MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by j22chan78 | 2025-12-22 05:25:32+00:00
Hey everyone! After 7 months of development, I'm excited to share Narrate - an iOS app that transforms documents and web articles into podcast-style audio. The problem I wanted to solve: I had a massive backlog of articles, PDFs, and research papers I never had time to read. But I did have time during commutes, workouts, and chores. So I built Narrate. How it works: • Upload a PDF, Word doc, or paste any URL • Al generates a concise summary in your preferred a Podcast style • Natural-sounding voices read it back to you • Listen offline, anytime What makes it different: • The voices actually sound natural, not like a robot reading a textbook • Supports 57+ languages • Smart playlists that recommend content based on what you're interested in Would love any feedback!
by phendrenad2 | 2025-12-22 05:25:38+00:00
Most of the people disagreeing seem to be forgetting that public doesn't necessarily mean using your real name. We used to have vibrant communities full of people with names like "claxxon" and "zerg". claxxon knows about cisco networking and zerg knows about the best punk bands in the chicago area. Their real names? Not needed, wanted, or relevant, and we're offended you even asked, noob!
by satvikpendem | 2025-12-22 05:25:50+00:00
I hate that people comment on this. It's a fascinating linguistic phenomenon that bothers some people but signals to others that it's for them, in a way. Linguistics is a descriptive, not a prescriptive, field. Humans have been speaking and writing in a myriad of ways for thousands of years that do not strictly correspond to the current du jour.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...
by godelski | 2025-12-22 05:26:26+00:00
:h netrw

You can also just place config files anywhere if you know what you then load. That's what I do in my dotfiles, but not exactly like the parent. I also purposefully keep the repo size tiny so it's also just easy to clone. I'd recommend setting a env var so you can always just set that

Also don't forget you can have local vim files. I have a function at the end of my vimrc that looks for '.exrc', '.vim.local', '.nvim.local' in the current directory. Helpful for setting project settings.
by somat | 2025-12-22 05:26:36+00:00
It's not even that. alcohol destroys engines.

Sure in retrospect lead is a bad idea. but for the sake of argument. If we ignore all the subtlety of the real world choices, research and development required the argument would probably be.

We have this great additive that will let us make more powerful efficient engines that is also stable and lubricating or we could put something in the gas that degrades quickly and eats all the rubber seals out of our customers engines.

In short even ignoring price alcohol was a non starter then, even today with many years of developing rubbers that handle alcohol better E blends are a lot harder on engines than non E blends.

And a fun science experiment "how do you tell how much alcohol is in the gas?" fill a glass mason jar about a third full of gas, mark a line on the jar where the gas is. put another third of water in and color it with food coloring, put lid on and shake well, let separate and settle out. mark new line on glass where gas is. figure out percentage. The alcohol is water soluble and will have formed a solution with the water, the food coloring will only color the water and will let you see the boundery layer easier.
by tstrimple | 2025-12-22 05:26:53+00:00
It's almost like some of these people have never seen artists work before. Taping up photos and cutouts of things that inspire them before starting on a project. This is especially true of concept artists who are trying to do unique things while sticking to a particular theme. It's like going to Etsy for ideas for projects you want to work on. It's not cheating. It's inspiration.
by BenFranklin100 | 2025-12-22 05:28:02+00:00
It’s not pharma that’s driving rising medical costs, it’s hospitals:

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-cancer-drug-markups/

Another contributing factor is that Americans consume a LOT of healthcare, often well past the point of diminishing returns:

“Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer)”

https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...

Finally, basic preventative health care — at least for children — could save more than it costs when we take into account the overall economic effects of poor health outcomes. We should consider making it an entitlement.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-12-22 05:28:06+00:00
I write for myself so I don’t forget things and so I can have a record of my thought processes as empirical proof of my processing and understanding

I publish so that I get feedback grounded in alternative interpretations which helps sharpen the ideas and processes and understanding

You can’t actually understand anything in any real way if it’s not subject to intense and widespread scrutiny

Doubly so if you think you’re onto some new idea.
by burningChrome | 2025-12-22 05:29:22+00:00
A buddy of mine had the same thing. He started taking the light rail into downtown and purposefully parked at one of the early stops instead of taking the bus in. He said he would sit and code on his side projects for around the same amount of time. In the span of a year, he knocked out several small mobile apps and several social media plugins.

He said the benefit was being able to spend more time with his family at night when he got home. He knew he would have some time on the train, so not having to crack his laptop to get in some coding after dinner allowed him to spend a lot more time handling the kids and spending time with his wife.

"Work/Life balance achieved!" he used to proclaim with a big smile when we'd sit and chat.
by 2001zhaozhao | 2025-12-22 05:30:52+00:00
Under current prices buying hardware just to run local models is not worth it EVER, unless you already need the hardware for other reasons or you somehow value having no one else be able to possibly see your AI usage.

Let's be generous and assume you are able to get a RTX 5090 at MSRP ($2000) and ignore the rest of your hardware, then run a model that is the optimal size for the GPU. A 5090 has one of the best throughputs in AI inference for the price, which benefits the local AI cost-efficiency in our calculations. According to this reddit post it outputs Qwen2.5-Coder 32B at 30.6 tokens/s. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1ir3rsl/inferen...

It's probably quantized, but let's again be generous and assume it's not quantized any more than models on OpenRouter. Also we assume you are able to keep this GPU busy with useful work 24/7 and ignore your electricity bill. At 30.6 tokens/s you're able to generate 993M output tokens in a year, which we can conveniently round up to a billion.

Currently the cheapest Qwen2.5-Coder 32B provider on OpenRouter that doesn't train on your input runs it at $0.06/M input and $0.15/M output tokens. So it would cost $150 to serve 1B tokens via API. Let's assume input costs are similar since providers have an incentive to price both input and output proportionately to cost, so $300 total to serve the same amount of tokens as a 5090 can produce in 1 year running constantly.

Conclusion: even with EVERY assumption in favor of the local GPU user, it still takes almost 7 years for running a local LLM to become worth it. (This doesn't take into account that API prices will most likely decrease over time, but also doesn't take into account that you can sell your GPU after the breakeven period. I think these two effects should mostly cancel out.)

In the real world in OP's case, you aren't running your model 24/7 on your MacBook; it's quantized and less accurate than the one on OpenRouter; a MacBook costs more and runs AI models a lot slower than a 5090; and you do need to pay electricity bills. If you only change one assumption and run the model only 1.5 hours a day instead of 24/7, then the breakeven period already goes up to more than 100 years instead of 7 years.

Basically, unless you absolutely NEED a laptop this expensive for other reasons, don't ever do this.
by ehnto | 2025-12-22 05:33:57+00:00
It's a corporate feel that comes from a professional setting and lots of risk aversion. That is exactly what LLMs tend to write, so I sometimes catch myself feeling the "LLM ick" but the article was from before the boom.

So I guess it's just the corporate wash cycle, which I am happy to criticize, LLM generated or not.
by hattmall | 2025-12-22 05:37:47+00:00
I believe the primary most practical use would be compression. Devices could have quantum decoder chips that give us massive compression gains which could also massively expand storage capacity. Even modest chips far before the realization of the scale necessary for cryptography breaking could give compression gains on the order of 100 to 1000x. IMO that's the real game changer. The theoretical modeling and cryptography breaking that you see papers being published on is much further out. The real work that isn't being publicized because of the importance of trade secrets is on storage / compression.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-22 05:38:33+00:00
> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.

On the one hand, yes, this is not a nice thing to have happen. The frustrations shouldn't happen to begin with, and then people shouldn't be using the reverse Uno card on you just for that.

On the other hand, Linux has a lot fewer of these frustrations (in my experience), and a lot of frustrations are being fixed with time, since you're likely not the only one who is frustrated by it.

On the third hand, the situation being shit for obvious human reasons, not enough dev time, disagreements about the way forward, as is the case with Linux development, is a much, much nicer thing to have your problems caused by, rather than the source of Windows being shit, that is, someone wasn't happy with their dashboard this morning and decided to make that your problem today.
by cgriswald | 2025-12-22 05:38:53+00:00
No one in my real life would consider me anything other than kind, giving, and rational. I share things with them I wouldn’t say online. Even Kyburz admits to self censoring. That doesn’t mean I’m an extremist or even wrong. To some I’m a nazi, which is absurd. To others I’m a filthy pinko commie, which is equally absurd.
by skunkworker | 2025-12-22 05:39:19+00:00
Related:

PayPal Honey extension has again "featured" flag in Chrome web store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43298054 - March 2025

LegalEagle is suing Honey [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42581108 - Jan 2025

uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42576443 - Jan 2025

Show HN: Open-source and transparent alternative to Honey - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535274 - Dec 2024

Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42483500 - Dec 2024

Amazon says browser extension Honey is a security risk, now that PayPal owns it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016031 - Jan 2020

copied from this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43538687
by nospice | 2025-12-22 05:39:49+00:00
> I think the internet would be a lot nicer place if people were held accountable for the things they say and do.

Then I think you've been very fortunate (or sheltered). It's really not about accountability in any rational sense: it's not that I want to be a secret Nazi. It's that when you interact with enough people on the internet, you will probably encounter at least one person who isn't nice. Someone who gets upset not because of what you say, but maybe simply because you're "not worthy" of the attention of others. Who feels humiliated because you politely corrected them about some minor detail. Or maybe who just flat out misinterprets what you're trying to say.

Again, in a circle of real-life friends, this is rare. But in a sampling of 10,000 random strangers, even the nicest person will probably have one sworn enemy.

And yeah, I get it: anonymity shields the bad guys too. But on balance, I think there's a lot more good than bad when you look at pseudonymous content on the internet.
by undeveloper | 2025-12-22 05:41:15+00:00
All indications show that this is absolutely terrible for republicans' self interest, and popularity. trump has gone from winning the popular vote ~~(over 50% voted for him)~~ (a plurality of 49.8% voted for him) to polling at the 30%s. The recent 2025 elections (an off-year, so a variety of smaller elections at the state / city level mostly) have shown democrats are absolutely performing much better right now. This is not contested by either party.

> Is there some way aside from the obvious mistruths they can demonstrate its the democrats fault, and achieve some electoral advantage?

You discount the skill republicans have at lying -- regardless, when people are feeling the pinch in their pockets, they will blame whoever is in power. Currently it is the republicans.
by throwaway17_17 | 2025-12-22 05:41:38+00:00
What the actual fuck?

What does your comment mean? Is there some sort of substance to your statement or are you just being a hateful troll?

Did you even read the post? Are you trying to draw some conclusion from a person’s appearance?

I don’t know Jyn Nelson, but I have seen some of their talks. They seem to be a more than capable developer. Their blog is probably one of the least offensive, most down to earth, get shot done type of developer blog I have seen? So again, what the actual fuck.

(I’m not certain if the ‘seven words you can’t say on television’ are actually banned on HN or just frowned upon, but I think my usage is justified)
by CivBase | 2025-12-22 05:41:48+00:00
I also have a 10 year old laptop with no TPM 2.0 module. It was pretty high end for the time too (Dell XPS). I haven't needed it for much in recent years, but it still runs perfectly fine and I'm happy to continue using it if the need arises again. Sounds like I'll have to switch that over to Linux like I have all my other PCs.
by pca006132 | 2025-12-22 05:42:22+00:00
> The idea of bitwise reproducibility for floating point computations is completely laughable in any part of the DL landscape. Meanwhile in just about every other area that uses fp computation it's been the defacto standard for decades.

It is quite annoying when you do parallelization, and idk if that many people cared about bitwise reproducibility, especially when it requires compromising a bit of performance.
by devsda | 2025-12-22 05:42:51+00:00
> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.

There are also people who often claim that their installation of Linux always crashes after every single update, their favourite commodity hardware that's a decade old still doesnt work out of the box on Linux etc etc.

The truth is somewhere in between and its a lot closer to the positive experience these days compared to the old days.
by mrkeen | 2025-12-22 05:42:53+00:00
> You're coupling logging with business logic

Yes, the system shall not report that "User null was created" if it was actually "User 123 that was created".

String? Not a chance, make a proper type-safe struct. UserCreated { "id": 123}

> I don't want to have to think if i change a debug string am i going to break something.

Good point, you should probably have a unit test somewhere.
by johnwheeler | 2025-12-22 05:44:06+00:00
If you're 80 years old, you probably should not receive a subsidized hip replacement.

If you can't afford it on your own, there should just be a palliative care mandate after some age. We shouldn't save the soon-to-be-dead at the expense of the people with a long time horizon.

Or, we should pay doctors far less. I don't think they're multi-millionaires in other countries. Not all of them are in America, but many of them are.
by shrubble | 2025-12-22 05:44:12+00:00
Famously the golfer Payne Stewart and the total of 6 people on the LearJet 35, died after a sudden loss of cabin pressure incapacitated everyone including the pilots. A system like this, would have detected it and possibly saved them.

I wouldn't expect a whole lot more detail, as that airport is often used by defense contractors like Ball Aerospace, who have a large office nearby.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-22 05:44:17+00:00
Yes, there's a valid argument that simple code is not always best performance. Optimizing simple code usually makes it more complex.

But I think the main point stands. There's an old saying that doing a 60 minute presentation is easy, doing one in 15 minutes us hard. In other words writing "clever" (complicated) code is easy. Distilling it down to something simple is hard.

So the final result of any coding might be "complex", "simplified from complex", or "optimized from simple".

The first and third iterations are superficially similar, although likely different in quality.
by neilv | 2025-12-22 05:46:06+00:00
We're in an environment in which a handful of billionaire techbros (and aspiring ones) have simply taken most of the world's copyrighted material, and are using it to destroy the livelihoods of people who create it.

Why give them more stuff to steal for free?

(HN techbros are slow on feeling the pain of the greed and corruption, partly because we can temporarily ride the coattails of the exploiters. And partly because we don't have field-wide strong tradition of ethics and integrity, unlike some disciplines that are objecting fiercely to plagiarism and shoddy quality. But eventually HN will feel the livelihood impact, and many AI slop poems will be written about not speaking up when some earlier groups got wronged.)
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-12-22 05:46:22+00:00
No, it just favors the majority. People say racist stuff under their real names online all the time, but it's not safe to use your real name as a trans person because of groups like Kiwi Farms.

Have you heard of Kiwi Farms? They are bullies who would immediately benefit from real-name policies.
by ursAxZA | 2025-12-22 05:47:09+00:00
I might be mistaken, but as far as I know there is currently no other LEO broadband provider that is meaningfully comparable at a global scale.

Starlink is often treated as the reference point not because it is perfect or fully resilient, but because there is no second network at a similar scale that could realistically serve as a failover today.

If we imagine a hypothetical future where three mature operators exist, then yes — absent coordinated political or geopolitical action, at least one network might remain online.

However, even that surviving operator would not necessarily provide full coverage of the affected region. Global redundancy is extremely hard in practice, because maintaining continuous, worldwide LEO coverage is not free — it requires massive capex and opex, ground stations, regulatory permissions, and local political approval.

True worldwide failover remains more of a theoretical construct than an operational reality.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-12-22 05:47:14+00:00
One of the reasons I made the jump to Linux was the level of effort it took to disable all the shit that I don't want Windows to do. It became easier to just install Linux (Ubuntu, PopOS) and not have to futz with configuration to turn a bunch of unnecessary 'default on' stuff off - just get on and use the thing.

Yay Linux.
by xxr | 2025-12-22 05:48:47+00:00
> The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade.

Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?
by Telaneo | 2025-12-22 05:48:49+00:00
I don't feel the same way. I avoid a few topics that people probably would call me an extremist for opinions about, but they're rarely topics of conversation anyway. The internet is full of people from all ends of all spectra, so inevitably everyone will be called either a literal Hitler or a literal Stalin given enough time on the web. That doesn't make either of those extremes correct, nor even worth considering. They're both absurd, as you say, but that doesn't reflect poorly on you, but rather on the people making the claim.
by KPGv2 | 2025-12-22 05:49:58+00:00
> and no corrections

There of course could have been 100 corrections. He just threw those papers out and started again. Which is what we old timers did when we wrote things that we wanted to look nice. I did this with every math assignment at uni: do the work, get it right, then hand-copy a legible version to hand in.
Ask HN: Stepping into 2026. Your Take?
by paperplaneflyr | 2025-12-22 05:50:00+00:00
As 2026 approaches, what changes do you see yourself applying especially in tech with regards to the job you do as well as any hobby/side projects carry. I was hooked into AI generated apps, websites etc which was fun for a while(vibecoding) but the interest weird off. I don't see myself saying anywhere in my resume, I vibecoded that. I somehow always find myself drifting to the systems programming zone, so I might pick that up but will help me with my career is a question. Has anyone done this before? You work on one domain at work yet personally work on totally different one.
by mungoman2 | 2025-12-22 05:50:06+00:00
The money argument is IMHO not super strong, here as that Mac depreciates more per month than the subscription they want to avoid.

There may be other reasons to go local, but I would say that the proposed way is not cost effective.

There's also a fairly large risk that this HW may be sufficient now, but will be too small in not too long. So there is a large financial risk built into this approach.

The article proposes using smaller/less capable models locally. But this argument also applies to online tools! If we use less capable tools even the $20/mo subscriptions won't hit their limit.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-22 05:50:50+00:00
There's something deeply wrong with Microsoft if they look at 10% of their revenue and go "meh, we don't care about that". I get that it's not the majority, but that doesn't mean it is to be scorned either. 10% is a very hefty chunk of one's income (I would be pretty upset if my salary got cut by 10%, for example), and with an organization Microsoft's size is a huge amount of money in absolute terms.
by nutanc | 2025-12-22 05:51:12+00:00
You can disagree with the commons definition, and thats fine. But the point I wanted to make was about the exploitation. The open Internet was built with a code of sharing. Now they are trying to put walled gardens around all that knowledge. Lets remove Marx from the equation if that becomes a bone of contention. But we as a society need to come up with better dialogues to decide how we will treat our creators and how we will deal with the AI copy machine. We cannot expect that profit mongers will do the right thing.
Ask HN: What are the platforms I can reach out to open-source contributors?
by zfoong | 2025-12-22 05:51:42+00:00
Recently, I published an open-source project on GitHub, and would love to connect with people who might want to use it or contribute.

In your experience, what are some good channels for reaching users and contributors? Or, as an open-source developer yourself, where do you usually check out open-source projects?