MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dougdonohoe | 2025-09-30 14:55:50+00:00
I can relate to this post - great thoughts!

I took Spanish in high school and college, so had a rudimentary understanding of verb tenses and some vocabulary. Before I walked the Camino de Santiago el Norte (45+ days in Spain), I used Duolingo to brush up on my Spanish.

It helped my reading most, my speaking a fair amount and my listening/conversation the least. I was able to ask questions, but was often flummoxed at any reply that wasn't the most basic.

I grew to hate the gamification, but was addicted to my "streak' also ... using math lessons when I didn't feel like doing a Spanish lesson. The so-called "leagues" were kind of useless since the same people weren't in the league from week to week. Any friendly competitiveness to "learn more" was lost when randomly assigned to a different group each week.

I finally abandoned the app this spring.

I'm trying Babbel now since I'm going back to Spain for a month and Patagonia next year.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-09-30 14:55:51+00:00
Depends on how you measure things. Trump did not receive a majority of all possible votes, nor did he receive a majority of all votes that were cast. He did receive a plurality of votes that were cast.

2024 voting-eligible population: 244.6M

Voted for Trump: 77.3M

Voted for Harris: 75M

Voted for other candidates: 2.6M

Eligible to vote, but didn't vote: 90M
by duothrowaway99 | 2025-09-30 14:56:17+00:00
Both of my parents are teachers of a European language. They both have phd's in linguistics, and rate very highly with students (who basically adore them).

All of this context to say that not once has anyone using Duolingo been able to "test out" of the first ("101") class that they teach. Duolingo self-learners come in with a very unequal mix of vocabulary and... not much else. Unable to use declension properly [0], unaware of most rules around gender, verb tenses, etc.

I'm sure (and I should look it up) that there have been academic papers written on these quite different methods/approaches: gamified learning vs "academic" learning, immersion by moving to a country, etc.

But in my parents' experience of teaching (which spans ~40 yrs), Duolingo students pretty much all became disappointed in the app: these students thought that they had developed skills when it turns out they mostly got addicted to a game that overpromised useful learning over entertainment.

---

Imho, the ugly truth is that language learning as an adult is deeply hard and requires a tremendous amount of effort and "tricks" to keep yourself motivated. People who watch native media with subtitles, play with AI apps (such as the YC backed https://www.issen.com/ which is quite nice), take a mix of "classic" classes, spend time in a country where the language is spoken and force themselves into situations where they "have" to speak, etc. all do much better. But it's a ton of effort.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension
by al_borland | 2025-09-30 14:56:41+00:00
I don’t know what you’re referring to when talking about gymnastics as a beauty contest.

I’m not an expert, but I know there are specific moves with various degrees of difficulty. I believe there is a max score based on that difficulty level, and any imperfection will lower that score, such as a foot pointed or flexed the wrong way at the wrong time, taking an extra step on a landing, etc.

I know all these rules exist, but I’m not an expert where I can say someone had their foot flexed when it should have been pointed. These details would go over my head, where a humanoid robot might get a pass from me, while an actual gymnast or judge would be able to see faults.
by forgotusername6 | 2025-09-30 14:56:43+00:00
I have a 2000+ day streak on Duolingo, mostly learning Russian. The app has got progressively worse since I started, for a while just giving me the same lesson every single day. I of course finished the course years ago, but I keep up with my one lesson a day to keep the bird happy. I find the UI incredibly annoying, I've disabled all the sounds and animations that I can. You might ask why don't I stop? Well I want to keep up my Russian, and the one lesson a day keeps my brain ticking over.
by sorcercode | 2025-09-30 14:56:54+00:00
here's a similar implementation for Bluesky that I whipped up sometime back.

https://kau.sh/blog/bluesky-comments-for-hugo/

I like my implementation cause it blends really well with the blog making it looks almost native.

transferring the burden of maintenance - curation to a social media platform (and a slightly more open one to boot) has been a complete win.
by rtkwe | 2025-09-30 14:57:04+00:00
Farther if you're looking at public transit travel times. It's ~90-120 minutes by the train-bus combo you have to take for Udvar and 120-180 for the bus only service (no weekend service afaik) for SC Houston. The one upside may be that if you're visiting Houston you're probably already renting a car because their public transit is worse than DC's.
by lxgr | 2025-09-30 14:57:08+00:00
I'd actually argue that developers being actually sped up by LLMs (i.e. in terms of increasing their output of maintainable artifacts and not just lines of code) are those that have a good theory of the system they're working on.

At least at this point, LLMs are great at the "how", but are often missing context for the "what" and "why" (whether that's because it's often not written down or not as prevalent in their training data).
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-09-30 14:57:16+00:00
Given how bad the security trainings I've seen are this isn't a surprise. My employer's last cybersecurity training said that data doesn't count as PII if it doesn't include some person's name. That's an outright contradiction of the CCPA, EU GDPR, and UK GDPR definitions! The rest of the advice tends to be similarly suspect, like the common advice that phishing emails have lots of spelling & grammar mistakes: that's well-known enough that scammers have started using proper spelling & grammar like in the recent supply-chain attacks NPM debug/chalk/etc.

The article blames it on people not engaging with the trainings, which is quite likely, but I suspect even if they did engage the trainings wouldn't be particularly effective. It recommends hardware 2FA & password managers that autofill based on domain which are both good choices, but I'd also say that splitting up communication channels into trusted internal & untrusted external is a good idea.
by overfeed | 2025-09-30 14:57:41+00:00
> However, that only works if there are assets to liquidate

Ownership of the company itself can be sold, but this only works if there's someone who believes the company was overvalued. Unfortunately for Musk, Twitter's market cap dropped by tens of billions between the time he locked-in his offer and the deal's effective date. It's hard to find banks to fund your LBO when you're paying significantly more than what the market believes the company is worth.
by chrisweekly | 2025-09-30 14:57:52+00:00
Anecdata: my daughter, when a rising high school sophomore in 2023, used DL to skip a full year^1 and join upperclassmen in Spanish 3. She went on to take AP Spanish, earn college credit w/ her AP test score, and join the Spanish National Honors Society. She credits DL w/ giving her the confidence -- and vocabulary -- to make the leap when she did. Of course that doesn't mean critiques aren't valid, and YMMV, but it does help show that DL isn't necessarily useless, either.

1. Despite US high-school language classes generally having a (usually deserved) reputation for failing to impart real fluency, our town's language instruction is actually first-rate.
by obk0943t | 2025-09-30 14:57:54+00:00
It's worse than anki because there is no SSR built in ( at least when i was doing it ).

>But there are many situations where memorizing 400 distinct things is pretty useful: countries, capitals, recipes, history etc.

Just memorizing 400 vocabs alone is actually pretty good early on because then you aren't tied to practicing grammar with childish content like " I went to school by bus yesterday" because of limited vocabulary.

I spent the first year alone learning about 2000 vocab without any grammar. And when I go on and do grammar I can actually practice with interesting content that related to my daily life. I now recommend new learner to learn their vocab by N + 1 level relative to their grammar.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-09-30 14:58:05+00:00
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/30/citize...

https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/09/28/ice-made-unlawfu...

https://goldman.house.gov/media/press-releases/goldman-warre...

Just a few of the hits for "us citizen ice arrest"
by infecto | 2025-09-30 14:58:12+00:00
What are the other efforts? Packbot was sold off for $45mm for the time a company with a market cap of $1.6bn. Again the PackBot could be great but would you call a product that had low $ contracts to the government that eventually was sold for peanuts a wildly successful company? I don’t consider iRobot to be a wildly successful company.
by water-data-dude | 2025-09-30 14:58:22+00:00
The current administration is trying to emphasize certain parts of our history and diminish others. If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say it's something along the lines of "this was something the public sector did with taxpayer money that advanced science. We should deemphasize anything positive that came out of it because it casts public sector projects and science in a good light"
by ldoughty | 2025-09-30 14:58:26+00:00
These people mostly already and effectively stopped working... The people I know that took this offer were told to stop showing up for work back in March-ish time frame. I see nothing in the article to suggest a sudden wave of new people taking up this offer -- as far as I can tell, the only thing that's about to change from what this article says is that our unemployment numbers will start to reflect it if those federal workers did not find new employment.
by drdrek | 2025-09-30 14:58:36+00:00
Somehow many very smart AI entrepreneurs do not understand the concept of limits to lossless data compression. If an idea cannot be reduced further without losing information, no amount of AI is going to be able to compress it.

This is why you see so many failed startup around slack/email/jira efficiency. Half the time you do not know if you missed critical information so you need to go to the source, negating gains you had with information that was successfully summarized.
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-30 14:58:39+00:00
You don't need a motor. You need a recurring calendar reminder to send someone out there to spin them all 2x per year at whatever day you determine to be the ideal crossover point where you want to switch between NS and EW.

The panels can be stayed in their correct positions by a trash tire or whatever buried in the ground with two chains poking out to clip to the panel corner.

None of this is rocket science. This is all stuff that has been proven out over the past 200yr of fence and gate construction.

Similar could be used for changing between tilted and vertical though you'd need more material.
by EGreg | 2025-09-30 14:58:39+00:00
Perhaps now my response to Moxie Marlinspike from years ago is as relevant as ever, including for people on HN:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

I guess Moxie “found out”, because being centralized, Signal can have only one response to this — retreat and retreat: https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/we-will-n...

Decentralized open source is essential to human freedom. I can’t believe so many talented technologists and entrepreneurs are on HN correctly diagnosing the problems with relying on centralized platforms of governments and corporations, but then these same people oppose anything that has the words “web3” or “blockchain” in it. They oppose it so strongly, they won’t click and read any details, they’ll just knee-jerk downvote it. And they’ll boost every argument against it. But we absolutely need ways to monetize open source and have it compete without becoming enshittified, pleasing shareholders and creating big juicy targets for governments and advertisers. Opposing micropayments and blockchain settlements is just useful idiocy in the governments’ war against privacy and autonomy, and make no mistake, it is a global war, not just in the EU. Here is the map:

https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...

It is not just the EU. It is a probably happening in your country as we speak.
by pshirshov | 2025-09-30 14:58:40+00:00
It can be partially addressed with proper set of agent instructions. E.g. follow SOLID, use constructor injection, avoid mutability, write dual tests, use explicit typings (when applicable) etc. Though the models are remarkably bad at design, so that provides just a minor relief. Everything has to be thoroughly reviewed and (preferably) rewritten by a human.
by ModernMech | 2025-09-30 14:58:50+00:00
Yes, "just take the time to review and understand LLM-generated code" is the new "just don't write bad code and you won't have any bugs". As an industry, we all know from years of writing bugs despite not wanting to that this task is impossible at scale. Just reviewing all the AI code to make sure it is good code likewise does not scale in the same way. Will not work, and it will take 5-10 years for the industry to figure it out.
by bluGill | 2025-09-30 14:58:55+00:00
There are 80 some countries in Africa (it has changed since I was in school as borders change). Some of them are doing really good, but most are doing bad. Many of them have seemed to be on the right track for a while and then fallen off again. I wish Kenya the best, but history on that continent hasn't been kind to anyone in my the last few hundred years (but go back farther...)
by actionfromafar | 2025-09-30 14:59:06+00:00
ICE will (and already are to an extent) come after anyone who looks like trouble. If they want to superficially follow the law, they beat people up and release them after 23 hours after "discovering" the person is a citizen. Then, repeat as many times as necessary.

Since nobody actually knows who ICE is, it can devolve pretty easily from there. The most pedestrian would be protection money to avoid detention, from citizens and non-citizens, it doesn't matter.
by proshan | 2025-09-30 14:59:10+00:00
A comprehensive Prometheus metrics exporter for Gunicorn WSGI servers with support for multiple worker types and advanced monitoring capabilities, featuring innovative Redis-based storage, YAML configuration support, and advanced signal handling. This Gunicorn worker plugin exports Prometheus metrics to monitor worker performance, including memory usage, CPU usage, request durations, and error tracking (trying to replace https://docs.gunicorn.org/en/stable/instrumentation.html with extra info). It also aims to replace request-level tracking, such as the number of requests made to a particular endpoint, for any framework (e.g., Flask, Django, and others) that conforms to the WSGI specification.

https://github.com/Agent-Hellboy/gunicorn-prometheus-exporte...
by gigatexal | 2025-09-30 14:59:16+00:00
No. the administrative state is negligible budget expense in the grand scheme of government payments. Interest payments, entitlements, defense budgets etc are orders of magnitude more. Trump is just using the Project 2025 playbook to screw over the American people and the USA and line his pockets while he can. The idiots over at the heritage foundation are foaming at the mouth they're so happy now.
by buran77 | 2025-09-30 14:59:19+00:00
That's the intention of this administration. Destroy any service that the government could provide until people can genuinely think the government is useless. Then the people currently in power and their cronies will come out of the woodwork "saving" the country with their private companies and interests. Competing with an empty shell of a government is the easiest way.

As a side effect, if they're to lose the next election they leave a corpse on the doorstep of the next administration. That makes it so much easier to pass on the blame.

Aligns perfectly with these people's views that a country is best led like a company not like a democracy. The realistic outcome will be formally (rather than the informal one as until now) corpocracy.
by toast0 | 2025-09-30 14:59:19+00:00
August 11, 2005: Yahoo acquires 40 percent of Alibaba.com for $1 billion, and Alibaba takes over the operation of Yahoo China.

Yahoo Japan was also a joint venture between Yahoo and Softbank, with Yahoo holding about 50% of the ownership.

At some point, Yahoo stock was regularly trading at or below the estimated value of the overseas holdings. The part of the company that actually did stuff was valued at zero or less. In the acquisition, yahoo stockholders got cash for the operating business plus shares in holding company formed around the overseas holdings ... Over time, the holding company sold the holdings and distributed the proceeds to shareholders and ceased operating.
by danaris | 2025-09-30 14:59:36+00:00
I genuinely believe that, at this point, that starts to stretch the definition of the word "represents."

It's readily apparent that no president for the past decade has clearly represented a majority of the country (as opposed to a plurality) in the sense that they voted for or supported him. But Trump has gone further, and openly declared that not only does he not consider himself to represent the people politically opposed to him, he considers them to be dangerous violent extremists.

At what point do you admit that a fascist dictator no longer meaningfully "represents" the people he rules?
by brandall10 | 2025-09-30 14:59:38+00:00
There's a newer app I use called Natulang, developed by a Ukranian software dev to solve this problem for themself, which is entirely speaking focused w/ AI support and aims to get a person to a B2 level over 360 lessons w/ about 15 minutes each. I'd round up to 30 minutes each for actual time commitment due to the extra SRS sessions tacked on.

I'm 50 lessons in Spanish now and I definitely believe the claim. Recently was on a date w/ someone who knew about as much English as I know Spanish and only grabbed Google translate about a half dozen times.

It doesn't have much in the way of gamification... to me the fact that it seems very evidently effective is enough motivation to do a daily lesson.

Actual LLM powered free-form conversationalist assistants are better once someone has a solid base understanding, probably at least a 2000 word vocab. What you'd really want is a LLM powered instructor that develops and adjusts a lesson plan based on progress.
by infecto | 2025-09-30 15:00:01+00:00
And brooks was one of three founders and not credited for the first iteration of Roomba. During his time the company barely broke even on and adjusted ebitda basis. His other company was a failure and this third is in a crowded marketplace.

Again as I keep saying. My reply was to someone who said he had three wildly successful companies. Yes iRobot created a segment but I still struggle to classify it as a wild success.
by lxgr | 2025-09-30 15:00:03+00:00
> With LLMs there is the problem with humans and automation bias, which effects almost all human endeavors.

Yep, and I believe that one will be harder to overcome.

Nudging an LLM into the right direction of debugging is a very different skill from debugging a problem yourself, and the better the LLMs get, the harder it will be to consciously switch between these two modes.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-09-30 15:00:13+00:00
>In his preferred orientation, one side faces South, while the other faces North. [Dave] is in the Northern Hemisphere, so those of you Down Under would have to do the opposite, pointing one face North and the other South.

I'm sure that they mean there's a side A and a side B in some way that I don't quite understand but boy howdy does this sentence seem meaningless absent its context.
by doublerabbit | 2025-09-30 15:00:22+00:00
> Once the DKMS packages are in place very little should change for end users

Doesn't that mean I now have to enroll the MOK key on all my work workstations that use secure boot? If so that's a huge PITA on over 200 machines. As like with the NVIDIA driver you can't automate the facility.
by tzs | 2025-09-30 15:00:28+00:00
That's not correct. With a government issued signed digital ID cryptographically bound to a hardware security module you can use a zero-knowledge proof based protocol to prove to any third party site that (1) you have a signed government ID, (2) you have the hardware security module that it was bound to when the government issued it to you, and (3) the date of birth field on that ID says you are older than the site's age threshold.

This reveals no other information to the site.

The EU is on track to deploy such a system by the end of 2026. They are currently doing field testing involving thousands of users.
by middayc | 2025-09-30 15:01:02+00:00
When I am not working on my 'job' project, I am working on Ryelang.

In September, I was working on language core, console, generic methods, etc ... but this week I updated integration with OpenAI, IMAP, Surf (browser like client) and then I did few experiments by meshing together these libs.

These few lines proved to be quite helpful for my work email :)

read-file: fn { f } { .Read .trim } line: "\n----\n" cli: imap-client read-file %.imap-user read-file %.imap-pwd "secure.emailsrvr.com" 993 |Select-folder "INBOX" |Search-emails "UNSEEN SINCE 30-Sep-2025" :uids cli .Get-emails uids |map { -> "text" } |join |concat3 line " Summarize the most important emails above and report them to me. Then separately report the most URGENT ones." :cmd oai: openai read-file %.oai-token oai .Chat\stream cmd { .prn }

I also tried to write/use these libs interactively: https://asciinema.org/a/745616

and made a "console applet": https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G2FXUepWgAAn7cu?format=jpg&name=...

... since you asked :)
by brian_meek | 2025-09-30 15:01:15+00:00
OP here. Thanks for all the thoughtful feedback, I really appreciate it.

I mentioned in the README that I leaned heavily on Claude Opus for the port. One of the biggest challenges was tamping down its default “everything is production-ready in a week” optimism. That said, I also discovered along the way which guardrails worked and which didn’t for guiding it toward a compliant implementation. It was good learning, and honestly, fun.

I’m genuinely interested in the Cap’n Web protocol. Writing this in Rust gave me a much clearer sense of where I would and wouldn’t use it. Credit to the Cloudflare team for defining the protocol and shipping a solid reference implementation, this wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

A good example of why a second client (even one bootstrapped with AI) is useful: in implementation I ran into a spec ambiguity around array escaping (documented here: https://github.com/cloudflare/capnweb/issues/68 ). My initial Rust serializer emitted unescaped arrays at lower levels, and I even patched the TS reference to accept them. In the end, escaping arrays at all levels turned out to be the cleaner and more consistent approach, so I’ve recommended that clarification in the issue.

On naming: fair point about possible confusion with Cap’n Proto. If the Cloudflare team ever wants the crate names for an official Rust impl, they’re theirs. If there’s interest in pushing this to production ready quality, I’d also be glad to put in the work.

Thanks again for the constructive input. Happy to dive into technical details if folks are curious.