MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Speech2Text, a Gnome Shell Extension for Dictation
by kwar13 | 2025-09-19 18:35:51+00:00
Hello HN,

I have been an avid user of Linux for a few years and have always wanted to make a contribution to the ecosystem. This is my first standalone contribution.

GNOME Speech2Text is a Shell extension that uses OpenAI’s Whisper automated speech recognition to let you dictate via microphone and have your words transcribed.

Given how much vibe coding I do these days, this extension has made my development with various tools much faster.

I learned a lot building it and got great feedback publishing it in the extensions store.

If you try it, I’d appreciate any critique or suggestions for improvements.
by Blackstrat | 2025-09-19 18:36:15+00:00
I go the other direction. I use audio books to screen books that I actually want to spend time on (nonfiction). Typically, I run the audiobook at double speed. After completing the audiobook, I decide whether it’s worth the time and if so, I buy it. Otherwise, move on. The worst examples are those I can’t finish as audiobook, rare but it happens and usually points to an error in my prescreening.
by jstanley | 2025-09-19 18:36:23+00:00
The four books discussed in that passage are:

AI Snake Oil – by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

Nexus – by Yuval Noah Harari

Genesis – by Henry Kissinger, Craig Mundie, and Eric Schmidt

The Singularity Is Nearer – by Ray Kurzweil
by panzagl | 2025-09-19 18:36:41+00:00
Sometime in the last 30 years builders learned how to build something that looks like a house, but isn't- no vent to outside in kitchen, 'two-car' garage that cannot fit even the smallest cars, etc. You don't notice these things as a kid, so you don't look for them when you buy your first house, by which point it's too late.
by cybwraith | 2025-09-19 18:36:42+00:00
I agree. My enjoyment of my career as a software developer dropped dramatically about 10-15 years ago when "agile" started taking off. Even in some of the companies I worked at that didn't actually use it, it was mentioned in pitches by sales to show how modern we were and then used as an excuse to shoehorn in all kinds of random features that made no sense.
Show HN: wt a tool to help quickly manage git worktrees
by bnchrch | 2025-09-19 18:37:30+00:00
Hey all,

I created a small git worktree utility some might find useful when creating worktrees so you can work on a few tasks in your code base in parallel

https://github.com/bnchrch/wt

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Why did I create this?

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Essentially raw worktrees are rough

1. You need to decide where in your file system to create them

2. Theres no connection back to the original local repo

3. Theres no way to copy or symlink untracked files (.env, build artifacts etc...)

I looked at existing worktree helpers and could not find anything that both

1. Let me create a branch + worktree and cd to the worktree in one command

2. Prune unused worktrees

3. Set what untracked files I wanted to "sync" and how

So I created my own

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What does it do?

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1. Introduces a `.worktree` file you can add to your project that defines:

1. Where to create worktrees 2. What files/folders to copy/symlink (e.g. `.env`) 3. What commands to run when you create a new worktree (`npm install`)

2. Create a branch + worktree + cd to the folder in one command `wt switch <branch-name>`

3. Return to the root repo in one command `wt root`

4. Prune wt related to branches that no longer exist `wt prune --all`

----

Anyway, hope someone finds this useful, happy coding!
by runako | 2025-09-19 18:37:31+00:00
> To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable.

The US federal government has taken a third route: increasing scale faster than resources. Before this administration, the # of federal employees sat roughly where it was in 1969 (there have been some fluctuations since then). In addition to the added tasks/departments/etc., there are 70% more Americans for which to administer government.

Scope has gone up quite a bit faster than headcount. I haven't done the analysis, but would be curious to see how this compares to given companies over similar timelines.
Show HN: Built an AI research environment inspired by Cursor and Google Drive
by ieuanking | 2025-09-19 18:38:09+00:00
Hi HN!

We hear consistent complaints from academics, researchers, and scientists about AI chatbots having poor PDF awareness and often generating incorrect citations. This is bad for high-level researchers and people learning who need answers grounded in evidence.

We took the best parts of Cursor, like workspace awareness, @ symbol referencing, and human approval/oversight, and built a PDF browser with academic database searching (ArXiv and Semantic Scholar) + our Ubik agents that can highlight text down to the line level and use our "Detailed Notes Tool".

Why is this better? With Ubik agents, you can either upload a PDF or search for an open-access paper and save it to your workspace (ingest the document and turn it into an interactive AI doc). With our Cursor-like @ referencing, prompt agents like: What the paper @example is about, highlight 10 points using the notes tool, and summarize why each point is important.

Unlike any available agents or models, Ubik agents can highlight text down to the line level; we call this a note. Every note is referable in chat using the @ symbol or drag-and-drop it into chat with any other file, canvas, found paper, etc.

Cross-analyze, annotate, and generate with citations. Pick from 20+ models, and use @ symbol referencing to craft better prompts that minimize hallucination and increase efficacy.

Start researching: https://app.ubik.studio/chat

Full app for MacOS and Windows soon + Custom EVAL suite almost done and ready to start test (will def share findings)
by boars_tiffs | 2025-09-19 18:38:30+00:00
there are some glitches here and there yes, visual and otherwise, across various parts of the system.

gaming is somewhat impacted too; i noticed strange glyphs playing disco elysium

some memory leaks too apparently but I didn't encounter this first hand.

battery life is impacted but idk by how much or if it's to any significance, time will tell.
by rtkwe | 2025-09-19 18:39:32+00:00
It would be on the longer side of ultras and unique if it was actually run over the route (vaguely defined) that Leatherman took. But that's mostly because they tend to not be done that way because of the difficulties of supporting runners when the course is that long. The really long ultras are often lap based instead of being a course that's actually 100+km long or take place in remote areas with support cars following the runners.
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-19 18:39:55+00:00
Android has a bunch of special signing keys (vendor, Google, that kind of thing) that get special treatment. I assume the same will apply here.

I don't have much of a problem with developers getting blocked, blocking malware shops is the entire point.

Installations failing because of a network problem is different, though. The Android ecosystem can trivially leverage the existing app certificates + occasionally updated CRLs to verify app developers. Android needing to call to the net before installing an APK seems over the top.
by palata | 2025-09-19 18:39:58+00:00
What do you mean with "Google lets it"? GrapheneOS is based on AOSP.

GrapheneOS only runs on the Google Pixels, and Google may decide to render future Pixels unusable for GrapheneOS (e.g. by preventing to unlock/relock the bootloader).

But another Android manufacturer could get to the point where GrapheneOS endorses them. It feels like it shouldn't be that hard for an Android manufacturer, and they would immediately get quite some attention. Maybe not mainstream attention, but largely profitable, I think.
by Spivak | 2025-09-19 18:39:59+00:00
Look I don't even know what sides the various actors in this spat would see themselves on so don't consider what I'm about to say as an endorsement of their beliefs because I don't know what they are.

That being said the freedom of (non-)association is one of the few non-violent means to signal your disapproval of someone else in a way that actually matters. The fact that folks are insulated from the consequences of their actions I think is a big part of how we got here. People spew hateful nonsense and sling accusations at each other that in person would get their teeth knocked out. Refusing to work with or collaborate with someone you consider to be distasteful is pretty mild and not terribly unreasonable even if it makes things awkward.

I can't exactly blame someone for acting on their conscience even if I don't like it. Working with someone who are at odds with despite your differences I consider praiseworthy but obligatory.
by zer00eyz | 2025-09-19 18:40:41+00:00
Most of the workloads that people with homelabs run, could be run on a 5 year old i5.

A lot of business are paying obscene money to cloud providers when they could have a pair of racks and the staff to support it.

Unless you're paying attention to the bleeding edge of the server market, to its costs (better yet features and affordability) this sort of mistake is easy to make.

The article is by someone who does this sort of thing for fun, and views/attention, and im glad for it... it's fun to watch. But it's sad when this same sort of misunderstanding happens in professional settings, and it happens a lot.
by torginus | 2025-09-19 18:40:44+00:00
Using the 3.7V nominal voltage for a lithium cell, that puts the Blade Battery at 10kWh - I think the price provided is for over the entire life of the battery which works out to 10000x10kWh*$0.014/10kWh, which is $140 per kWh. Not expensive, but not particularly remarkable considering modern pack prices.
by brokegrammer | 2025-09-19 18:40:47+00:00
> followed 30,000 Swedish women for 20 years. It likewise found that, even after correcting for things like age, wealth and health, sun-seeking behaviour was associated with a lower chance of death from all causes.

Is it because they got exposed to sun or is it because of the "sun-seeking behavior", which probably means more physical activity?

Either way, it's too soon to be throwing away our sunscreen.
by cameldrv | 2025-09-19 18:40:50+00:00
One thing that frustrates me about air quality is that we have sensors for various types of gasses, but when it comes to particulates, the sensors are just telling you the size. The composition of the particle has to make a huge difference in terms of the effects. Metal dust from a brake pad or rubber from a tire must do very different things to your lungs than vegetable oil.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-19 18:41:00+00:00
A topic that's notable but has little to discuss can get a lot of upvotes. A lot of the best stuff on this site has exactly that: lots of upvotes, little commentary, because the thing itself is notable. That's definitely not what happens on Meta threads. They usually get lots of votes then lets of repetitive spam-like comments about how ethically bankrupt Zuck or Meta or social media or algorithms or whatever are. A new comment on the behavior would be interesting, but most of the comments are basically just spam. I could probably get an LLM to generate most of them with ease. Perhaps the worst part is, even if there is novel analysis it's buried under an avalanche of "Zuck will grind you to dust" or whatever that gets repeated over and over again.

For a while that was okay, this kind of stuff was just contained in those threads. But it's started leaking out everywhere. Just spam like comments tangentially related to the topic that just bash a big company. That's the lowering of SNR that I find grating.
by fckgw | 2025-09-19 18:41:28+00:00
YouTube has built a whole content ID and revenue sharing agreements as a direct result of getting sued nearly into oblivion by numerous organizations. Most "infringing works" on YouTube are permitted under an agreement laying out revenue sharing with the rights holder, and if not, is flagged and taken down when found.

None of that is in place with IA and I fear their laissez-faire attitude in this current climate is gonna bite them in the ass.
by zamadatix | 2025-09-19 18:41:34+00:00
I think you'd be hard pressed to get most people to agree to that strict of a definition where Norway wouldn't be considered a democracy. It's easy to pick at things like "someone has immunity in court" as unequal, but that kind of thing is typically considered compatible with a democracy. Same with grants, titles, ceremonial roles, etc - so long as the voters choices about such things aren't being suppressed it's pretty solidly in the "democracy" camp - which isn't mutually exclusive with having a decorative king.

I'm not sure what the reference to "democracy is for peace" is about, unless you count Nazi occupation and rule as the same government or something.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-19 18:41:35+00:00
NDAs in the context of a patent license should legitimately be considered grounds for patent invalidation. Patent literally means "open to public inspection" and the entire premise is that you get a temporary monopoly in exchange for openly documenting how your invention works in the published patent. If there is something about the invention for an NDA to cover it means you left it out of the patent application, which is essentially an admission of wrongdoing.

A patent is an alternative to a trade secret. You can't eat your cake and still have it.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-09-19 18:42:06+00:00
That highly depends on the individual and their risk profile. But the best approach in general is to be aware of the signs that are up on these posters you see in every good dermatologist's office. Then you can spot abnormalities immediately and get them checked out professionally. Half of all melanomas are not found by screenings and are self-detected instead.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/screening-advice-thats...
by freeopinion | 2025-09-19 18:42:11+00:00
You have just convinced me to stop using the word J8t. It is not worth even $1 to me to be able to use that word. If Oracle wants to claim ownership, that claim can just be added to the legacy of Oracle. It's a bit stupid to be legally forced to stop using the word, but such is the nature of any discussion involving Oracle.

How about Deno put up $10,000 to sponsor a renaming contest? In honor of Deno, I propose VajaScript.

err... Vajascript
by snailmailman | 2025-09-19 18:42:23+00:00
The book has a non-binary character. The course also acknowledges the existence of transgender people.

This is part of a much broader crackdown in Texas on the LGBT community. The only “threat” here is that students might learn about the existence of trans and non-binary people. If they do that, they might have issues with how the current government of Texas is trying very hard to take away the rights of those people.
by dmoy | 2025-09-19 18:42:26+00:00
> Um, this seems ass-backwards to me. If some grant is denied when it should've been approved, the only harm that should be considered is "was this money allocated to the research?"... not "was this researcher's career harmed?".

Right, exactly. And that seems to be exactly how the court ruled on this injunction. Since "just money" typically can't reach the bar of "irreparable harm", then an injunction that requires meeting the bar of "irreparable harm" is not granted.

The case itself still proceeds, there's just not an immediate injunction granted while the (slow as hell) court proceedings continue.
by nomel | 2025-09-19 18:42:33+00:00
> because this moron predicted it.

I don't think that's fair, at all, for two reasons:

My whole career has been in HW. In the few startups I was in, where I was privy to the higher decisions, the executives themselves were predicting if hardware would continue next year. It's normal for things to flip-flop, decisions to change, normally, but especially when a product isn't competitive, and you don't have the resources to keep it that way. A leaker can be 100% correct in what they say the current decisions are, and 100% wrong the next week. I've seen it happen, with whole teams fired because they weren't needed anymore.

He makes it very clear when he's speculating and when he's relaying what he's been told, and his confidence for them all (some leakers are proven trustworthy, some are not). This alone is why he doesn't deserve to be called a moron. Morons can't comprehend or communicate uncertainty.
by creddit | 2025-09-19 18:42:38+00:00
People love to hate on certain companies for certain things: Apple and all things design is one of those company-thing pairs.

Just take a look at the MacOS Tahoe topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252378). A HUGE portion of the comments are clearly from people who both (A) don't use MacOS and/or (B) haven't used Tahoe and they are all intensely negative.

Taking Hacker News as an inverse signal on these things makes sense. For example, HN's iPhone Air hate is making me extremely bullish on its sales prospects.
by terminalshort | 2025-09-19 18:42:39+00:00
I am extremely averse to arguments that place a moral obligation on another person which does not apply equally to the person making the argument. If it is immoral for Jeff Bezos to buy a yacht when he could have given that money to charity, then it is also immoral for me to spend $10K on a ski vacation because that is no more necessary to me than a yacht is to Jeff Bezos.

Furthermore, I object to the concept that money spent on consumption is any worse than money spent on charity. That money I spent skiing goes to plenty of worthwhile economic activity and people's salaries just as Jeff Bezos yacht money goes to pay the boat builders and crew. The only difference between that and charity is emotional impact and the fact that a charitable donation doesn't inspire envy in others like a yacht does.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-09-19 18:42:49+00:00
Y combinator isn't hackers. It's venture capitalists trying to advertise to computer nerds to make lots of money.

VCs in the late 1970s (the real age of "hackers") were, in the words of John Doerr, considered "filthy real estate salesmen." This was the opinion at the time of Andy Grove, who was CEO of intel during its rise.

The big companies and VCs are cowering to protect their investments.
by rsync | 2025-09-19 18:42:57+00:00
I want my terminal to be as simple, and dumb, as possible.

It should ignore unexpected inputs and formats. It should not know what a web page or an image file is.

It should have no idea what it is displaying nor what is happening on the remote end ... I don't want it to know I am more'ing or less'ing or paging, etc. Just show the output.

I feel so strongly about this that I am sometimes tempted to collapse output to ascii-256. I resist this temptation because I sometimes cut and paste foreign URLs ... which my terminal has no idea is a URL.
by taurath | 2025-09-19 18:42:59+00:00
Yes exactly. There is a huge amount of people going into software development so they can have the basic security of owning their own dwelling. Prices have gone up even in non tech hubs. Home pricing vs what people earn is the reason for so much destitution in this country, and so many people are locked in its a complete non-issue for them, or a benefit.
by adregan | 2025-09-19 18:43:33+00:00
I often think of Thoreau when my mind drifts to romanticizing farming:

> I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?
by ModernMech | 2025-09-19 18:43:41+00:00
Oh yeah, and then there's those commercials you see on the channels with a 55+ viewership. They're selling things like this: https://www.ovidlife.com

"Sell Your Life Insurance Policy. Turn your life insurance policy into an immediate cash payout" next to a picture of seniors vacationing on a yacht. Then they bring out Tom Selleck who looks in the camera and says "Would I lie to you? You can trust me!"
by clpm4j | 2025-09-19 18:43:42+00:00
Aaron Levie strikes me as one of the sharpest and most prescient people in SV. I think you must be 100% correct that he's a true nerd about this stuff, or else he could have gone on to a thousand different things outside of Box by now.. he would probably be an incredible VC (I think I recall he was one of the first seed investors in Stripe as a result of cornering Patrick Collison at a house party, talking his ear off, and thoroughly impressing Collison).
by ulan_kg | 2025-09-19 18:44:27+00:00
Hey HN,

We've been tinkering with TTS models for a while, and I'm excited to share KaniTTS – an open-source text-to-speech system we built at NineNineSix.ai. It's designed for speed and quality, hitting real-time generation on consumer GPUs while sounding natural and expressive.

Quick overview: Architecture: Two-stage pipeline – a LiquidAI LFM2-350M backbone generates compact semantic/acoustic tokens from text (handling prosody, punctuation, etc.), then NVIDIA's NanoCodec synthesizes them into 22kHz waveforms. Trained on ~50k hours of data. Performance: On an RTX 5080, it generates 15s of audio in ~1s with only 2GB VRAM.

Languages: English-focused, but tokenizer supports Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish (fine-tune for better non-English prosody).

Use cases: Conversational AI, edge devices, accessibility, or research. Batch up to 16 texts for high throughput.

It's Apache 2.0 licensed, so fork away.

Check the audio comparisons on the page – it holds up well against ElevenLabs or Cartesia.

Repo: https://github.com/nineninesix-ai/kani-tts

Model: https://huggingface.co/nineninesix/kani-tts-450m-0.1-pt

Page: https://www.nineninesix.ai/n/kani-tts

Feedback welcome – what's your go-to TTS setup?
by alephnerd | 2025-09-19 18:44:34+00:00
American and European pension funds do not act like Sovereign Development Funds (SDFs) - they tend to act under a mandate of "wealth safeguarding", and tend to target dedicated asset pools without short-term liabilities. A fund like CalPERS has an added issue that it has become hyper-politicized.

The only North American pension funds I can think of that act like SDFs is the Ontario Teacher's Venture Growth arm, but they've begun pulling back from venture and growth funding.

> But the US in general hates "state owned enterprises" in the form that China has

We don't need a China style model tbh.

A coordinated trust banking model with a controlling stake owned by an agency or ministry like in Japan and South Korea is probably a better analogue for the US - in most cases we have the IP, human, and financial capital, it's coordination that is lacking. The issue is antitrust fundamentalists would balk at that kind of government enabled consolidation. The IRA and CHIPS would have been steps in the right direction, but who knows now with this admin. They are discussion SWFs but I do not trust their ability to execute.

I would love In-Q-Tel to transition into something similar for Cybersecurity and Enterprise SaaS, but they have issues.
by motorest | 2025-09-19 18:44:45+00:00
> The cost effective way to do it is in the cloud.

This. Some cloud providers offer VMs with 4GB RAM and 2 virtual cores for less than $4/month. If your goal is to learn how to work with clusters, nothing beats firing up a dozen VMs when it suits your fancy, and shut them down when playtime is over. This is something you can pull off in a couple of minutes with something like an Ansible script.