skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've got a Palma 2 and I like it. It replaces the Kindle for me: fits in the pocket, more book apps, actual feed reader and read later apps, good for typing quick notes and using Anki. You can also use Terminus to ssh to a box in a pinch.

I would never think of daily driving it as a phone if it had a modem. The biggest dealbreaker is that streaming music is a pain on e-ink devices: all of the services except Apple Music (which doesn't support 2FA sign in on Android so it's useless to me) are dark mode only, and dark mode is the enemy on e-ink. Another problem is that the camera is pre smartphone level, it's really bad and with e-ink it's harder to see if the focus is good. And of course, it's running an obsolete version of Android and is continuously phoning home to China, so you probably don't want any important data on it. But as an e-reader, I strongly prefer it to the walled garden tablets.
Unfortunately, the picked example kind of weighs down the point. Cursor has an extremely vocal minority (beginner coders) that isn't really representative of their heavy weight users (professional coders). These beginner users face significant issues that come from being new to programming, in general. Cursor gives them amazing capabilities, but it also lets them make the same dumb mistakes that most professional developers have done once or twice in their career.

That being said, back in February I was trying out of bunch of AI personal assistant apps/tools. I found, without fail, every single one of them was advertising features their LLMs could theoretically accomplish, but in practice couldn't. Even worse was many of these "assistants" would proactively suggest they could accomplish something but when you sent them out to do it, they'd tell you they couldn't.

* "Would you like me to call that restaurant?"...."Sorry, I don't have support for that yet"

* "Would you like me to create a reminder?"....Created the reminder, but never executed it

* "Do you want me to check their website?"...."Sorry, I don't support that yet"

Of all of the promised features, the only thing I ended up using any of them for was a text message interface to an LLM. Now that Siri has native ChatGPT support, it's not necessary.
> but reading the replies here just confirms to me that cynicism, pessimism and doomerism are certainly the mood of the current zeitgeist.

Isn't that the human condition? Historically, it was no doubt an evolutionary advantage to always think that a lion is about to pounce, so to speak. That doesn't just go away. The instincts still need something to work with even after all the real threats are gone.
> the split between /usr/local/etc and /etc constantly leaves you guessing where to find a particular config file;

Isn't it just that /etc is the base OS and /usr/local is all packages added on top?
Thats not how I read the closing and description of the prior era. I read it as one that was more human, before being stamped out and sterilized due to the PR challenges is posed.
I get that when my GPU is disabled, although it usually falls back to CPU...
You'll probably enjoy this scene from Reservoir Dogs: https://youtu.be/M4sTSIYzDIk
The anticaking agent doesn't have an effect on taste afaict, but it really is a large difference in texture.

Some people key more on olfaction/taste, I have nervous system quirks that cause me to key heavily on texture.
Show HN: Tweakr – AI code reviews that help devs learn and grow
Hey there ,

I’m a dev and co-founder at https://norman.finance. For the past few years I’ve been building Norman and got tired of our PR reviews being slow, repetitive, and didn’t help our devs actually learn from mistakes.

That’s why I am building Tweakr (https://www.tweakr.dev/): an AI that instantly reviews your PRs, finds & fixes bugs, gives clear advice, and turns every review into a learning session for your dev team.

I’d love your feedback!
I've been a sentient human for at least the last 15 years of tech advancement. Assuming this stuff actually works, it's only a matter of time before these AI services claw back all that value for themselves and hold users and businesses hostage to one another, just like social media and e-commerce before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Unless these tools can be run locally independent of a service provider, we're just trading one boss for another.
They nerfed it as of sunday March 30, a lot of people noticed performance drop and it rambling.

https://x.com/nisten/status/1906141823631769983

Would be nice if this review actually wrote exactly when they conducted their test.
I almost always book via apps. I can compare flights by looking at Kayak (app), then actually book it in the carrier app. I think the workflow just has to adapt to the tools you’re using, and trying to follow the same methods you’d use on desktop just don’t work. I don’t think either particular method is objectively worse than the other for every use case.
Golf actually adopted tech that probably ought to have been banned. Namely the modern ball and driver going from balata and persimmon. Pros went from driving it 260 yards to 325 sometimes longer and entire courses had to be redesigned as they would just trivially drive over fairway hazards and rough. Golf became a bomb and wedge game ever since as they can’t make certain historic courses terribly longer.

They are exploring the idea of rolling back the ball but the implications of that are endless.
I will forever remember how my parents, who insisted we should be honest in all situations, also taught us to just click the blue button whenever something wants to be installed.
I'm sorry that you think your goalposts are the only valid goalposts. I can assure you that the fascists in power don't care about your goalposts. For me the only goalpost that matters is trump trying to remove these protections. If you don't think he'll start removing natural born citizens after asking to do so, then I'm not sure there's anything point continuing this conversation.

The fact that they are even trying to remove the protections that natural born citizens have always had in the US, should ring alarm bells for you, but somehow they are not. Maybe you really aren't familiar with the concept of "First they came for...", but you'll find out how this plays out soon enough.
It would be interesting to have something that used VRAM when there was no other demand and regular RAM otherwise.

Even gamers and (most) LLM users are not using the GPU all the time.
They merged with openzfs to maintain a common base so Linux didn't venture off on its own, not because they couldn't keep up.
> In my experience, systemd is far better and more reliable than anything else, especially if you need complex logic

The author is talking about home servers that do not need the complex logic.
Exactly. So many local first libs don't cover this that it makes me wonder if the applications I am typically working on are so fundamentally different from what the local-first devs are normally building?

Most apps have user data that needs to be (partially or fully) shielded from other users. Yet, most local-first libs neglect to explain how to implement this with their libraries, or sometimes it's an obscure page or footnote somewhere in their docs, as if this is just an afterthought...
Define conflict.
> they seem to intend to Embrace Extend Extinguish

What makes you think that? Limbo is MIT licensed and I don't see any CLA on [1].

[1]: https://github.com/tursodatabase/limbo/blob/main/CONTRIBUTIN...
Lots of people use iPads for content creation. I think your worldview on this topic is a bit narrow. There have also been multiple feature length movies shot on an iPhone, at least two of them by Oscar winning directors! Those weren’t done on a mobile browser.
That's nice, but for a better experience or more critical infrastructure, you usually want something that works reliably and comes with support.

Would you rather use an open-source project that has 2000 open issues and only 1–2 updates per year, where developers haven't responded in months and have no incentive to help you, or pay for the software, support the developers, and receive quick answers to your questions and even have your issues/bug reports addressed immediately?

Personally, even if I use open-source "free" software, I often donate to the developers, because I want that software to be maintained and improved, or even have my feature requests implemented.

Why are people so reluctant to pay for stuff they actually need/use and to support smaller businesses? It's not even about being selfish, because paying the developers actually will make your experience with the product better.
Show HN: Monika–Open-Source AI Assistant with Whisper STT and Emotional TTS
Hi HN,

I'm sharing Monika, an open-source AI assistant I've built. The main focus was on leveraging local processing for the speech components to enhance privacy and create more natural-sounding interactions.

Key components:
* Speech-to-Text: Uses OpenAI's Whisper running locally.
* Text-to-Speech: Uses RealtimeTTS with the Orpheus model for emotional expression, also running locally.
* NLP: Uses Google Gemini on the backend

It includes Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and a basic web interface using Flask. The idea was to see how well local STT and expressive local TTS could work together for a conversational agent.

Tech stack: Python, Flask, Whisper, Gemini, RealtimeTTS.

Video Demo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vdlT1uJq2k]

The project is MIT licensed. I'd appreciate any feedback, thoughts on the approach, or suggestions you might have!
Does anyone have AI agent use cases that that you think might happen within this year and that feels very exciting to you?

I personally struggle to find a new one (AI agent coding assistants already exist, and of course I'm excited about them, especially as they get better). I will not, any time soon, trust unsupervised AI to send emails on my behalf, make travel reservations, or perform other actions that are very costly to fix. AI as a shopping agent just isn't too exciting for me, since I do not believe I actually know what features in a speaker / laptop / car I want until I do my own research by reading what experts and users say.
I'm fine with it as long as they don't change bats in between pitches.
> Any sane client will instead use UIDs for everything

Yes! Since last year there's the experimental UIDONLY extension that allows clients & servers to operate entirely without message sequence numbers. Saves quite a bit of accounting and possibly memory (for large mailboxes). It's a bit surprising the RFC so recent.

> [... thick vs thin clients ...]

For some programmatic email access, IMAP seems quite easy to use. Just write a programmer-readable line of text as command (eg fetch/search/store/etc) and parse the response lines (that's a bit trickier in many cases, probably needing a library, but you may be able to get away without it some of the time) and you're done.

About thick clients: Storage capacity is growing much harder than my email, also on mobile. I would be fine with thick clients that sync all messages. Allows for simpler protocols and simpler implementations. An email access protocol is then not much more than a two-way sync of email message files and associated "dynamic data" like flags/keywords.

But IMAP and JMAP are doing many things at once: synchronization for thick clients, and online access for thin clients. JMAP is specifically targeting the web (thin clients), so what was old is new again (although base IMAP isn't too helpful to (web-based) thin clients either).
Passkeys do definitely make the mobile web experience better, but unfortunately they’re still not widely supported. I’m not saying mobile web apps can’t be good, but a native app allows for a lot of UX optimization.
I disagree that's the central issue, that's why I didn't engage with it.

The belief that students are somehow now mentally broken in a way unique and never-before-seen is an enormous claim. These articles never manage to support this claim. Instead they just assert it as if it's so obvious it doesn't require any actual work to show.

Where you see some problem that starts pre-university, what I see is students acting rationally given the system they find themselves in. My own university experience was decades ago but no different except for the absence of smartphones and laptops in the lecture theatres. Bad lecturers, bad material, rampant cheating and fake marking schemes in which there was no connection between work and final grades: all the problems have been there for a very long time. Phones didn't create this problem, educators did. It's just easier for faculty to play pretend when students appear to be staring at the front of the auditorium because they have nothing else to stare at.
Are there some examples of "non flawed" research that is getting ignored? Because (as a non-academic) I feel like I'm seeing the same HN attitude that OP describes. No study is good enough for HN. There are always nit pickers that come out of the woodwork. For every science article about some study or finding, the top comment is always a variation on: "This study is flawed because..." Almost without exception. Also, the standard is so high: A single flaw found is grounds for dismissing the whole study as flawed.

My guess is if you raise examples of "good science" the HN peanut gallery will jump in to point out the flaws in that science, too.
>> GTK is an abomination of a UI framework.

I respectfully disagree with that. I think it's a solid UI framework, but...

>> It's openly hostile to not consider the upgrade path of existing users, and make things so difficult that it requires huge lifts just to upgrade versions of something like a UI framework.

I completely agree with you on that. We barely use any UI widgets so you'd think the port would be easy enough. I went through most of the checklist for changes you can make while still using GTK3 in prep for 4. "Don't access event structure members directly, use accessor functions." OK I made that change which made the code a little more verbose. But then they changed a lot of the accessor functions going from 3 to 4. Like WTF? I'm just trying to create a menu but menus don't exist any more - you make them out of something else. Oh and they're not windows they are surfaces. Like why?

I hope with some of the big architectural changes out of the way they can stabilize and become a nice boring piece of infrastructure. The talk of regular API changes every 3-5 years has me concerned. There's no reason for that.
Reality is probabilistic yes but it’s not black box. We can improve our systems by understanding and addressing the flaws in our engineering. Do you want probabilistic black-box banking? Flight controls? Insurance?

”It works when it works” is fine when stakes are low and human is in the loop, like artwork for a blog post. And so in a way, I agree with you. AI doesn’t belong in intermediate computer-to-computer interactions, unless the stakes are low. What scares me is that the AI optimists are desperately looking to apply LLMs to domains and tasks where the cost of mistakes are high.
("it" being the Claude 3.7, not the Gemini)
The longevity of Minecraft blows my mind. I was always aware of its existence but never looked into it. Now my kid is getting into it. So many generations of kids! It's incredible really.

That said, it has been a little sad digging into the current state of Java vs Bedrock, Bedrock iPad vs Bedrock Switch. The platform ubiquity is wonderful and the tradeoffs are what they are. But if folks were able to create a touch-capable web-powered Java Minecraft that would be a great fit for the iPad.
I took a look at your project and while it's nice (technically), for the actual use case shown, I can't see the value over something like the old Dreamweaver with a bit of training.

I still think like prompting is still the wrong interface for programming systems. Even though they're restricted, configurations forms, visual programming with nodes, and small scripts attached to objects on a platform is way more reliable and useful.
Don't forget "structured sparsity" where two out of every four weights must be zero. Another trick that Nvidia still happily assume for the sake of a graph or an headline figure.
Thanks! Now I have more questions, but they're better. This is good progress.
> I like the various BSD and distributions like postmarket OS, but I wish they had access to modern tools instead of having to "roll my own" with scripts or make do with what they depend on

It sounds like you wish they used systemd. "Modern" is rarely a good description, and at 15 years old I don't think systemd qualifies as such anyways.
Time Machine can do that. Whether they're automatic or manual backups, you can boot your system in recovery mode and restore from a backup to fully revert to a previous snapshot. It will require a reboot and the speed of execution will depend on the size of the changeset from the current state.
Did anything prevent them from transitioning undefined behavior towards defined behavior over time?

> It's that there was live C code in the world that did this stuff, for real and valid reasons.

If you allow undefined behavior, then you can move towards a more strictly defined behavior without any forward compatibility risk without breaking all live C code. For instance in the `EraseAll` example you can define the behavior in a more useful way rather than saying 'anything at all is allowed'.
> people claiming "AI" can now do SWE tasks which take humans 30 minutes or 2 hours

Yes people claim that but everyone with a grain of salt in his mind know this is not true. Yes, in some cases an LLM can write from scratch a python or web demo-like application and that looks impressive but it is still far from really replacing a SWE. Real world is messy and requires to be careful. It requires to plan, do some modifications, get some feedback, proceed or go back to the previous step, think about it again. Even when a change works you still need to go back to the previous step, double check, make improvements, remove stuff, fix errors, treat corner cases.

The LLM doesn't do this, it tries to do everything in one single step. Yes, even when it is in "thinking" mode, in thinks ahead and explore a few possibilities but it doesn't do several iterations as it would be needed in many cases. It does a first write like a brilliant programmers may do in one attempt but it doesn't review its work. The idea of feeding back the error to the LLM so that it will fix it works in simple cases but in most common cases, where things are more complex, that leads to catastrophes.

Also when dealing with legacy code it is much more difficult for an LLM because it has to cope with the existing code with all its idiosincracies. One need in this case a deep understanding of what the code is doing and some well-thought planning to modify it without breaking everything and the LLM is usually bad as that.

In short, LLM are a wonderful technology but they are not yet the silver bullet someone pretends it to be. Use it like an assistant to help you on specific tasks where the scope is small the the requirements well-defined, this is the domain where it does excel and is actually useful. You can also use it to give you a good starting point in a domain you are nor familiar or it can give you some good help when you are stuck on some problem. Attempt to give the LLM a stack to big or complex are doomed to failure and you will be frustrated and lose your time.
Stop syncing everything
Ask HN: Should I Price It
Hi guys. New here. New founder too. I need some help figuring out how to price my product.. I'm not sure about the rules so I'll not post any of my product links or whatever.

So I currently have a product that consists of a Chrome extension and a web platform. It allows my users to highlight any text on the internet, add notes and open LLM chats directly on-page linked to their highlights.

My current features are:

- highlight text (underline / background as a highlight style)

- add notes to highlights

- open LLM chats directly on-page

- auto-scroll to highlights (works on LLM apps like Claude, ChatGPT, etc.)

- auto-sync to their account so they can cross-browser it

So... what should I price it? What should the model even look like?? Some form of freemium, of course.. but what? Nr of highlights, notes & chats per day and then something like $7.99?

Are the current features too few to price it? I guess to figure out if anyone wants to pay for this core functionality the features are just enough?

Anyway, any input appreciated.
I have had failed logins in a old but neccessary microsoft account about 20 times a day from Random IP's in Random Countries over the last 3 years (Could be more, but I only checked so far back)

I can see every attempt, unsuccessful as they are, which is nice, but I'm also surprised that there's no rate limiting

For an account that's never been outside of the American Continent, I'm surprised a Gazillion attempts from Russia, Africa, or even Czechia don't ring any alarms (Or if they do, aren't visible)
> custom filtering dropdown

I already said that. "Select" is not filterable in the browser already, so `select[multiple]` has no chance of seeing that in this decade.

However you slice/style it, it's just checkboxes (that you can filter/reorder)
What does this mean for pip-tools' requirements.in, Pipfile.lock, pip constraints.txt, Poetry.lock, pyroject.toml, and uv.lock?
I understand your frustration with some of these AI startups, and there is a lot of hype in this space. However, there are a couple meaningful differences between ACS and Redis.

One difference is the engineering effort for integration. If an SWE was using Redis they would have to create custom polices on when to move the data between S3 and Redis, how to store it, for how long and when to move newly written data back to S3. This can impose a significant amount of engineering effort for a team. Redis is also mostly single-threaded whereas ACS is designed from the ground up to be multi-threaded.

Another difference is the interface. ACS is accessible through an S3 compatible Python/Go SDK or a high-performance FUSE mount for a POSIX-like file system interface. With Redis, you would still have to build an interface around it for other engineering teams or customers to use.
> But every time I set up a basic box I feel teleported back to 2007.

You sat that as though its a bad thing! The author values simplicity.

> I notice FreeBSD admins tend to follow a 'pets not cattle' approach, carefully nurturing individual systems. Linux admins like myself typically prefer the 'cattle not pets' mindset—using infrastructure-as-code where if a server dies, no problem, just spin up another one. Leverage containers. Statelessness.

Is it less work to write that code and manage "pet"? Are there other advantages?

I think you probably are right about the preferred approach - but what are the advantages of each?

> Statelessness

What about data storage?
Same, tbh. I love cheese. But that aged Gouda is absolutely memorable. I can literally taste it now haha
You might want to look up what free speech actually means before engaging in discussions about it.
> improving on real world physics and understanding

Can't help but flashback to when Sora was first previewed and the hype crew were claiming it was a world physics engine and now when it finally shipped months and months later no one uses it and it didn't deliver on any of the hype at all.
> I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.

Alternatively, the internet enables "true" democracy and we're finding out that we don't really like it. There is probably a good reason why our formal "democracies" are more like semi-frequently refreshed dictatorships.
The hacker is following a number of corporations. Is it an empty threat or a hint?

https://imgur.com/a/IsksRrZ