MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bashkiddie | 2025-08-06 10:34:25+00:00
TL;DR: If you are interested in TTS, you should explore alternatives

I tried to use it...

Its python venv has grown to 6 GBytes in size. The demo sentence

> "This high quality TTS model works without a GPU"

works, it takes 3s to render the audio. Audio sounds like a voice in a tin can.

I tried to have a news article read aloud and failed with

> [E:onnxruntime:, sequential_executor.cc:572 ExecuteKernel] Non-zero status code returned while running Expand node. Name:'/bert/Expand' > Status Message: invalid expand shape

If you are interested in TTS, you should explore alternatives
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-06 10:35:22+00:00
You don't have to be a genius to make way more progress on the latest equipment compared to PhD's in their environment, with their constraints and encumberment, plus their survivor bias based on "dramatically" different things other than progress.

You could even do it as a complete gentleman without ruffling any feathers at lower cost than most well-paid corporate workers waste, and get more done if you set your mind to it. Sometimes even in your spare time.

So I definitely wouldn't sell the lone genius short.

Could very well be an even better bet.
by __alexs | 2025-08-06 10:35:54+00:00
I believe it's to create barriers to entry and make the space harder to compete in.

There's still a ton of value in the lower end of the market by capability, and it's easier for more companies to compete in. If you make the cost floor for that basically free you eliminate everyone else's ability to make any profit there and then leverage that into building a product that can also compete at the higher end. This makes it harder for a new market entrant to compete by increasing the minimum capability and capital investment required to make a profit in this space.
by mdp2021 | 2025-08-06 10:36:18+00:00
> world model

Another linguistic devastation. A "world model" is in epistemology the content of a representation of states of thing - all states of things, facts and logic.

This use of the expression "world model" seems to be a reduction. An that's too bad, because we needed the idea in its good form to speak about what neural networks contain, in this LLM sub-era.

Like the new widespread sloppy use of the expression "AI", this does not contribute to collective mental clarity.
by cjtrowbridge | 2025-08-06 10:37:11+00:00
No. It's because large models have leveled off and commodified. They are all trending towards the same capabilities, and openai isn't really a leader. They have the most popular interface, but it really isn't very good. The future is the edge, the future is smaller, more efficient models. They are trying to define and delineate a niche that needs datacenters where they can achieve rents.
by ricardobeat | 2025-08-06 10:38:23+00:00
Writing your own logic to handle flags is trivial at first, especially if you're running a monolithic app, but quickly grows in complexity:

- distributing flags to multiple services

- broadcasting updates

- caching rules

- audit logs

- product, not eng, will start managing the flags at some point and needs easy access

- custom logic for gradual rollouts, A/B testing

- custom attributes support (used in evaluation)

- managing multi-variant flags

- supporting multiple platforms (backend, frontend, native apps, services, jobs) and evaluation strategies (eager server-side evaluation vs shipping a client-side engine)

There are quite a few open-source options like Growthbook, Flagsmith, go-feature-flag, and Unleash that you can check out for comparison.
by XorNot | 2025-08-06 10:38:57+00:00
And the drones which can do this cost (???) with a range of (???) and a flight time of (???).

The problem with the "drones will do it!" narrative people put out there is that it's anything and everything but what the drone is, what it weighs, it's volume and current production are all absent figures which simply fill in as "better then whatever you just said".

For example, a reasonably portable drone capable of ISR and limited infantry scale strike would be the Switchblade 300, already provided to Ukraine. This has a range of 30km a top speed of 161km/h and 20 minutes of flight time, with a 1.6 kg explosive payload - which is respectable. You could carry quite a lot of these to the front if you wanted to.

That particular system cost about $50,000 a unit - optimistically. It's likely that price could be bought down, but it does include the drone, launcher and ground control system. A reasonable price today would be closer to $15,000 judging from more recent products being offered.

If I hunt around a little then locally I could buy something like this[1] locally for $1,300 which has a 1kg drop payload...but only 10km of range, and a 45 minute flight time - and let's remember better radios will eat into that payload and flight time.

Now obviously different drones can do different things, but the core point is the same: drones don't magically not have logistical "mass". You can't fly a bunch of drones to the front for free - you need to either recharge or refuel them at the destination. Which means you need to stockpile them. Which means they can be spotted and destroyed on the ground. The loiter times aren't "days", they're still better measured in minutes counting hours at most.

All of these disadvantages apply to artillery too, of course but the point is that once you start considering the actual range brackets involved and the parameters of real systems built with current technology, including limiting technologies like energy storage, payload and physics of real explosives, the generic superweapon slips away. Ukraine is using a lot of drones because Ukraine can buy drones but can't easily get artillery and gun barrels for it. But Ukraine was also having a lot of trouble with Russia's considerable artillery advantage up until quite recently, and still is because of North Korean shell resupply.

The word "drone" gets substituted in for a superweapon fulfilling every role perfectly, with no actual physical parameters which would make it imperfect - and that type of thinking should give a lot of people pause particularly in the context of Ukraine where any number of systems have had their moment in the spotlight before either falling out of favor due to adaptation or simply no longer being the most applicable to the task (i.e. the various anti-tank weapons are still doing excellent anti-tank work...there's just very few Russian tanks any more).

[1] https://au.aeroodrones.com/products/aeroo-pro
by 7bit | 2025-08-06 10:39:10+00:00
As for the vertical centering, trying this 20 years ago, it was a pain in the ass. These and layouting in general got massively simplified in the past 20 years. Remember that back then, everything was cramped into tables? I do. So if someone tells me, "DOM, HTML and CSS is becoming more and more difficult" just tells me to ignore their amateurish and unfounded opinion... Hah!
Show HN: Blogs shouldn't be slow or bloated – I built a lightweight alternative
by webdev293 | 2025-08-06 10:39:13+00:00
WebNami is a lightweight blogging tool for developers who care about performance and SEO. Built using 11ty, it delivers instant page loads while automatically handling the technical SEO details that most developers skip.

Key features: - Perfect Core Web Vitals: 100/100 scores out of the box - Built-in SEO audit: Catches on-page SEO errors during build time - Zero-config SEO: Auto-generates sitemaps, RSS feeds, robots.txt, and json-ld structured data - Complete meta management: Canonical links, Open Graph tags, and rich snippets included - Modern UX: Dark/light theme toggle with system preference detection - Developer-friendly: Syntax highlighting and clean, responsive design - No plugins needed, no complex configuration. Just focus on writing while WebNami handles the performance and discoverability.

Just run `npx create-webnami-blog my-blog-name` to get started

Excited to hear your feedback!
by Lutger | 2025-08-06 10:39:20+00:00
You're right of course, it is better without an intermediary. But only if you already are, can or want to use typescript in the backend. If you have good reasons to not do so, then those usually outweigh the cost of having to go through an intermediary codegen step. The tooling is often good enough.

Plus, openapi can be useful for other things as well: generating api documentation for example, mock servers or clients in multiple programming languages.

I'm not disagreeing with you, what is best always depends on context and also on the professional judgement of the one who is making the trade-offs. A certain perspective or even taste always slips into these judgement calls as well, which isn't invalid.
by eagleislandsong | 2025-08-06 10:40:08+00:00
You were downvoted, but you were right in pointing out that the quote was taken out of context. Here's the full context:

"Nixon should be told," Kissinger said, "that it is probably an objective of [Clark M. Clifford, the Secretary of Defense] to depose [Nguyen Van Thieu, the President of South Vietnam] before Nixon is inaugurated. Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as [Ngo Dinh Diem, a former President of South Vietnam whom the U.S. initially supported, but who was later murdered in a CIA-backed military coup], the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."

Kissinger was motivating why the U.S. should continue to support Nguyen Van Thieu, the dictator of South Vietnam; but today his words are frequently taken out of context to suggest a self-aware take of U.S. foreign policy.
Show HN: Read Sort and Write Parquet Faster Than DuckDB in Java
by pyckle | 2025-08-06 10:40:14+00:00
I built a tool in Java that reads, sorts, and writes flat Parquet files faster than DuckDB, using a new Java Parquet driver called ParquetForge.

Performance is achieved through column-wise reordering and parallel algorithms. Sort order is computed using fastutil’s parallel radix or quicksorts, and columns are reordered in parallel as well. Parquet-Sort outperforms DuckDB when sorting a 59M-row Parquet file generated by TPC-H by about 25% when compiled by graalvm native-image and about 12% faster when run with the latest Corretto 24 JVM.

More details, benchmarks, and source code are available here: https://github.com/Earnix/parquet-sort All code is under the Apache 2.0 license.

Would love feedback, ideas, or contributions.
by criley2 | 2025-08-06 10:40:33+00:00
Everyone is suggesting that AI rejected this candidate but that brings up two points:

1) Is the hiring AI so incompetent that it did not realize it had a "S-tier pull" in the process and should have immediately prioritized the find?

2) Was the candidate's submission so bad that a reviewing AI couldn't even tell the massive relevance he had to their work?

I suppose, alternatively, Anthropic could just not really care about Claude Desktop enough to hire a specialist for one part of the stack. Perhaps they're looking for much more "full stack AI" who can do a lot. They have 350-400 total engineers, is that enough to hire a specialist for Claude Desktop?

I guess my question is: Did the AI fail, did the candidate fail, or did the AI work well and we just don't know the criteria it was succeeding in using.
by blensor | 2025-08-06 10:41:30+00:00
Prices going up is only true if you also let the specs go up

If you fix the specs and progress time then the prices go down considerably

Take the first Iphone which was $499 ( $776.29 if adjusted for inflation ) and try to find a currently built phone with similar specs. I couldn't find any that go down that far but the cheapest one I could find was the ZTE Blade L9 ( which still has higher specs overall ) then we are looking at over 90% price reduction
by tecleandor | 2025-08-06 10:41:39+00:00
In some fields it's becoming a bit ridiculous/worrying.

The work load is making people create or extend their work using LLMs, and the reviewers/managers are also overloaded and don't have enough time to go through it so they feed it to an LLM to get a summary, that later is pushed somewhere else to feed another process... becoming a "broken telephone" business process were nobody really knows the detail of what's going on, and it's just LLMs feeding another LLMs in an eternally absurd process.
Show HN: HMPL – Small Template Language for Rendering UI from Server to Client
by aanthonymax | 2025-08-06 10:41:43+00:00
Hi HN! Together with contributors, we've been making a small template language for a year now, which, in our opinion, can replace HTMX and Alpine.js. It is a mix between EJS and Handlebars, that is, you can make a request with a familiar syntax to the server in HTML right in the markup.

Requests are made via fetch and are configured via javascript almost entirely, which is what is needed today to work with the server.

The very essence of the template language comes down to minimizing the size of the bundle of the original web application by moving the components to the server and then storing them there. Thus, on the client we get a framework, where we insert components from the server brick by brick.

We showed this template language a long time ago, but it was not so mature then, so people had a lot of questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41204552

Thank you very much to everyone for your attention! Please tell me what you think about the project? It will be interesting to know!
by Onewildgamer | 2025-08-06 10:42:49+00:00
Was wondering something similar, if OP had blogged it earlier when he found claude was using it and re-posted it in HN/reddit it in a sensational way to capture eyes. Maybe through one of the forums he could have got an introduction and a job doing what he loves.

OP still has a chance now, maybe not anthropic, even other competitors can come knocking.
by philjw | 2025-08-06 10:42:56+00:00
Born in 1995, I used to joke that kids from 1998 wouldn’t know what a VHS tape is. But turns out “digital native” doesn’t mean digitally literate. That hit me again recently, observing someone rewatch an Instagram reel several times in the supermarket just to grab the ingredients on the fly — no notes, no structure.

I realized I do the same: contextually Googling terminal commands I’ve used 10 times before, then forgetting them. So I started writing them down — first for family recipes, then for shell commands.

This is my “terminal spellbook” — a collection of the commands I actually use and automate. I'd love to see yours too, especially the ones where terminal still beats a polished UI.
by ClarvoDeisign | 2025-08-06 10:43:23+00:00
We’re excited to share SuperPrompt with you today; a tool built from our daily frustration with messy, scattered prompts and wasted time!

You didn’t forget your prompt, you just buried it in 17 open tabs.

You had the perfect AI output yesterday. But today? You’re stuck retyping, scrolling, and thinking, “Did I save that? Where did I put it?”

Wasting 10 minutes to reuse a 10-second idea is killing your workflow.

Copying from Google Docs. Pasting from Notion. Manually formatting things again and again. Every time you context-switch, you lose focus—and those little losses add up to hours every week.

SuperPrompt is your second brain for prompts. Always a click away, never out of reach.

It sits quietly in your browser, remembering what worked. Save once. Paste anywhere. Organize like a pro. And never switch tabs to find your genius again.
by sjw987 | 2025-08-06 10:43:41+00:00
It's an important discussion. We should all be aiming to do better. Instead we're just lowering the standards for everything.

Only the morbidly obese should be using these drugs to get down to a healthy enough (overweight) level to lose the rest with sensible discipline, healthy/less eating (mostly this), and exercise (less this, but important for the mind, strength and cardio).

Discipline and basic understanding of nutrition and fitness are important life skills. At some point everybody should be developing them. If people can't be arsed doing that and we give easy shortcuts for everything in life, what's the point in being alive?

This argument comes up time and time again because it's common sense, yet people always seem to want to ignore it because deep down they are being lazy and undisciplined.
by IronyMan100 | 2025-08-06 10:44:13+00:00
There ideas in how to get better. -People start talking about pre-register studies, where the study design is evaluated independent of the results. -Some years ago Nature was thightening the acceptance criteria for articles about new laser principles. - in the field of metasurfaces there are more and more articles in how to assess the performance of flat optics and calling Out Problems with the Status quo. Honestly, i Don't See your point. Is the progress maybe slow... Yes. But changes are Happening. It's also in the best interest of Academia. You don't want to build Up your career (~5-30 years)on someone else fraudulent.
by etiennead | 2025-08-06 10:44:37+00:00
Actually this is very ignorant. I was one of these, left April 3rd. - These people contribute a lot, they employ people, start businesses, spend a lot... Most of them don't even use the NHS. All things that stimulate and contribute the economy tremendously. - In my case my nestegg was going to be taxed a lot more since it was optimised for tax somewhere else, moving it is complicated and risked UK inheritance tax which is handled better/more fairly in my country of origin and could have been a huge burden on my siblings and family business - Tax is a delicate balance, quality of life is not that high in the UK, it was just a good place to do business - If I am going to be taxed too much I would much rather not work and live in Italy, Portugal, Spain or Switzerland
by ionwake | 2025-08-06 10:45:50+00:00
I want to take this chance to say a big thank you to OpenAI and your work. I have always been a fan since I noticed you hired the sandbox game kickstarter guy about like 8 years ago.

Even from the UK I knew you would all do great things ( I had had no idea who else was involved).

I am glad I see the top comment is rare praise on HN.

Thanks again and keep it up Sama and team.
by 7bit | 2025-08-06 10:46:34+00:00
As a German, I always loved the long distance trains I. Italy. I remember a trip in 2008 crossing From south to North Italy which cost a fraction of what it would have in Germany. It had A/C and it was on time. So comfy. Meanwhile in Germany, they charged a shitton of money and it had no A/C.

Still last year I found it much better than in Germany, overall. The only thing that PISSES me off is that the stupid Trenitalia does not show me which platform the train is departing/arriving from. It blows my mind that this CRUCIAL information is not shown anywhere and you literally have to be standing in the station to hopefully find it.
by benchly | 2025-08-06 10:46:39+00:00
What about C? Is there something to be said for the proximity of the language to the machine language?

Maybe that sounds like a dumb question because I am a beginner at coding, so I apologize, but it's something I've recently gotten into via an interest in microcontrollers. A low(er)-level language like C seems to be pretty universally sound, running on just about anything, and seems to have not changed much in a long, long time. But when I was dabbling in both Python and Ruby (on Rails) and .NET framework, I noticed what you mean, as I scooped up some old projects on github thinking I'd add to them and realize that it would be a chore to get them updated.
by kubb | 2025-08-06 10:47:07+00:00
1) Orders of magnitude cheaper, faster and more reliable travel in both directions.

2) Ability to recreate Earth-like conditions including gravity, atmosphere, sunshine, farming and raising livestock on a massive scale (hundreds of square kilometers) on Mars.

3) Ability to create adequate conditions for the transport phase.

4) Ability to justify the investment (most issues on earth solved, remember opportunity cost).
by skeezyboy | 2025-08-06 10:47:51+00:00
> It's great because we had no other way to address this problem at a population level. Not any realistic ones, anyway.

um, go out and exercise? compared to your ancestors from a century ago, you live a relative life of luxury. THIS IS WHY YOU ARE FAT. Too much food in, not enough burning calories. So simple. Im sure there are people who are clinically fat, broken metabolism, but there are tens of millions of obese in the USA alone, are they all metabollically disabled? I doubt it
by LittleCloud | 2025-08-06 10:48:27+00:00
C# 1.0 did not have generics, period. So the standard dictionary (Hashtable†) type took keys and values typed as "System.Object". As seen in the linked documentation this class still exists in the latest .NET to this day.

Occasionally one would still encounter non-generic classes like this, when working with older frameworks/libraries, which cause a fair bit of impedence mismatch with modern styles of coding. (Also one of the causes of some people's complaints that C# has too many ways of doing things; old ways have to be retained for backwards compatibility, of course.)

† https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.collecti...

The paper that the other commentator was referring to might be this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
by freefrog334433 | 2025-08-06 10:48:41+00:00
It seems like you are making the point that there are large ranges of drones, and other weapons are required when drones are not effective, which I agree with. Drones aren't as cost effective as your earlier example of 12 soldiers being killed by a few drones. I can't find the interview, but a Ukranian drone operator said on average 15-20 FPVs were needed to wound/kill a soldier (80% are jammed). Just as it takes 1000 bullets to kill a soldier, it takes lots of drones (on average) to kill a soldier, making the cost-effectiveness worse.
by lynx97 | 2025-08-06 10:49:22+00:00
Regarding humans, yes and no. If a human had constantly problems with 3 and 4 digit numbers like tts-1-hd does, I'd ask myself if they were neurodivergent in some way.

And yes, I added instructions along the lines of what you describe to my prompt. Its just sad that we have to. After all, LLM TTS has solved a bunch of real problems, like switching languages in a text, or foreign words. The pronounciation is better then anything we ever had. But it fails to read short numbers. I feel like that small issue could probably have been solved by doing some fine tuning. But I actually dont really understand the tech for it, so...
by concinds | 2025-08-06 10:49:37+00:00
Only in theory, not in practice. Every Safari adblocker I've seen also uses scripts and requests permission to "modify data on all websites", because you can't effectively block ads without that (especially pre-18.6). I assume most users grant it.

So actually, you had closed-source extensions with full access to every webpage. Literally zero privacy benefit compared to the status quo ante. I doubt Apple thought it through.
by etiennead | 2025-08-06 10:49:55+00:00
Non-dom was a special tax regime whereby for 15 years they didnt look at your income from abroad provided it stayed abroad. It costs 30k from year 7 to stay in this regime.

This was great for people who just want to come to the UK to work say in finance for a few years but don't want to move their inheritance regime or finances from other countries. It was much fairer than most people make it out to be since most other countries dropped the double taxation agreement if you opted for this, therefore you would also pay tax in your origin country.