MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Vocaware – AI Voice Agents (Shadcn, Twilio, OpenAI, Supabase, Next.js)
by AlexNicita | 2025-11-11 18:42:46+00:00
Staying fresh with the "startup stack"... so I made Vocaware.com: an AI voice agent that picks up the phone, talks naturally, takes notes, and connects to your workflows.

It’s built with shadcn/ui + Next.js, Twilio for telephony, OpenAI for reasoning + speech, Stripe for payments, and Supabase + Railway for the backend. Basically a modern full-stack AI app — start to finish — that actually works in production.

Right now you can:

* Get a phone number instantly

* Have an AI answer calls 24/7

* Build agent conversation workflows

* View transcripts, summaries, and analytics in real time

I built it in a few weeks. It’s live and works surprisingly well — but now I’m trying to figure out what’s next:

* Should I pick a vertical (e.g. real estate, service businesses, golf courses, ...)?

* Offer free trials?

* Make it open-source and developer-first?

* Go onsite with customers and implement it?

Would love any feedback, advice, or collaboration ideas from other builders.

— Alex (x.com/NicitaAlex)
by bostik | 2025-11-11 18:42:57+00:00
Erlang's hot reload is a two-edged blade. (Yes yes, everything is a tradeoff but this is on another level.)

Because it's possible to do hot code reloading, and since you can attach a REPL session into a running BEAM process, running 24/7 production Erlang systems - rather counterintuitively - can encourage somewhat questionable practices. It's too easy to hot-patch a live system during firefighting and then forget to retrofit the fix to the source repo. I _know_ that one of the outages in the previous job was caused by missing retrofit patch, post deployment.

The running joke is that there have been some Ericsson switches that could not be power cycled because their only correct state was the one running the network, after dozens of live hot patches over time had accumulated that had not been correctly committed to the repository.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-11 18:43:02+00:00
The ignited sabers used spinning sticks with reflective tape covering them, and some rotoscoping applied in post to get the final effect. There are spots in the un-retouched Star Wars where the effect is missed, or something, and you can indeed see the raw stick. Something similar's also behind that one weird shot where Obi Wan's saber seems to almost fizzle out (the tip is pointed too much toward the camera, and messes up the effect)

The careful eye may also notice they almost never strike the sabers against one another in that scene... because it'd break the spinning sticks. Apparent contact is usually gently done, or a trick of perspective.
by op00to | 2025-11-11 18:43:13+00:00
Right, because real science never updates. Once an idea gets said out loud, it’s locked in forever like when doctors insisted ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food, and we definitely didn’t discover Helicobacter pylori decades later living rent-free in stomachs.

Fauci’s “herd immunity” comments came before Delta and Omicron turned one virus into a family reunion. Updating that view wasn’t deceit. It was responding to evidence, something the “verify, don’t trust” crowd supposedly likes, except when the verification disagrees with their memes.
by logicchains | 2025-11-11 18:43:14+00:00
>sometimes we favor safety, standard of living or social safety nets above short term profit.

Did you read the whole article? The current European standard of living is built on debt and unsustainable without an increased rate of growth (to outgrow the debt). And it potentially poses an existential threat, because if Europe's GDP and industrial capacity relative to its neighbours continues to fall, it faces the risk of invasion by e.g. Russia.
by vlovich123 | 2025-11-11 18:44:15+00:00
As others have pointed out to you. Memory safety is enforced at compile time through static analysis. This does not mean the absence of runtime checks - that is a property you are injecting into the definition and arguing about.

RefCell enforces memory safety too by doing the lifetime enforcement at runtime by using UnsafeCell to provide certain semantics. But the compiler ensures that the RefCell itself still has correct lifetimes and is used correctly, resulting in a compile time guarantee that the code that’s run is memory safe.
by derefr | 2025-11-11 18:44:25+00:00
I don't think it's baffling; the original band was just Apple making the same kind of fumble that Coke made with New Coke: they assumed that because something is well-received in quick one-time demos, that means that people will also like it over longer exposures.

If you don't know the backstory: New Coke had a sweeter formula than Coke Classic. And, as the original "Pepsi challenge" [1975] demonstrated a decade prior to New Coke [1985], people tend to prefer a sweeter drink when they're only being given a 15ml sip of it. New Coke's initial user testing was essentially a "New Coke challenge" — giving people 15ml sips of Coke Classic vs New Coke — and this led them to believe that this sweeter formula would be popular. But as demonstrated by later attempted replications of the "Pepsi challenge", the preference for sweeter drinks goes away when people get a full mouthful of the beverage; let alone when they're handed a full glass to drink as they please. It never seemingly occurred to Coke to do another round of "full-scale" testing, with testers being given full glasses of New Coke to drink (perhaps with ice; perhaps with food; perhaps chilled, perhaps warm... etc), before green-lighting the formula for production.

Same thing seemed to happen to Apple with the Vision Pro's original band. You don't tend to notice the strain of headset's weight pressing down onto your face at first; it only becomes apparent after ~10-15 minutes of use. It was likely that both their user-testing sessions, and their shareholder demo sessions, were short. (The final retail demo they walk you through is certainly short!)

You wouldn't think that this could be true of the Vision Pro, because it was a very-clearly dogfooded product: Apple made this thing first-and-foremost for Apple engineers, to allow their hardware design teams to work remotely during COVID. (That's why they shipped a "Pro" SKU first; the "Pro" SKU was what they needed.) Many of those same engineers were likely wearing prototypes of the Vision Pro to design later revisions of the Vision Pro.

My guess, though, is that early revisions didn't have all of visionOS (especially the computer-interaction parts) finished yet; and therefore, the Vision Pro was, at the time, really just serving as a peripheral for viewing of spatially-AR-embedded 3D objects (i.e. their hardware prototypes). The workflow likely looked like: edit and collaborate in a CAD program, with the headset off; save their changes; push the 3D model to the headset; pop the headset on; check out their changes ("do a walk around" of the object); take the headset back off; and go back to editing/collaborating on their computer.

Obviously, the original band would have worked just fine for that workflow!
by dataflow | 2025-11-11 18:44:34+00:00
> I do think that mandatory road duty is about as direct a violation of the purpose of the 13th Amendment as anything else the state could do.

Let me make sure I'm getting this right. You're making a serious claim that if the state required you to, say, clean the road by your house every morning, you'd feel like your experience would rival those of 19th-century slaves? You genuinely think that was the kind of thing the amendment was written for and do not see a meaningful distinction between the two?
by montague27 | 2025-11-11 18:44:43+00:00
I’m based in Canada and have no ambition to join a FAANG company. Listing it on my résumé would definitely boost my profile, especially for startups. I’m still figuring things out, but I envision creating a product that would allow me to work internationally, potentially opening the path to becoming a digital nomad.

However, I realized I might already be doing it wrong — as the old saying goes, “build and validate early.” I wonder how might one navigate this scenario?
by cestith | 2025-11-11 18:44:46+00:00
Oh, yeah. The call overhead specifically isn’t all that onerous though is it? For your example you’re also talking about making a memory copy, and unless you have hardware multiply you’re doing looping addition.

Most Forths I’ve dealt with also offer inline assembly as part of a word definition, so I suppose you could do it that way if really desired. I can see what you mean though about the penalty being completely acceptable, because it shouldn’t be super large.
by kmoser | 2025-11-11 18:44:52+00:00
> Travel booking often has a fixed schedule with limited time options, such as every 15 minutes. Relative dates like “Today” and “Tomorrow” can be easier to understand.

Except when you're booking a flight and you're not sure whether "today" is based on your local time, the server's local time, or GMT. (I often book flights right about midnight and find words like "today" and "tomorrow" to be completely confusing.)
Ask HN: How do you search for DevOps talent in 2025?
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-11-11 18:45:07+00:00
I have a rough idea of how I would hire a software engineer, picked up from osmosis and of course from the interviews I have engaged in myself over the years, on both ends.

I have only a fuzzy idea of how I would hire for a DevOps engineer, in a way that doesn't boil down to a conversation and a keyword search over specific technologies I already know and hope they know too. I trust that judgment, but it won't scale to hundreds or thousands of CVs.

Blog posts, technical articles, etc. from companies who have successfully done this would be most welcome.
by simoncion | 2025-11-11 18:45:45+00:00
> Will it ever run in WASM?

A ten-second search reveals [0]. (Have Kids These Days forgotten all about Emscripten?) However, given that web browser pages are often short-lived, I don't see what benefit bringing in all of Erlang and its VM gets you, other than the fact that you've pulled off the stunt.

[0] <https://www.antvaset.com/erlang-otp-wasm>
by jamincan | 2025-11-11 18:45:54+00:00
I wonder if it's simply the fact that there really isn't anything driving them to get their kids vaccinated rather than a particular religious conviction. In Ontario, the old-order Mennonite and Amish groups have separate schooling for their kids and aren't integrated into the medical system here (not even being a part of our public health insurance system). Your family doctor and public health agency (through the schools) are the avenues the vast majority have to vaccination and so being apart from that, the old-order families would need to make a special effort to get vaccinated above and beyond what most people need to do.
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-11 18:46:07+00:00
> Foxconn has reportedly dismantled all but one and a half of its production lines for the iPhone Air , and all production is expected to be stopped at the end of the month

Ouch! That sounds pretty bad, indeed.

I was originally a little interested in the Air because I wanted to downsize from my previous 15 Pro Max. I ultimately decided that the Air was only thinner, and still big in the dimensions I wanted it to be smaller in.
by marcus_cemes | 2025-11-11 18:46:21+00:00
This stands to reason. If you need to bridge different languages together like in your case, they need to speak a common tongue. REST/GrahQL/gRPC solve this problem in different ways. There is no technical limitation keeping you from serving HTTP traffic from Erlang/Elixir, but from my own experience it isn't a pleasant experience. JavaScript or Python are dead simple, until you realise that 64-bit integers are not a thing in JS, and need to be handled as strings. Similarly, tuples will give you hell in Python.

On the other hand, if you don't need to cross that boundary, the BEAM will very happily talk to itself and let you send messages between processes without having to even think about serialisation or whether you're even on the same machine. After all, everything is just data with no pointers or cyclic references. That's more that can be said for most other languages, and while Python's pickle is pretty close, you can probably even share Erlang's equivalent of file descriptors across servers (haven't tried, correct me if I'm wrong), which is pretty insane when you think about it.

> I have found the real value of Erlang to be internally between trusted nodes of my own physical infrastructure as a high-level distributed "brain" or control plane

I think this is pretty high praise, considering it's about as old as C and was originally designed for real-time telephone switches.
by exdigitalnomad | 2025-11-11 18:46:27+00:00
I wrote this for digital nomads who are now tired from traveling and are currently deciding on a homebase to live in.

I started my journey as a snowbird escaping Boston and working in Mexico City in 2010. Over the past 15 years, I’ve lived in 8 cities, including Austin, and did the “bi-coastal” thing between SF and NY. Finally decided to be an expat again and bought a home in Colombia. It’s been 4+ years and I love it.

Nomads passing through town always ask, “How did you decide where to live?”

My number one tip, is when you're feeling exhausted from nomading, it may seem like the time to find a home.

It's not.

Step back into neutral, reset your nervous system and then make a decision on the place that's most aligned with you and your goals.

Full story in my link...
by rh-app-dev | 2025-11-11 18:46:38+00:00
We haven't started that phase of development yet but the original image would still be immutable. Subsequent edits to the image metadata would be would be done via Photoshop with a plugin for tracking those edits and then saving and certifying that the original image was still locked with the added visual changes. Haven't decided how those additional changes would be tracked, but I'm guessing it's necessary to do so.
by conductr | 2025-11-11 18:47:12+00:00
If I don’t know you, sure. The source of this usually comes from a teammate via a chat app (slack, teams) or email. In that context, I’m telling them concisely “I don’t have enough information to help you”. Tell me more. Figure out how to ask for help in a better way. Conciseness shouldn’t be assumed as rude when you have a working relationship with the other person and it’s obtuse precisely because they need to fill in the gaps, not me.

Me and my teammates regularly get by on one word responses. Nobody interprets it as rude, we’re all busy and don’t get our feathers in a bunch over this kind of stuff. If someone did, they’d need coaching not the other way around.
by fnordlord | 2025-11-11 18:48:59+00:00
PTSD is not usually what happens when taken without supervision either. I think there's a large chasm of experiences between lifelong healing and lifelong damage with regard to psychedelics. I have pretty limited experience with it and came to the conclusion that it's not for me. But of the people I know who do them or have at one time, I don't think I know anyone whose life has been changed by them.
by graeme | 2025-11-11 18:49:01+00:00
I didn't condemn or approve of anyone, I just answered your question. You're making a lot of assumptions.

You're focussing exclusively on violence. If Israel adopted China's Xinjiang methods they would:

1. Take direct administrative control over Gaza

2. Place any man even remotely linked to violence or Islam in a prison camp and use them as prison labour to produce products

3. Monitor all women and prevent them from having births

But, violence would go down. In Xinjiang the Muslim population is shrinking as the authorities prevent reproduction.

Following your logic you are saying you would find this less objectionable. Is that actually the case? I suspect not.

I write this to hopefully expand your view that more than one situation can be objectionable, that not everyone is American or Israeli and it is possible to analyze a situation on its own merits and say "huh that's bad".

China goes to great lengths to minimize actual violence, which minimizes attention, which lets them focus on shrinking the population of Uighurs. I doubt Israel could actually do this in Gaza, but I think it would be worse if they did.
by dpark | 2025-11-11 18:49:42+00:00
> Apple needs to realize the user base that wants a portable, one handed phone isn't the same market that wants a cheap phone.

The reality is that “I want a small phone” for most seems to mean “I would prefer that the phone is small but this is actually the least important factor for my purchase decision”. The set of people who bought the mini was quite small, estimated around 3% of sales.

You didn’t even buy the smallest phone. You got seduced by the thin phone but the 17 and 17 pro are both physically smaller devices corner to corner and would fit in your pocket better.
by balksi | 2025-11-11 18:49:50+00:00
For similarity it is important to consider the dimensionality of your embeddings. The larger the text you wish to compare the bigger each embedding should be (to my limited understanding).

So a paragraph might be good as a 384-dim vector but if you have 1,000 words then you might want a 768-dim embedding (if not higher). Embedding models have slightly better/worse accuracy based on the training data they're fed, but higher dimensionality definitely gives better results - to a great extent. If you have an extensively long piece of text, it's easier to chunk it into pieces and create separate embeddings. You do have to manually stitch them back together and do some cleanup when displaying results but it works.

Once you have embeddings for all your data the rest is just cosine similarity, play around with the min_similarity. You will need to build good indexes on postgres but it is basically all you need.
by ok_dad | 2025-11-11 18:50:47+00:00
It's not reddit leaking, it's normal people leaking into your weird millionaire world. I say weird because 99.9% of people in the world would consider it on a range of weird all the way to unethical that you spend tens of thousands on pants. I'm not going to sit here and preach and make you bored, but consider what good you could do with that money, if only your ass and thighs were slightly more uncomfortable than they are today. Especially now when people around the world are dealing with 2x the food costs of a year or a few ago.

Also, HN is a fine place to complain about capitalism, maybe a few of you capitalists will have it click in your brains that other people are struggling and you can do something about it other than sitting on a cloud.
Ask HN: What's your top-recommended tuts for chatbot dev with local-hosted LLMs?
by dualogy | 2025-11-11 18:51:02+00:00
"Locally-runnable, CPU-not-just-GPU-permitting LLMs for chatbot dev" probably means Llama, right? Or are there other contenders on par and worth (co)considering?

I'm late to the game (no regrets), having had simply zero inspirations until now for any kind of chatbot dev. So I wanna skip all the already-outdated (or hallucinated) tuts a simple web search might probably yield (given today's web search quality especially...)

This toy I'll tinker on will be foss&fully-free, no startup stuff.. so not looking for some bleeding edge. Will be sth like SocialAI but more limited in various ways (stuff I don't care for) and yet offline-capable and with way more user-side tweakability of the nature/inclinations/worldview/opinions/conditioning of the (majority of) bots. That's the angle I wanna experiment on, to bring "make your sufficiently-plausible filter bubble of interest for entertainment value, and observe it unfolding by itself over time". So for amusement, but should be interesting.

So yeah, thanks for sharing here which blogs/videos/other-tuts take the coder from (near)zero to CustomTargetedChatbot(s)HelloWorld, are recent / current and building ideally specifically on (LLMs with) an offline / local setup. I only know these things as prompt textareas so far, not as configurable hackable API surfaces..

On the off-chance there's a pre-LLM-era or non-LLM alternative (foss lib or sdk in any lang/stack) that you'd recommend, ie. better-than-Eliza but non/pre-LLMs, I'd be interested too =)
by AugurCognito | 2025-11-11 18:51:03+00:00
https://github.com/Pikaday/Pikaday

> We’ve decided to archive the Pikaday repository on GitHub. The project has not been actively maintained for years.

> Pikaday was started before <input type="date"> was supported in browsers and before custom elements and component frameworks. Pikaday is probably not the right choice today.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-11 18:52:08+00:00
The original DVD was way, way less green than later releases, which were changed to match the more-extreme greens used in the sequels. IDK if it was as subtle as in the theater (I did see it there, but most of my watches were the first-run DVD) but it was far subtler than later DVD printings, and all but IIRC one fairly recent blu-ray that finally dialed it back to something less eye-searing and at least close-ish to the original.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-11-11 18:52:09+00:00
This is fascinating! Is this on-net good or bad for humans? On one hand, bacteria that consume plastics can help clean up the mess humans have produced, keeping the world somewhat more balanced. On the other, plastics are very useful to humans, so if they start "rotting" away this could cause lots of problems for society.

My guess is that this is on-net good for humanity. Curious what more qualified folks think.
by munificent | 2025-11-11 18:52:17+00:00
Hard panning isn't naive. It's just a choice that presumes an audio playback environment.

If you're listening in a room with two speakers, having widely panned sounds and limited use of reverb sounds great. The room will mix the two speakers somewhat together and add a sense of space. The result sounds like a couple of instruments playing in a room, which is sort of is.

But if you're listening with a tiny speaker directly next to each ear canal, then all of that mixing and creating a sense of space must be baked into the two audio channels themselves. You have to be more judicious with panning to avoid creating an effect that couldn't possibly be heard in a real space and add some more reverb to create a spatial environment.
by Zigurd | 2025-11-11 18:52:32+00:00
Battlefield robots already exist. They just don't look like you and me. And mostly they fly. That word "embodied"is a broad hint at misunderstanding. Robot surgeons don't stand on humanoid feet next to the operating table, and they don't have humanoid "hands."

Boston Dynamics has had humanoid robots doing parkour for years now and nobody needs a robot to do parkour. This was also a hint.
by jack_tripper | 2025-11-11 18:52:45+00:00
>I'm not sure what you mean by "so you can't hot -plug/-unplug it"

Only UMS (universal mass storage) devices can be hot-plugged-unplugged without ejecting, while UAS (USB Attached SCSI) devices cannot and need to be ejected beforehand since the OS treats them like an internal drive instead of a removable one.

> I'm also not sure what issues you've been having with booting from them. Might be a compatibility issue with your BIOS specifically?

NO, like I explained before, it's not the BIOS, it's the lack of 512 block support on the USB SSD controller which is very uncommon on traditional USB thumb drives but is needed for UEFI/BIOS boot. USB tools (like Rufus in default mode) create 512B-aligned images, but if the drive is 4Kn-only, GRUB or kernel can't read the filesystem.

The lack of 512 support seems to be a issue on the newer lower-cost USB SSDs which are designed to just do NTFS file transfers on the go and not host an OS for boot.

>I've occasionally used these things to boot Linux LiveCDs without issue.

Because yours have 512 native support like most USB drives. But No 512 support, no OS boot. Simple.