Friday 12 April 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Sonauto – A more controllable AI music creator

Show HN: Sonauto – A more controllable AI music creator
441 by zaptrem | 230 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, My cofounder and I trained an AI music generation model and after a month of testing we're launching 1.0 today. Ours is interesting because it's a latent diffusion model instead of a language model, which makes it more controllable: https://sonauto.ai/ Others do music generation by training a Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder like Descript Audio Codec ( https://ift.tt/DcbQ5XO ) to turn music into tokens, then training an LLM on those tokens. Instead, we ripped the tokenization part off and replaced it with a normal variational autoencoder bottleneck (along with some other important changes to enable insane compression ratios). This gave us a nice, normally distributed latent space on which to train a diffusion transformer (like Sora). Our diffusion model is also particularly interesting because it is the first audio diffusion model to generate coherent lyrics! We like diffusion models for music generation because they have some interesting properties that make controlling them easier (so you can make your own music instead of just taking what the machine gives you). For example, we have a rhythm control mode where you can upload your own percussion line or set a BPM. Very soon you'll also be able to generate proper variations of an uploaded or previously generated song (e.g., you could even sing into Voice Memos for a minute and upload that!). @Musicians of HN, try uploading your songs and using Rhythm Control/let us know what you think! Our goal is to enable more of you, not replace you. For example, we turned this drum line ( https://ift.tt/6n90I31 ) into this full song ( https://ift.tt/5wPvMUk skip to 1:05 if impatient) or this other song I like better ( https://ift.tt/faT9s1u - we accidentally compressed it with AAC instead of Opus which hurt quality, though) We also like diffusion models because while they're expensive to train, they're cheap to serve. We built our own efficient inference infrastructure instead of using those expensive inference as a service startups that are all the rage. That's why we're making generations on our site free and unlimited for as long as possible. We'd love to answer your questions. Let us know what you think of our first model! https://sonauto.ai/

New best story on Hacker News: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P
569 by nikitml | 259 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: I Lost Faith in Kagi

I Lost Faith in Kagi
556 by Tomte | 487 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: An open source initiative to share and compare heat pump performance data

An open source initiative to share and compare heat pump performance data
549 by protontypes | 263 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: U.S. imposes first-ever national drinking water limits on PFAS

U.S. imposes first-ever national drinking water limits on PFAS
548 by geox | 358 comments on Hacker News.


Thursday 11 April 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD

Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
530 by 00702 | 99 comments on Hacker News.
Here's a "behind-the-scenes" look at my development of a cool sensor during my PhD (electrical engineering). This sensor is only about 1/3 of my total research for my degree and took about a year. I've been on HN for a while now and I've seen my fair share of posts about the woes of pursuing a PhD. Now that I'm done with mine I wanna share some anecdotal evidence that doing a PhD can actually be enjoyable (not necessarily easy) and also be doable in 3 years. When I started I knew I didn't want to work on something that would never leave the lab or languish in a dissertation PDF no one will ever read. Thanks to an awesome advisor I think I managed to thread the needle between simplicity and functionality. Looking back, the ideas and methods behind it are pretty straightforward, but getting there took some doing. It’s funny how things seem obvious once you've figured them out! Oh, I love creating GUIs for sensor data and visualizations as you'll see -- it's such a game changer! pyqtgraph is my go-to at the moment - such a great library.

New best story on Hacker News: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem
466 by speckx | 265 comments on Hacker News.


Wednesday 10 April 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Intel Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator

Intel Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator
423 by goldemerald | 247 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: I made a discrete logic network card

Show HN: I made a discrete logic network card
475 by ynoxinul | 80 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: We built PriceLevel to find out what companies pay for SaaS

Show HN: We built PriceLevel to find out what companies pay for SaaS
453 by cluo21 | 126 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! Christine and Steven here. As a PM and engineer, we’ve both evaluated and purchased a lot of software. One of the biggest frustrations was figuring out how much it would cost us without having to go through the sales process. When we did have a quote, we had no idea if we were getting a good deal or ripped off. We built a site where you can see what other companies are actually paying for SaaS and enterprise software. Buyers contribute prices via quotes, pricing proposals, and other documentation to ensure quality. We unlocked Talkdesk for Show HN users so that you can use the product without needing to sign in or upgrade. Check it out at https://ift.tt/vXa78dZ . Would love to hear any feedback, thank you!

New best story on Hacker News: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness
431 by throwup238 | 441 comments on Hacker News.


Saturday 6 April 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Homemade 6 GHz pulse compression radar

Homemade 6 GHz pulse compression radar
424 by henrikf | 116 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
584 by panqueca | 638 comments on Hacker News.
If you're feeling useless, remember that I exist. Let me give you some context. I work in the pipeline automation department of a company. Last month, our team decided to deprecate an internal tool due to several maintenance issues. So we created a pipeline that automates the implementation of this legacy tool, in case other teams needed to use it. (WHAT???) This month, a guy in my team found some improvement scenarios in the automation. So I was chosen to implement this changes in this legacy internal tool. The thing is, after I finished the adjustments, my pull requests are not getting approved due to adjustments meticulously requested by this guy in my team. Adjustments to make the pipeline automation even more resilient in complete unlikely scenarios. But this same week, my TL sent notices to all the other teams informing them that this internal tool has been deprecated and they should no longer use it. So what sense does it make to have a pipeline automation that implements the use of the deprecated tool? And if it has been deprecated, why would I need to make an adjustment for the automation to be even resilient if no one should be able to use it anymore? So why am I being allocated to work on in such waste of time like it? (WTF???) This makes me wonder, how many people have to work on something that they see no sense in doing at all. So once again, if you're feeling useless, remember that I exist.

Thursday 4 April 2024

Tuesday 26 March 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor

Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor
374 by the_king | 127 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! We’re Jack and Finn from Aqua Voice ( https://withaqua.com/ ). Aqua is a voice-native document editor that combines reliable dictation and natural language commands, letting you say things like: “make this a list” or “it’s Erin with an E” or “add an inline citation here for page 86 of this book”. Here is a demo: https://youtu.be/qwSAKg1YafM . Finn, who is big-time dyslexic, has been using dictation software since the sixth grade when his dad set him up on Dragon Dictation. He used it through school to write papers, and has been keeping his own transcription benchmarks since college. All that time, writing with your voice has remained a cumbersome and brittle experience that is riddled with painpoints. Dictation software is still terrible. All the solutions basically compete on accuracy (i.e. speech recognition), but none of them deal with the fundamentally brittle nature of the text that they generate. They don't try to format text correctly and require you to learn a bunch of specialized commands, which often are not worth it. They're not even close to a voice replacement for a keyboard. Even post LLM, you are limited to a set of specific commands and the most accurate models don’t have any commands. Outside of these rules, the models have no sense for what is an instruction and what is content. You can’t say “and format this like an email” or “make the last bullet point shorter”. Aqua solves this. This problem is important to Finn and millions of other people who would write with their voice if they could. Initially, we didn't think of it as a startup project. It was just something we wanted for ourselves. We thought maybe we'd write a novel with it - or something. After friends started asking to use the early versions of Aqua, it occurred to us that, if we didn't build it, maybe nobody would. Aqua Voice is a text editor that you talk to like a person. Depending on the way that you say it and the context in which you're operating, Aqua decides whether to transcribe what you said verbatim, execute a command, or subtly modify what you said into what you meant to write. For example, if you were to dictate: "Gryphons have classic forms resembling shield volcanoes," Aqua would output your text verbatim. But if you stumble over your words or start a sentence over a few times, Aqua is smart enough to figure that out and to only take the last version of the sentence. The vision is not only to provide a more natural dictation experience, but to enable for the first time an AI-writing experience that feels natural and collaborative. This requires moving away from using LLMs for one-off chat requests and towards something that is more like streaming where you are in constant contact with the model. Voice is the natural medium for this. Aqua is actually 6 models working together to transcribe, interpret, and rewrite the document according to your intent. Technically, executing a real-time voice application with a language model at its core requires complex coordination between multiple pieces. We use MoE transcription to outperform what was previously thought possible in terms of real-time accuracy. Then we sync up with a language model to determine what should be on the screen as quickly as possible. The model isn't perfect, but it is ready for early adopters and we’ve already been getting feedback from grateful users. For example, a historian with carpal tunnel sent us an email he wrote using Aqua and said that he is now able to be five times as productive as he was previously. We've heard from other people with disabilities that prevent them from typing. We've also seen good adoption from people who are dyslexic or simply prefer talking to typing. It’s being used for everything from emails to brainstorming to papers to legal briefings. While there is much left to do in terms of latency and robustness, the best experiences with Aqua are beginning to feel magical. We would love for you to try it out and give us feedback, which you can do with no account on https://withaqua.com . If you find it useful, it’s $10/month after a 1000-token free trial. (We want to bump the free trial in the future, but we're a small team, and running this thing isn’t cheap.) We’d love to hear your ideas and comments with voice-to-text!

New best story on Hacker News: Baltimore's Key Bridge struck by cargo ship, collapses

Baltimore's Key Bridge struck by cargo ship, collapses
368 by tbihl | 788 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language

Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
346 by jonathanb88 | 150 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, For over two years I've been working on an App to learn languages (currently French, Italian and Spanish), together with my partner, a language teacher. I think it is finally ready to share with this community! The idea is to introduce vocabulary and grammar whilst you read eBooks in your own language. I've found that it is easier to remember vocabulary 'in context' and with regular repetition. Plus you don't have to carve out dedicated time for language learning. Other apps require you to build a habit around various exercises or ‘games’, whereas lots of people already read books. From testing with early users so far it's proving effective for building a basic understanding of a language and quickly getting to the point where you can read and broadly understand text in the target language. It’s even better in combination with other apps that help with listening/speaking like Pimsleur. There were lots of technical challenges making this. It turned out to be (reassuringly) hard to get accuracy to an acceptable level, requiring a rabbit-hole into machine translation. There was a lot of testing required to optimise the engine that chooses the translations to show and to reduce the friction when reading books. And the backend to support uploading books is a beast in itself. I’d love to share details if there is interest. Roadmap - Accuracy - 100% accuracy is the target, but at present there can be errors. Feedback from users will be important here so that accuracy issues can be generalised and solved at scale. Errors can be reported within the app - please do so if you spot anything! - Dynamic difficulty - rather than have a progression of difficulty levels I’d prefer to introduce vocabulary and grammar automatically in response to user progress, balancing against the friction of seeing unfamiliar words. There’s a lot ‘under the hood’ to manage this today, but plenty of room to improve. - More practice features - to reinforce vocabulary/grammar and support writing, listening and speaking. - Better eBook support - improving the formatting of eBooks within the app and providing more methods for finding good books to read. Use of AI - LLMs provided a step change in accuracy and have enabled a feature that explains translations and grammar to the user - vastly improving the utility versus a year ago. - I believe apps like this, which use AI to enhance or scale functionality rather than simply acting as a wrapper over APIs, will be the major beneficiaries as LLMs improve. Take a look, and let me know your thoughts or questions!

New best story on Hacker News: New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco

New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco
370 by dzdt | 150 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland Has Collapsed

The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland Has Collapsed
517 by repelsteeltje | 374 comments on Hacker News.


Friday 22 March 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance

Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance
695 by radialapps | 201 comments on Hacker News.
Memories is a FOSS Google Photos alternative that you can self-host (it runs as a Nextcloud plugin). Website: https://ift.tt/2efCWDj GitHub: https://ift.tt/BrO596z Demo Server: https://ift.tt/xstMCXi (demo runs in San Francisco on a free-tier cloud vm) Memories has been built ground-up for high performance and is extremely fast when configured correctly. In our testing environment, it can load a timeline view with 100k photos in under 500ms, including query and rendering time! Some features to highlight: * A timeline similar to Google Photos where you can skip to any time in history instantly. * AI-based tagging that runs locally on your server, identifying and tagging people and objects. * Albums and external sharing. * Metadata editing support * A world map of your photos, supported both on mobile and the web * Did I mention it's extremely fast? Would love to hear feedback from the HN community! :)

Saturday 9 March 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Hatchet – Open-source distributed task queue

Show HN: Hatchet – Open-source distributed task queue
546 by abelanger | 180 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN, we're Gabe and Alexander from Hatchet ( https://hatchet.run ), we're working on an open-source, distributed task queue. It's an alternative to tools like Celery for Python and BullMQ for Node.js, primarily focused on reliability and observability. It uses Postgres for the underlying queue. Why build another managed queue? We wanted to build something with the benefits of full transactional enqueueing - particularly for dependent, DAG-style execution - and felt strongly that Postgres solves for 99.9% of queueing use-cases better than most alternatives (Celery uses Redis or RabbitMQ as a broker, BullMQ uses Redis). Since the introduction of SKIP LOCKED and the milestones of recent PG releases (like active-active replication), it's becoming more feasible to horizontally scale Postgres across multiple regions and vertically scale to 10k TPS or more. Many queues (like BullMQ) are built on Redis and data loss can occur when suffering OOM if you're not careful, and using PG helps avoid an entire class of problems. We also wanted something that was significantly easier to use and debug for application developers. A lot of times the burden of building task observability falls on the infra/platform team (for example, asking the infra team to build a Grafana view for their tasks based on exported prom metrics). We're building this type of observability directly into Hatchet. What do we mean by "distributed"? You can run workers (the instances which run tasks) across multiple VMs, clusters and regions - they are remotely invoked via a long-lived gRPC connection with the Hatchet queue. We've attempted to optimize our latency to get our task start times down to 25-50ms and much more optimization is on the roadmap. We also support a number of extra features that you'd expect, like retries, timeouts, cron schedules, dependent tasks. A few things we're currently working on - we use RabbitMQ (confusing, yes) for pub/sub between engine components and would prefer to just use Postgres, but didn't want to spend additional time on the exchange logic until we built a stable underlying queue. We are also considering the use of NATS for engine-engine and engine-worker connections. We'd greatly appreciate any feedback you have and hope you get the chance to try out Hatchet.

New best story on Hacker News: Home Lab Beginners guide

Home Lab Beginners guide
592 by ashitlerferad | 366 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)

My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
653 by atan2 | 371 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Sweden Is a NATO Member

Sweden Is a NATO Member
541 by belter | 626 comments on Hacker News.


Monday 26 February 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Generative Models: What do they know? Do they know things? Let's find out

Generative Models: What do they know? Do they know things? Let's find out
373 by corysama | 121 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Meta's new LLM-based test generator

Meta's new LLM-based test generator
355 by ben_s | 186 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Reverse-Engineering a Switch Lite with 1,917 wires

Show HN: Reverse-Engineering a Switch Lite with 1,917 wires
457 by uSoldering | 94 comments on Hacker News.
Hey Hackers. This is a project I solo-developed that turns completed PCB assemblies into an easy to use boardview with some accompanying boardscans. There are lots of easier and better ways of doing this, but this is an experimentation to do it as cheaply as possible, with the highest quality and lowest chance of errors. The technical details are in the link. Most public boardviews are almost entirely the result of industrial espionage, other than a few encrypted subscription based software platforms that provide extensive access. The process output is released as donationware, as my main concern is that even released as a low-cost purchase, there is a very strong culture to share this type of information at no cost. I would like to have a more sophisticated suggested donation system adaptive to user country, but I wasn't able to find a good solution. In terms of 'good startup ideas', I don't think this is one of them. The very high level of soldering skill required makes it difficult to scale, and the prevailing piracy culture makes it challenging to monetize. My main advantage is that costs are very low now that I have the entire thing working. Other than forge ahead at a loss and hope for the best, or to pivot hard leveraging the imaging technology, I'm not sure what other options I have. It feels too complicated and repetitive for shoft-form video content. If you have any feedback, questions, suggestions, etc., I'd love to hear them.

Thursday 8 February 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy

Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy
502 by jacooper | 427 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

VirtualBox KVM Public Release
452 by CyberusTech | 175 comments on Hacker News.
For the past few months we have been working hard to provide a fast, reliable and secure KVM backend for VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a multi-platform Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) with a great feature set, support for a wide variety of guest operating systems, and a consistent user interface across different host operating systems. Cyberus Technology’s KVM backend allows VirtualBox to run virtual machines utilizing the Linux KVM hypervisor instead of the custom kernel module used by standard VirtualBox. Today we are announcing the open-source release of our KVM backend for Virtualbox.

New best story on Hacker News: Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games

Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games
473 by sp3n | 356 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: FCC rules AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal

FCC rules AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal
556 by ortusdux | 351 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: A search engine in 80 lines of Python

A search engine in 80 lines of Python
457 by alexmolas | 60 comments on Hacker News.


Wednesday 7 February 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Improve cognitive focus in 1 minute

Show HN: Improve cognitive focus in 1 minute
441 by junetic | 216 comments on Hacker News.
Staring at something for 30-90 seconds has been proven to improve & boost mental focus on subsequent tasks (from Andrew Huberman - https://youtu.be/CrtR12PBKb0?t=3367 ). So I made something simple you can look at (and simultaneously meditate) for 1 minute to improve focus for your next task :) Let me know if it works for you

New best story on Hacker News: “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement

“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement
418 by Tomte | 257 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: TSMC to build second Japan chip factory

TSMC to build second Japan chip factory
412 by ytch | 271 comments on Hacker News.


Tuesday 6 February 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly
448 by notamy | 875 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Beyond self-attention: How a small language model predicts the next token

Beyond self-attention: How a small language model predicts the next token
463 by tplrbv | 85 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
463 by Timot05 | 245 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! We are the founders of atopile. We’re building a tool to describe electronics with code. Here is a quick demo: https://youtu.be/7-Q0XVpfW3Y Could you imagine the pain of building an entire software product using only assembly code? That’s about how we felt designing hardware. We don’t currently have good ways to describe what we need, reuse existing designs and compile that description down to a product. We started atopile to fix this. atopile is an open-source language and toolchain to describe circuits with code. The compiler is here: https://ift.tt/UAtSGV2 Docs are here: https://ift.tt/rxW2HQq . For a detailed deep dive designing an ESP32 module, see this video: https://youtu.be/eMWRwZOajdQ We realized this was a problem in our previous jobs. Narayan and I (Tim) had to manually, draw and export all our electronic circuit boards. This lasted until our friend Matt, a software engineer, showed us his development workflow. All his projects were built, tested, and merged automatically via GitHub. So we asked: Can we build the same for hardware? We observed that the ability to abstract electronics effectively hinged on using a language to describe the requirements, so we came up with the “ato” language. In ato, you can break down circuits into modules, components and interfaces. You can nest and connect those blocks with each other. Here is an example with an RP2040 microcontroller: import RP2040Kit from "rp2040/RP2040Kit.ato" import LEDIndicatorBlue from "generics/leds.ato" import LDOReg3V3 from "regulators/regulators.ato" import USBCConn from "usb-connectors/usb-connectors.ato" module Blinky: micro_controller = new RP2040Kit led_indicator = new LEDIndicatorBlue voltage_regulator = new LDOReg3V3 usb_c_connector = new USBCConn usb_c_connector.power ~ voltage_regulator.power_in voltage_regulator.power_out ~ micro_controller.power micro_controller.gpio13 ~ led_indicator.input micro_controller.power.gnd ~ led_indicator.gnd led_indicator.resistor.value = 100ohm +/- 10% From there, the compiler produces a netlist that describes how the circuit is connected and selects jelly-bean components for you ( https://ift.tt/OBJTKc8 ). Our next focus will be to add layout reuse, mathematical relations between values and define circuits by traits (similar to Rusts’). At the moment, atopile is intended to design all types of printed circuit boards (PCB) with low to medium complexity. The circuit complexity that the compiler can handle will steadily increase until it becomes suited for production usage. We often get asked if the compiler is meant for chip design rather than PCBs, but that is not the case. The language is exclusive to PCBs. At least for now..! A big part of why the software community is so prolific is thanks to open source and open core technology. The ability to share software packages with each other and efficiently chain tools together has made the software world an awesome place for developers. As hardware engineers, we would love our field to benefit from this as well. That’s why we’ve made atopile’s core open source (Apache 2.0). We plan to generate revenue by selling entreprise targeted features, similar to GitLab. We would love to have your thoughts on the compiler! What’s your story in electronics? What would you want us to build?

Tuesday 30 January 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Apple Vision Pro review

Apple Vision Pro review
501 by fortran77 | 749 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure

Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure
485 by leeny | 206 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games

Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games
469 by joshbuddy | 80 comments on Hacker News.
Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games Tldr: We’ve made a framework for web-based board games. You can try out some games over at https://boardzilla.io , or you can take a look at https://ift.tt/EJMyuYC to learn more about how to develop your own game. Source is available at https://ift.tt/DSYEIu6 Hey y’all. My brother and I have made a framework for board games. During the pandemic we started to look at BGA but got discouraged by how old-fashioned the tools were and how cumbersome the development process was. We set out to make our own framework where you could use the same code for both the client and server. Our hope is anyone familiar with Typescript and CSS could code up a game without worrying about state management, persistence or networking. It’s still very much a wip, and we're rapidly adding features and games. But we’ve got our first draft of developer docs done, and we've put up a few games we've developed to showcase and test out the platform. Source for the games and framework is available on Github, and we’re excited to code more games and hopefully encourage other people to try it out. Happy for any feedback.

Monday 22 January 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections

Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections
433 by itvision | 226 comments on Hacker News.
For the past three days Russians have been unable to use their VPN services working via OpenVPN/WireGuard protocols, and some even have reported that in certain situations SSH connections have stopped working. The prospect of an isolated Russian interweb has become oh so real. As a person currently residing in Russia I can confirm that I've been unable to connect to my favourite VPN provider for the past three days, not even its official application works. I've not seen any discussions on the English-peaking Internet, not it's been in the news for some reasons despite its importance in preserving freedom of information and opinions. In the Russian internet it's being hotly debated here: https://ift.tt/ULJAujn... More on the topic: https://ift.tt/gdXVy6S

New best story on Hacker News: FTC bans TurboTax from advertising 'free' services, calls deceptive advertising

FTC bans TurboTax from advertising 'free' services, calls deceptive advertising
521 by fairytalemtg | 135 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Reading QR codes without a computer

Reading QR codes without a computer
479 by input_sh | 64 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Kayak's new flight filter allows you to exclude aircraft models

Kayak's new flight filter allows you to exclude aircraft models
451 by Eisenstein | 311 comments on Hacker News.


Monday 15 January 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
442 by janchorowski | 242 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Dynamic programming is not black magic

Dynamic programming is not black magic
411 by qsantos | 176 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: #!/usr/bin/env docker run

Show HN: #!/usr/bin/env docker run
468 by adtac | 165 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: DevDocs

DevDocs
449 by jakogut | 111 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Marimo – an open-source reactive notebook for Python

Show HN: Marimo – an open-source reactive notebook for Python
431 by akshayka | 106 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! We’re excited to share marimo, an open-source reactive notebook for Python [1]. marimo aims to solve well-known problems with traditional notebooks [2]: marimo notebooks are reproducible (no hidden state), git-friendly (stored as Python files), executable as Python scripts, and deployable as web apps. GitHub repo: https://ift.tt/GFaqXPH In marimo, a notebook’s code, outputs, and program state are always consistent. Run a cell and marimo reacts by automatically running the cells that reference its declared variables. Delete a cell and marimo scrubs its variables from program memory, eliminating hidden state. Our reactive runtime is based on static analysis, so it’s performant. If you’re worried about accidentally triggering expensive computations, you can disable specific cells from auto-running. marimo comes with UI elements like sliders, a dataframe transformer, and interactive plots that are automatically synchronized with Python [3]. Interact with an element and the cells that use it are automatically re-run with its latest value. Reactivity makes these UI elements more useful and ergonomic than Jupyter’s ipywidgets. Every marimo notebook can be run as a script from the command line, with cells executed in a topologically sorted order, or served as an interactive web app, using the marimo CLI. We’re a team of just two developers. We chose to develop marimo because we believe that the Python community deserves a better programming environment to do research and communicate it; experiment with code and share it; and learn computational science and teach it. We’ve seen lots of research start in Jupyter notebooks (much of my own has), only to fail to reproduce; lots of promising prototypes built that were never made real; and lots of tutorials written that failed to engage students. marimo has been developed with the close input of scientists and engineers, and with inspiration from many tools, including Pluto.jl and streamlit. We open-sourced it recently because we feel it’s ready for broader use. Please try it out (pip install marimo && marimo tutorial intro). We’d appreciate your feedback! [1] https://ift.tt/GFaqXPH [2] https://ift.tt/N7SYAkb [3] https://ift.tt/69QWqXG

Friday 12 January 2024

New best story on Hacker News: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes
559 by ryanisnan | 263 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy

I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy
694 by edward | 304 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine
488 by popcar2 | 245 comments on Hacker News.
GodotOS, an operating system interface created entirely in Godot! Browse folders, edit text files, view images, play games, and more in one cohesive polished interface that can even be used on the web. Note that GodotOS is more of a toy than a serious project. It's meant to push the limits on UI design in Godot while creating a desktop that is minimalist, distraction-free, and aesthetically pleasing. Any feedback is greatly appreciated! Apologies for posting again, but I forgot to include "Show HN" in the title, and when I did post yesterday Hackernews almost immediately went down for over an hour, which is unfortunate.

Sunday 7 January 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)
537 by harrisonlo | 168 comments on Hacker News.
Nino is a radical approach to solve the app chaos problem for today's knowledge worker. I believe there are still too many tools; even using them becomes work in itself. I'm building all these apps from scratch in one place, using the same database and UI, with the flexibility to eventually support the majority of work from one "superapp." Currently there are 18 apps (called "modules") on Nino: - Database types: Sheet, Form, Calendar, Gallery, Board, Todo, List - Composition types: Doc, Slide, Drive, Notebook, Canvas, Grid, Blog, Site - Communication types: Channel, Chat, Meet I want to improve these modules and build more. Your feedback is important! FAQ: How is it different from Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or startups like Notion and Clickup? A: I think Nino has a better foundation to (1) consolidate a lot more apps than they currently do, (2) drastically improve speed with offline architecture, and (3) offer unmatched privacy and security with end-to-end encryption (coming soon) Let me expand on these points: 1. Consolidation In Nino, pages and blocks are interoperable with each other. Google and Microsoft still have mostly isolated apps. Nino is one (super)app that supports 18 modules, saving you time from switching and integrating between different providers. 2. Offline mode This is actually more complex than it seems, but I ultimately decided it's worth it, not only for people who need to work without internet, but also for everyone else who want instant page load. Everything is saved locally by default. 3. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) This is just a preview and not open to public yet, but is something I have been building alongside since day 1. In fact, it's likely not architecturally possible for existing products to add later on. Nino is built to offer both E2EE and cloud features (backup, search, collaboration). One more thing: pages on Nino are also publishable! There are blog and site modules, but you can also publish other modules (i.e. sheet, board, canvas, etc.) on your custom domain or on a free nino.page subdomain. Give it a try and let me know how it can improve. I want to hear from you.