MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Real-time voice AI agent console with 133ms latency (YC assessment)
by sanjaykumar584 | 2025-12-22 15:38:58+00:00
Hi HN,

Built a real-time voice AI agent console for a YC W25 startup assessment (Freya Voice). Focus was on production-ready implementation with minimal latency.

GitHub: https://github.com/05sanjaykumar/Freya-Voice-YC25-Assessment

Key specs:
- 133ms average latency (voice input → AI response → audio output)
- LiveKit for WebRTC streaming
- Next.js frontend + Python FastAPI backend
- Multi-stage Docker deployment
- Full observability and session management
- In-memory storage for speed (design trade-off for assessment scope)

Tech stack:
- Frontend: Next.js, TypeScript, LiveKit client SDK
- Backend: FastAPI, LiveKit server SDK, OpenAI
- Infrastructure: Docker multi-stage builds, production configs

Design decisions I made:
- Voice-first interface (no text fallback) to match real-world use case
- In-memory session storage (speed over persistence for MVP)
- LiveKit over WebSocket (proven real-time infrastructure)
- Concurrent audio processing to hit latency targets

Built in ~1 week for the assessment. Didn't land the role (extremely competitive) but learned a ton about real-time systems and WebRTC optimization.

Happy to discuss the latency optimization techniques or design trade-offs!
by Someone1234 | 2025-12-22 15:38:59+00:00
Low.

While the NSA would, absolutely, use it to elevate existing internal access - it is such low-hanging fruit that they have enough alternative tools in their arsenal that it isn't a particularly big loss. Most of their competent adversaries disabled it years ago (as has been best-practice since 2010~).

More likely, it is Microsoft's obsession with backwards compatibility. Which while a great philosophy in general has given them a black eye several times before vis-a-vis security posture.
by hnbad | 2025-12-22 15:39:05+00:00
They say they remove information from the collected data. They aren't very explicit about what information they remove or not. They also seem to be feeding the data they collect right into the affiliated data broker company.

There are two different markets for this kind of complex data:

- Aggregate (demographic) data is useful for targeting, not just regular ads but also in-person outreach or even just identifying areas with a high density of potential customers; you can also use these insights to then categorize people in your own data set (e.g. when onboarding a new user you might cross-reference their details and find out they're high value just based on the "non-personal" data from the data broker that matches their profile).

- Specific (personal) data is useful for companies like insurances to flag you for risks you wouldn't otherwise have to disclose or they might not be able to request disclosure of; because direct transfer of personal data is the most likely kind to run into privacy law issues this is now often obfuscated by feeding it into AI models (i.e. the AI learns to match the collected data at the data broker to the input data it receives from the data broker's customer but there is never an explicit connection between the two data sets so the data broker can claim it is anonymized/aggregated when in practice it's still granular enough for the AI model to be able to categorize you based on seemingly spurious associations).

Note that the fist case overlaps with the second because "aggregate" usually still means that when looking at a new dataset (i.e. data collected from one person) you can say with some confidence which pile of aggregated data it fits in even if that pile doesn't contain an exact match due to anonymization/pseudonymization. Also note that this means there isn't really any feasible way to "aggregate" data in such a way it can no longer be argued to be subject to the data subject rights of the GDPR unless the data is fully isolated (e.g. total number of monthly visitors of an entire website by year).
by techjamie | 2025-12-22 15:39:12+00:00
> it really is superior to the Carplay experience (a square in the middle of the round screen, vs a map that takes up nearly the entirety of the screen

I haven't used CarPlay since I'm an Android user, but this reeks to me of a manufacturer developing a problem so they could seek rent for the solution.

If there were no financial incentive otherwise, they certainly would have ensured the CarPlay experience was as nice as their own solution as a selling perk.
by ViktorRay | 2025-12-22 15:39:12+00:00
It’s frustrating to me to see this article promote Bluesky. Both Bluesky and Mastadon can lead to the same negativity, mental health issues, and addiction and misery and so on as all of the other social media platforms.

Maybe the Bluesky and Mastadon algorithms are or are not as addiction producing as Twitter or Facebook. I don’t know. But the harms are still there.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 15:39:14+00:00
> I'm not blaming them though;

Exactly. All of your comments are built upon the mindset that employees cannot be held accountable for their own actions. Even when those actions impact a peer, blame must flow to management.

Which is why this conversation isn't going anywhere. You're off on tangents raging about businesses, but every time the topic comes too close to admitting that employees can do bad things too, you pull out mental gymnastics to blame the company or change the subject to something else you want to complain about.
by alsetmusic | 2025-12-22 15:39:19+00:00
> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.

My current employer is so great that I have casually mentioned that I might stay until I retire a bunch of times since joining. I've never said that about any other job. We have Word because there are industry requirements that it meets in terms of formatting legal documents. Can other apps supplant it? Possibly, but no one is spending the time and money to find out and it's not my decision to make.

I understand the motivation of the statement, but it's a fallacy.
by joe_mamba | 2025-12-22 15:39:20+00:00
Which EU law say that exact thing?

Because now I live in an EU country that had (and has) foreign products and services, typically of US origin, that are not officially available in my home EU country, like for example Xbox GamePass for console. Was same with Nextflix till a few years ago. Same with AMEX cards.

So NO, you can definitely provide your services only to specific EU member states if that's what you wish, they can't force you to sell in all countries.
by skydhash | 2025-12-22 15:39:44+00:00
Although it would be manual, that’s very doable in Emacs and Vim. It’s the very reason I use these editors as you can have a screen fulls of opened files instead of the tabbed model of common editors. One example having all the files you need to edit when you’re implementing a feature in a multilayered architecture. Easier that switching tabs again and again.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-22 15:39:51+00:00
Josef Pieper wrote a book called "Leisure: the Basis of Culture"[0] - published in 1948 - in which he discusses the meaning of leisure, which is not what we mean by it today, and criticizes the "bourgeois world of total labor" as a spiritually, intellectually, and culturally destructive force.

Today, we think of "leisure" as merely free time from work or recreation, something largely done to "recharge" so that we can go back to work (in other words: modern "leisure" is for the sake of work). This is not the original meaning. Indeed, etymologically, the word "school" comes from σχολή ("skholē"), which means "leisure", but with the understanding that it involves something like learned discussion or whatever. (Difficult to imagine, given how hostile modern schooling is, resembling more of a factory than a place of learning.) The purpose of work was to enable leisure. We labored in order to have leisure.

What's also interesting is that unlike us, who think of "leisure" in terms of work (that is, we think of it as a negation of work, "not-working"), the Greeks viewed it in exactly the opposite way. The word for "work" is ἀσχολίᾱ ("askholíā"), which is the absence of leisure. The understanding held for most of history and explains why we call the liberal arts liberal: it freed a man to be able to pursue truth effectively, and was contrasted with the servile arts, that is, everything with a practical aim like a trade or a craft.

This difference demonstrates an important shift and betrays the vulgar or nihilistic underbelly of our modern culture. Work is never for its own sake. It is always aimed at something other than itself (praxis and associated poiesis). This distinguishes it from something like theory (theoria) which is concerned with truth for its own sake.

So what do we work for? Work for its own sake is nihilistic, a kind of passing of the metaphysical buck, an activity pursued to avoid facing the question of what we live for. Work pursued merely to pay for sustenance - full stop - is vulgar and lacks meaning. Sustenance is important, but is that all you are, a beast that slurps food from a trough? Even here, only in human beings is food elevated into feast, into meal, a celebration and a social practice that incorporates food; it is not merely nutritive. Are you merely a consumerist who works to buy more crap, foolishly believing that ultimate joy will be found in the pointless chase for them?

Ask yourself: whom or what do you serve? Everyone aims at something. What are the choices of your life aiming at?

[0] https://a.co/d/eCd0cJX
by Lapel2742 | 2025-12-22 15:40:11+00:00
> OK now slap the wrists of Alphabet and Meta.

Google is probably next (Antitrust case(s)). AFAIK the EU is currently probing a case.

And before the Nationalists get mad again: If I sell in the US I'm naturally obliged to follow US rules and regulations. I wouldn't even think twice about this. The same is true in other markets. So for the Single Market: If you play on European turf, you play by European rules.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-22 15:40:27+00:00
That's how any relatively busy 4-way stop works in Ohio, too. The law says to do it one way (first to arrive, yield-to-the-right, wait for intersection to clear before entering).

But in practice what happens is an unscripted ballet where other things happen instead, like: Like, 4 cars can turn right simultaneously, and this works fine.

People know it's "wrong," but they also know it works. It's normal, expected, and a bit weird.

The weird part is something I've only ever really observed when I've driven cop cars around the block and had to traverse a 4-way stop. Other drivers stop the ballet immediately and get all timid and stuff -- like they're waiting for me (just someone being a lowly radio tech today, not a cop at all) to give them direction or something. It's bizarre.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-12-22 15:40:39+00:00
No one in their right mind believes that you can accomplish widespread, high speed communication via "talking to people IRL" like you can with the internet. It has become a very important way that we share information broadly, deal with emergencies, and stay informed. Going back to the stone age is not a good option at this point. But you know that, and you're just posting nonsense to have an argument.
by 9rx | 2025-12-22 15:41:35+00:00
When Go was launched, it was said it was built specifically for building network services. More often than not that means using protobuf, and as such protobuf generated code ends up being a significant part of your application. You'd have that problem in any language, theoretically, due to the design of protobuf's ecosystem.

Difference is that other languages are built for things other than network services, so protobuf is much less likely to be a necessary dependency for their codebases.
by dahart | 2025-12-22 15:41:35+00:00
Agreed on 2, this problem predates what we call social media.

I also tend to agree with 1, but that’s the actual problem, and I don’t think it’s fair to call it clickbait. The news media shouldn’t be reporting what they think viewers will find interesting, they should be giving an accurate picture of what is happening. We all know how, for example, YouTube’s and Facebook’s engagement algorithms turn your online world into echo chambers. The traditional media has the same problem when they chase engagement at the expense of the whole truth.

For sure there’s a balancing act necessary. The media of course can’t ignore what people want, but they can choose to be a force for truth and still have a viable business. They can choose not to dramatically overexaggerate things that don’t affect us, and they can choose to sprinkle doses of reality and boring stuff amid the drama.
by seanhunter | 2025-12-22 15:41:44+00:00
> The assumption is that the SNR of logical (error-corrected) qubits is near infinite, and that such logical qubits can be constructed from noisey physical qubits.

This is an argument I've heard before and I don't really understand it[1]. I get that you can make a logical qubit out of physical qubits and build in error correction so the logical qubit has perfect SNR, but surely if (say the number of physical qubits you need to get the nth logical qubit is O(n^2) for example, then the SNR (of the whole system) isn't near infinite it's really bad.

[1] Which may well be because I don't understand quantum mechanics ...
by choffee | 2025-12-22 15:42:08+00:00
Feels like this is a reasonable compromise for them. They can release the source for their machines while still remaining in enough control to allow them to stay in business. It's similar to the Business Source licenses that we have seen from software companies recently. Not Open Source or Free but better than a lot of other manufactures. Does this leave the Voron as the only Open and Free design that is being built in quantities?
by rovr138 | 2025-12-22 15:42:17+00:00
> Finally, it should be noted that this doesn’t work in ZSH, and if you’re using ZSH, you probably are a bit more of a terminal enthusiast than the average person. And if the enthusiasts can’t use this in their favourite shell, it’s less likely that they will use it in the scripts they make.

Important thing to note here is, ZSH is the default on macOS.
by wiseowise | 2025-12-22 15:42:33+00:00
> Wait until those people hit a snafu and have to debug something in prod after they mindlessly handed their brains and critical thinking to a water-wasting behemoth and atrophied their minds.

You've just described typical run of the mill company that has software. LLMs will make it easier to shoot yourself in the foot, but let's not rewrite history as if stackoverflow coders are not a thing.
by dpark | 2025-12-22 15:42:51+00:00
People get extremely frustrated and upset about arbitrary rules, especially when they are imposed inconsistently.

From the talk page it seems like exactly three people were involved in deciding if this was worth deleting and they indicated they could not find evidence of notability. Meanwhile I found a Register article about PerlMonks in minutes and there are pointers here to Google Scholar references as well.

When the bar for deletion is “a couple of people who didn’t try very hard didn’t find notability” is it any wonder that there’s pushback? This feels entirely arbitrary.
by QaysHaji | 2025-12-22 15:42:55+00:00
Hi HN — I built Runiq: a local “sovereign runtime” that lets LLM agents (Claude Desktop, local Llama, etc.) use hardened tools to interact with your OS, instead of executing arbitrary shell/Python.

Runiq implements Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) and exposes a small set of controlled capabilities:

Stealth Chromium browser for scraping/automation (aimed to survive common bot checks)

File operations and local workflow tools

Human-in-the-loop security: native OS popups block risky actions (write/delete/etc.) until you approve

It ships as a single static Go binary (no venv/daemon). It’s localhost-only and auditable; if you pair it with a local model, nothing leaves your machine. There’s also an optional Python adapter to use the same tool interface with OpenAI/Groq/LangChain-style agents.

Repo: https://github.com/qaysSE/runiq

I’d love feedback on the MCP implementation in Go, and on the security/UX tradeoffs for permission-gated agent actions.
by lambdaone | 2025-12-22 15:42:56+00:00
Arguably, all we do is something similar to hallucination; it's just that hundreds of millions of years have selected against brains that generate internal states that lead to counter-survival behavior.

I recently almost fell on a tram as it accelerated suddenly; my arm reached out for a stanchion that was out of my vision, so rapidly I wasn't aware of what I was doing before it had happened. All of this occurred using subconscious processes, based on a non-physical internal mental model of something I literally couldn't see at the moment it happened. Consciousness is over-rated; I believe Thomas Metzinger's work on consciousness (specifically, the illusion of consciousness) captures something really important about the nature of how our minds really work.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-22 15:43:07+00:00
Yeah it is a fair point that runtime errors are sometimes easier to understand than compile time errors. They're still a much worse option of course - for the many reasons that have been already discussed - but maybe compile-time errors could be improved by providing an example of the kind of runtime error you could get if you didn't fix it (and it hypothetically was dynamically typed). Perhaps that would be easier to understand for some people or some errors.

There's a (Curry-Howard) analogue here with formal verification and counter-examples.
by akersten | 2025-12-22 15:43:56+00:00
Sort by weighted upvotes vs time decay is an algorithm. You can review the psedocode here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013

Note that there is also "censorship" (!) - `gag_factor` - even in this free thought paradise. The lesson is that no matter your scale, suppressing certain content is necessary to prevent low quality posts and spam from turning your site into a swamp.

Correct, it is not personalized. So we need a different word than 'algorithmic'. People keep saying that word when they want to "ban" a certain kind of math. But they should at least be particular about what they don't like (sort your friends' posts chronologically is also a personalized algorithm, after all..)
by gck1 | 2025-12-22 15:44:19+00:00
When they launched Discover Weekly thing, I used to add at least 1 track from it to my library - it was insanely good. Now it's all junk - not even close to what I listen to.

They also removed a lot of discovery features - Playlist Radio - for example. And they still do have some version of it on the backend, but you have to go through some weird mechanisms to trigger it - like play the last song in playlist, wait till it ends (or rewind) and you get the playlist radio. But it's also a crippled version of it - prefers playing the exact same popular songs for some reason.

Then they released this DJ thing, which is laughably bad. No Spotify, I don't want someone talking to me with useless information in between songs. Who though that was a good idea? Who actually uses that?

There hasn't been a change in Spotify in last 7 years or so that wasn't negative.
by freedomben | 2025-12-22 15:44:36+00:00
At least for me:

* I don't trust Swift on Android to be well supported, either now, or in the future. I would never want to rely on something Appley on a non Apple platform

* I dislike Swift and find it to be an unpleasant language. This is personal pref of coures, just like preferred flavors of ice cream

* Dart looks interesting and like a good option, though I don't want to learn a new language and Dart doesn't appeal to me because it feels like they took javascript and made it more like Java, and Java is in about the middle of my list of preferred langs (see above comment about preferred flavors of ice cream). Flutter is a killer app though and might be enough to sway me.

* Kotlin is a nice language, though not nice enough to where I'd want to use it outside of Android. The ties to the JVM-world tooling/dependency management is very offputting to me.

Overall I have a strong desire to use my preferred language(s) for everything if possible, so things like this are quite attractive to me for that reason. Now that said, when I write Android apps right now, what I typically use is Kotlin or Java because I've found I always end up having to write at least part of the app in those, so might as well keep it simple and consistent in one lang. But I'm always on the lookout!
by jmye | 2025-12-22 15:45:20+00:00
Agree with both - it's a shitty thing for the company to do.

But I do not understand why someone who's so passionate about the issues raised in the post would do something as silly as post this on a Meta-owned property at all. The end result is blindingly obvious, and anyone who doesn't expect exactly this is living in a bizarre fantasy-world, where social media (and moreso Meta-owned social media) isn't inherently evil and run/maintained by evil people (and yes, I understand the irony).
by numpad0 | 2025-12-22 15:45:36+00:00
The tubes start generating X-rays above 5kV or whatever(some docs say 15kV), and you need leaded(literally Pb melted in) glass for the screen to block it, unless you could find a substitute material(Sn nanoparticles or something) or you're fine with <5kV brightness for the tube whatever that amounts to. So you can't pitch it as a nicely eco friendly product, and the glass can't be easily recycled(Pb removed from glass).

Otherwise they're not THAT complicated. They're a lot like lightbulbs. Certainly not as exotic as LCDs.
by mintflow | 2025-12-22 15:45:54+00:00
recently I just noticed github trying(but failed) to charge the self host runners, I find a afternoon to setup a mini PC to install freeBSD and gitaea on it, then setup tailscale to let it only listen on the 100.64.x.x IP address.

Since I do not make this node public accessable, so no worry for AI web crawlers:)
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-12-22 15:46:11+00:00
What the hell does GTM even mean?

How many industries can prosper by defining what the customer should get and have an endless stream of demand in response?

Isn’t GTM just “business 101”? I really don’t understand how people can use the term and not realize they are screaming “we’re going to do the basics of what we should have been doing all along”.

Imagine if software developers championed a “logic” based approach.
by dns_snek | 2025-12-22 15:46:18+00:00
You shouldn't be surprised. Almost every single story involving the EU and Apple that I've seen over the past few years was full of low effort responses and generic rants about the EU by people who clearly haven't read past the title, especially when it comes to fines.

Take your pick: "EU is fining us to finance itself", "EU can't innovate", "I can't believe that EU is fining Apple for [gross misunderstanding of the situation]"
by ghaff | 2025-12-22 15:46:21+00:00
The topic/area definitely matters a lot. Certainly politics is a big one that generates a lot of strong opinions and emotions. Some things in open source (see systemd--at least at one time) do as well but the blast radius is probably a lot smaller even for people who are regular speakers and writers in certain tech circles.

As was mentioned in another comment, there have almost certainly been more cases where women have had serious/scary issues than men.
by dudu24 | 2025-12-22 15:46:45+00:00
I'm tired of this pseudointellectual reductionist response. It's not "literally by accident" when they're trained to do something, as if we are not also machines that generate next actions based on learned neural weights and abstract (embedded) representations. Your issue is with semantics rather than content.

Obviously "hallucinate" and "lie" are metaphors. Get over it. These are still emergent structures that we have a lot to learn from by studying. But I suppose any attempt by researchers to do so should be disregarded because Person On The Internet has watched the 3blue1brown series on Neural Nets and knows better. We know the basic laws of physics, but spend lifetimes studying their emergent behaviors. This is really no different.