MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saaaaaam | 2025-12-18 16:22:22+00:00
There’s a piece here, written by Paul Graham, which talks about why he started hacker news, written two years after it was launched.

If we take what he wrote at face value, I don’t think the purpose was primarily its promotional value.

https://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

_ Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news._

_ Hacker News is an experiment, and an experiment in a very young field. Sites of this type are only a few years old. Internet conversation generally is only a few decades old. So we've probably only discovered a fraction of what we eventually will._

_ Hacker News is definitely useful. I've learned a lot from things I've read on HN. I've written several essays that began as comments there. So I wouldn't want the site to go away. But I would like to be sure it's not a net drag on productivity. What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time._
by mellosouls | 2025-12-18 16:22:23+00:00
Thing is, this has always been the case. One of the problems with LLM-assisted coding is the idea that just because we're in a new era (we certainly are), the old rules can all be discarded.

The title doesn't go far enough - slop (AI or otherwise) can work and pass all the tests, and still be slop.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-18 16:22:56+00:00
What the hell language was Muratori teaching with that he doesn't have a sort?

Even C provides a halfway useful comparison sort in the box† and they're so cheap they don't even supply the O(1) growable array type

† It's named qsort, but despite the name it might not just be Hoare's "Quicksort". However it also won't be somebody's half-remembered bubble sort.
by verteu | 2025-12-18 16:23:03+00:00
Thanks for the context, I didn't realize the supervisor sits in the passenger seat in Austin. They do have a kill switch / emergency brake, though:

> For months, Tesla’s robotaxis in Austin and San Francisco have included safety monitors with access to a kill switch in case of emergency — a fallback that Waymo currently doesn’t need for its commercial robotaxi service. The safety monitor sits in the passenger seat in Austin and in the driver seat in San Francisco
by alfyboy | 2025-12-18 16:23:40+00:00
I was recently evicted from my apartment in a city in Norway experiencing similar growth in short-term rentals. The rental on that apartment was around €750 (same for my roommate). Apparently, during high season in the winter similar apartments goes for ~€830 a night. High season is 3 months in the winter, but seemingly that is enough to outcompete longterm tenants.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-18 16:23:53+00:00
> How accessible is the course now?

Entirely irrelevant.

If a city has a public library, but refuses to build a wheelchair ramp, and an elevator to upper floors, and doesn't provide reasonable alternatives to these deficiencies, they can (and should) get sued. If the city then throws up their hand and says "Too expensive" and shuts down the library (everyone suffers), I will not be siding with the library.
Show HN: MiraTTS, a 48kHz Open-Source TTS at 100x Real-Time Speed
by Yatharth3501 | 2025-12-18 16:24:26+00:00
I’ve been working on MiraTTS, a fine-tune of Spark-TTS designed for high realism and stable text-to-speech. The goal was to create an incredibly fast but high quality model.

Most open TTS models are either computationally heavy or generate 16-24kHz audio. Mira achieves high fidelity and speed by combining two things:

FlashSR: For generating crisp and clearer 48kHz audio outputs.

LMDeploy: Heavily optimized inference allowing for 100x real-time speed and low latency (roughly150ms).

I built this so local users have access to a high quality local text-to-speech model that works for any usecase. It’s currently in its early stages, and I'm currently experimenting with multilingual versions and multi-speaker versions. Streaming is coming soon as well.

Repo: https://github.com/ysharma3501/MiraTTS

Model: https://huggingface.co/YatharthS/MiraTTS

I also wrote a breakdown on how these LLM based TTS models work: https://huggingface.co/blog/YatharthS/llm-tts-models
by array_key_first | 2025-12-18 16:24:32+00:00
Well after a certain point people have to smell the roses, so to speak. You don't get to control your business 100%, the market tells you what to do a lot of the time.

I think, the reality is, as models become more competitive they are becoming commodities. There's really no reason an app has to be built on GPT, or Gemini. It makes much more sense for apps to be "model agnostic" and let their customers choose which models to use.

I think, if OpenAI sticks to just trying to make their own apps for everything, they will be outrun. People will make apps outside of their ecosystem and will just use them as an API dumb pipe, regardless of if OpenAI wants that. And if they don't want that and restrict it, then their models will fall to the wayside as more competitive models which DO allow that take their place.

They're in a bind here, which is probably why we are seeing this announcement. OpenAI can see the writing on the wall for them.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-18 16:24:49+00:00
Never heard about it myself before, and went to Wikipedia of course, and found this:

> Prison labor in the US is mostly optional. Although inmates are paid for their labor in most states, they usually receive less than $1 per hour. As of 2017, Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas did not pay inmates for any work whether inside the prison (such as custodial work and food services) or in state-owned businesses. Additionally, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and South Carolina allowed unpaid labor for at least some jobs. Incarcerated individuals who are required to work typically receive minimal to no job training resulting in situations where their health and safety could potentially be compromised. Prison workers in the US are generally exempt from workers' rights and occupational safety protections, including when seriously injured or killed. Often times, inmates that are often overworked through penal labor do not receive any proper education or opportunities of "rehabilitation" to maximize profits off the cheap labor produced. Many incarcerated workers also struggle to purchase basic necessities as prices of goods continue to soar, meanwhile prison wages continue to stay the same. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

It sounds like it isn't optional everywhere, the pay is beyond inhuman, they don't always get any benefits at all, no training, don't safety and are overworked.

Overall, sounds like a nice idea on paper, but combine it with private companies actually running these prisons and probably making profits on having more f̵o̵r̵c̵e̵d̵ labour available to them and you basically re-invented slavery again, just with a nicer name.
by schvenk | 2025-12-18 16:24:55+00:00
AI product-design principle #1: Keep the user in the driver’s seat.

Users need a sense of control, and want confidence that your product is working for them rather than calling the shots. Which might seem strange: AI is about automating our lives, taking things out of our hands; keeping the user in the driver’s seat seems to pull in the opposite direction.

This is the first of six posts exploring the AI-centric product-design principles crystallizing as we design and build Tiptap Flex (https://flex.tiptap.dev).
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-18 16:25:13+00:00
> Signaling my turns is zero cost with regards to that action. At least for me, signaling as a matter of habit comes at the cost of focus.

What do you mean by "comes at the cost of focus", there? Do you mean you are more distracted by having to use your indicators?

Maybe you're just not a very good driver, if you're so distracted by the basic controls of the vehicle.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-18 16:25:38+00:00
One relevant distinction: those who follow the rules, and those who discover them. Or the theory builders and the problem solvers.

Consider something like set theory. When set theory entered a period of crisis in the early 20th century, there were those who mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers who tried to determine what a good formalization of the notion of set is. Russell and Leśniewski come to mind, for example. Naturally, this isn't just a matter of coming up with any collection of axioms. It involves analyzing the concept of "set".

This is different from the Erdos's of the world.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-18 16:26:03+00:00
Yup. But not on advertising.

I wasn't defending Apple. I was merely pointing out that one of these, is not like the other.

Like I said, it seems that we have a hard time understanding business models other than "Harvest and sell data." Posts like the GP, seem to reinforce this appearance.

Upton Sinclair is known for a quote, referencing this kind of thing.
by chamomeal | 2025-12-18 16:26:09+00:00
I appreciate the discussion that this post sparked. But it is so lame that something like this is LLM generated. It's a perfect setup for some fun creative writing, what is the need to pour slop all over it??

Also the lack of comments calling out the obvious AI style is confusing to me. HN usually jumps on this stuff. Are we just getting tired of calling it out? Or have we just accepted that we're going to read slop sometimes? Or I guess the opportunity to talk about HTMX was probably more important than the post content
Ask HN: PMs using Linear: how do you keep decision context from getting lost?
by istvan_intrnd | 2025-12-18 16:26:14+00:00
Founder here.

I’m seeing teams run execution in Linear but lose decision rationale across meetings, Slack threads, and time.

When issues are revisited, context/understanding is gone.

How do you handle this today? I’m looking for a few PMs who want to act as early design partners or advisors for something I’m building in this space.
by komali2 | 2025-12-18 16:26:20+00:00
It's still slave labor if the most basic of comforts and privileges are locked away from you if you don't participate.

Plus you don't really have choice in the labor you perform, no choice in where you perform it, no choice in when, you aren't really paid, you can only spend money in the commissary (at insanely inflated prices).

Sure it's not a slave on a cotton field getting whipped for not meeting quota, but it really isn't far from that.
by jstimpfle | 2025-12-18 16:26:46+00:00
It might be the _logically_ correct interpretation that these are separate things. Now let's talk about rhetorics. Why are two unrelated, heavy accusations combined in a single sentence? Then consider that the added accusation (misogynist) doesn't hold water even on a logical level (let alone the bad faith involved here), it is a crass misreading of the evidence that was brought up for it.
by mcphage | 2025-12-18 16:26:46+00:00
The Puzzle Boy / Kwirk series of games is Sokoban-based, but has 3 different mechanics on top of that: turnstiles, pits (that can be filled by blocks), and blocks larger than 1x1. One of the things I love about it is that, each mechanic is interesting on its own, and each combination of mechanics results in levels with very different feels. Lots of puzzles with a bunch of mechanics try to throw tons of them into each level, and each level ends up feeling very samey. But judicious use of combinations can lead to a lot of interesting variety.
by parineum | 2025-12-18 16:26:50+00:00
That's not the "Gotcha' you think it is.

Net immigration is down. That counts illegal immigration and deportations, presumably which are way down and way up, respectively. Both stats have nothing to do with how many people _want_ to be in the US, just how many people are able to get here.

How long is the of _applicants_ for residency in the US? That's the metric you're looking for. I suspect, with the increased difficulty in illegal immigration, that there is an increase in applications for legal immigration. That's speculation though, I have no idea where to get those numbers.
by rimunroe | 2025-12-18 16:27:04+00:00
For anyone unaware, that is nearly[1] the entirety of the text of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution from 1865. This exception is rather (in)famous. I remember being quizzed on it in an elementary or middle school history or social studies class.

[1] the only excluded bit is the followup "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Without this, the power to enforce the 13th Amendment would be left up to the states due to the 10th Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."), which would have slightly useless given the whole war that had just been fought over some states wanting to keep slavery.
by xp84 | 2025-12-18 16:27:33+00:00
Absolutely. The current level of service these companies provide is functionally identical to what would have existed 25 years ago. Losing your Apple account would have been a minor annoyance - the relationship involved trivial amounts of money, and wasn’t deeply integrated into anyone’s lives. Even if you lost an email address, losing access to it wouldn’t have locked you out of hundreds of important accounts, and any important accounts would probably be easily updated to a new address with a phone call, and likewise for a few friends. If you got fully locked out forever, it really wasn’t important.

So, we now have the same “who cares, it’s just some dumb online account” level of service with much more critical accounts. Because big tech has scaled users to the 9-10 figure range, while not investing almost anything in customer service. Instead of having thousands of CSRs like the phone company, tech employs a few disempowered call center operators overseas, whose only job is to read FAQ answers at callers and ask them to try restarting their computers.
by kilpikaarna | 2025-12-18 16:27:53+00:00
I would put The Witness somewhere very high on the list of most impressive games of all time. This is despite it being the only first person game to ever give me motion sickness (a common experience -- the crosshair and adjustable FOV that were added via an update helped a little but not completely), me not generally having the patience for this type of puzzle game, and not even playing it all the way to the end.

There's a pivotal moment where (assuming you find it at all, which isn't a given) your entire perception of the game world flips around, and walking back through environments you've already explored you're now perceiving them in a completely new way. The closest thing from fiction I can think of is the big reveal in Fight Club, in that it puts the entire plot in new light, except in The Witness the flip is basically unrelated to any of the "content" of the game. Very very impressively done.

It's weird that people seem to really have latched on to some off-the-cuff remarks Blow made on stream about not being an atheist (even though he also called out the false dichotomy between naive atheism and literal interpretation of Christianity). Blow has been open about his experiences with meditation practice and its influence on his game design, and I think it shows. I'm not personally a huge fan of the type of games he makes, but the thing he seems to be aiming for in his use of the medium are interesting enough that I'm definitely going to pay attention.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-18 16:27:56+00:00
It's a list of cities proper, not just "cities".

> A city proper is the geographical area contained within city limits

I'm not sure about the others, but the one from Barcelona is a city actually, with their own local government and all, separate from Barcelona, exactly like Badalona on the other end of Barcelona. It is within the city-limits of Barcelona (region, not city) though.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-18 16:27:56+00:00
> These people are imprisoned, and I'm assuming forced to do this work

This is an incorrect assumption, at least in my state. It’s a job that they can apply for and opt in to do.

The debate is about their hourly wage.

There is a possibility of forced penal labor, as I understand it, but it’s mostly things like being forced to do cleaning duties, road cleanup, etc.
by patresh | 2025-12-18 16:28:04+00:00
Yes, I don't mean HN doesn't experience toxicity, but putting things in context, if you read random posts on X versus HN there is no comparison.

Moderation for sure helps, would there be ways to make it scalable with less manual supervision? Or a system that would organize people with certain rule-sets to distribute them into suitable sized groups?

I do agree with your statement that "Good discussions evolve naturally and also randomly", let's say now your platform becomes popular. It will attract players that will want to exploit that either to sway opinions for their own gain, and I believe that this is becoming increasingly cheaper to game and simulate whole crowds. So the limits are mostly with this in mind.

Indeed perhaps the term social platform is vague and different "optimal rules" could be different for social platforms that is a mega-forum, a network for friends, or just generic post sharing.

I'm wondering if there is some sort of taxonomy of these rulesets or levers that exist? Or a review paper on what has been tried and what effects they had? There are so many possible ways to structure online social interactions.
by lokar | 2025-12-18 16:28:14+00:00
> Gatekeeping

Not at all. Just trying to understand a POV I think I see here, and in other discussions that I can't quite place / relate to.

The person I replied to seemed to be saying that there is no role for experience, beyond knowing the language, tools, and the codebase. There is no real difference between someone with 5 years of experience and 15 years. This may not be what the think, or meant to say, I'm extrapolating a bit (which is why I asked for clarification)

That attitude (which I have run into in other places) seems totally alien to me, my experience, and that of my friends and colleagues. So, I think there must be some aspect that I'm missing or not understanding.
by alexfoo | 2025-12-18 16:28:31+00:00
> I'm imagining someone driving in England and the police having no way to input those letters into their system.

I would assume the UK has worked out a way of dealing with this having had plenty of years of foreign plates being driven around the country.

Any Danish license plate driven in the UK will almost certainly have to a be an EU style plate with the blue band on the left with the "DK" country code. If someone needs to send a fine to the registered owner of this plate I'd guess they'd be handing over the camera footage/images to a contact in the relevant country and letting them confirm what the exact plate is.

(There may be some weird exemptions for old classic/vintage cars that can continue to be driven on their original number plates, in which case you really don't know who to contact.)

The UK is very strict on license plates. I don't think there's any valid reason for driving a car without some form of a license plate on display (cars being driven on trade plates placed in the front/rear windscreens are the closest thing I can think of). I'd expect the UK Police to pull over any car that didn't have plates on it if they spotted it. It's certainly considered very suspicious in the UK if a car is missing either of its plates.

There are plenty of examples of normal ANPR cameras failing to capture plates properly. Or even sillier examples like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-58959930

This story got referenced by the associated Government body here: https://videosurveillance.blog.gov.uk/2021/10/27/the-camera-...
by PoorRustDev | 2025-12-18 16:28:48+00:00
Even job fairs are useless now. I'm a current student and when I show up a lot of companies seem to just send an intern or 3rd party recruiter out with a bunch of generic company fliers. You can't ask any questions about the job because the recruiter won't know the answer, they don't work in the department or even worse they don't work for the company, and when you find a company you want to join they tell you to apply online anyway. Sometimes you get a special link for applying, which I think is how they differentiate between job fair applications and the others.

At least the few smaller companies that show up seem more immune to this, but they have the problem of wanting to pay an electrical engineer about $50,000-$60,000 for starting pay, which just isn't worth it. So everyone still puts up with the recruiters that know nothing because at least then you have a shot of earning a market rate salary.
by yesfitz | 2025-12-18 16:28:55+00:00
If you live anywhere like Houten[1] anywhere in the US, please tell me ASAP because I'll move there tomorrow.

From my area of the Midwest around Iowa City, there are decent paths that connect the local towns, but intra-town cycling is far less supported. We have bike lanes (good), on some streets (bad), they're unprotected (bad) and they close on Sunday (bad, also what?). The car-free bike path along the river is shared with pedestrians, and some spandex-festooned idiots don't understand that it's not the place to go fast.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFEfr7Amn6U (5 minute overview of Houten)
by titzer | 2025-12-18 16:28:55+00:00
As someone who publishes regularly, has organized conferences and seen this from multiple angles, publishers add marginal value to the publication process and it is no longer worth what they charge--to the point that I think their existence is parasitic on the process. They're usually paid from a combination of conference budget (subsidized by ACM, but usually a break-even prospect with enough attendees) and the author fees.

For several conferences I have been involved with, the publishers' duties included the princely tasks of nagging authors for copyright forms, counting pages, running some shell scripts over the LaTeX, and nagging about bad margins, improperly capitalized section headers, and captions being incorrectly above figures.

Frankly, in the digital age, the "publishers" are vestigial and subtractive from the Scientific process.
Show HN: Call Santa AI with your kids. My new side project
by s-stude | 2025-12-18 16:28:56+00:00
I created a simple app that lets your kid call Santa AI via video call. Parents can use this webpage to schedule a 5-minute or 10-minute call with Santa, who will speak to their child.

Very, very realistic and could support a dialogue, ask questions, and even tell if there is a gift for a kid.

I use the HeyGen AI avatar, and I DO NOT record any video. Would you show this to your kid? Could you give me some feedback?

https://CallSantaTonight.com