MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by laszbalo | 2026-01-16 11:28:24+00:00
Not sure about macOS or Windows, but on Linux Firefox uses speech-dispatcher, which is a server, and Firefox is the client. Speech-dispatcher then delegates the text to the correct TTS backend. It basically runs a shell command, either sending the text to a TTS HTTP server using curl, or piping it to the standard input of a TTS binary.

Speech-dispatcher commonly uses espeak-ng, which sounds robotic but is reportedly better for visually impaired users, because at higher speeds it is still intelligible. This allows visually impaired users to hear UI labels more quickly. For non visually impaired users, we generally want natural sounding voices and to use TTS in the same way we would listen to podcasts or a bedtime story.

With this system, users are in full control and can swap TTS models easily. If a model is shipped and, two weeks later, a smaller, newer, or better one appears, their work would become obsolete very quickly.
by delaminator | 2026-01-16 11:28:27+00:00
Every $1 taken by illegal workers is $1 stolen from Americans.

Every $1 not paid in tax by illgal workers and their employers is $1 stolen from Americans.

They do not pay for themselves. They are a net negative on the economy.

I am not being sarcastic, I am using analogy. It is even worse by your model, you invite people in my home and force me to cook for them.
by klondike_klive | 2026-01-16 11:29:09+00:00
Roald Dahl has been great for the whole family, we do a lot of driving and listen to them in the car. We are very picky about the narrator's voice. Best so far have been The Witches (Miranda Richardson), Matilda (Kate Winslet) and the BFG (David Walliams - I don't like him personally but he is a great reader). Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a disappointment, the narrator garbles and throws away the lines.

Also David Tennant reading the How To Train Your Dragon series. He is a superb reader with an amazing range. Before he hit the big time with Dr Who he did a lot of radio.

We've also had family members record stories and I've put them onto cards. We gave my son a dictaphone to record his own stuff. He would do great long sagas of mayhem and battle, but he's lost interest in recent months.
by tim333 | 2026-01-16 11:29:26+00:00
The president is kind of impressionable and flips his position depending on who he talked to last. The Russians have an influence either directly or through others he speaks to and would love him to invade Greenland as it would break NATO and legitimise their whole strategy of being able to invade and annex their neighbours of the basis of some bs excuse. The Russians really want NATO to collapse and to take back Ukraine and the Baltics. Or at least Putin's lot do.

The whole rationale is quite Russian in style - they have to invade Ukraine because it was an existential threat - it never was - they have to denazifi it - it's run by a democratically elected jewish comedian. And similarly Trump has to take Greenland before Russia or China does - there's no way that was happening. The whole thing is rather mafia style in that the reasons are ridiculous as a way of showing power, like we need money to protect you in that case.

That said the US has been interested in acquiring Greenland for ages.
by grunder_advice | 2026-01-16 11:30:26+00:00
Propaganda always builds on real greviences that the electorate has.

It's good that you bring up housing. There are, to my knowledge no political parties that have made housing their top agenda item. They only use housing as a talking point to serve their message. For example the extreme right will just say, immigrants are occupying all the housing supply. The extreme left will say it's just capitalism that is to blame.
by well_ackshually | 2026-01-16 11:30:52+00:00
Please go to court using only ChatGPT as legal defense, I'd love to see it, it's going to make for great entertainment. The judge a little bit less so.

You can criticise the hourly cost of lawyers all you like, and it should be a beautiful demonstration to people like you that no, "high costs means more people go into the profession and lower the costs" is not and has never been a reality. But to think that any AI could ever be efficient in a system such common law, the most batshit insane, inefficient, "rethoric matters more than logic" system is delusional.
by tomaytotomato | 2026-01-16 11:31:11+00:00
Indeed, it makes you wonder how prevalent this psychological malaise is in the world of teaching and academia.

I don't want any future children of mine, to have self loathing/pessimism or "woe is me" feelings taught by teachers or lecturers.

Self reflection yes, abstract and critical thinking yes, expressing feelings yes.

No - "sorry the world is burning, I think you should be sad about this and maybe reconsider being an Engineer".
by itopaloglu83 | 2026-01-16 11:31:44+00:00
Mostly legacy industrial machines that need some additional software for telemetry, scheduling, automation etc.

These machines are likely to live at least another 10-15 years and even the brand new ones being sold today uses Windows 7.

Modern languages and frameworks proceed and leave these old systems behind, but everything from our infrastructure to manufacturing capacity that exists runs on legacy systems, not modern computers. The cost of replacing the computers is usually more than the machine itself.
by raincole | 2026-01-16 11:31:45+00:00
> LLMs are a spectacular demolition of that premise.

It really isn't. While I personally think the Universal Grammar theory is flawed (or at least Chomsky's presentation is flawed), LLM doesn't debunk it.

Right now we have machines that recognized faces better than humans. But it doesn't mean humans do not have some innate biological "hardware" for facial recognition that machines don't possess. The machines simply outperform the biological hardware with their own different approach.

Also, I highly recommend you express your ideas with your own words instead of letting an LLM present them. It's painfully obvious.
by watwut | 2026-01-16 11:31:47+00:00
Unchecked groups like you describe and large part of reason why so many people checked out first time they could. The in person contact they were forced into was not helping them or was actively harming them. People escaped - by leaving those bullies and going elsewhere. It is, frankly, ridiculous to claim that those people found "crowd to cheer them". They either found better healthy place of were lonely. You are describing a playground full of bullies and frankly parents who enabled it are equal assholes.

Following may sound like bad faith, but I 100% mean it. Now, former bullies complain they are lonely as others used the option to leave. Those others may be lonely too, but they are still better off then being degraded.

> Voiceless people must find their voice. The responsibility is their's. The crowd will not come to the rescue of the person who won't stand up for themselves and make their way in life.

Bullies are responsible for bullying. Punishing bullies is necessary part of the solution. The responsibility is not just on victims. And if you push the responsibility on victim, stop complaining that the victim left.
by barrell | 2026-01-16 11:32:41+00:00
Thank! Regarding the translation, Phrasing is Bring Your Own Content. In my initial launch, I used an official translation for the demo, but apparently chose poorly haha

For languages without the Roman script - you can enter in qwerty (or configure it to work with any script). When you tap on a word, it shows you the phonetics; and if you tap on the shapes feature you can see that information for every word at the same time.

The app will be default display everything in its native script intentionally. With a bit of curiosity, you’ll pick up the script soon enough. Normally within a few weeks for easier-from-latin scripts like Greek and Cyrillic, to a few months for harder scripts (although you’ll pick up the basics still in a few weeks).

For Japanese and Chinese, I have more suggestions though. Which language(s) are you learning?
by whntheduvscry | 2026-01-16 11:33:17+00:00
> The terminal trauma of a program occurs when it is challenged by entropy beyond its capacity to adjust.

This seems true.

In my experience, these things that happened to kill programs could be considered entropy:

- New (e.g. hardware / software / code / people / focus)

- Money (e.g. actual or perceived infusion of it / actual or perceived lack of it / focus changed)

- Loss (e.g. someone or something left / was injured / died / was destroyed / was deleted / was corrupted)

And I think that if you have a system that contains risk due to entropy, then even a planned event resulting in success is entropic, e.g.:

- I plan a sunset for X software.

- There is risk of an asteroid or sudden epidemic that would thwart that plan.

- The “dice are rolled”, and the sunset happens because the asteroid and epidemic didn’t happen.

- Therefore, the planned sunset occurred due to less than 100% chance. This is still entropic.
by ruraljuror | 2026-01-16 11:33:47+00:00
Is that what happened? In Nexus, Harari looks at this exact same situation: the invention of the printing press, and shows how clergy used it to stoke witch hunts (ahem, misinformation) for decades--if not centuries. It was not for hundreds of years until after the invention of the printing press that we had The Enlightenment. What gave rise to The Enlightenment? Harari argues it is modern institutions.

It's not so simple that we can say "printing press good, nobody speak ill of the printing press."
by daft_pink | 2026-01-16 11:33:50+00:00
As a previous Thinkpad user who moved onto Mac. I think you’re missing the appeal of the Track point and how well they were made to run something like Linux. They had better driver support and were more likely to use intel chip sets then the propriety crap that HP or Dell would sell you. Framework and the Dell XPS line eventually caught up and Linux driver support improved, but this was a huge benefit to owning a think pad.
Show HN: Investor asks "what did engineering ship?"
by inferno22 | 2026-01-16 11:34:20+00:00
Gitmore (https://gitmore.io) – dev visibility for founders and stakeholders.

*What Gitmore does:*

Connect your repos. Ask questions in plain English:
- "What shipped this quarter?"
- "What features launched last month?"
- "Who worked on what?"

Get answers you can actually put in a board deck.

*Automated reports:*

Schedule weekly or monthly summaries to Slack or email:
- Features shipped
- Bugs fixed
- Who contributed

Forward directly to investors. Or let it auto-send before your Monday meeting.

*Slack bot:*

Add it to your workspace. Ask questions from where you already work. No GitHub login needed – for you or your team.

*How it works:*

Webhooks only. Git platforms push metadata – commit messages, PR descriptions, authors, timestamps.

Every event normalized into a structured schema. AI queries structure, not raw text.

*Security:*

Metadata only. We never access source code.

- Encrypted tokens (Fernet)
- Webhook signature verification
- 2FA support

GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket – one dashboard.

Free for 1 repo: https://gitmore.io

How do you currently handle investor questions about engineering progress?
by mvandermeulen | 2026-01-16 11:34:37+00:00
I would rather parenting be the responsibility of parents and I resent the selfish individuals who wilfully burden others with the various costs associated with their demands for safety from their own choices over taking responsibility for themselves. No impact to others is too great for those who insist anything they don’t wish to be exposed to is dealt with at the societal level.

If an at risk child’s parent is unwilling to do what they believe is the right thing by their child then they have failed the child and need to get a grip - confiscate the device or change the wifi password or sleep with the router under your pillow if you have to it’s really not that hard.
by intended | 2026-01-16 11:35:02+00:00
The first weakness of your claim is that it is inherently one of the elite.

You read the works of the cognitive elite, when they support AI. When most people sing its praises, it’s from the highest echelons of white collar work priesthood.

AI is fundamentally a tool of the cognitively trained, and shows its greatest capability in the hands of those capable of assessing its output as accurate at a glance. The more complex the realm, the deeper the expertise to find value in it.

Secondly, linguists are not the sole group espousing the concerns with these tools. I’ve seen rando streamers and normal folk in WhatsApp groups, completely disconnected from the AI elite hating what is being wrought. Students and young adults outright wonder if they will have any worthwhile economic future.

Perhaps it is not a “movement”, but there is an all pervasive fear and concern in the population when it comes to AI.

Finally, position is eerily similar to the dismissal of concerns from mid level and factory floor job workers in the 80s and 90s. It was forgivable given the then prevalent belief that people would be retrained and reabsorbed into equivalently sustaining roles in other new industries.
by anal_reactor | 2026-01-16 11:36:18+00:00
> don't expect to get much praise or monetary reward

Yeah so I figured out that if I have a bullshit busyjob for €100k and my option is to actually start working my ass off and maybe double the salary in absolute best-case scenario, then fuck that. But I admit that my position might be exceptional.

> and you're the first to go as soon as something goes wrong.

I live in Europe so I assume I'd survive even a big fuckup as long as I'm following my manager's orders, even if HQ is American. Also, when there are bigger layoffs, they specifically by law must let go in the order of new hires to old hires, which means that I'm not in immediate danger even if they cut workforce.

The biggest danger is someone discovering that I mostly play video games at work and then giving me lots of useless tasks just to keep me occupied.
by seu | 2026-01-16 11:37:09+00:00
I studied computer science and worked in and around software for a good 20+ years. Then I slowly started realizing how apolitical almost everyone around me in software was. I was fortunate to have had other influences and interests beyond CS, but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech.
I started gravitating out of the software bubble. First, I decided not to work for any company that is directly responsible for things like fossil fuel or finances. Then, away from anything that had to do with incentivizing irresponsible consumption. After a while I realized that it was extremely hard to find any job doing software that was not detrimental in general to the people or the planet. It's sad, but most people don't think about the global consequences of their jobs, or don't want to think much about it.
These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs.
It is ethically almost impossible for me to work again for 99% of software companies.
Show HN: Accordio, AI contracts and payments for freelancers
by deduxer | 2026-01-16 11:37:20+00:00
Been building this with AI since before "vibe coding" was a term. 2 years, mass amounts of credits, 4 complete rebuilds. Lovable → Gemini → GPT-5 → Claude.

Paste meeting notes → AI generates proposal → client accepts → contract auto-generates → client signs → invoice ready. Describe your project once, everything flows from that.

Free to use. Would love feedback.
by roenxi | 2026-01-16 11:37:41+00:00
I enjoy a good whine about how it is all going wrong as much as the next person, but this is a piece of academic arrogance. He's way outside his area of specialisation and his advice seems to be either trivial or bad.

If we just go through the suggestions he makes (slide 35 of 34) - some things that jump out is that life has always been "fucked up" for all of history for pretty much everyone. It isn't a pretence that things are normal, for everyone outside a fairly well off privileged class of professionals that is what normal looks like. The anti-innovation points are not being intellectually honest about the vast improvements in quality and quantity of life that have been driven by innovation. And the "pretence of disinterested scholarship" is a just a too controversial. People are allowed - in a moral sense - to figure out what is true without having their motivations cross examined and having to preconceive every possible implication of their work. Truth is a worthy goal in and of itself.

And for heavens sake, getting arrested or heading to the mountains is just crazy advice. That isn't what he did, he got a good job and spent his time teaching people. I'd watch what he does, not what he says on that one.
by swiftcoder | 2026-01-16 11:37:42+00:00
> but only if the iPhone had equivalent value-add to Nvidia hardware... iPhones are overpriced and underpowered, most people will agree

I'd argue this from almost the opposite direction - there is no value-add for Apple because high-end smartphones exceeded the performance requirements of their user-base generations ago.

Nvidia has a pretty much infinite performance sink here (at least as long as training new LLMs remains a priority for the industry as a whole). On the smartphone side, there just isn't the demand for drastic performance increases - and in practice, many of us would like power and cost reduction to be prioritised instead.
by publicdebates | 2026-01-16 11:37:44+00:00
Definitely, yes. But I figure, the people I'm trying to reach are basically only ever outside when they're talking to the grocery store and back. That's the only time to catch them, if ever. So this is my only shot. I do stand right across the street from the Walgreens too, so I definitely know that I've seen people going there for something quick and back. And many of them pass me regularly, every week. Some of them have stopped and met me and have become "regulars" so to speak, but others have never even made eye contact with me, though I recognize them now. This is of course out of thousands of people, and only on one consistent street corner in Chicago. But we have to start somewhere.
by sfn42 | 2026-01-16 11:38:16+00:00
I asked first. You're the one claiming all this scientific and expert consensus. I'm just talking common sense stuff that pretty much everyone agree on. This is simply the basics of how the body works. I could take some time to find some sources but so could you and you aren't so why should I?

It's pretty clear that you're thoroughly convinced of your own bullshit anyway, if you had any interest at all in finding the truth you'd do some light googling and find that pretty much everything I'm saying is true. I'm not interested in wasting my time finding arbitrary sources for common knowledge that you're just going to ignore anyway.

You don't have to find sources for me, I know they don't exist and if you find anything it's going to be obvious bullshit anyway. There are no serious doctors, nutritionists nor researchers who have any doubt whatsoever regarding what the roles and relationships of food and fat are in the human body. You're obviously just delusional. So good luck with that, I hope you can get past your issues and improve your life some day. Good luck with that.
by ehnto | 2026-01-16 11:38:23+00:00
I think you are pointing out the exact conflation here. The commentor probably didn't steal a bunch of code, because it is possible to reason from first principles and rules and still end up being able to code as a human.

It did not take me reading the entirety of available public code to be kind of okay at programming, I created my way to being kind of okay at programming. I was given some rules and worked with those, I did not mnemonic my way into logic.

None of us scraped and consumed the entire internet, is hopefully pretty obvious, but we still have capabilities in excess of AI.
by lazide | 2026-01-16 11:38:46+00:00
Yes, and not just politics - also day to day life. People would naturally average out with others around them, emotionally.

Not that previously there weren’t real issues (including, quite literally Nazi’s), but it previously required a whole society to go through something like a wide scale traumatic event (like post-WW1 massive external payments, hyperinflation, and associated social problems!) to get the momentum going.

Of course, then it was super dangerous because you had most of a society on the same page and working together. :s

Here, it seems like it’s mostly chaos and navel gazing, with small scale specific targeting of high profile areas, for ratings. At least so far.

The Overton window is shifting, and I’m not looking forward to where it is going so far.
by ben_w | 2026-01-16 11:38:55+00:00
> It's not hundreds but perhaps only a few of a few dozens of them, and defence does not need to be absolute, if a few slip through, it's still OK.

No, it isn't. We can tell by all the forest fires that the USA's power grid has not been maintained. This matters in this context, because we know that a single nuke in the right place can fry most of the nation's systems by EMP. Losing all of it at the same time means losing the industrial capacity to repair it. It also means losing most logistics, not just EVs but also combustion vehicles because of the fuel pumps. It also means losing reliable refrigeration: yes, those could now be directly connected to local PV, but without reliability you get random spoilage.

The estimates from before renewables got interesting were in the order of 50-90% of the US population dying from a single high-altitude EMP, within the first 12 months.
by terminalshort | 2026-01-16 11:39:04+00:00
I dismiss the paper for 3 reasons:

1. It is entirely based on speculation of what is going to happen in the future.

2. The authors have a clear financial (and status based) interest in the outcome.

3. I have a negative opinion of lawyers and universities due to personal experience. (This is, of course, the weakest point by far.)

Speculation on future outcomes is not by itself a bad thing, but when that speculation is formatted like a scientific paper describing an experimental result I immediately feel I am being manipulated by appeal to authority. And the conflict of interest of the authors is about as irrelevant as pointing out that a paper on why Oxycodone is not addictive is paid for by Perdue Pharma. Perhaps Jessica's papers on IP are respected because they do not suffer from these obvious flaws? I owe the author no deference for the quality of her previous writing nor for her status as a professor.
by MarginalGainz | 2026-01-16 11:39:18+00:00
This mirrors my experience trying to integrate LLMs into production pipelines.

The issue seems to be that LLMs treat code as a literary exercise rather than a graph problem. Claude is fantastic at the syntax and local logic ('assembling blocks'), but it lacks the persistent global state required to understand how a change in module A implicitly breaks a constraint in module Z.

Until we stop treating coding agents as 'text predictors' and start grounding them in an actual AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) or dependency graph, they will remain helpful juniors rather than architects.