MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Relaya – Agent calls businesses for you
by rishavmukherji | 2025-10-14 21:02:17+00:00
HN - this is rish.

Ended up on a 2h call with Chase which resulted in building Relaya to automate this. For simple tasks (e.g. checking if something is in store, making a reservation that isn't on opentable, etc.), it will just do the full task. No need to dial anything.

For more complex tasks e.g. applying Chase Sapphire credits to rebook an existing flight, it will wade through all the menus and holds and connect you with the agent directly.

At the very least, only talk to humans and reduces an avg. 20-30 min call to 2-3 mins (~20+ ppl have tried so far).

Next, I imagine will be able to automate a certain % of the more complex calls as well. Looking for feedback.
by FigurativeVoid | 2025-10-14 21:02:27+00:00
I have a distinct moment in my memory of when I stopped being a voracious reader, and started spending more time online: when I got an iPod touch.

To reverse the trend, I’m trying to read physical books or ebooks on a dedicated ereader as much as possible. No one seems to care, they are on their phones.

When I do use social media, I try to use a computer where I have much more control over what’s happening. So far I’ve read a ton more books this year.
by klaff | 2025-10-14 21:02:42+00:00
Ah, this brings back memories of listening to long-distance phone calls using a C-band dish and a general coverage (aka shortwave) receiver. Voice channels were placed on single-sideband channels between roughly DC and 6 MHz, and that whole set of signals was transmitted to the particular satellite transponder just like a video signal would be. The dish receiver couldn't decode that but it had a subcarrier output intended for accessories (stereo decoders maybe?). By plumbing the subcarrier output to the antenna input of the shortwave radio you could dial around to individual voice channels. I could only hear one side of the calls, but it was still very enlightening. I heard a number of mundane conversations, one drug deal, and a woman cursing in ways I'd never heard before. This was pre-internet and I was an impressionable kid - maybe 13 or so. Fun times.
by rpcope1 | 2025-10-14 21:02:44+00:00
I mean the thing with parents both needing likely stressful jobs just to make ends meet doesn't just stop at education, it also impacts fertility. We won't even have kids to educate if something doesn't change. It shouldn't require two people working full time to be able to afford a home and have kids, and we need to push against the various forces that have driven us to that.
by boringg | 2025-10-14 21:02:56+00:00
>> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.

Thanks for the finger wagging - great motivation there. I mean if you live in a country where these things are actual serious problems, you're no longer living in a democracy. I have doubts that ownership of the voting machine company is truly a problem - though it certainly doesn't look great.
by OrvalWintermute | 2025-10-14 21:03:39+00:00
If there was no fraud, and all the recent elections were secure then this wouldn’t matter.

My contention has always been that until we see the basis of identity secured like Estonia/CAC/PIV/Passports through strong identity proofing and robust processes, we are not ready to talk about the Pandora’s box that is voting machines.
by SalientBlue | 2025-10-14 21:03:40+00:00
>But it's a different we already know

'we' is the operative word here. 'We', meaning technical people who have followed this stuff for years. The target audience of this article are not part of this 'we' and this stuff IS completely new _for them_. The target audience are people who, when confronted with a problem with an LLM, think it is perfectly reasonable to just tell someone to 'look at the code' and 'fix the bug'. You are not the target audience and you are arguing something entirely different.
by dijit | 2025-10-14 21:03:40+00:00
The standard threat model for secure messaging does assume a potentially compromised provider.. that’s exactly why the client-trust issue matters.

If the provider is compromised (maliciously or via hack/subpoena), they can alter the client to capture data before E2EE engages, rendering it moot.

E2EE protects past messages from server-side access, sure, but it doesn’t prevent future compromises via client backdoors, which are a real vector under laws like Australia’s TOLA or US CLOUD Act, again: providers have been compelled to modify software (e.g., Lavabit’s resistance led to shutdown, but others comply quietly).

You’re right that client-server alone fails catastrophically on server compromise, but E2EE isn’t a panacea if the same actor controls the client supply chain.

Trust is binary: If you don’t trust the provider, don’t use their client. reproducible builds help a tiny fraction, but for most, it’s unverifiable.

In partial-trust scenarios (e.g., worrying about hacks but not full malice), client-server with distributed keys and TLS can suffice without E2EE’s complexities.

I’m hand-waving a bit here; but I’m talking about peoples actual realities, not some hypothetical.

How does E2EE hold up if a subpoena forces a silent client update? You won’t know, and history shows that’s the path of least resistance for adversaries.
by johnea | 2025-10-14 21:03:55+00:00
I still think the California system is the best currently available:

Votes are recorded by filling in the dots on a scantronic ballot form.

The form is scanned and the votes are tallied electronically.

The original paper ballot is archived, and can be re-scanned (or hand counted) if a recount is required.

This combines the best of both worlds: speed and accuracy of electronic tally, and the original hand-filled paper ballot is retained as a record.
by vladms | 2025-10-14 21:04:05+00:00
> Any programming or mathematical question has several correct answers.

Huh? If I need to sort the list of integer number of 3,1,2 in ascending order the only correct answer is 1,2,3. And there are multiple programming and mathematical questions with only one correct answer.

If you want to say "some programming and mathematical questions have several correct answers" that might hold.
by djupblue | 2025-10-14 21:04:11+00:00
>For example, to build shared threads like OpenAI’s, you might end up creating a new collection, a caching layer, or an index just to connect messages that logically belong together.

Which messages belongs together depends on the context and when you discover that the fancy thread store you built your app around can't return a list of MY messages without a full sequential scan of every single thread you'll wish you could solve it with an index.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-10-14 21:04:21+00:00
Mississippi cooks the stats by holding the poorest students back. You can probably adjust for this if you have the raw data, but it's something you need to adjust for.

If you didn't let students into the 4th grade until they were 40 inches tall, you'd have taller than average 4th graders, but only because of survivorship bias.
by consumer451 | 2025-10-14 21:04:25+00:00
Here is the exact passage, so everyone can make up their own mind.

> Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/texasgop_pre/assets/original/2012Pl...
by hotep99 | 2025-10-14 21:04:43+00:00
The hand-wringing in this article about Republicans signing up election monitors and having lawyers on stand-by is absurd. Both parties pour huge amounts of resources every election into this sort of thing and aggressively pursue it. If you really want integrity in elections you should want interested parties to be able to audit the results and mount legal challenges if they feel it is justified (and, yes, that means all interested parties and not just who you consider to be the "good guys").
by walkabout | 2025-10-14 21:04:47+00:00
Media literacy seems to be one of those things it's easy to forget you ever had to learn. I'm routinely amazed at how little of it most other people are capable of, when a lot of it is now so automatic for me that I can't turn it off, it's just a permanent part of how I experience things—but at some point I'm sure I was about that limited, and I'm better at it now only because I found improving my literacy to be interesting and fun, so I effortlessly put a lot of time into it.

Still, the idea of watching as much video, listening to as much music, et c., as most people do and not putting a little thought & effort into "reading" it better/more-fully seems like an odd choice, yet it's the norm. Apparently not even wanting to engage with the "why did the creator make that choice? OK, this part achieves effect X, but how does it do that? What does it seem like this other part was trying to do, and does that illuminate or enhance any elements of or mysteries in the rest of the work?" side of things seems totally alien to me.
by susiecambria | 2025-10-14 21:04:59+00:00
Even if we accept that Americans want to be more and better informed as they say they want to, I don't believe that the desire actually means that they are better informed. People have limited bandwidth and issues are complicated.

Take the hep b vaccine as an example. ". . . if a child gets infected with hepatitis B in the first 12 months of life, their chance of going on to develop cerosis or liver cancer is about 90%." (Dr. Paul Offit in Beyond the Noise #82: Jumping without a net https://youtu.be/7pxJb7ANWkc?si=EflkB6VaOx6onP5D)

Right now, the CDC recommends the birth dose of the vaccine. And yet the ACIP (CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) is expected to delay the birth dose of the hep B vaccine following the president's statement in September that the vax is unnecessary and therefore be delayed to age 12.

I would expect the media to be talking about this. According to the Hepatitis B Foundation, "Hepatitis B, the world’s leading cause of liver cancer, continues to impose a staggering, but preventable, burden on individuals and healthcare systems alike. Without widespread prevention and early intervention, the U.S. is projected to spend more than $44.8 million by 2050 on hepatitis B-related care." (https://www.hepb.org/assets/Uploads/Cost-of-Hep-B.pdf)

So we have a practice that can prevent the cancer, save money, and improve lives and the government may totally ignore science and change the vax schedule. Dr. Offit did say in the video that he expects doctors to still provide the vaccine to patients and counsel parents on the need for it.

If a major news network reports that ACIP delays the first dose to 12, will they also interview experts? Will parents, grandparents, social workers, early learning professionals, policy wonks, and legislators know to ask questions, have the time or capacity to deal with this at the state level?

I would like to believe in people. It's getting harder and harder (on a population level).
by slg | 2025-10-14 21:05:38+00:00
Although we should remember that “old age” is long. Someone can die at 72 from heart disease and people might just call that dying of old age when that person could have easily lived another decade or two if they made different lifestyle choices. That would be more of an “early death” than a centenarian dying in a car accident. The suddenness is irrelevant.
by basisword | 2025-10-14 21:06:02+00:00
>> extensive subway systems with protective barriers at every single station (so you can't suicide or push someone on the tracks)

I find this one most interesting. In London for example this is brought up all the time. There is always an excuse (cost, platform length, trains can't stop at the same spot etc etc) and we accept ~100 suicide attempts per year not to mention various accidents. There's the immediate human cost, the PTSD for first emergency workers + the disruption to public transport.

If we can't invest in simple things that would make a meaningful difference how do we expect to match those big infrastructure projects? Crossrail is fantastic but was delayed many years. HS2 is beyond a joke.
by btown | 2025-10-14 21:06:08+00:00
Reading https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho... (2019) was eye-opening for me. It's a must-read companion piece if you want to take this Atlantic article seriously, particularly with some of the politicization the Atlantic article tries to inject.

From the Atlantic article:

> An explanation that deserves equal consideration is what one might call the low-expectations theory. In short, schools have demanded less and less from students—who have responded, predictably, by giving less and less.

The APM Reports article I linked above, in this context, would likely suggest that "low-expectations theory" might actually be an effect of a specific and well-intentioned methodology change: one that replaces phonics-based approaches with an effort to get pupils through books rather than being able to read every word. From APM Reports:

> For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by — memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know — are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process.

It goes on to describe the origins of the different methodologies, historical reactions, plenty of context on adoption, visual examples. There's an ongoing debate here, but it provides real food for thought.

The Atlantic article could have done something similar, focusing on the methodologies at hand. Instead, it tries to conclude by assigning blame based on political affiliation:

> But for Democrats, who pride themselves on belonging to the party of education, these results may be awkward to process. Not only are the southern states that are registering the greatest improvements in learning run by Republicans, but also their teachers are among the least unionized in the country. And these red states are leaning into phonics-based, “science of reading” approaches to teaching literacy, while Democratic-run states such as New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have been painfully slow to adopt them, in some cases hanging on to other pedagogical approaches with little evidentiary basis.

The article provides no quantitative backing for these statements, much less evidence of causality. (The research they do cite has Massachusetts in 4th place, and New York in 10th place, for adjusted reading scores: https://www.urban.org/research/publication/states-demographi...)

It's a good reminder to read articles critically, and seek external sources, when blame is being ascribed.
by mc32 | 2025-10-14 21:06:28+00:00
Yes, it's filtered, but to a substantial degree it's because that's what the audience wants. If they make money on ads and that revenue depends on eyeball time, then they will want to maximize eyeball time. An exception would be a news org that was funded differently. However that bias while different, would still be present because you only have so many hours in a day and thus can only present things of interest.
by jerlam | 2025-10-14 21:06:28+00:00
There is already a law passed (AB 347), signed by Gov. Newsom, enacted in 2025 that bans PFAS in juvenile products, textiles, and food packaging. I remember because on January 1st 2025, a whole bunch of hiking boots (which are classified as textiles or juvenile products?) could not be shipped here to California.

I guess this new law was a bit too broad in scope to sign, but it follows previous legislation.
by itsnowandnever | 2025-10-14 21:07:22+00:00
just to nitpick: the Tepe sites definitely did not have forced labor. they had no social hierarchy at all. hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian.

definitely sedentary neolithic people had forced labor. all the Sumerian legal texts that were some of the first writings ever included legal definitions of slaves, for example. but the pre-neolithic Anatolian people were nomadic animistic people with no social hierarchy.
by skygazer | 2025-10-14 21:07:35+00:00
Bah! This stupid mistaken rumor will not die. SPR AVS is the USB Power Delivery 3.2 spec for Standard Power Range + Adjustable Voltage Supply. Apple announced their support of SPR AVS in their new dynamic 40 watt charger that can alter its voltage in small increments and can peak at 60 watts, specifically to fast charge the new iPhone 17 Pro.

The erroneous expansion of SPR AVS to "Spatial Relay Audio-Visual Sync" was entirely fabricated by Patently Apple, and reported on by other sites like TechRadar, which shortly after realized the error and corrected it with an update in the middle(!) of the article. This video cites under its sources that same TechRedar article which has the correction, which apparently escaped their notice.

https://www.techradar.com/audio/earbuds-airpods/report-says-...
by conradev | 2025-10-14 21:08:02+00:00
The single-writer limitation in SQLite is per-database, not per-connection. You can shard your SQLite tables into multiple database files and query across all of them from a single connection.

I agree that "the single-writer limitation isn't just a theoretical concern", but it's also solvable without forking SQLite. ulimit's the limit! If your goal is resource maximization of a given computer, though, Postgres is likely a better fit.
by itchyouch | 2025-10-14 21:08:16+00:00
As an East Asian, not really trying to argue that China hasn’t accomplished great things.

While I can’t speak directly to this, but from watching The China Show on YouTube, the tradeoff to the amazing amenities is that the personal-injury risk from failing infrastructure has been fatal, but covered up by their propaganda. Anyone on the receiving end of it, will deal with devastating consequences, if not fatal.

Infrastructure and manufacturing corners are cut in ways that look great, but literally kill their population and tourists.

Building foundations are not thick enough, buildings aren’t built to proper fire safety standards, underground pipes leak, leading to roads constantly failing, high rises burn down, sewage pipes literally blow up due to methane build up like someone detonated a bomb.

Drainage grates are fake and flooding cities, drowning people in vehicles, while the QA of car battery manufacturing is causing electric fleets of cars in parking lots to burn.

And the aforementioned occurrences are happening in tier1 cities.

I sound hyperbolic, but China is great at quickly cleaning up and quickly rebuilding, so it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as it does.

Once I learned about the infrastructure, I realized my cousin’s business trip accident in China was not a randomly rare accident.

He broke his back in China when his rental car’s front wheel popped off the car.

Chances are most folks are fine if they go. But I would be very weary, because the probability of a disaster is not nearly as high as it ought to be.
by Ancapistani | 2025-10-14 21:08:17+00:00
Helplessness? Not at all. I'd be very much in favor of changing the way our elections are run, in many ways.

Pointing out that one person that you don't like is in a position of power isn't the same thing.

I think this quote by Thomas Paine illustrates my position:

> [...] so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.

There's a reason the US Constitution prohibits bills of attainder. We are supposed to be a nation of laws, applied equally to all. The way to fix this is via legislation that codifies the system we want to have.
by jennprenuvo | 2025-10-14 21:09:05+00:00
Prenuvo is redefining proactive healthcare through our advanced whole-body MRI technology, combining fast and safe scanning with cutting-edge software, automation, and AI. We’re seeking a Staff Full Stack Engineer to join our Clinical Engineering team to help build and scale the systems that support our clinics and patient workflows.

You’ll work with modern technologies like Python, GraphQL, FastAPI, React, and TypeScript, helping drive innovation across our product and infrastructure. This is a fully remote role, but we require working hours aligned to Eastern Time (EDT) for team collaboration.

Please note: At this time, we cannot support visa sponsorship or transfer, and candidates must be authorized to work in their country of residence.

If you're excited to build software that has a real-world impact on people’s health, let’s connect!
by beloch | 2025-10-14 21:09:25+00:00
In the U.S. each state runs their own part of the federal election.

In Canada, federal elections are run by Elections Canada, which is a non-partisan independent agency. It's responsible for both defining ridings (to avoid gerrymandering) and running the elections themselves.

I'm probably biased as a Canadian, but I have a lot more confidence in our approach than the U.S.'s. After this, even more so.
by chvid | 2025-10-14 21:09:26+00:00
Dutch seized Chinese chipmaker following US pressure

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-pressured-the-netherlands...

…

Newly published court proceedings reveal that the Dutch Foreign Affairs Ministry and a U.S. government bureau that protects U.S. critical technology met in June to talk about Nexperia, the Dutch-based chipmaker owned by Chinese technology group Wingtech.

In the meeting, U.S. officials said the removal of the CEO, Wingtech founder Zhang Xuezheng, would be necessary to exempt the company from U.S. export controls.

…
by nostrademons | 2025-10-14 21:09:27+00:00
Yes. It's usually more fun to do things that you're good at. Reading and academic performance generally has a snowball effect: if you're good at it, you want to do it more, which makes you even better at it, and so on.

My point is that if you're looking for an ultimate cause for why this snowball never gets started, I'd look at the very beginning, when kids don't learn the fundamentals needed to make that first leap into reading. Without phonics they don't have the tools needed to sound out unfamiliar words, without this, they really are just guessing all through the rest of their education. And without competence, reading isn't fun, so why would they do it for fun?

I'd actually go further and say that the causality between screen time and lack of reading goes the other way. The reason that today's social media industry looks the way it does, with lots of short videos, is because its primary audience can't read. There were plenty of text-based social media sites that catered to Millennials in the early 00s; one is literally named "Reddit". But images and videos started dominating around 2013 because the kids entering prime social media demographics couldn't read. It's a case of the market pulling the product out: text based social media is a niche product today, with Instagram dominating over Facebook, YouTube over Google+, and Reddit and Twitter/X moving to videos, because its primary market can't deal with text.
by Spooky23 | 2025-10-14 21:09:33+00:00
That’s two reductive and poor arguments. Both sides fallacy doesn’t fly in 2025.

Voting machine anxiety for lack of a better term has been a presence for some time and isn’t a partisan issue. What is a partisan issue is President Trump’s baseless allegations re the election he hasn’t acknowledged losing in 2020.

Party affiliation is absolutely an issue with respect to Marvel villain parody that the modern Republican Party has become. I can’t read the article because Substack, but if the new owner is in fact a MAGA guy, (and this isn’t just drama) that’s a big problem.