MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wodenokoto | 2025-12-17 05:31:37+00:00
"all" might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the philosophy is to learn to recognize roughly 2000 kanji before starting the actual language learning. Volume 2 and 3 are supposed to complement more normal language learning.

The theory is based on the authors experience seeing Chinese and Korean students learn much, much faster than their western peers in Japanese language classes, coupled with an argument for "If you can read 50% of characters, you still can't read"

I'm surprised you've never come across this, as it is in the foreword.

> There will be somebody, somewhere who took this path and is happy to tell you about their success using it.

I met this somebody in Japan. If I remember correctly, he spend a summer "doing" RTK, then took 1 semester Japanese at his home university, went on exchange to Japan for two semesters, and after finishing his first semester abroad he passed JLPT 2 (not N2 - this was before they added the N)

Good for him. He was a strong student, but I wouldn't recommend it.
by nirui | 2025-12-17 05:32:26+00:00
> Waterfox won't include them. The browser's job is to serve you, not think for you... Waterfox will not include LLMs. Full stop. At least and most definitely not in their current form or for the foreseeable future.

> If AI browsers dominate and then falter, if users discover they want something simpler and more trustworthy, Waterfox will still be here, marching patiently along.

This is basically their train of thought: provide something different for people who truly need it. There's nothing to criticize about.

However, let's don't forget that other browsers can remove/disable AI features just as fast as they add them. If Waterfox wants to be *more than just an alternative* (a.k.a. be a competitor), they needs discover what people actually need and optimize heavily on that. But this is hard to do because people don't show their true motives.

Maybe one day, it turned out that people do just want an AI that "think for them". That would be awkward, to say the least.
by reactordev | 2025-12-17 05:32:53+00:00
I’m here for it. Best of luck. This is the biggest issue we have with old C/C++ (besides the neckbeards not wanting change) is no one wants to go and update that old code so making it just work (with minimal intervention) is exactly what we need.

Now, guarantees…

I’d love to see Rust level intrinsics in gcc now that we have a rust gcc frontend. Improve upon the “RVALUE” crap and actually generate meaningful “oopsies” messages and errors with tips on how to fix. I’d even be ok with gcc + LLM to perform Rust level checking but I digress. Even just making sure footguns become errors is a start and making sure pointer trash is cleaned up is paramount. Even after 30 years I still sometimes forget to include a member variable in the move constructor…
by pavon | 2025-12-17 05:36:09+00:00
This NHTSA report agrees with those numbers[1]. It reports 6,138,359 crashes and 3,246,817,000,000 Vehicle Miles Traveled in the US for 2023, which comes to about 530k miles per crash. The data comes from FARS which only reports fatalities, and CRSS which only includes crashes reported to the police[2]. It also only includes crashes on roadways (or from cars driving off roadways), not parking lots and other private property.

[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/crash-data-systems/crash-report-sampli...
Ask HN: Would you use self-hosted payments to avoid payout holds?
by alexmccain6 | 2025-12-17 05:36:50+00:00
No hold on payouts for online businesses.

I’m a founder and recently had a payout from a major payment platform delayed without much warning. The delay directly affected my ability to cover infrastructure costs, even though the money had already been earned. That experience was frustrating and made me question how much control builders really have over their own cash flow.

This got me thinking: instead of relying entirely on black-box gateways that pool funds and control payout timing, would builders want a self-hosted payments setup where money goes directly to their bank account using instant bank rails like UPI, SEPA Instant, or FPS? Not as a replacement for cards or Stripe, but as a way to avoid opaque payout holds where instant settlement is already possible.

Before building anything, I wanted to ask: is this something you’d personally use, or are payout delays simply an unavoidable cost of doing business online? I’d really appreciate hearing real experiences and honest opinions.
by ggm | 2025-12-17 05:36:51+00:00
Anyone who could sustain a friendship with F.R. Leavis has stories to tell. I only know of him by repute, but from talking to people who had major roadblocks on their career as a result of the ructions in English Criticism from Leavis' effect on the community at large, I suspect this was a delicate balancing act.
by the_duke | 2025-12-17 05:37:04+00:00
I've been preaching similar thoughts for the last half year.

Most popular programming languages are optimized for human convenience, not for correctness! Even most of the popular typed languages (Java/Kotlin/Go/...) have a wide surface area for misuse that is not caught at compile time.

Case in point: In my experience, LLMs produce correct code way more regularly for Rust than for Js/Ts/Python/... . Rust has a very strict type system. Both the standard library and the whole library ecosystem lean towards strict APIs that enforce correctness, prevent invalid operations, and push towards handling or at least propagating errors.

The AIs will often write code that won't compile initially, but after a few iterations with the compiler the result is often correct. Strong typing also makes it much easier to validate the output when reviewing.

With AIs being able to do more and more of the implementation, the "feel-good" factor of languages will become much less relevant. Iteration speed is not so important when parallel AI agents do the "grunt work". I'd much rather wait 10 minutes for solid output rather than 2 minutes for something fragile.

We can finally move the industry away from wild-west languages like Python/JS and towards more rigorous standards.

Rust is probably the sweet spot at the moment, thanks to it being semi-popular with a reasonably active ecosystem, sadly I don't think the right language exists at the moment.

What we really want is a language with a very strict, comprehensive type system with dependent types, maybe linear types, structured concurrency, and a built-in formal proof system.

Something like ADA/Spark, but more modern.
by throw10920 | 2025-12-17 05:37:43+00:00
> It's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt, including the likes of Google, Mozilla seems to get the exact opposite of that.

You have any evidence for this - that is, that the same subsets of users are being hard on Mozilla and soft on Google? Because that's pretty easy to quantify if you have evidence, which I notice you haven't presented.

Right now all you have is a gut feeling disguised as an factual claim about reality - which is worse than worthless because it's biased by your feelings, as opposed to being a wild guess.
by antonvs | 2025-12-17 05:39:02+00:00
> they are really just good at appearing to be smart.

In other words, functionally speaking, for many purposes, they are smart.

This is obvious in coding in particular, where with relatively minimal guidance, LLMs outperform most human developers in many significant respects. Saying that they’re “not smart” seems more like an attempt to claim specialness for your own intelligence than a useful assessment of LLM capabilities.
by rcbdev | 2025-12-17 05:40:20+00:00
It's very interesting to think about, depending on your sociological understanding of law. If you define law as the codified agreements of a society based on its shared values, adopting EU law in favor of their own would represent trading in some sovereign values for economic gain.

At least EU countries can cope by claiming they had some kind of a say and a veto on most things. EU prospects don't have this rationalization.
by yencabulator | 2025-12-17 05:40:43+00:00
I'm a Finn. I personally interpret that survey as Finland being the least unhappy place. There's a social safety net, health care is taken care of, you know your life won't get destroyed by the slightest misfortune, you get a good education for free, your surroundings are generally safe and well maintained, you feel safe & are fairly certain nothing bad will happen, there are people around you who share your values, life is good.

Things that for example the article author's favorite USA does not have. But of course a Murkin' can't accept that. I fully expect him to gripe that somehow the Corruption Perceptions Index is also somehow unfair to his favorite country too, and just cannot be right.

You had me at blaming "elites".
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-17 05:40:49+00:00
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the modern practice of not telling people why they've been blocked -- or even that they've been blocked -- was devised by sadists to satisfy their proclivity.

The core of the flaw is that actual fraudsters and spammers are repeat players and ordinary people aren't. The bad guys expect to be blocked, so they test for it. They check if their messages are getting through and then notice immediately when they stop. Whereas real people expect their messages to go through, because why wouldn't they when they've done nothing wrong? And then become isolated and depressed because it seems like everyone they know is suddenly ignoring them.

The bad guys create thousands of accounts and play multi-armed bandit, so when some of them get blocked they can identify why by comparing them to the ones that didn't, or create new ones and try new things until something works, and thereby learn what not to do. Whereas real people have no idea what sort of thing is going to arouse the Dalek either before or after their primary account is exterminated.

So it's a practice that creates a large increase in the false positive rate (normal people have no way to know how to avoid it) in exchange for a small decrease in the false negative rate (bad guys figure it out quickly). In a context where false positives cost a zillion times more than false negatives because the bad guys treat accounts as a fungible commodity they acquire in bulk whereas innocent people often have their whole lives tied to one account.

And all of that is only disguising the real problem, which is that people get blocked having done nothing wrong. If you were expected to point them to the spam they sent or the fraud they attempted then you wouldn't be able to do it when they'd done no such thing, and then "we can't tell anyone because it would help the bad guys" is used to paper over the fact that you couldn't tell them regardless. When the decision was made by an opaque AI and then reviewed by no one, there isn't actually a reason, there's just a machine that turns you off.
by hakfoo | 2025-12-17 05:42:32+00:00
Why don't they have at least a receive-only radio? I can understand if they're averse to someone keying up and accidentally broadcasting Secret Military Stuff on the civilian frequency, but a an air-band capable VHF receiver is less than $100 as a consumer buying single units. Surely the MIC could find a way to add one for just $10k as cheap insurance against losing a $5 million plane in a tragic and avoidable accident?
by ineedasername | 2025-12-17 05:42:56+00:00
No, I really don't think cost is the limiting factor- it's tooling and competent workforce to implement it. Every company of any substantial size, or near enough, is trying to implement and hire for those roles, and the # of people familiar with the specific tooling + lack of maturity in tooling increasing the learning curve, these are the bottlenecks.
by kstenerud | 2025-12-17 05:44:54+00:00
There's a lot of editorializing going on. Now that the title has been restored, hopefully things calm down a bit.

Ultimately, Tesla has two problems going on here:

1. Their crash rate is 2x that of Waymo.

2. They redact a lot of key information, which complicates safety assessments of their fleet.

The redactions actually hurt Tesla, because the nature of each road incident really matters: EVERY traffic incident must be reported, regardless of fault (even if it's a speeding car from the other direction that hits another vehicle which then hits the robotaxi - yes, that's actually in one of the Waymo NHTSA incident reports). When Tesla redacts the way they've been doing, it makes it very difficult to do studies like https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15389588.2025.2... which show how much safer Waymo vehicles are compared to humans WHEN IT COMES TO ACTUAL DAMAGE DONE.

We can't get that quality of info from Tesla due to their redaction practices. All we can reliably glean is that Tesla vehicles are involved in 2x the incidents per mile compared to Waymo. https://ilovetesla.com/teslas-robotaxi-dilemma-navigating-cr...
by hypercube33 | 2025-12-17 05:45:00+00:00
Look up the YouTube on project Argus that uses drone cameras in like 2010 or something. every moving object inside a city is classified, identified and tracked in and out of buildings, cars and that's just the declassified part. I've talked to people who've told me or shown me a lot more wild systems they've built for retail decades ago to track user product interactions then tied it to loyalty and credit cards so they know what you looked at vs purchased and how long and mood age etc just from video. tie all that to public data or purchased or given data and it's basically game over for being anonymous.
by salawat | 2025-12-17 05:45:07+00:00
Forget it. DoA due to Bank Secrecy Act, compliance costs (AML/KYC), money transmitter licensure, and the fundamental structure of the U.S. financial system

You could make a self-hostable solution, but the rest of the financial network would basically either refuse to accept your packets without sufficient proof of regulatory compliance in order to preserve their own good standing with regulators. It's a pretty jealously guarded sector, because it sorta has to be to make fiscal crime tractable.

I mean... Go for it if you want. Just be aware, your resulting impl cannot be legally employed without a money transmitter license.
Show HN: Seedance 1.5 Pro–Native Audio-Video Generation with Film-Grade Quality
by lu794377 | 2025-12-17 05:45:17+00:00
Hi HN,

We're excited to share Seedance 1.5 Pro, a joint audio-video model designed for creators who need cinematic quality and native audio synchronization—not just isolated video clips.

Key capabilities:

Native Audio Generation: Generate voices, spatial sound effects, and background music that evolve naturally with the visuals, with precise lip-sync and motion alignment across languages.

Film-Grade Cinematography: Complex camera movements from intimate close-ups capturing subtle emotions to full shots with cinematic composition and stable motion.

Intelligent Storytelling: Maintain coherent character emotions, expressions, and actions across the entire video based on high-level prompts.

Why we built this:

Most AI video tools treat audio as an afterthought, requiring manual sync work. Seedance 1.5 Pro generates audio and video together from the start, modeling how sound should evolve alongside visual storytelling.

We’d love feedback on:

- How native audio-video generation would change your production workflow

- Creative or narrative use cases you’d explore

- API features or controls you’d want to see

Try it here: https://www.seedance15.net/?i=d1d5k
by ablob | 2025-12-17 05:48:09+00:00
I feel like it's a win by default. I do like to write my own programs every now and then and recently there's been more and more graphics sprinkled into them. Being able to reuse those components and just render onto a target without changing anything else seems to be very useful here. This kind of seamless interoperability between platforms is very desirable in my book. I can't think of a better approach to achieve this than the graphics API itself.

Also there is no inherent thing that blocks extensions by default. I feel like a reasonable core that can optionally do more things similar to CPU extensions (i.e. vector extensions) could be the way to go here.
by schoen | 2025-12-17 05:48:10+00:00
There's an older tradition of rule-based machine translation. In these methods, someone really does understand exactly what the program does, in a detailed way; it's designed like other programs, according to someone's explicit understanding. There's still active research in this field; I have a friend who's very deep into it.

The trouble is that statistical MT (the things that became neural net MT) started achieving better quality metrics than rule-based MT sometime around 2008 or 2010 (if I remember correctly), and the distance between them has widened since then. Rule-based systems have gotten a little better each year, while statistical systems have gotten a lot better each year, and are also now receiving correspondingly much more investment.

The statistical systems are especially good at using context to disambiguate linguistic ambiguities. When a word has multiple meanings, human beings guess which one is relevant from overall context (merging evidence upwards and downwards from multiple layers within the language understanding process!). Statistical MT systems seem to do something somewhat similar. Much as human beings don't even perceive how we knew which meaning was relevant (but we usually guessed the right one without even thinking about it), these systems usually also guess the right one using highly contextual evidence.

Linguistic example sentences like "time flies like an arrow" (my linguistics professor suggested "I can't wait for her to take me here") are formally susceptible of many different interpretations, each of which can be considered correct, but when we see or hear such sentences within a larger context, we somehow tend to know which interpretation is most relevant and so most plausible. We might never be able to replicate some of that with consciously-engineered rulesets!
by kidproquo | 2025-12-17 05:49:04+00:00
A standalone audio processing engine + app with a web ui for the Raspberry Pi and other ARM based SBCs, that let's me use NAM models from tone3000 for guitar effects. Two channels with gains, noise gate, NAM, eq and reverb.

Open source: https://github.com/kidproquo/hoopi-pi-ng
by m-schuetz | 2025-12-17 05:49:28+00:00
Man, how I wish WebGPU didn't go all-in on legacy Vulkan API model, and instead find a leaner approach to do the same thing. Even Vulkan stopped doing pointless boilerplate like bindings and pipelines. Ditching vertex attrib bindings and going for programmable vertex fetching would have been nice.

WebGPU could have also introduced Cuda's simple launch model for graphics APIs. Instead of all that insane binding boilerplate, just provide the bindings as launch args to the draw call like draw(numTriangles, args), with args being something like draw(numTriangles, {uniformBuffer, positions, uvs, samplers}), depending on whatever the shaders expect.
by mjevans | 2025-12-17 05:50:28+00:00
Observationally, their model was roughly like this:

* For hit movies buy an obscene number of copies to rent month 1

* Sell off some for a discount as the rentals dwindled

* Discount anything over a reasonable backlog / duplicates set shortly after

Offhand I think they tried to time this to end well enough before the release windows slid to TV + Ads distribution.

* Rent the backlog until dead or until they sold in a discount bin

Some independent shops also competed. I recall my parents kindly rented a few less popular games they happened to carry. Not sure about videos, might have been better for stuff not mainstream enough at the big national chain.
by stuffn | 2025-12-17 05:50:45+00:00
The thing is every thing I listed is also used by law enforcement. There is nothing stopping them from turning everything into a dragnet. We already know they use ring cameras, cell phones, tower data, etc to build a dragnet. Flock is just another player.

To be honest flock seem like the perfect distraction from the larger surveillance state we live in. I feel like most of the writing I have seen on this acts like this some new, disgusting, pervasive thing. The truth is law enforcement has been using everything available because there’s nothing stopping them from subpoenaing or straight buying the data.

The larger problem is law enforcement needs to be curtailed (good luck unless we bust their union which the pro-union left won’t do), and then cameras need to be removed from phones and homes.
by phil21 | 2025-12-17 05:50:55+00:00
A giant datacenter of AI scale will have a dozen or so contractors for physical plant on-site pretty much every single day as long as the thing is in operation. More if a refresh project is ongoing, which after a few years will be more less all the time.

They certainly are not high density employers, but these huge hyperscale facilities typically employ 150-300 people directly, and probably at least that many on average in contracting roles. They are massive facilities.
by hakfoo | 2025-12-17 05:52:16+00:00
Also 20% for a big heavy transformer.

Sometimes I see cheap "amplifier only" designs that are about the size of a small 2U rackmount, but then you usually give up a lot of inputs and controls; they seem to be used either as PA amplifiers or as "extra room" units in the weird whole-house audio systems that apparently thousands of people had at one point and all dumped in the Goodwill.
by II2II | 2025-12-17 05:52:29+00:00
I simply removed it from the toolbar, same as I did with the Firefox sync icon. Out of sight, out of mind. Granted, they were much more pushy about other features and services. Much less pushy than other vendors and it was, in some respects, understandable. (How do you convince people your product is relevant if they think it does less than the competition because they aren't aware of what's there?)
by MPSFounder | 2025-12-17 05:53:16+00:00
It is easy to be weak, and watch war criminals like Netanyahu with support from rich American je-uwry like the Adelsons from afar get away with evil. We are dealing with a tribe that starves children, which the Nazis themselves did not dare to do. We are dealing with a tribe that bans journalists from Ghaza (western journalists) so they can rape women and children. But then again, an intelligent conversation here while children are starved is not possible buddy. I saw your other comments. What intelligent conversation do you speak of? They are all lacking in intelligence, charisma, and wit. You are as much a stranger to intelligence as those oil barrons of Israel are to kindness and humanity. Maybe instead of leaving dumb comments, try to go after those war crimes in Israel. Get sanctions against Israelis and American Je-ws that are supporting this apartheid, and the theft of property. It is always disappointing when a Je-w like you wants to benefit from the west, but decouples from our values the moment their darling Israel is a bully.
by akersten | 2025-12-17 05:53:47+00:00
i don't know what it would take to remove all this OEM LCID 1252 ANSI nonsense from computing (well, just Windows) but if I were in charge of "make sure developers ever willingly choose to work on Win32 instead of any other sane Unicode only platform" I would make it my top priority

whatever imagined problem is solved by marking clipboard text with some magical locale indicator is surely not as important as being able to interop literally just unicode characters between programs without having to read a 2-part blog post