skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am excited to release Podcastfy.ai: An open-source Python package and CLI tool that transforms multi-modal content into engaging, multi-lingual audio conversations using GenAI; akin to Google's NotebookLM but open, programmatic, and customizable. You can simply 'pip install podcastfy' and start using it today!

You can run it on a paper, your CV, a website or even on artwork images if you like as well as the combination of the above!

I was intrigued by Google's newest GenAI product: NotebookLM, especially its “deep dive” podcast feature that converts uploaded content into a two-person AI-generated audio conversation. As Andrej Karpathy put it, "NotebookLM [...] is a re-imagination of the UX of working with LLMs" and I do agree!

While exploring NotebookLM, however, I got a bit frustrated with its UI which added friction to the process, leaving me yearning for more automation and customization options. This sparked a question: Could we replicate the essence of NotebookLM's podcast feature as a customizable API?

To address this, I developed Podcastfy – a weekend project built using Cursor dot com - akin to NotebookLM’s podcast feature but open, programmatic, and customizable by anyone.

Key Features:
- Generates conversational content from multiple sources (e.g. URLs, YouTube, and PDFs) and modalities (images+text)
- Customizes transcript and audio generation (e.g., style, language, structure, length)
- Provides sulti-language support for global content creation

Technical Highlights:
- Flexible LLM integration with LangChain, supporting both cloud-based and local models
- Support for advanced text-to-speech models (OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and Microsoft Edge)
- Seamless CLI and Python package integration for automated workflows

The Verdict:

While NotebookLM's AI-generated voices remain unparalleled in quality, this project did solve my original problem and showcased the fascinating possibilities of building GenAI products today. It's now live on GitHub, and I'd love for you to check it out and even contribute!

What would you like to Podcastfy today?

GitHub: https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy
Why `Pin` is a part of trait signatures (and why that's a problem)
Wouldn’t the low credibility VCs, who don’t care about customers being thrown under the bus, be displaced by higher credibility VCs over time?
Cerebellum Plays Crucial Role in Skill Retention and Memory
> enough portability that I don’t mind the many restrictions of iPad OS.

Would it be a sweeter spot without those restrictions?

I hate that I can’t code on my iPad Pro.
If you are aware that "Maxatar's conjecture is that 1 + 1 = 5", then it's correct to say that you have knowledge about "Maxatar's conjecture", regardless of whether the conjecture is actually true or false. Your knowledge is that there is some conjecture that 1 + 1 = 5, not that it's actually true.

In that sense, it's also correct to say that physicists have knowledge of relativity and quantum mechanics. I don't think any physicist including Einstein himself thinks that either theory is actually true, but they do have knowledge of both theories in much the same way that one has knowledge of "Maxatar's conjecture" and in much the way that you have knowledge of what the flat Earth proposition is, despite them being false.'

It seems fairly radical to believe that instrumentalism is indefensible, or at least it's not clear what's indefensible about it. Were NASA physicists indefensible to use Newtonian mechanics to send a person to the moon because Newtonian mechanics are "wrong"?

What exactly is indefensible? The observation that working physicists don't really care about whether a physical theory is "real" versus trying to come up with formal descriptions of observed phenomenon to make future predictions, regardless of whether those formal descriptions are "real"?

If someone choses to engage in science by coming up with descriptions and models that are effective at communicating with other people observations, experimental results and whose results go on to allow for engineering advances in technology, are they doing something indefensible?
The problem really is that the baseline is adjusting so that formerly routine activities can quickly become dangerous, but people do not want to adjust their expectations on what they should do.

It’s a tough problem; people love campfires and they love fireworks, but it is legitimately becoming risky to do that without starting a large forest fire for large parts of the year in places.
In the same vein: https://plantuml.com/ascii-art
> That title is most definitely a swipe at OpenAI.

Eh, 'OpenAI' is a swipe at OpenAI.
Ah, thank you. Hurricane-addled mind missed that.
Look at wages and household income. The wealthy don't rely on them, they have capital.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think you understand Adams. He was incredibly logical. That was his genius: He would extrapolate on every topic to their logical conclusions - from computers to science to religion.

When he was being absurdist, he was very clear about it. Like you said, he was writing about conkers as if it's just the same in the rest of the galaxy, which is definitely absurd. But in order to ground that absurdity, the rest has to be normal. He doesn't just drop in complete nonsense.

So the question remains: What part of British culture or Adams personal history am I missing where it's logical for an adult to happen to have a bunch of chestnuts on hand to give to children?
Agreed. There is both explicit and implicit feedback in user responses. Did they continue or stop? Clarification? Pushing back? Correction? so many signals. Even more, you can judge a response by looking at how the conversation went after that moment. Hindsight analysis to predict their usefulness.

The more interesting thing is when the user tests the AI ideas. Like running some code or applying advice for your hobbies. The user returns again and again communicating the outcomes in order to get new advice. The model can collect all chats across many days by topic, and judge them in retrospective. Which answers were good or bad?

The user base is so large, 200M users means lots of perspectives, lots of ideas, chatGPT puts trillions of tokens in human brains per month. They influence on a grand scale. After a while some article will describe the outcomes, and that data percolates back in the next training set. A feedback loop. And an indirect agent, working through people. An experience flywheel, collecting from hundreds of millions and serving back.
Yes it can : https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/1g41rjy/comment/ls0...
This is very cool!

Can you share the technical background you've used for creating the 3D reconstruction? Like software packages, or algorithms used.

Are we looking at the result of packages like OpenSfM here, or COLMAP?
From my experience working with the default repl in e.g. a docker container is extremely frustrating comparing to ipython, and I don't want to be installing ipython and its multitude of dependencies everywhere
I was just looking at motion graphics (I guess it's called motion design now) tools yesterday. I have a small YouTube channel and I was noodling around with the idea of making a little intro screen that just does some kind of swishy flooshy thing. I am very good at operating technical software, but I have no graphic design skills, so as much as I am concerned about and skeptical about AI "art", I thought I'd see what's out there. Maybe instead of starting from a template, it could generate an idea that I could finish my own way.

To get to the point: I didn't find anything that looked usable. Maybe it's telling that I didn't find Fable/Prism at all. But from what I can make of their site, it seems to be about adding (to my eye, unpleasant and unnecessary) textures, rather than generating new animations.

This looked like a nice piece of software with a lot of functionality and a meaningful customer base. It sucks that everything is grow, grow, grow, grow, exit, or die. I've been contemplating starting something, but I don't know if there's any oxygen left for the idea of simply making something people want and selling/operating it at a reasonable profit.
Finding 12 ancient skeletons in a place that was not previously known as a tomb is pretty stunning. Imagine if you found 12 bodies under your neighborhood bank- people would freak out, and it's not nearly as old as the Petra Treasury.
Sometimes, I wish the U.S. should suddenly leave the world alone, including NATO. That's when people will realize that the EU is too militarily weak to tackle Russia's aggression, and the Middle East will fall into chaos.

People who yap so much about America frankly deserve a real-life lesson to correct their brains.
Fair (and very cool!), sorry for the assumption.

I see people speaking complete falsehoods about things I have material knowledge of here, and either don't have the energy or the latitude to correct them.

And those reactions to (e.g.) o1 speculation are happening in (e.g.) OpenAI, I'm sure, haha.
I don't disagree, but these are in the ~2% convenience at most. With the huge baggage of including C++ in a project. The cost of learning C++ easily outweighs all those benefits. If you happen to have a proficient C++ team (that actually know embedded), go for it!
Show HN: I made a social like Instagram but for books
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Brigido Lara, the Artist Whose Pre-Columbian Fakes Fooled Museums (2017)
Every C/C++ coder thinks that they are good at memory management. Just look at the endless flame wars on garbage collection.

We just need to admit that we suck at it.
Tell the person who is trying to talk that you're busy and you'll get back to them later. It's part of the interpersonal skill of learning to say no.
Show HN: Unblocked To-Do List for iOS and macOS
Inbox Zero is a system where your inbox is for things you need to do right now. Everything else gets moved to later and you clear your inbox everyday. The Gmail snooze button is really good for this.

This strategy helps me to get things done but what I really need is an inbox zero to-do list app. iPhone reminders doesn't work this way; you can only move items by giving them a due date and this splits all your to-dos into ‘today’ and ‘all.’

The today view has a couple of issues: If a snoozed item is now ‘today,’ and you don't do it immediately, it becomes overdue. All the red text is super anxiety inducing and it makes me never wanna open the app ever again. Secondly, if I ever forget to set a due date on an item, it will never shows up in the today view. I'll forget to do it all together. It really feels like organizing your iPhone Reminder app becomes a chore in and of itself.

So for week 11 of building one app every week I decided to build Unblocked. It's a to-do list app that only shows you the items that you're unblocked on right now. Everything else can be snoozed with one tap.

It synchronizes with Apple Reminders so you have all your to-dos on both your Mac and iPhone and it syncs in real time.
While obviously all three laws do apply to a usual conker match (if not, the radiation from the plasma sheath and relativistic shrapnel is probably the bigger concern that the result of the match), I think the third law is the one you mean: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Generating codes is only half the problem --- and the only part you've addressed.

Securely storing secret keys is the other half --- and the main job of a local 2FA app.
I don’t remember this.
Just waiting for Minecraft to be so reverse engineered as to be its own protocol with multiple server and client implementations that just work.
You get features like manual personalization of results, bangs, redirects, paywall warnings, WolframAlpha integration, etc.
Yeah, 12 years ago, when governments couldn't care less about nation state cyberattacks, and Microsoft was yet to be called by the Congress to testify on their failures.
I'm not saying cold weather doesn't produce issues, especially for places unaccustomed to it. I'm saying the impact is on a different scale than from a natural disaster, so perhaps it's wise to reserve catastrophic language for potential catastrophes. If you use the same language for cold weather as you do for hurricanes, people might not take hurricanes seriously enough.
I'd guess this is the Carbon people milking 1-2 more promos out of this thing before acknowledging reality and switching to Rust ;)
Show HN: TbsGrid – Table Library
Hello. I am a TbsGrid developer. TbsGrid is currently in beta. I would like to hear your opinions, so I am posting this on show hn.
I've seen either style, but it the argument about which is proper is pointless. Any modern compiler will optimize either equally well, unless you're doing something that actually depends on the order of the increment.
Human brain changes after first psilocybin use
Nob.h – a header-only library for writing build recipes in C
Agreed. I've been taking the game seriously for 50 years, I'm recognised as a CM (Candidate Master) by FIDE the international chess federation. I devoted years of my life to writing my chess workbench Tarrasch https://triplehappy.com. I've beaten an IM and FMs in FIDE rated classical events (I've played 3 GMs and fallen short each time - highlight was Australian GM Darryl Johanssen telling me in our post-mortem "at least you got to play one fantastic move"). Yet this guy at 22 has chess skill that dwarfs mine. An 800 Elo gap means his expectation is something like 99.9%.
I would have thought carbon would have memory safety from the get go, but having a language where memory safety is one of the primary goals is meaningful in and of itself (as opposed to C++, where memory safety is one of many competing priorities).
Java yes over JVM/bytecode, the rest were all largely interpreted languages and so the discussion focused on if an interpreted language could ever compare to a compiled one.

But much as there's an indignity to something compiling to JS or your own preferred VM, people were convinced that memory allocation/GC is the reason they got a job and tended to object accordingly - so there was fight against that. Rust is treated by the hard-core C-ists as an affront to their ability to manage memory safely. Go look up early go vs C (or C#, D) - it had its own animated themes, but this was before GG went fucky with its own open source stuff so there was an air of 'google is trustworthy' in those discussions.

TLDR: Yes.
> C++ code can seamlessly add #include "sqlite3.h" unchanged.

Almost seamlessly. You have to do

extern “C” {
#include "sqlite3.h"
}

(https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/mixing-c-and-cpp#include-c-hdrs-...)
Keeping an app running requires personnel, personnel is expensive, and good personnel is unlikely to cool their heels on an EOL'd app at an EOL'd company.
As a first pass, check out the pop history book called Fearless Symmetry by Ash and Gross.

Next, and perhaps I shouldn't be suggesting it, Serre's A Course in Arithmetic. Despite it's reputation of terseness it is a great book by one of history's great mathematicians and worth every sweat and tear spent over its short number of pages.

Yet another way is to see the lectures by Richard Borcherds (who won the fields for the moonshine conjecture) on youtube.

Finally, since this hacker news check out William Stein's Modular Forms: A Computational Approach (pdf online)
Interesting. I'm curious about scalability. For local dev this makes sense, but how does it perform in prod with larger datasets?
I do, I use Fastmail and create aliases for every service. It's interesting to see how fast companies will "lose" or sell your email address.

I've seen it as fast as 24 hours my unique email address is being used by others even though their privacy policy says that they will never share your info.
I have tried other options and you're right, many of them are better at specific things. But I don't have the time or desire to manage lots of tools when ChatGPT is generally good enough for most use-cases.
Interesting. Why a mast and not just the ground? Pull up the mooring lines (probably more than the amount needed to actually hold the ship, for redundancy), connect them to the ship, then pull on the lines with winches until the ship is on the ground. That's basically how seafaring ships work... are there any unique challenges with airships?
I always keep in mind that the product with the most complaints is usually the most used one.

Not because it's the worst, but because more people use it, and because it's the one people have to use even though they don't like it.
I remember reading about that last. I believe that was a case where the Army runs the course in an area where local law enforcement and citizens role-play nationals of a fake foreign country, and the guy tried to bribe an LEO with fake "money" as if he was in character as a third-world cop. But the LEO wasn't part of the exercise, tried to arrest the guy, who resisted because he thought it was in-character, and things escalated from there.
It was on purpose, Microsoft was done with C, the official message was to move on to C++.

The change of heart was the new management, and the whole Microsoft <3 FOSS.
Yes, these are called red teams and this has been a thing for decades.

Why is this relevant to Hacker News?
Code and biology. For me, the constraints locally are typically quality and speed of generating responses.
Not that you're wrong but you're thinking of the preparedness paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
Yep. I lament the loss of native, local apps all the time (and the prevalence of "always online" local apps - I've seen LoB apps that were promising, native apps only to find out they won't run offline because the app does a license check online at startup and will refuse to launch without a connection).

Everything as SaaS web apps is just yet another chapter in the enshittification of tech.
"asimovfan", would you say the same type of criticism of Asimov's injection of the Cristian God in "the Last question"?

In this story from Clarke, the sentiment you just portrayed is acknowledged, and the point of the whole story.

The two westerners cannot understand not only the grand project being undertaken by the monks, but also what "god" even is to them. Before they can really understand, their project is completed and reality changes.
... but that's been a thing since ever using the "Open" moniker? I just feel "Open" is a mental shortcut that's being misused a bit.

See, e.g. [0] for an example of Facebook (now: Meta) for admirable dissemination of knowledge.

[0] https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam...
> It started almost entirely on AWS serverless services (Lambda, Dynamo, etc). That ended up being ridiculously expensive for this use case,

I work for a company that solves this problem. If you're interested check out my profile or hit me up! We may be even cheaper than your VPS (and certainly more reliable).
> Presumably you already know about yourself, yet that was the example you chose to pick. It comes across as you basically leading the witness just to be able to say say "gotcha! I knew you'd suck".

With all due respect, how the hell else am I supposed to evaluate its ability to answer accurately on topics without testing it first on topics I know about?

> Instead of trying to confirm your bias that LLMs are bad, try to find discomforming evidence.

I wasn't trying to confirm my bias. I literally thought that with all the information OpenAI has collected throughout the web they can probably give me a pretty good summary of the publicly available information about me. They probably even have stuff that's a bit more obscure or difficult to find. This seemed like an extremely easy way for me to be impressed.

I was trying to find disconforming evidence. Yet again I was thoroughly disappointed.

If spot-checking AI with softball questions is considered a "gotcha", that is an extremely damning comment on the current state of things.
Switzerland is no good because they don’t have enough banks or tech startups? I’m not sure everyone would agree that those are the most important metrics.
From their terms:

> You must be 18 years of age or older and reside in the United States or any of its territories to use the Services

In hindsight, excluding 95.3% of the world from using their product may have been a mistake.
Iunno, I don’t think the side effects of a washing machine have been studied at all.

We’re really flying in the dark there.
Why would a cannon be used instead of, say, striking a bell? Does the sound travel better/further, or was it a display of wealth/status?
Ah, but where were the survivors buried?
Indeed. There's also bioglass compounds like Novamin, etc that will literally remineralize your teeth, and in many cases, reverse caries. Xylitol gums and mouthwashes are a game-changer, as well.

The entire dental industry is only in business because of sugar and ignorance. Fortunately for them, the overall vanity level of society is increasing, so they'll likely make up for it with whitening sessions and veneers.
There was no backlash against Java, Swift, Kotlin and TypeScript because they are all GCed languages. You don’t need to learn anything to use them, and it’s not constraining much how you write your code. Rust is very different in that regard. You need to learn about memory ownership and borrowing, and it requires an effort and also constrains your design. I think that explains the (limited but real) backlash.
Webapps will work locally soon. Say hello to OPFS https://web.dev/articles/origin-private-file-system. Works surprisingly good, see this demo app https://fink2.onrender.com/
Do you think that the 16k GPUs get used once and then are thrown away? Llama 405B was trained over 56 days on the 16k GPUs; if I round that up to 60 days and assume the current mainstream hourly rate of $2/H100/hour from the Neoclouds (which are obviously making margin), that comes out to a total cost of ~$47M. Obviously Meta is training a lot of models using their GPU equipment, and would expect it to be in service for at least 3 years, and their cost is obviously less than what the public pricing on clouds is.
Remarkable design, but I can't stand it - not for aesthetic reasons, but because trying to watch the graphics move along two different axes simultaneously induced a feeling of motion sickness!
Good? I've got gigabit symmetrical and I'd much rather stream just what I need rather than have to dedicate an entire hard drive to storing a planet I won't see 99% of. And if it replaces some of the god-awful updating procedures from 2020 then all the better.
Let it die, adopt RISC-V. X86 is built on cruft over cruft.
+1, there are definitely some sad parts to this story.
Reminds of a quote about Van Morrison:

There are two types of people. The people that like Van Morrison and the people that have met him