skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: ChatTTS – A Conversational Text-to-Speech Model for Lifelike Dialogue
As a developer working on conversational AI systems, I've always been fascinated by the potential of text-to-speech technology to bring virtual assistants and chatbots to life. However, during my work on a voice-enabled chatbot project last year, I encountered a frustrating limitation – most existing TTS models lacked the natural expressiveness and nuance required for truly engaging dialogue.

The available models often sounded robotic, struggled with proper intonation and prosody, and lacked the ability to convey subtle elements like laughter, pauses, and interjections – all crucial components of natural conversation. I realized there was a pressing need for a text-to-speech model specifically designed for dialogue scenarios, one that could capture the nuances of human speech and deliver a truly lifelike conversational experience.

Driven by this realization, I embarked on an ambitious journey to develop ChatTTS, a conversational text-to-speech model tailored for dialogue applications. Over the course of nine months, and after overcoming numerous challenges in data acquisition, model architecture, and fine-tuning, I finally succeeded in creating a powerful TTS system that could synthesize natural and expressive speech, supporting multiple languages and speakers.

ChatTTS boasts several key features that set it apart:

1. Conversational TTS: Optimized for dialogue-based tasks, enabling natural and expressive speech synthesis with support for multiple speakers, facilitating interactive conversations.

2. Fine-grained Control: The ability to predict and control fine-grained prosodic features like laughter, pauses, and interjections, adding an extra layer of realism.

3. Improved Prosody: Surpassing most open-source TTS models in terms of prosody, delivering a truly lifelike experience.

I'm thrilled to finally share Chat TTS with the Hacker News community. I invite you all to try it out and provide feedback. Let's revolutionize the way we interact with conversational AI!
> if I use anything wiki like

Why would you lose grades when Wikipedia tells you „there is www.f35.com“, but not when someone on HN tells you „there is www.f35.com“?
> Please note that using slash at the end of the tag is not supported in HTML: `<link rel="stylesheet" href="base.css" />`

It is supported in HTML5.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#start-tag...

> ... if the element is one of the void elements ... then there may be a single U+002F SOLIDUS character (/) (at the end of the element, before the closing bracket)

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#void-elem...

> Void elements: area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, link, meta, source, track, wbr

--

> This is why you should read proper documentation or specification instead of blindly copying garbage code from Internet.

Physician, heal thyself :)
I don't even need to open the linked article to know that when they say "fake news" they actually mean "facts that go against the current narrative".
i do that in general but i cant find all the details i am searching for example about supercruise, there is just a little part about the engines, so also no links to follow, but thanks for the tipp
No, that’s a luxury
This is how you shut down people from starting a business unless they are super rich. Liability first thinking is gumming up the gears of society.
Interesting perspective!

For us Russians, collective memory for almost all people starts with post-WWII era, usually 1950s. Old generation rarely told me about what was before - although i am old enough to vaguely remember some of my ancestors born around 1895 and spent a lot of time talking to those born around 1910.

One might think that it was about memories being overly heavy - indeed there was Commie and for some, also Nazi terror, hunger, and the stuff - before ~1956 an average Soviet starved at least for several weeks a year, and before ~1951, once in a few years, some relative always died of starvation - that was the norm, but real reason as i understand it, wasn't that. The reason is that there was almost nothing to tell. These people were illiterate peasants living very local-minded lives, without formal jobs (kolkhoz serfdom), without electricity or money, and with very little worldview apart from primitive propaganda pushed once in a while by visiting agitators.

Before WWII, there was almost nothing any of them could tell: only thing that could happen, was repressions, but those to who they happened, couldn't tell anything - they never returned - and their relatives usually forgot of them because it was too scary to remember. Apart from that, it was all the same - endless toil on a small plot of infertile land to produce as much food as possible to avoid kids dying next spring, and keep as much of it from kolkhoz eyes, and slacking off at kolkhoz forced work as much as possible to keep more energy to work on your own plot. Never leaving the village, unless forced out of it by Nazis or Commies (actually happened to my relatives - one day they were forced out of the village and it was razed, moved ~20km away, and left in the field, being issued some formal "compensation" in worthless money - had to dig a new earthhouse). That's the kind of stories i heard.

I can understand why they were not keen on telling them.

Stories of later generations had a lot more of "story" in them and i can understand they lived an actual life.
That’s like saying communism works because all you have to do is distribute the wealth equally right?

It may look good on paper but in practice it always becomes a target and it’s considered a failure if you miss one. If it doesn’t work in practice the theory is wrong.
> Right now we're trying a combination of company-level objectives (not KRs) and Kanban, where the teams just work on the next most important objective they can.

Aha. That’s an interesting take I never would’ve thought of. Thx…
I think the time it would take me to remember the command, look at the man page to see if I had it right, and then do the command, I could have done the three mv commands

mv zork mytemp

mv advent zork

mv mytemp advent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_uranium

Natural uranium is a mix of 0.7% U-235 and 99.3% U-238. U-235 has a half-life of 700 million years and a spontaneous fission (SF) probability of 7e-11. U-238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years and a SF probability of 5.4e-7. So on average it takes 6 times longer for a U-238 to decay than U-235, but when it does it has a probability to do it by spontaneous fission that is 7000 times higher. Add to that that U-238 is 141 times more plentiful in natural uranium, and you get that you can completely ignore U-235 when it comes to spontaneous fission.

1 kg of Uranium is about 4.2 moles. Each has 6e23 atoms (Avogadro's number), that's a total of about 25e23 atoms. Every year about 1 in 4.5 billion of those will decay one way or another. That's 5.5e14 decay events. The probability of spontaneous fission is 5.4e-7, so basically 10 million of these decay events are SF. There are 32 million seconds in a year, so I am getting about 0.3 SF events per second. On average a fission event generates about 2.5 neutrons, so that's close to 1 neutron per second.

They are getting 10 per second. They are nuclear engineers and I'm just a guy who knows how to multiply and how to read wikipedia. Most likely their number is correct.
If anything this suggests openai trained Sky on more than one Hollywood actress voice.
Part of me thinks this was always a publicity stunt - he never expected the rocket to succeed. And now that the possibilty of it succeeding looks increasingly likely, he's backing out. SpaceX's timelines have always been highly optimistic, as he would have been well aware of when he signed up.
Journalism is an interesting one as, in a way, the most important thing isn’t being correct/accurate/imformative etc, it’s getting clicks

AI is already very good at writing clickbait nonsense, and if an AI can pump that out faster than a real person can, it’s game over
It’s significantly easier to output an integer than a JSON with a key value structure where the value is an integer and everything else is exactly as desired
Windows: A Software Engineering Odyssey
Thanks a lot for commenting and pointing me to the blog post. I do think I've seen it before but forgot about it. I've re-read it now and it's a great read!

From what I understand you decided to do sharding in the application code, and given the current state I think that makes total sense and I'd have probably done the same.

Part of my point with the blog post is that there is a built-in horizontal sharding solution in vanilla Postgres (partitioning + FDW), but it's currently badly lacking when it comes to cluster management, schema changes, distributed transactions, and more. If we put work into it, perhaps we tip the balance and the next successful Notion clone could choose to do it at the DB level.
A commute of 2-3 hours means you have lots of time to meditate or read, if that's something you want to do.
If CEO is AI, who is responsible for failure?
Show HN: I made an NPM Package to encrypt big files in the browser w/Web Crypto
If the authors happen across this

"We work to improve the API management space with open-source software, increasing the digitalization of legacy services and companies"
This comment does not exist.
The law says "images, photos, videos and links". What about simple encrypted or password protected zip files?

As far as I know, most messaging platforms allow you to send regular files too. Wouldn't "the bad guys" simply use that as a loophole and continue with their day?

I know the real reason behind the law isn't to actually protect children, but, you know...
nbb: Scripting in Clojure on Node.js Using SCI
Yes. Prosecution should perform exhaustive search thru company policies, internal communications and processes during discovery to get the the bottom of this.
We can definitely destroy the version of AI CEO that made the bad decisions and replace it with a „better“ version.
Let me posit an ad-hoc theory built on our anchoring bias in regards to price and our inability to think in terms of inflation/hyperbolic discounting:

tl;dr - Once a cheap alternative is on the market, us frugal folks can't imagine paying for what was once the default and only option, distorting our understanding of what constitutes good quality

* He says buying a new sofa of the same quality today would cost upwards of $5000, and he paid more than $3000 for it in 1999. He paid $1000 now to reupholster.

* Using US inflation data which is easier to access, $3000 in '99 is around $5600 today - so practically unchanged.

* What's changed? Since the emergence of cheap badly-built furniture, it now _feels_ profligate to spend $5000 on a sofa, when in 1999 it was (hypothetically) the only option.

* Instead people feel better buying a (say) $800 IKEA sofa every 5 years, which over 25 years is the $4000 nominal he has spent on his own sofa. It _feels_ much less painful to give IKEA $800 now than to give your local artisan sofa maker $5000. Who profits from that? You moreso than the local artisan.

* It's true that the middle has been hollowed out - I can't find a well-made $1500 sofa, but on the plus side the less affluent have access to cheap sofas, and the affluent but frugal whinge and buy a new sofa every few years.

I'm squarely in the frugal bracket, if not affluent...
> We'll have a core directable glued-together stack that can take instruction like "make me a shopify site to sell cute mini traffic cones that are oscar-the-grouch themed, but make sure they don't violate any copyright themes, make me 100 ads to sell them" by the end of 2024

lol I’d be VERY surprised if they can do that by the end of 2030.

1. You need relationships with manufacturers to do that

2. You need to validate the physical results prior to a full run

3. These LLMs have no idea about copyright and even the best ones tell you stuff that isn’t remotely true.

These models predict the next construct (phrase, word, etc.) and they’re decent at it. They’ll eventually do images, with text, hopefully both actually relate and make sense. I’d give that 2 years really to refine.

They’re really good predictors, but when you start mixing things and gluing 4-5 things together, the error rate grows exponentially and the understanding equally had a massive drop.
Until restaurants are forced to catch up with minimum wage laws, I am more than happy to tip. I need the money less than the people who made the food or whatever for me. Despite this, I'd prefer to patron no-tip businesses because it is more likely that the employees working them are treated and compensated more fairly.
Awesome recap! Thank you
Well it makes no difference but i can't find enough details on wikipedia, f.e about Supercruising with the Gripen-E wikipedia or Saab only mention the engines itself a little bit, so no "ww.f35.com" to follow there, that is my problem.
see also dan ellis' webpages at columbia and the most excellent librosa.
Enclosures to Defend F-15Es from Drone Attacks Eyed at Seymour Johnson AFB
Hey,

Thanks for the feedback and great suggestions. It's something I will try to implement in the coming days.

p.s. I tried to make my affiliation clear - I wrote "I’m the founder" in the original comment above :)
https://archive.ph/EWaBS
It’s the easiest thing for intelligence agencies to scan all your messages. They just need to submit a few million fake “content id” hashes and automatically your phone will share the images that match. Nobody can tell if content id has is of a photo of a document or a photo of a person it’s just a 256byte hash. This is so easily abused. I bet the way it’s implemented it doesn’t have enough resolution to read text so one evil content id hash will match any photo of any document or screenshot you have taken. So essentially your WhatsApp client will send every screenshot of a text document to nsa.
Thanks, I'm grateful for this useful feedback.
I'm not a doctor/chemist, but as far as I understand, the polymerization of urushiol renders it hard and inert. Your thread discusses contact with raw urushiol as found in poison ivy, cashew sap (and apparently mangos) which is indeed known to cause allergic rashes in most humans. I'm not saying that kintsugi is definitely food-safe, but it's an important distinction.

Side-note: I did get some raw urushi on my fingers while working on this project, but nothing happened. Perhaps I'm immune.
Circle C++ with memory safety
I'd bet it's the same job more often than not.

For example, when I go to a restaurant serving steaks, the job isn't significantly different from one steak to another, but the cost can be significantly different.

Preparing a ribeye vs. a t-bone vs. a sirloin isn't all that different, but you can expect the prices on each to vary wildly, mostly due to the cost of materials. Rationally, neither the wait staff nor the chef really deserve more of a tip for one vs. the other, but the convention demands it.
It would
I am asking because I never tried this. Isn't it better to earn more and take unpaid leaves than having 2 more weeks of paid leaves? 2 weeks of extra unpaid leave = 1/2 a month's pay, meaning you could afford to do it if you earn 4% more yearly.
> "just took over a big functional company and made it continue do what it did before" is a funny way to describe the tear Apple has been on for the last ~15 years.

Compared to Facebook, yes Apple just continued doing what they did under Steve while Facebook went from being a small private site for Harvard students to being a global tech giant. I don't see why you would equate those two.
Yes, those pesky regulations. Now you have to have a several exit doors if you want to open a nightclub. It keep it for the rich people.
Nvidia RTX Remix to Open Source Creator Toolkit
I have the feeling that the future big steps in AI will not be related to data
AI are not people and can not run for office. Only a person can be an MP. An AI can only be an MP in the sense that a human can run on a platform of always doing what a particular AI tells them to do. Most MPs always follow the whip, so this should actually be quite familiar territory for the kinds of people that become MPs.
Why did you write that response to me and not to the person above me? I didn't say Tim Cook didn't do anything, keeping the company on course isn't doing nothing. The person above me said he did nothing of value, not me.

But note that keeping the company on course isn't the same thing as building the company and setting the course.

Edit: Also there are a lot of people who can keep a company on course, there are much much fewer who can build a company.
Ligra – an open source image projector based off of flea marked parts
Software engineer here trying to start a startup.

The amount of business advice GPT-4 has given me is immeasurable.

I'd say I'm getting 10x more non technical business advice in multiple areas than I'm getting with the technical stuff.

Kind of like an AI CEO advising me on what to do next.
Unnecessarily cynical reading. If the nightclub was certified to have sufficient egress by the relevant qualified authorities, then that should be enough for the business owner to not have to worry about being liable for it.

Similarly, if a food truck uses a point of sale service, the food truck owner should not also have to be knowledgeable about evaluating the point of sale’s database security. Their job is to make food.

If the government wants to protect people’s data, then it should set the standards or certifications for the vendors (and/or go after the people who misuse the data), not lay that liability on the vendor’s customers.
Please host ut
It*
How Your Voice Changes as You Age
I'm amazed at how many people she met. It was my first PyCon and I was happy with trying to chat with like 5 people. The conference was huge and very physically and socially exhausting.
Another vote for XMPP with OMEMO here. I use it my wife, family, and a few friends and haven't heard any complaints yet[1] (aside from the lack of stickers, which are apparently important).

[1]: But like I said in another thread, who knows if they would directly complain to me.
> not making cheap crap. You can find some way to disincentivize making cheap stuff. Ban IKEA.. etc.

As I type my keyboard is sitting on an Ikea desk. It's cheap, it's simple, it does the job and I'm happy with it.

Cheap stuff is not the problem. Crappy cheap stuff (and crappy expensive stuff!!!) is.

For example, I have two radios in my house that I don't use? Why because the crappy power leads have frayed and I can only use them with batteries.

Or again, I bought a kettle 2 years ago that stopped working after 6 months.
Reminds me of a friend that married a German. In order to become himself a German citizen he had to pass an integration exam with questions about history, law and culture. He passed the exam, his German partner tried the same set of questions and failed it.
https://archive.ph/kKTgR
Hey hey, the AI won’t take 35M parachutes (Boeing) when it gets fired.
"Why should I pay for that?" crippling good policy is one of our biggest impediments in the US
It really can't. It can finish some text though that infers the most likely completion taking into account tokens in the prompt and generated content.
Hi,

There's no way to fine tune at present, but it does pretty well with all but the scrawliest of handwriting out of the box.

btw I wrote to the email in your profile, not sure if you got it.
Really nice to see no-GIL Python become closer and closer to reality.
I'm reminded of what happened to Instant Brands. They made a series of popular electric pressure cookers, but instead of remaining a successful medium-sized business, they took on a lot of debt in an attempt to expand, then went bankrupt when interest rates increased. Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36310733

It's disappointing to see, because the products were genuinely good.
I my experience, measurable goals is a pipe dream.

It promotes menial tasks like "take a 2 day course in React". "Clean my desk twice a week" "write 10 unit tests" over "spending 100% of my time creating value for customers"
If your small company (150 is small!) has groups that need to work together but have OKRs so orthogonal that they don’t, something is seriously wrong with the OKR implementation or the culture.

That kind of “not my OKR” nonsense shouldn’t happen in a 15,000 person company, let alone a company where everyone’s OKR’s are, what, two steps from the corporate ones?
Where do you propose the future AI influencers of the world are going to get their inputs? How can they make content so good that it replaces human creators, if those human creators aren’t even expressing themselves? It will be entirely disconnected from culture and therefore not be compelling to viewers in the first place.

The AI-replacement theory just doesn’t line up with how online trends and social behavior actually works. Creators become popular because they are relatable, are charismatic, etc. not because they have a formula that can be replaced by a machine.
Absolutely off topic, but does remind me of a Mexican movie ‘I Am No Longer Here’ that I’d seen not long ago was astonishingly good for something I hadn’t heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_No_Longer_Here
> They couldn't get Johansson so they set out to find something similar and found it.

> So what?

You can't just do that though. There's at least two cases of legal precedent where companies had to pay out millions to artists, though musicians in these cases, for soundalikes after they couldn't negotiate originals.

Midler v. Ford Motor Co, 1988 (won on appeal)

Waits v. Frito-Lay, 1992 (won and won appeal)

I won't comment further since I'm certainly not a legal expert and this is going to be settled by the parties or will be determined by a court. I mostly wanted to mention "Tom Waits sued Doritos"
My experience of the UK (resident) and the US (tourist use of public transit in both central California and the Newark-Boston strip), is that the UK system is wildly better than the USA system.

I needed to show a passport (perhaps any photo ID would have worked, but still WTF?) to get the train from Davis to Sacramento, the trains were not particularly frequent, and that's the equivalent distance of Petersfield to Portsmouth & Southsea:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Davis,+California,+USA/Sacra...

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Petersfield,+UK/Portsmouth+a...
When will the shaolin temple start teaching rsa and transformers ? When Kwai chat kane can come save the day ?
Looking into layouts may have been a "waste of time" for you, but it definitely wasn't for me or some colleagues. I learned to type on a German QWERTZ layout on a terrible laptop keyboard, where one shift key didn't really work. I accustomed myself to a terrible technique which did hurt my hands after some years.

I tried improving my technique, but wasn't really successful - learning a new layout on a radically different keyboard was easier for me than changing old habits. So I created my own layout for a split orthogonal keyboard, based on neo 3.

I took about two weeks to get to my previous speed. Until today, I did not get much faster - and I don't really need to, I can type about as fast as I think. But a) it's much more comfortable, especially when typing code. Most diagrams are rolls and I don't need to stretch to any number row. And b) I didn't expect it, but it took some mental load of me. I don't need to think about the correct bracket or anything.

So yeah, looking at a new layout to improve speed (especially at plain text) is seldom successful, but there can be great benefits.
Unfortunately most of the world's population do not pursue longer education. We'll have wars over water and arable land in the near future.
Right; unfortunately the CEO tweeted
The workers, just like now.

The real question is who gets the bonus and the golden parachute?
My first, too. I went ahead and joined the PSF on the strength of the experience.