skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The technology shown here is great - but I think the problem with most open-source voice assistants is that the voices just don't sound as good as the commercial ones. This one in particular appears to have a mixed accent and I'd imagine having it speak in French might produce more natural output. Examples of good voices are of course the OpenAI ones, and a bunch of the Nuance voices (I think the Tesla/Mercedes Me uses the "Ava" voice). Microsoft Azure's voices are decent too.

Even before neural TTS, some commercial TTS solutions were just better than others and a lot of that was the tone and timbre of the speakers. The challenge here, of course, is that

1) Good voice actors wouldn't want to train AI, especially not for free (though you could go far with people who aren't very professional, just committed)

2) You'll only have a limited set of voices, and people might not want that

3) Any really good model will have usage limitations because it sounds like some particular person

I'm wondering whether there are any techniques to create a good "synthetic" voice. Such as being trained on a large population of people, and then being able to generate character-consistent but uncorrelated with any input data output, the same way you can generate photos of people that don't exist but still look real. (I'm aware there's style transfer, but how do you create the style to begin with?)

I think that solving this may or may not be necessary to get a really robust voice AI solution esp one that's open source. Imagine choosing a voice for your AI personal assistant - wouldn't it be nice to be able to press a button and find *your* Alexa, not just *Alexa*?

You could also use that to find and create voices that "reflect your company's brand" or whatever, and not have to worry about changing it all the time when people come and go
Interesting proposal, but can this really be done?

> The ISS be stripped of whatever of the billions of dollars of still-useful hardware and tech it has aboard. This can be auctioned to one of the several new commercial space station facilities, or even, if appropriate, transferred to NASA’s planned lunar orbiting “Gateway” facility.

Are there any such reusable systems aboard the ISS? Can they be removed?

> The station be moved to a medium-high orbit, sealed, and declared a Universal Heritage Site.

What system would be used to bring people and supplies to that orbit? How much would it cost per launch?

And the elephant in the room: How can this project guarantee the safety of the station long term? We already know about cracks appearing and Mir also decayed over time.
> Is your app as large and important as the OS of the device (Chrome/facebook/etc...) you should probably have similar language across devices.

No app is more important than the OS, and certainly not Facebook (which has no business being an app in the first place). I made a choice when I got the OS, and I like developers respecting it and not chase the fad of the day with poor approximations of the native widgets (text fields that do not support standard shortcuts, buttons that do not behave as they should, labels that do not support accessibility features, the list could go on). Even huge apps like Photoshop or Office get this wrong everywhere.

I definitely agree on the default (use the native toolkit), but there are no applications big enough to get their own behaviour. Open Source or hobby applications get a pass if the UI is a bit wonky, but that’s about it.
I dunno why HN likes to hate on angular. Its an amazing, batteries-included framework where you don't have analysis-paralysis from 100 different choices, easy to pick-up and learn, CONSISTENT, quite performant and doesn't break your build from year to year. (or month to month like some other HN-loved frameworks)

React terrifies me. Nothing is consistent. Everything is always a little broken and maintenance is painful. This has been my anecdotal experience doing maintenance work on 3 diff React projects.

Framework of current project uses Vue and Vuetify - and its been a very pleasant experience. It was the easiest framework to pick up and get going amongst the three. (Though Angular is still the most stolidly consistent framework)
I didn't imply that it was, so I'm honestly unsure what your point is. I already stated I'm skeptical of these things, but even as a skeptic I don't believe it's reasonable to expect perfection out of them, especially early in development. That's why we do these things in a limited fashion to begin with.

Humans get confused by construction signage all the time. I'm curious if this was a mistake that would be understandable if a human made it, or if it was an obviously incorrect choice. "Can make the same mistake a human would" isn't ideal, but it's better than "Makes mistakes a human wouldn't."
Makes me proud to be a chud myself
I work for the company that owns/developers Flyway, so I didn't include it in here.

However, for DBAs, they often are doing ad hoc stuff and there is a bit of overhead for FW/LB that they may not want. This is part of a series, just getting people comfortable with tracking their work.
Nice catch, brought to you by Blue Zones LLC (We make money using a fake longevity research to effect "positive change" in communities)
Insights on Co-Founder Dynamics
Chomsky, as did everyone during COVID, revealed his true colors and he certainly did not live up to his own rhetoric over the years.
Design deserves better than Figma AI
Despite having one good customer, it doesn’t sound like it was a promising business? Why would they do better at finding customers on their own?

Instead they licensed the technology to their main customer.
In the world I work in, which is lots of DBAs/sysadmins/db developers, lots don't do anything with VCS when working in databases.

To be fair, lots of developers who make/need database changes still email those to DBAs/sysadmins.
> If you are claiming that "compile-time evaluation" (macros) in Racket works with lists (i.e. the input to a macro is a list, and the output from a macro is a list), that is false. It works with syntax objects

This is a distinction without a difference. From your quote:

> A syntax object contains symbols, lists, and constant values (such as numbers) that essentially correspond to the quoted form of the expression.

If it's important to you that it's actually atoms and lists, well, some of us generalize better than others. But calling it false? Lame. As is your feigned confusion.

> A macro can do anything

Syntax and side effects. Take your pick.

> It seems to me that Racket's macros are strictly a super-set of Zig's comptime.

The difference here is that you have experience with one of these systems. I have experience with both. I doubt further interactions would be informative for either of us.
Here's one little-known tip I learned from Fastmail support some time ago: it's only possible to train the spam filter using their Web UI. If you're using a 3rd-party client, simply moving messages to your spam folder will have no effect on your filter quality. So to truly flag a message as spam, you must switch to your browser, login to FM, and handle it from there.
Fortune 500 companies love to vacuum up all of this IP. It’s a game of “it’s not really viable today, so shelve it and use archaic IP laws to prevent anybody else from using ‘our’ [bought] idea”
This is one of many reasons why we generally don't use the x87 registers anymore.
Braces, maybe. But I've always felt that semicolons at the end of lines were just noise. I can tell it's the end of the line because it's the end of the line. The few cases of ambiguity that happen can be solved by common sense (in the programmer or in the parser).
First of april is not now. So I will seriously discuss the idea:

IMHO, some level of linting should be required.
I would often have to reject lengthy and excellent pull requests (PRs), just because autoformat was not pressed and three instead of four whitespaces are in kotlin code. That annoys everyone.
Python does that right, code won't compile with the three version whitespace, which is easily spotted before the PR.
Why not use your editor to do this? I would never expend mental energy doing something this trivial in 2024.
Thank you (it's my piece)
nobody is concerned with your beliefs lol
(another happy paying customer of Fastmail here)

I am pleasantly surprised that Fastmail has no AI cruft in it especially that Fastmail is founded by one of the godfathers of modern AI, Jeremy Howard.
The documentation notes that reserving braces for blocks makes it very ugly to deal with dict literals, but it’t also terrible for sets, set comprehensions, and dict comprehensions. You’d think they’d choose some other characters than braces in order to avoid this. I seem to recall that RPL used « and » for program blocks.
That's what some of the proposals to tax "unrealized" capital gains try to do, but I don't see how it wouldn't be a huge mess.

I had an economics professor who rather eloquently made the case that we should just make it a legal and fiduciary responsibility of corporations to return money to shareholders - either as dividends or buybacks. They get taxed when the profits are realized, and they can always re-invest their (taxed) earnings right back into the company if they want to.
Does he glow in the dark?
Be a little freaked out about Hurricane Beryl
It's that lots of db people don't understand anything about VCS period. They don't use them. (it's my piece)
Using AI(OpenAI, Anthropic,Gemini) Function Calling to Automate IDE Actions
Maybe the “fun safe math” flag could be used?
Yeah, I always look forward to their new developments. This is similar to Ange's effort with SiliconX to add realistic engine sounds to an electric motorcycle though this appears to be for an electric race car.
Exactly: Like `ew`, but worse.
I would argue this post (and the majority of resultant comments) have demonstrated that programmers staying relevant isn't as difficult as it seems. They were curious about how to pivot, had a forum in which they could ask, and in minutes started getting a wealth of practical, actionable advice from folks who have done the same or similar. The theme so far is that those programming skills aren't obsolete just because you want to change the vertical you work in and learning materials to help you achieve that goal are abundant.
Help me out. I have never understood the logic of anarchy.

So everybody for themselves, ok. But what if two form a group and start oppressing the one who thought he is free.

Group formation seems to be natural way humans organize up to a state level.
And Rocket Men.
My BiL is currently doing his PhD in CS(AI/ML)[1] at a University in the Midlands.

Despite the scholarship/funding, he had to pay a rather heavy NHS fee for my him, my sister and the kids, and this is before the increase.

I keep urging him to to move to the US, he will be done by next year and I think don't think that even if he were to win the global talent visa after that, (and pay the NHS fee again) he would ever earn a salary good enough to cover that, since UK salaries are so low.

He's hesitant, but I don't believe I will have to push hard, if such policies continue.

So stupid, that they (UK) attracted talent, paid for it, and yet might lose it.

____

[1]: He tried to explain it to me, it's something about audio/speech processing and using AI to do something about that, the funding is in a medical context, iirc.
Was summarizing this article for a group of friends who largely met during the Apple II days and wanted to repost a bit of that here:

The optimized code at the end takes 94 nanoseconds to sum an array of 1024 32-bit floating point numbers.

In 94 nanoseconds, our old friend the 1 MHz 6502, would be just starting to consider signaling the memory chips that maybe they ought to try digging up the first byte of the first instruction in the program.

Worth mentioning, that code is entirely dependent on running in cache. Otherwise even the mighty M1 Max in the post would still be stuck waiting on that first memory fetch. DRAM is slow. :-)
Don't be vague, what about his comments on Covid vaccines was statist? As far as I know, he only called for social shunning of the unvaccinated, not state action.

In fact, in this interview, he declares opposition to a vaccine mandate, and doesn't even call for social shunning - he instead suggests that the unvaccinated should take it upon themselves to self-isolate. https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/noam-chomsky-calls-for...
It should be illegal. Unfortunately archaic IP and copyright laws have created this market of build as much junk, hodl the ip until market viable, sue competition that tries to use ‘their’ [unused/under utilized] IP
Spinning them off has a cost too; at least to Goog, potential sales proceeds don't seem to justify the sales costs, so they shut everything down.

Also, it may be slightly profitable when run under the umbrella, but not once you consider the cost of separate administration. That's especially true for things like Google Reader --- that project benefited enormously from living on Google Infra, behind Google Login, and you'd have to do a lot of refactoring and rebuilding to get it to run elsewhere, and then you'd have to get people to create new accounts, etc. And there wasn't much revenue there, certainly not enough to make it a viable standalone business.
Leaked documents prove that Zelensky and his inner circle have had their own network of offshore companies. Two belonging to the president’s partners were used to buy expensive property in London.

The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch dogged by allegations of multi-billion-dollar fraud. The offshores were also used by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the center of London.

The documents also show that just before he was elected, he gifted his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to his business partner — soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of giving up his shares, the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his wife.
Show HN: My real-time network packet traffic visualization tool
People are smart - how about listen to their concerns? Do that before hitting them over the head with a list of 'best practices' and 'desired outcomes'.

I'm starting to come to the opinion that nits are entirely and outright counterproductive in code reviews.

Since I learned about "Ship/Show/Ask" - it's drastically changed my view of code reviews: https://martinfowler.com/articles/ship-show-ask.html; I no longer believe reviewing every change is healthy, seeing the difference of other models I can tell it's actively harmful now. Another good approach IMO is allowing for post-merge reviews, 'ship/show/ask' is better, but why is it written in stone that a code review MUST happen before merge?
Discussed at the time:

Zig-style generics are not well-suited for most languages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33142751 - Oct 2022 (128 comments)
Tested at the moment of installation != test valid 30 years later
I meant that when you focus on one thing you ignore another. Great focus tends to create great blind spots.
unless you're hosting wordpress on a $5 vps, random bot traffic won't affect your website at all. it's just background radiation
"...No sugars added!"
> What system would be used to bring people and supplies to that orbit? How much would it cost per launch?

What people? What supplies? It would be parked there, noone would be visiting any time soon.

> And the elephant in the room: How can this project guarantee the safety of the station long term? We already know about cracks appearing and Mir also decayed over time.

Nothing is guaranteed, but a lump of unpressurized metal in a high orbit wouldn't face many issues.

> Mir also decayed over time.

Orbital decay can be ignored for objects high enough.
Yes. A quick search yielded: <https://github.com/DarthFennec/highlight-indent-guides>
Caltech's Submillimeter Observatory Has Been Removed from Maunakea
It's gonna blow over. Like everything in life.

Don't worry.
Even though you are entitled to fire people in the US, there are a lot of differing state and city rules. You are also open to (potential) lawsuits at all times. There are also now a lot of very obtuse rules about things like healthcare coverage for full time employees.

There's an extra layer of simplicity when it comes to probationary periods.
Genuine question for this audience.

Given a general recognition of the philosophical grounding of Chomsky and the broader social anarchist philosophers (Henry George comes up frequently)…

Why is there not more directed advocacy or support for leadership that present anarchist political perspectives?

My observation is that in a large percentage of cases, people have such a strong reaction to the word, “anarchist” that they can’t actually evaluate it the way that political philosophers define it

And so there is no linguistic term that is not triggering, which also reflects the broader philosophical tradition of individual agent based Interactions that are disintermediated from other power structures.
> What did you install in Vim for inferring parens from indentation?

It's been years now, but I believe it was "parinfer". This specific plugin might not be it, but it looks very similar at least: https://github.com/gpanders/nvim-parinfer
To me, the way they've done it seems correct. In your mind, where does the interest come from on the money saved for the bridge? The government has to be collecting interest from somebody no?
Anarchism means no unearned hierarchy, it doesn't mean no cooperation. It means no kings, it doesn't mean no leaders.

Everybody for themselves would be a demand that a king would make. Normal people cooperate.
Oh, what about the petty fights between different webrings accusing each other of using AI generated content....

Reminds me of the early days of the web.
Not sure, I realized later that the car was made in 1986 and was 20 years old at the time of the crash (and so literally didn't come with airbags.)

I just figured they were old as hell, and I ended up having to hold myself off the steering wheel with my arms.

Ended up bending it significantly, which I can only put up to the time(not much!) that was actually spent transferring energy from me to the wheel.
....That's what "systemic" means.

It doesn't "only take one person" to try something like that. It takes one person who is already part of the capital class—ie, someone who is already wealthy, a category correlated, if somewhat loosely, with the exact bigotries listed here. It takes someone who has, statistically speaking, made their money by being ruthless about it deciding they want to take a huge risk with it rather than do the sure thing (hire from the privileged classes). It also takes them having an idea for an actual business that's not merely viable, but highly lucrative. It also takes enough people in the marginalized classes who are within the target industry, who actually hear about the business, who are looking for a job, who are qualified, who can prove to the hirers' satisfaction that they are qualified.

This is not an exhaustive list.

You are oversimplifying in service of justifying an irrational ideology.
I find it plausible that this enhanced level of awareness cannot be directed at will to just any object, but is bound to whatever goal puts one into the zone. Which would be the flaw in the experiment.
NSFW ads show up on YouTube again, despite Google's promise to fight them
The computer works with binary sequences. LLMs do not change this fact.
Maybe that's a fun new OS feature. If somebody wants to try it, more power to them.

Answering your question more directly though, why would you want it in an OS? The OS primarily exists to mediate shared resources, and to a slightly lesser degree to sensibly wrap shared code everyone is definitely using (e.g., chrome and hacker news don't have to care about my LCD driver).

What exactly do you gain by baking TAI into the OS? You lose in update availability, OS install size, application-specific customizability, runtime performance of TAI function calls, .... You'd want to gain something for those costs.

> Why would I use a library for a timezone?

Most people do? Even libc localization isn't a part of the OS (and is fraught with issues; never use libc localization), and that's the most primitive timezone library most people use. Everything else is baked into their language runtime or a third-party like nodatime. TAI isn't special in that regard.
The station was built in pieces out of modules. Just as modules were added, they can be removed, I would assume.

Moving it to a higher orbit and just leaving it there is a way to ensure there's a long lived source of space debris. The sealing it up part kind of implies there wouldn't be any crew or supplies needed, but the thing will suffer collisions and decay (fall apart) on its own.
> The PE jackals

This pretty much explains most of what's wrong with the current US economy.

My previous employer was a 120 year old retailer, destroyed by private equity. My current employer is 100 years old, market research firm. Currently being destroyed by private equity.

It's not just that they finanicialize everything and focus on the short term. It's also that they are genuinely bad at running companies.
I used to have connection issues every few weeks. I got a digital timer plug and reboot my router every night at 3am, that fixed almost all of my connection drops. I was thinking about this XKCD comic after digging through logs to try and trouble shoot the issue https://xkcd.com/1495/ and just went with the timer solution.
> So everybody for themselves, ok.

This has nothing to do with anarchism.

Anarchism is simply organizing society to have as little hierarchy as possible.
Everything I know, or need to know, about branch prediction, I learned from James Mickens.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/theslowwinte...
While there are many good answers to your question, here is mine, trying to answer as generic as possible:

Anarchy doesn't mean "everybody for themselves" in a chaotic sense. It advocates for the absence of a formal, hierarchical government, aiming for self-managed societies based on voluntary, cooperative institutions.

Here are key points:

1. Mutual Aid:
Anarchists believe in mutual aid and voluntary cooperation rather than competition and individualism.

2. Horizontal Structures:
They support horizontal organization without hierarchies, promoting collective decision-making.

3. Community Defense:
Anarchist communities often organize collective defense mechanisms to protect individuals from oppression.

The concern about groups oppressing individuals is valid, but anarchists argue that decentralized, community-based approaches can mitigate this better than centralized power structures, which often lead to greater systemic oppression.
In my 20s, I had several side projects and would burn the entire weekend tending to those and splurging on domain names on weekly basis. Usually most of these projects die slowly with lost interest.

Presently, I only pursue maximum 2 projects with one getting 80% effort. Time wise, I just keep a markdown file on the git with a roadmap on 12 weeks basis. If some feature keeps moving to next 12 weeks twice, it becomes major task or gets scraped.

I find using tools like Trello, Github issues, some form of notion page requires additional tending and time, which could be spent on the project.
This was a lovely article. I only wish the author wouldn’t have kept switching units (between µs and ns) making it hard to scan the tables for comparison.