcompeting what became Google AdMob - and one of the stars of the European startup scene.

Yet it's collapse in 2013 was severe. When I see a number of HNers bemoan the nonexistence of European AdTech (and tech in general), it was due to the collapse of Velti and the echos of the Eurozone crisis (which only ended 10 years ago).
by defrost | 2025-07-23 23:57:56+00:00
The "massive (percentage) increase" in assaults on ICE officers is a good example of How to Lie with Statistics * (1954, still a good book, worth a read).

For comment, see:

We now know that an “830% increase” is an increase from 10 assaults in 6 months to 93 assaults in 6 months, at a time when DHS has *massively* increased at-large arrests and officers deployed in the community. For comparison, NYPD is averaging 194 assaults on officers per MONTH.

from:

DHS Still Pretending 15 Assaults A Month Is Evidence Of Widespread Violence Against ICE Officers

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/23/dhs-still-pretending-15-...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics
by perigrin | 2025-07-23 23:58:18+00:00
I've been surprised. I have a coworker who has a deep industry knowledge but none of it was in Perl, he was reaching for ChatGPT a lot early on and while sometimes it wasn't how I would have written it it wasn't wrong. So I did some experiments and I asked Claude to do things like generate apps using the latest Class syntax which is only 3 years old at this point … it didn't have a problem.

Edit: well it occasionally had a problem where it would confuse things for Moose or Raku … but by and large it wasn't wrong it's just the syntax is new. I know Perl developers who have the same issues.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-07-23 23:58:38+00:00
Where is the line on tyranny?

Who decides? Someone who doesn't like how the last election turned out?

Some person who decides the police are being too tyrannical by asking them to turn down their stereo for neighbourhood peace?

Honestly, when does this go from "we're prepared" to "time to act"?

This has mess written all over it.

Also, it should be noted that the army and police are made up of humans too.

As has been pointed out in various war tribunals doing something under orders doesn't entirely absolve you from moral duty.
by neuroscihacker | 2025-07-23 23:59:14+00:00
I wrote about analytic easing functions a number of years ago and show how to precisely design a spring function:

https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-spring-factory-4c3d988e712...

And a bounce function:

https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-bounce-factory-3498de1e526...
by bko | 2025-07-23 23:59:16+00:00
Sometimes I just need a prescription. I don't know why I have to drive somewhere, fill out a form, wait, see a nurse, tell them what I wrote on the form, wait some more, see a doctor and tell them what I wrote on the form and have him write me a prescription.

Why can't I just chat with an AI bot and get my prescription? Much cheaper to administer which helps monetization (!) but much better and cheaper for me.

Things aren't slow and wasteful because of monetization. Having all these steps doesn't necessarily mean more profit. I would argue that its deeply inefficient for everyone involved and doctors. For instance, physician salaries have decreased 25% in real terms over the last 20 years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Residency/comments/15cr60z/adjusted...
Show HN: DrinkMe – A Minimalist Video Compressor
by wasivis | 2025-07-23 23:59:44+00:00
I recently built my first ElectronJs app, a minimalist video compressor called DrinkMe. It uses a two-pass FFmpeg encode and estimates the final size based on the original video’s duration, resolution, quality, and size.

The idea behind it is to provide an alternative for non-power users who struggle/don't want to learn how to use CLI-based programs like FFmpeg, or even Handbrake (whose myriad of settings and options CAN be overwhelming).

The target reduction is usually around 80–85% of the original for high-res files, but it adjusts dynamically if the video’s already compressed.

All feedback is welcome!
by coolspot | 2025-07-24 00:00:01+00:00
> Lumo’s code is open source, meaning anyone can see it’s secure and does what it claims to.

No link to source code in the article. GitHub search also doesn’t show any source code for Lumo.

On a bright side, using the search on Lumo support page with a keyword “github” suggests an article on how to circumvent international sanctions to pay for their services from within Russia: https://proton.me/support/pay-russia
by x2tyfi | 2025-07-24 00:00:42+00:00
This is a good point, and highlights that there’s an additional variable somewhat out of scope from this test.

1. finish temperature (as mentioned in this article) 2. peak temperature

In these tests, the finish temperature and peak temperature were the same - he sliced while carryover cooking was still climbing. However, when resting, most people achieve a peak temperature (due to carryover cooking), then roll down the other side of the curve to a lowered temperature.

As you imply, a longer rest - in conjunction with protein pulled at just the right time - can likely result with both the perfect (to taste) peak temperature, and a lower (and more juicy) slicing temperature
by consumer451 | 2025-07-24 00:01:21+00:00
> AI for billing or other administrative tasks could be a big cost saver

Do we really still think that "AI" is some sort of magic that does everything for everyone?

What are the alignment goals of healthcare billing AIs?

Won't it just end up with insurance conglomerates having their AIs which battle the billing admin AIs on the service provider side?

Ffs, AI is not magic! This all feels like yet another form of tech deism, hoping that some magical higher power will solve all of our problems.

I am a daily user of LLM-based dev tools, but the real definition of AI appears to be Accelerated Ignorance.
by meerab | 2025-07-24 00:01:46+00:00
I am building VideoToBe.com - I have found that whisperX works the most reliable.

https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX

It is built on top of OpenAI Whisper, so speech recognition is good, the transcript gives speaker tags as 'SPEAKER_00' and 'SPEAKER_01' etc.

Here is how the transcript may look like

https://videotobe.com/play/media/1b02f75a-9503-43aa-8956-d18...
by swyx | 2025-07-24 00:02:14+00:00
(hi i'm OP) kimi k2 was released a while ago with some headlines like muonclip already discussed* but the tech report is new so submitted here. their own highlights are here: https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/1947520758760313170

we just covered it today on the latent.space paper club if you want to listen along while reading this paper https://youtu.be/VHwZa7lZhK8

definitely see also sebastian raschka's writeup https://t.co/oEt8XzNxik

*background on muon and muonclip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcTNQLebHb0
by paulryanrogers | 2025-07-24 00:02:46+00:00
> Yeah, but does it really prevent knife crimes?

It likely reduces knife crime. Much as denying sales of lighters and flamable fluids to minors makes fires started by children less likely. (This deeply offended me as an adolescent who enjoyed burning things.)

Is there a benefit to society of allowing minors to buy knives?

We don't have laws to make bad things like murder completely impossible. We do it to make them less likely.
by zeckalpha | 2025-07-24 00:04:10+00:00
I didn't see any mention of this so thought I would add:

This sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Earth_hypothesis. Going through history, there have been times where the Earth has had oxygen spikes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen (Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoproterozoic_oxygenation_eve...) Cool image showing how this process is unstable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event#/media/F...

You might be interested in the different photosynthesis cycles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_carbon_fixation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassulacean_acid_metabolism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_photosynthesis - this one was only discovered in 2016!

Research into these may have profound impact on climate change.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-24 00:04:20+00:00
Just to roll with your way: https://chatgpt.com/share/688177c9-ebc0-8011-88cc-9514d8e167...

Please do not take the numbers below at face value. I still expect an actual reply to my initial comment.

Per-call overhead:

C (baseline) - ~30 ns Rust (unsafe) - ~30 ns C# (P/Invoke) - ~30-50 ns LuaJIT - ~30-50 ns Go (cgo) - ~40-60 ns Java (22, FFM) - ~40-70 ns Java (JNI) - ~300-1000 ns Perl (XS) - ~500-1000 ns Python (ctypes) - ~10,000-30,000 ns Common Lisp (SBCL) - ~500-1500 ns

Seems like Go is still fast enough as opposed to other programming languages with GC, so I am not sure it is fair to Go.