MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sjoerdvdhoorn | 2025-07-30 10:38:00+00:00
Babbelaar is an open source language learning app that helps you learn a foreign language through personalized conversations with an AI teacher. It offers Text-to-Speech and Voice Recognition to be able to listen to and practice your pronunciation. Babbelaar does not have any server components and uses a free LLM service. To use all functionality you can provider your own OpenAI API key.
by saubeidl | 2025-07-30 10:38:17+00:00
The electoral college is elected. It then chooses the president, who is not elected by the people. The electoral college is not necessarily reflective of the popular vote, as famously demonstrated by the 2016 election.

All of this is simple fact. I'm not sure what you're trying to get at.

The term presidential election is a euphemizing misnomer, more accurately it would be called presidential electoral college election.
by 2muchcoffeeman | 2025-07-30 10:38:21+00:00
I think people argue this because the little pins for lightning are in your device. If these break there’s no fix. The flexible pins on USBC is in the cable. Do if the pins break, you get a new cable. Thought arguably, you now have this thin plastic flappy bit. But none of the parts that are meant to flex are in your device.
by astrobe_ | 2025-07-30 10:40:20+00:00
Hopefully these cases will get viral to the general public, so that everyone becomes more aware that despite the words "intelligence", "reasoning", "inference" being used and misused, in the end it is no more than a magic trick, an illusion of intelligence.

That being said, I also have hopes in that same technology for its "correlation engine" aspect. A few decades ago I read an article about expert systems; it mentioned that in the future, there would be specialists that would interview experts in order to "extract knowledge" and formalize it in first order logic for the expert system. I was in my late teens at that time, but I instantly thought it wasn't going to fly: way too expensive.

I think that LLMs can be the answer to that problem. One often reminds that "correlation is not causation", but it is nonetheless how we got there; it is the best heuristic we have.
by Nerdx86 | 2025-07-30 10:40:55+00:00
There are real capacity limits here. Supply and demand are serious forces. When you have a top tier product, you can do a lot but at some point so many people come that it overloads capacity. Last week I had 3 Claude code opus windows happily burning over $100 worth of API credits simultaneously documenting an old code base. This was after a senior engineer had spent 2 weeks learning how to have new code interact with it. And they were timing out and/or hitting excessive cap while my regular teams account just returned "too busy".

Claude 4 is good enough that people will pay whatever they ask as long as it's significantly less than the cost of doing it by hand. The loss leaders will need to fade away to manage the demand, now that there is significant value.
by goku12 | 2025-07-30 10:41:07+00:00
Except, that's not how most laws mandate it. The verification of personal data, its storage and the subsequent authentications based on it are done by a trusted third party - usually a government agency. Either they (the agency) maintain the mapping between the real life identities and the 3rd party online accounts, or they give the 3rd party an ID code which cannot be used to retrieve the personal info without the consent of both the agency and the individual user. Thus, you don't litter your personal data everywhere on the web and risk leaking it like this.

All that said, I'm still not a fan of such invasive arrangements and laws.
by wafflemaker | 2025-07-30 10:44:16+00:00
Last night I went to bed late and my wife had trouble sleeping. She said that she is afraid of the world where a state can decide that they will plannedly un-live whole other nation and nobody is willing to do anything about that.

We're both from the country where most of the planned un-living of the First Holocaust were performed. We recently discussed how in a street poll, half of Polish population couldn't solve a simple math task, a simple language task and one more simple task, placing Poland in the second last position from all the countries taking place. (For comparison, in Norway and Holland only 9%). And how it was likely a consequence of genetic holocaust performed on Poles by both German and Russian nazis during the 2WW. That systematic destruction of elites can behead a country for years to come.

I tried to calm her down, show her that it's just her Instagram bubble that makes her think so. That such things like planned un-living don't happen anymore in the civilized world where we are living, that last time something like that was about to happen, there was a UN action in the Balkans. Or that through the common effort we've managed to halt Russia's advance when they once again attempted to conquer Europe.

But now in the morning the next day I have my own doubts. That people have to use special language to talk about the Holy Land situation to avoid censorship on Youtube or other websites. That this thread got pulled down 30 minutes after posting (even though I was positively surprised when it was reinstated another 30 min later). That just like during the First Holocaust, even though the nations of civilized world are being informed about what's happening, people are ignoring the subject and not beliving that it actually happen.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-07-30 10:44:25+00:00
iPhone's picture quality has degraded substantially in recent models. Photos with a newer model look cooler, but fake and unrealistic. There's so much post-processing that photos looks completely artificial.

For example, take a photo of someone standing in front of a landscape. It looks like you took a photo on a green-screen and photoshopped the landscape behind the subject.
by EmiDub | 2025-07-30 10:44:26+00:00
Why do we keep having these LLM studies that are completely unsurprising. Yes, the probabilistic text generator is more likely to output a correct answer when the input more closely matches its training sources than when you add random noise to the prompt. They don’t actually “understand” maths. It’s worrying how much research seems to operate from the premise that they do.
by alphazard | 2025-07-30 10:44:28+00:00
It's specifically Quinolones which can harm mitochondria. There's no ongoing concern for something like Penicillin. We also shouldn't expect there to be mitochondrial risk from a fungi-derived chemical like Penicillin, since fungi also have mitochondria.

In general you want the weakest and most targeted antibiotic for the job. Most people will never need a Quinolone, and you should be skeptical whenever sophisticated antibiotics are prescribed. Why not Penicillin? should have an answer involving the name of a bacteria, not the doctor's personal preference, or a relationship with a company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinolone_antibiotic#Cellular_...
by relaxing | 2025-07-30 10:45:03+00:00
Yah, you can. Get out of the 80s or whatever decade you learned paparazzi style light was a good look.

For anyone reading, soft shadows from indirect light is why professional studio setups use beauty dishes, bounce cards, and big flash boxes or umbrellas with diffusers. Bounce flash is a way to create a little of that magic when you can’t get the entire rig to a shoot, as in wedding photography.

Pointing your on camera flash directly at the subject is the easiest route you can take. How does that make every other method lazy? (Note that I’m not calling direct flash lazy - it still takes skill to balance flash power vs aperture and speed. But every other method takes that and more.)
by Saline9515 | 2025-07-30 10:46:31+00:00
This is why I enjoy analog camera - aside from the fact that any 100$ camera can take crisp photos, they don't try to be perfect and add creative and artistic aspects to photography. Each film has its own color balance and sensitivity, each lens will render light differently, you can choose between them to create the aesthetics you want. I enjoy it more, and take really good family pictures with it!
by rurban | 2025-07-30 10:49:43+00:00
Of course it cannot guarantee forward progress in all cases, because that would be NP.

Pony guarantees deadlock freedom by eliminating locks and other mechanisms that can lead to deadlocks. Instead, Pony uses a message-passing concurrency model and static analysis to prevent data races and deadlocks at compile time. This means developers don't need to worry about manually preventing deadlocks because the compiler handles it. The scheduler is lock-free, the order of message-delivery to all actors is guaranteed.

Here's a more detailed explanation:

Message-Passing:

Pony employs a message-passing model where actors (objects) communicate by sending messages to each other. This avoids the need for shared mutable state and locks, which are primary sources of deadlocks.

Static Analysis:

The Pony compiler performs static analysis to ensure that concurrent access to data is safe. It prevents data races and other concurrency issues that could lead to deadlocks by verifying that no two actors can simultaneously write to the same memory location.

No Locks:

Because Pony doesn't use locks, there's no possibility of threads getting stuck waiting for each other to release locks, which is a common cause of deadlocks.

Data Race Freedom:

By eliminating the possibility of data races (concurrent modification of shared mutable state), Pony also eliminates a major source of potential deadlocks.
by shalmanese | 2025-07-30 10:50:26+00:00
No it’s not. Assume there is demand for 5000 units at $1 and 2000 units at $2. If it cost $0 to produce, then the profit is $5000/$4000 so you should price at $1. If it cost 90c to produce, then the profit is $500/$2200 so you should price at $2.
by ay | 2025-07-30 10:52:25+00:00
It was Claude in November 2024, but the “west of equator” is a good enough universal nonsense to illustrate the fundamental issue - just that today it is in much subtler dimensions.

A not-so-subtle example from yesterday: Claude Code claiming to me yesterday assertion Foo was true, right after ingesting the logs with the “assertion Foo: false” in it.
by Festro | 2025-07-30 10:52:37+00:00
Is the output supposed to make better use of markup formatting? I'm getting the following as raw output:

"{ "message": "message": Bonjour! Je suis heureux de parler avec quelqu’un qui aime la nourriture et le vin. Moi aussi, j’aime découvrir de nouveaux vins quand je voyage. Tu as déjà goûté un vin spécial lors de ton voyage ?", "explanation": "I'm greeting you in French and mentioning your interests in food and wine to make the conversation engaging. I ask if you've ever tasted a special wine during your travels, which encourages you to talk about your experiences.", "reply": "Bonjour ! Oui, j’ai goûté un vin rouge en France, dans la région de Bordeaux. C’était délicieux ! Et toi, quel est ton vin préféré ?", "suggested": ["bonjour", "oui", "vin", "région", "délicieux"], "translations": { "Bonjour": "Hello", "oui": "yes", "vin": "wine", "région": "region", "délicieux": "delicious" } }"

Which is quite difficult to read and learn from.
by amelius | 2025-07-30 10:52:45+00:00
Yes, I have to tell it a lot of things. Like that I use Linux (Ubuntu version also), that I want to use emacs and not nano, etc. It would be nice if I could say it once and for all.

One problem with LLMs giving so many steps at once is that the first step scrolls from the screen and I have to stop the LLM, scroll back and find the first step. The UX could be much improved here (with little effort, I believe).
by madaxe_again | 2025-07-30 10:54:07+00:00
Nah, you just put a 5-10kwh battery on there, along with a small water tank and pump - a load of washing (in Europe) only uses 50L and about 2kwh tops - up to 5 with drying. The rest of the battery powers the drive train for the vehicle. Then you just have a dock for charging and water replenishment. We only use zero phosphate eco detergent, so waste can be dumped wherever. Maybe position it to water some plants when it drains.

You know, my whole life is madcap projects (today is running half a km of fibre down the inside of a live water main) so I’ll update you when I have a mobile laundromat.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-30 10:54:15+00:00
It is all a matter of number engineering, after all, as by the old account tale, which got hired because it answered correctly the interview question with "what do you want the numbers to look like?".

Outside countries like US, and similar economically level, Apple desktops will never be a big presence, unless they change their premium price policies.

On the same markets, hardly any normal person can buy GNU/Linux desktop/laptops on regular computer stores.

Their choices are between Windows, ChromeOS and Android tablets with detachable keyboards, which naturally makes most pick Windows regardless.
by freeopinion | 2025-07-30 10:55:13+00:00
As a T-ball coach, I had every player bat left-handed in the first inning and right-handed in the second inning. They alternated each inning. I was surprised how much this upset parents.

"My child is right handed!" some insisted. I wondered how they could know that about a child who had never swung a bat before. I also wondered why a parent would want their child to be so limited.
by antonyh | 2025-07-30 10:55:23+00:00
That is unfortunate for both symlinks and for a lack of LAN sync. Not having the ability to deal with anything I throw at it does add risk that the sync isn't true, but outside of the OS I don't use symlinks. LAN sync would save data transfers over slower links but with E2E is this isn't too surprising that it's centralised.
by jalapenos | 2025-07-30 10:55:49+00:00
Why is it that every bit of news that comes out of some western country is now some form of shit-headedness?

I thought it used to be that parents were responsible for their kids - that's not even a thing now?

And as if this will make any difference to anything?

I think one day the Chinese will be saying "at least we're not living in the west"
Ask HN: Is university still credible?
by mettamage | 2025-07-30 10:56:03+00:00
I'm sorry for asking the question so blunt. I'm not in uni anymore, I did my time from 2010 to 2019 (Europe/cheap, multiple degrees).

But recently in a private chat someone said "these days all universities (at least in Australia) are a total scam and employers are starting to feel the same --- the advent of gen ai has seen a lot of companies here very skeptical of any student who didn't graduate before 2020 due to cheating and the like."

So I'm now asking around. One friend, who did his university studies in Europe, responded with: "A friend of a friend is doing a computer science bachelor's. Same place I did mine. But the easier version. And he doesn't know anything, everybody just cheats on everything."

Of course, this is anecdata. But I've never heard him be so strongly opinionated about university.

So I'm simply asking the question to see if there's nuance to this discussion or whether this is becoming the new normal rapidly. Or perhaps I'm just in a bubble.

I'm open to your experiences about this and what you all know.
by ffsm8 | 2025-07-30 10:57:13+00:00
My workplace forces me to use a virtual windows VM atm, which I'm usually connecting from an MacBook Pro.

I recently wanted to try using such an XR glasses (viture) and just use a Bluetooth keyboard/trackpad and connect from my phone. It would make teethering unnecessary as an additional plus.

While it worked, it was super janky because mobile devices are still not optimized for desktop use... The VM screen was effectively limited by the phone resolution which was mirrored by the glasses. Couldn't get it to work without the mirroring...

If it was less janky I would definitely use that for some business trips. Currently? Nope.
by teiferer | 2025-07-30 10:57:31+00:00
Does it? The point was that stopping calorie intake leads to death. That's not a controversial statement. Stopping funding is similar, it ends the thing it used to fund. Expansion of human knowledge, in this case.

Unclear what that would have to do with beef. Are you saying that beef is bad for health, so stopping only that from entering your mouth is good for your health, and similarly, academic research is bad, so ending that could be good for society? Which type of research is better for society, assuming you'd like to keep some way for society to expand its knowledge of the world?
by os2warpman | 2025-07-30 10:57:35+00:00
> Ever wonder why you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed on the wall?

No.

I have numerous smartphone photos printed and framed. On both walls and horizontal surfaces.

There does not exist a greater pixel-peeping gearslut than I, but that's just a hobby. Hobbies only dominate my wallet, not my life.
by Thorrez | 2025-07-30 10:58:05+00:00
>But if an unfertilized egg dies due to not being fertilized, I'm sure you would argue that "not being fertilized" doesn't count as a problem; or alternatively, that the fertilized egg is a different entity from the unfertilized egg. But none of this follows naturally from the definition, it requires our notions of "problem" and "entity" to be perfectly aligned to begin with. And you will pick your understanding of "problem" and "entity" based on wanting to prove that the unfertilized egg isn't a human but the starving child is.

I think there's a clear biological difference between an entity receiving nutrition, and 2 entities, each with half of a set of DNA, coming together to make a single entity with a full set of DNA.

>it is a case where the law prioritizes protecting the interests/preservation of the state over another's bodily autonomy, which might in some cases coincide with caring for others, but it clearly doesn't have to.

What you're saying seems to be that it's ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state. My response is (1) mandating citizens protect the state is protecting the people in the state, and (2) if there was some hypothetical case where citizens protecting the state didn't protect the people in the state, I don't see how it would be morally ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state.
by jstimps | 2025-07-30 10:58:28+00:00
ecto_foundationdb makes it easy to use FDB with Elixir, providing indexes, on-line migrations, and multitenancy.

https://github.com/foundationdb-beam/ecto_foundationdb

I use it as the DB layer for LiveSecret.

https://github.com/jessestimpson/livesecret
by tialaramex | 2025-07-30 10:59:04+00:00
On a good day, with an excellent print and the best people doing the matching you can be pretty sure if this print is from this person, but crime scenes are not that perfect scenario and the actual crime scene investigator might be less than great at the matching or influenced to some extent by what their boss wants.

There's a big difference between "This thumbprint in blood was on the recovered murder weapon and it's a perfect match" and "This smudge of half a finger on a paper bag found near the scene was arguably a match" but the jury isn't necessarily told about this and where on that scale the evidence they've been told about would lie.
by Flowdalic | 2025-07-30 10:59:13+00:00
> The standardization process comes into play when you think you have found a good solution, which should be adopted by THE standard respectively the ecosystem.

Na, the standardization process starts much earlier. Using the example of the IETF process, after which XMPP standardization process is largely modeled: standardization starts when you submit an I-D to IETF and/or approach an IETF WG.

> What matters is what the standard itself looks like, do you have a coherent specification which specifies the current way of doing things, including optional components? Or do you have a set of independent ways of doing it, because the standardization process doesn't actually decide what is the correct way of doing something (e.g. managing a group chat)

Well put and I totally agree (I think no one would have a reason to disagree with that statement).
by Joan_Vendrell | 2025-07-30 10:59:43+00:00
I wrote this after seeing how many GenAI products go from prototype to production with zero security reviews—no input sanitization, no output controls, no auditability.

The post looks at why trust in AI depends on security, and why it's not just an infra problem. It's a product, risk, and brand issue too.

Curious to hear from others building GenAI systems: how are you thinking about guardrails, observability, or abuse prevention?
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-30 10:59:50+00:00
I would say that LLM might give a correct answer, in a good enough question there is more than one answer.

Furthermore the LLM might give an answer but probably not explain with the best skills available why the answer is the way it is. This is of course something that varies with StackOverflow but there it is at least possible that somebody with deep technical knowledge decides a question is worth answering deeply.
by jpatten | 2025-07-30 10:59:58+00:00
I’m sure that Apple did tons of A/B testing, focus groups etc. with different image processing parameters to arrive at the settings that their phones use for photos, and from these comments it’s clear that a lot of people prefer the iPhone photos. When I was in grad school (in the pre-iPhone era) I photographed lots of weddings on the weekends, and one thing I noticed during the process was that people often have a set idea of what good photos look like. This idea of a “good” photo is often not tied to what the scene in front of them looks like. For example a “good” photo that includes a sunset will show a highly saturated orange/red sky, even if that’s not what the sky looks like at the moment the photo is taken.

Personally, I carry around a Ricoh GR3, and shoot random shots with the iPhone, but when it really matters I’ll use the Ricoh. The way the iPhone flattens the lighting is what bugs me the most. Recently I was at a kid’s birthday party and each kid had a cupcake with a candle in it. The room was a bit dark, and the Ricoh photo showed that each kids face was illuminated just a bit by the candle in their cupcake… The color temperature of the candle light is warmer than that of the room light. The photo makes you feel like you’re really there. My friend shot a photo on her iPhone at the same time and we compared afterwards. In her photo, every kid’s face is well lit and the candle effect is gone. She likes her shot better and I like mine. Some people want a shot that reflects what they saw, and some people want a shot that looks like what they think good photos look like.
by Zambyte | 2025-07-30 11:00:38+00:00
This is the "they're holding it wrong" of search engines. People want to use a search engine by querying with complete sentences. If search engines don't support such querying, it's the search engine that is wrong and should be updated, not the people.

Search engines have gotten way better at handling complete sentences in recent years, to the point where I often catch myself deleting my keyword query and replacing it with a sentence before I even submit it, because I know I will be able to more accurately capture what it is I am searching for in a sentence.
by soco | 2025-07-30 11:01:06+00:00
FWIW I have Mint on two grandparents laptops and I agree with the parent comment. I gave up doing any updates on them, I just wipe off everything once a year and reinstall from scratch. Even though it's only browser and music player and nobody touches the settings (unless there was a misclick) yet still last time the desktop came to show through the application windows so I had to wipe it again and lo it worked.