MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nmfisher | 2025-10-22 08:13:13+00:00
Yes, quantization isn't anything new, nor are audio codecs. As you point out, though, it's not just about designing a quantization scheme to reconstruct an analog signal. The scheme itself needs to be "easy" for current model architectures to learn and decode autoregressively (ideally, in realtime on standard hardware).

The blog post addresses this directly with samples from their own baseline (an autoregressive mu-law vocoder), and from WaveNet (which was similar architecture). The sound is mostly recognizable as a human voice, but it's unintelligible. The sequence length is too long and the SNR for the encoding scheme is too low for an generative/autoregressive model to learn.

This is what the neural codec is intended to address. Decoupling semantic from acoustic modelling is an important step ("how our ears interpret a sound" vs. "what we need to reconstruct the exact acoustic signal"). Mimi works at 1.1kbps, and others work at low bitrates (descript, semanticodec, etc). Encodec runs at at a higher bitrate so generally delivers better audio quality.

Now - why are neural codecs easier to model than conventional parametric codecs? I don't know. Maybe they're not, maybe it's just an artifact of the transformer architecture (since semantic tokens are generally extracted from self-supervised models like WavLM). It's definitely an interesting question.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-10-22 08:14:22+00:00
Backups are only advanced in the context of our Postgres being "Good" enough (maybe our built-in Posgres could be called "Barely enough" but that sounds a bit lame) :-)

I fully agree with you though, it's table stakes (unintended pun!) for any prod deployment, just as read-only followers, etc. Our biggest, most important point, is that folks should be using real dbs hosted by people who know what they're doing. The risk/reward ratio is out of whack in terms of doing it yourself.

And finally, re Hetzner and cross-DC latency, that's unfortunately a very good issue that we had to plan for in another case - specifically, a customer using Supabase (which is AWS-based). The solution was to simply use an EC2 machine in the same region. Thankfully, some db providers end up being explicit about which AWS region they run in - and obviously, using AWS RDS is also an option! It's definitely a consideration.
by arielcostas | 2025-10-22 08:14:38+00:00
They are until you need to verify them and ensure nobody owns multiple identities. The following must be true:

- We should know whether you may vote (you are a citizen, over the legal voting age, and haven't been taken away that right because of a crime, etc.) - We should know whether you did or didn't cast a vote (to prevent you from voting twice) - We should NOT know who you voted for - You should be able to know the votes are counted towards the party intended

You can't solve that with crypto, since you need a way of proving your identity, while at the same time making the payload anonymous and not traceable back to you.
by jjav | 2025-10-22 08:14:40+00:00
> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I had a ton of graybeard wizard coworkers from these places, and they were all a pleasure to learn from and even better friends. For the first 2 years of my first job, every day of work was like walking into the Shire and talking magic spells with 20 Gandalfs.

That's great imagery and a good description of how it felt! I was lucky to work at two of those three and those were awesome years. Going to work with people who created Unix and had commands named after them and later at Sun with all the magic, those were the days.

Post-Sun I've only done startups and while that has been a lot of fun in its own way, it is nowhere near as special.
by Terretta | 2025-10-22 08:15:23+00:00
What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-22 08:16:05+00:00
> rather need to validate against a common list of valid universities

Don't you need that already anyway? There's no standard for how universities format their academic email addresses.

Plus, .edu only applies to American universities. Services validating if you're a "real" student by checking for .edu emails were quite annoying during my time as a student. A lot of these platforms don't seem to even know .edu is an American thing.
by jakub_g | 2025-10-22 08:16:25+00:00
In some ways, this reminds me of Bernard Tapie, called "a man with 1001 lives". It's a really interesting story from 1980s/90s of a self-made-businessman, turned politician, getting to the very top, doing deals with African leaders, becoming minister, having his football club (Marseille) win the European Champions League; which however was a turning point that started his downfall, as they bought a domestic game just before, to avoid injuries before the big final.

A very interesting documentary [2] explains all this. There's also Netflix series that I didn't watch though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Tapie

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_football_bribery_scanda...

[2] https://lcp.fr/programmes/les-mille-et-une-vies-de-bernard-t...
by inglor_cz | 2025-10-22 08:16:42+00:00
"optimizing for quality of life seems nice, and the French do seem to aim for that."

Looking at economic trends, it does seem like optimizing for quality of life of the boomer generation at the cost of the future generations, which is not so nice.

Without major cuts to its welfare state (which is Europe's most massive one as a percentage of GDP), France's finances are unsustainable. The necessary tax revenue just isn't there and you cannot borrow indefinitely to spend on entitlements.

As of current trends, if something explodes the Eurozone, it will be endless accumulation of French sovereign debt. It is the same as once Greece was, but ten times as big.
by immibis | 2025-10-22 08:17:06+00:00
Changing task is some fraction as bad as changing thread because less state is changed, but some state is still changed. For example, if you run unrelated tasks, they all start with cold caches. It might not clear the IBPB, TLB etc for security because it doesn't go through the kernel, but if the task was completely unrelated, none of those caches were helping with the transition anyway. Usually, the task is related to some small degree.
by latexr | 2025-10-22 08:17:37+00:00
No, that is not my thesis, and nowhere in my post do I talk about a dislike for a particular tool or “being enlightened”.

I’ll say it again:

> So to have a productive conversation we need to go in with the mindset of “we’re on the same side in the goal of not having this suck”.

If you’re unwilling to engage in those terms and steel man the argument, I don’t see the point in engaging in conversation. If what you want is to straw man and throw unsubstantiated jabs at someone, there are other communities better suited for that.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-22 08:18:31+00:00
I mean, I think that's obvious. Ukraine obviously wouldn't contract anything essential from Russia, same goes for Denmark/Greenland and the US. You don't threaten countries you want to do business with.

It's also not very "between the lines" at all, the article finishes with:

> Binzer said the company will keep an open mind for future partnerships, but the priority remains clear. Greenland’s communication systems must stay under Greenlandic control.

Sovereignty is more important than ever, and governments are catching up to this fact.
by BHSPitMonkey | 2025-10-22 08:18:55+00:00
> the whole space industry is a joke; if it were healthy, there would be an ecosystem of multiple launch providers vs one finicky government-funded-Elon-company

ULA has been operating for many, many years (Atlas/Delta, now Vulcan Centaur), RocketLab has been putting up small payloads for the last few (with Electron, someday Neutron perhaps), and BO seems close to having New Glenn flying real missions this season. But yes, one hopes that the others can become competitive on price eventually.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-22 08:19:19+00:00
If your core feature is data entry, you probably want to get as close to 100% accuracy as possible.

"AI" (LLM-based automation) is only useful if you don't really care about the accuracy of the output. It usually gets most of the data transformations mostly right, enough for people to blindly copy/paste its output, but sometimes it goes off the rails. But hey, when it does, at least it'll apologise for its own failings.
by sousou123213 | 2025-10-22 08:19:58+00:00
Memos Worker is a powerful and high-performance serverless application for notes and knowledge management. Built entirely on the Cloudflare ecosystem (Workers, Pages, D1, R2, KV), it provides a private, cost-effective notes solution that you can own forever.

For me,it is mainly used to replace https://github.com/usememos/memos
by mildzebrataste | 2025-10-22 08:20:29+00:00
Two more tells: 1. phrasing the negative and then switching (x is not just this, but this and more or y does this not because of this, but because of this, that, and one other thing that certainly would necessitate an Oxford comma.)

2. Gerunds all day every day. Constantly putting things in a passive voice so that all the verbs end in -ing.
by MaxL93 | 2025-10-22 08:23:24+00:00
Well, it's a bit off-topic, but yes, Google is demonstrably killing the fabric of the Internet. Ever since they introduced the info box & knowledge graph, pretty much every change they've introduced is geared towards one goal: they don't want to just be a guide, they want to be the journey AND the destination. All the latest AI efforts are the apotheosis, the extreme logical conclusion of that. Surely I don't need to explain how this makes them extremely similar to a parasite killing its host, how this degrades the very ecosystem their foundations are built on?
by gregsadetsky | 2025-10-22 08:23:42+00:00
Correct! Re: latency, as I just noted elsewhere, if you run your prod database using Crunchy Bridge or Supabase or another big provider (which you absolutely should for prod), that typically means that your db will be running within an AWS region. You would, in most cases, need to run your compute in the same region. So yeah, at that point, Hetzner would be out.
by VagabundoP | 2025-10-22 08:24:26+00:00
There was an illusion you could trust certain countries, political institutions and, for some bizarre reason, certain billionaires-cum-oligarchs.

Recent upheavals and actions have really pushed people to question exactly who and what you can trust.

Also the recent focus on strategic elements with regard to globalisation also plays into these choices now - where it might have been dismissed a couple of years ago.
by gregjor | 2025-10-22 08:24:41+00:00
How does this specifically help digital nomads? Do you mean freelancers who don't have bank accounts that their customers can make payments to?

Every country has different laws around crypto, including partial and full bans, so nomads using crypto should know about that depending on where they work from. Certainly "spend from balance" and converting to local currency will vary a lot across countries, likely always more trouble than converting USD.

I freelanced and traveled full time for over a decade. Never experienced any problems with payments or US banks, or simply using US credit/debit/ATM cards. I never asked customers to pay in crypto, but I know freelancers who insisted on that and lost customers as a result. Freelancers generally don't have leverage to tell their customers how to manage payables, and crypto smells too much like risk and fraud to more than enough business people already. Introducing friction, novelty, or anything that looks sketchy into a freelancing relationship seems like a bad idea to me.

Edit: Two of the largest freelancer marketplaces, Upwork and Fiverr, do not accept or pay out in crypto.
by falcor84 | 2025-10-22 08:25:19+00:00
Reading up about Israeli politics, it seems that this might be a "be careful what you wish for" situation. They had previously put in prison both a prime minister and a president, and the disastrous governance there over the last decade and a half appears to be in large motivated by Netanyahu's almost certain knowledge that he'll go to prison if and when he loses his grip on the reins.

The documentary The Bibi Files was a particularly interesting examination of the allegations against him and his almost shrugging response to them [0]. And going back to America, a week ago Trump asked the Israeli president to preemptively pardon Netanyahu during his speech at their parliament [1], which I find to be concerning on all possible levels.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33338697/

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trump-urges-israel...
Show HN: I Built a Handheld ESP32 NES from Scratch as My First Embedded Project
by ShimmySundae | 2025-10-22 08:25:21+00:00
This is my first ever ESP32 and embedded project. For three months, I've been building a handheld NES with an ESP32 from scratch. I bought the parts and learned how to solder for the first time.

While having already made my own NES emulator for Windows, I had to do a whole rewrite of the program to port and optimize it for the ESP32. This is written in C++ and is designed to bring classic NES games to the ESP32.

This project focuses on performance, being able to run the emulator at native speeds and with full audio emulation and save states implemented. Check out the project!
by ikekkdcjkfke | 2025-10-22 08:26:03+00:00
The first trump campaign was fueled by government and banks not being held accountable, ex. after the financial crisis and bailouts of banks. Though trump kind of piggy backed on those sentiments along with the tea party/koch brothers backing. Just goes to show you need to apply justice blindly and harshaly, or else you will trigger peoples strong and inate sense of injustice and burn it all down
by MaxL93 | 2025-10-22 08:26:36+00:00
I'm sure the court could have gotten him on other charges, but they went with the absolutely 100% safe one rather than the other 99% safe ones.

Sarkozy and all of his billionaire media allies are already trying their hardest to undermine the credibility of the justice system at every turn with extremely dangerous rhetoric; I dread to imagine what this would have been like had they gone with ever-so-slightly-less-safe charges
by motorest | 2025-10-22 08:26:41+00:00
> Even if indeed guilty, things like jailing him "provisionally" despite his appeal are discretionary decisions of the court so also open to all interpretations depiste the very black and white comments here...

I read it the other way around. You're arguing for preferencial treatment on the ground that any inconvenience could be misconstrued as politically motivated.

In the meantime you're seeing a case involving organized crime, lieutenants caught red-handed, and charges extended to the leader of the criminal enterprise. You're not seeing any doubt being raised on the charges, only on whether the politician could have political opponents.
by inglor_cz | 2025-10-22 08:26:56+00:00
Not the OP, but even though I respect the Soviet space results, the USSR itself was an abomination, a prison of nations, a rehashed Russian empire rebased on a totalitarian creed.

The eastern half of Europe took the first opportunity to run away from its grip, including my nation.

Happy (and naive) are the people who never lived under Moscow's rule.
by csomar | 2025-10-22 08:27:22+00:00
More like bombed Gaddafi and guaranteed his downfall than bombed "Libya". It is probably a bit more complicated than that, though. The U.S./NATO were also involved and there is a lot of money there.

He probably thought he could get away with it. But make no mistake this is a political play and everyone involved is as dirty as the Paris Seine.
Show HN: Ninbox – a simple way to organize your newsletters
by przemekdz | 2025-10-22 08:28:03+00:00
Hi!

I'm a big "inbox zero" nerd, and I also like to sit down once or twice a week to read through all my newsletters. The problem with these two things is that it's hard to keep a clean inbox with unread newsletters.

So, I created Ninbox. Ninbox gives you a unique email address for your newsletters, so all of them land not in your personal inbox but in Ninbox, where they’re grouped based on the sender’s email. That way, you can read all newsletters from one sender before moving on to the next.

I’d love to hear your feedback.
by phrotoma | 2025-10-22 08:28:27+00:00
Like others I noticed this capability was interfered with in some way. I had fun getting it to speak to me in a cheesy over-the-top Bostonian accent early on, then one day when I tried to demonstrate for a friend it interrupted itself mid-sentence, literally one voice speaking over the other truncated voice, saying something like "I'm sorry I can't mimic voices".

It seemed like they had one model monitoring the output of another model and then cutting it off when it crossed some line.
by motorest | 2025-10-22 08:28:48+00:00
> But it is also clear that judges (who are notable left-leaning, if not far-left) are much more efficient at prosecuting right-wing figures (Fillon, for 0 reason this time).

This blend of comments strike me as odd. Are you actually complaining that a judicial system is too efficient at catching corruption at high levels? Is this bad? What point are you trying to make, exactly?
by 334f905d22bc19 | 2025-10-22 08:29:43+00:00
Oh that sounds really interesting. I was searching for something like that to render something on a fun-hacky-ledscreen with an embedded processor. All things I found weren't satisfying. But if I understand that correctly, I should be able to just compile this and then software render stuff? For my tiny 192x128 pixels this should be fast enough on any kinda system. Time for fun animations
by porridgeraisin | 2025-10-22 08:30:16+00:00
Did not know about index-based string interpolation. Useful!

The part about changing a map while iterating is wrong though. The reason you may or may not get it is because go iterates in intentionally random order. It's nothing to do with speed. It's to prevent users from depending on the iteration order. It randomly chooses starting bucket and then goes in circular order, as well as randomly generates a perm of 0..7 inside each bucket. So if your edit goes into a bucket or a slot already visited then it won't be there.

Also, python is not an example to the contrary. Modifying python dicts while iterating is a `RuntimeError: dictionary changed size during iteration`
by somenameforme | 2025-10-22 08:32:06+00:00
I don't entirely understand why they're framing rotations as so complex, outside of a play on words that I don't think they're making. Most rotations just use quaternions which are relatively simple. Their example of robotics uses quaternions and getting the inverse of any rotation is trivial - you literally just flip the signs of the 3 imaginary components of quaternions. For non-unit quaternions, you just then just renormalize the result (divide by the sum of the squares of the components).
by hunterpayne | 2025-10-22 08:32:06+00:00
> Postmodernism cares deeply about truth. It is highly skeptical of power, bias, perception, etc. and provides tools to mitigate these risks to truth.

I think someone told you this and you believed it, but the track record of postmodernists in academia tells a different story.

I once saw a history lecture from a dean of the history department who had written of a book on WWII in the Philippines. This is one of the most heavily studied and well documented periods in human history. There are dozens of books and hundreds of papers on this topic.

My father-in-law, who was born there and lived through the war there, read the book. He called it historical fiction. The book cherry-picked facts badly, ignored events which countered the narrative of the book and in general made every effort to promote an entirely counter-factual narrative of events. In addition, the author had no real expertise in military or naval warfare and didn't seem to understand even the basics about how wars are fought.

When things like this happen on a regular basis, it is hard to say that postmodernism cares about objective truth in any way. In fact, they seem to actively dislike reality. This isn't a caricature, this is from the horse's mouth. If you want people to have a different perception of postmodernism, make events like this have some sort of penalty, because he's still the dean many years later.
by mrtksn | 2025-10-22 08:33:51+00:00
I think its newsworthy because the media cycle(social&traditional) since years framed Starlink as the only company providing such services and it turns out that you can actually use some other services. Well, actually can't realistically because those established alternatives were marketed towards B2B and that's why their equipment isn't affordable and very usable for the end user but still, its newsworthy that Starlink isn't eating their market straight away.

Also, what's cool about Starlink is that they have sort of vertical integration with SpaceX that allows them to constantly keep launching new satellites which allows them maintain lower orbit constellation that allows for cheaper end-user equipment and potentially better speeds. Also the constant recycling of satellites allow for ever going network improvement as the tech advances.

What's not cool about Starlink is that it is American and Elon Musk affiliated, which makes it national security risk for Europe and Greenland in particular. That is also part of the newsworthiness because if this becomes a trend Starlink may become unviable business for a market of just 300M people.
by jjav | 2025-10-22 08:34:46+00:00
> Yeah it doesn’t really seem different from people copy/pasting from stack overflow without reading through it.

It is vastly different because there are no (as far as I've ever seen) multi-thousand line blocks of code to cut & paste as-is from stack overflow.

If you're pasting a couple dozen lines of code from a third party without understanding it, that's bad, but not unbearable to discover in a code review.

But if you're posting a 5000 line pull request that you've never read and expect me to do all your work validating it, we have a problem.
by ColinWright | 2025-10-22 08:35:39+00:00
Quoting from the post on Mastodon where I saw this:

"Chromium is like a computer virus. It spreads everywhere, infects every piece of software, makes your computer slow, and sets huge barriers to the improvement of software for intellectual emancipation."

-- https://mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling/115416641668491909
by eru | 2025-10-22 08:36:15+00:00
> I don't think percent of GDP is a meaningful metric.

Why not? I think it's close to the only useful metric across time.

> The distinction between mandatory and discretionary isn't weird - mandatory is payments that the government is legally required to make, discretionary is what they have the choice of spending.

Laws aren't god given. They can be changed. The political processes are slightly different, but if the voters want it, they can get it.

> Sovereign wealth funds of the sort you're alluding to have a problem - [...]

I'm not alluding to any sovereign wealth funds. What makes you think so?

I suggested to get pension systems out of the hands of government, not into them.