Hacker News Reader

o_____________oon Grok Bot

> I highly suspect others will be following suit.

There is

https://github.com/block/buzz

https://buzz.xyz/

though currently much worse

o_____________oon First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star

> helium was a preferred way for suicide

The era of ridiculous sounding last words came to an end

o_____________oon For the First Time, Scientists May Have Found a Way to Regenerate Cartilage

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/august/new-biomat...

> The new biomaterial comprises two components: a bioactive peptide that binds to transforming growth factor beta-1 (TGFb-1) — an essential protein for cartilage growth and maintenance — and modified hyaluronic acid, a natural polysaccharide present in cartilage and the lubricating synovial fluid in joints.

and application:

> the new material could be applied to joints during open-joint or arthroscopic surgeries. The current standard of care is microfracture surgery, during which surgeons create tiny fractures in the underlying bone to induce new cartilage growth.

o_____________oon Apideck CLI – An AI-agent interface with much lower context consumption than MCP

> modern MCP clients do smart tool search that obviates the entire "I am sending the full list of tools back and forth" mode of operation

How, "Dynamic Tool Discovery"? Has this been codified anywhere? I've only see somewhat hacky implementations of this idea

https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol...

Or are you talking about the pressure being on the client/harnesses as in,

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...

o_____________oon LLM Writing Tropes.md

https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/src/branch/main/prompts/LL...

o_____________oon Tao Te Ching – Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin

I picked up Tao Te Ching as an American teenager and was moved by how it cuts against the American faith in visible dominance and self-assertion, proposing a form of strength that is low, quiet, and unseen. It's much more than that of course, but that aspect had immediate impact on my thinking.

o_____________oon Backing up Spotify

> Please note that Apple Music and iTunes Music data will be migrating away from the Enterprise Partner Feed (EPF). Starting July 16, 2024

o_____________oon Spotify reportedly investigating Anna's Archive's scraping of their library

Simply sharing metadata, related artists, genres, etc would create a pretty interesting ecosystem[1].

[1]: https://everynoise.com/

o_____________oon Waymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, SF and Phoenix

I think this is too much credit given for emotional labor. NY has an intrusive din and these people live in their cars all day. They evolve toward chronic irritation alleviated with impotent shows of force.

o_____________oon Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

Would love to see this show up on homebrew!

o_____________oon Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits

Alternatively for Mac,

https://github.com/halo/LinkLiar

o_____________oon Malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy

> "Cheaper/easier" is what creates consequences, not "new".

Nuclear bomb?

o_____________oon Show HN: Lemon Slice Live – Have a video call with a transformer model

Mostly personal/art projects for now, but willing to pay.

o_____________oon Show HN: Lemon Slice Live – Have a video call with a transformer model

Are you going to offer a web embeddable version of the Live offering?

o_____________oon Telling the Bees

Had a hard time parsing this, assumed "breeder" was the role of a human ranch hand, and you were telling them about family trivialities ("bull") so they felt included and soothed. Theory really fell apart around the time you started giving them corn and "sweet feed".

o_____________oon OpenAI Audio Models

interesting to see what accents do and do not work

o_____________oon Directus – real-time REST and GraphQL API of any SQL database

The eternal red flag of a DB UI that tries to support wildly different backends explains a lot of the problems. Many sane and powerful Postgres features can't be used because Directus also needs to support SQLite, for example. Views not properly supported, search features inadequate, graphql DSL with arbitrary limitations, a lot of weird or dysfunctional relational patterns when something much simpler would do... it's a parallel, inferior system on top of stock pg that is very frustrating when used at some depth.

o_____________oon Music Generation AI Models

Suno has select region editing now

o_____________oon TikTok ban: data reveals sharp traffic decline and rapid shift to alternatives

I think part of this is the genuine benefit of social media, it's used for education, connection, political organization... not quite the same as a cigarette. You can pick any emotional or moral response you're having from it and cite some aspect of its multifaceted nature to bolster your position.

o_____________oon First AI-generated and 3D-printed shoe makes its dubious debut

> The Syntilay company used Midjourney AI to create the basic shape of the shoe, after which an artist drew a sketch based on Midjourney's creation. That image was run back through Vizcom AI to produce a 3D computer model. After that model was created, generative AI was used to apply the patterns to the model, to give it some character.

I assumed this was going to be a functional evolutionary algorithm to make an efficient shape, it's just an image generator and an artist in the loop

o_____________oon People who are good at reading have different brains: study

Yeah word replacement is exhausting, and it does feel like the two fluent states for me are extreme relaxation and a very specific amount of localized stress. Lots of... unnatural pauses. Sometimes warmup sounds like "uhhh" that can inject a kind of vowel before a word. Have you tried listening to an AI version of yourself speaking fluently? I have and sent it to some friends – one of their points of feedback was that the cadence isn't like mine. My cadence is built around stuttering avoidance!

o_____________oon People who are good at reading have different brains: study

What kind of stutter, blocks/valsalva or repetition?

o_____________oon Show HN: Talk to Santa x ElevenLabs – A Santa you can talk to

Thanks. Censor – it's hard to say what's happening because it's not even carried through in the transcription, but the agent will say one word at the start of a natural sentence and then stop talking. Seems to only happen with Gemini.

o_____________oon Show HN: Talk to Santa x ElevenLabs – A Santa you can talk to

Fun!

The 11labs agent product is promising but very buggy, I was glad to see some of those issues in your implementation as well. The agent often drops out and comes back randomly after long stretches of silence. They also seem to be running some kind of half-functional censor on the llm output when used with Gemini 1.5. It also bills 500 credits for any time < 1 minute, not the aggregate use.

o_____________oon Bryan Johnson – The World's Most Expensive Eating Disorder

No, practices like time restricting eating do more than that, into autophagy, insulin exposure, diurnal effects, SIRT1 and AMPK, and on. You can eat an equal amount of calories in a smaller window of time and see benefit.

o_____________oon Restic: Backups done right

& Arq

https://www.arqbackup.com/

o_____________oon A rare disorder makes people see monsters

Reminds me of the DMT "machine elves" that appear in hallucinations to westerners that have been exposed to those ideas, whereas indigenous ayahuasca experiences tended to materialize more naturalistic visions like animal spirits, etc.

o_____________oon Show HN: WhoDB – Streamlined, Lightweight Database Management with a Sleek UI/UX

> PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite3, MongoDB, & Redis

My wish is for one UI that specializes in one database like Postgres. These database engines are so powerful now, but generalist UIs can never take advantage of the specializations. Directus et al have the same problem.

o_____________oon Bitcoin windfall for Mt. Gox creditors after 10 year wait

I wonder if Bitforex, which was either taken offline as an exit scam or government intervention, is going to follow a similar path

o_____________oon WP21

It sure seems that way until you need to get just a little bit deeper and you realize what a dumpster fire WordPress is.

You want metadata on posts, you install ACF. You want to filter on that metadata, good luck if it's over a couple filters simultaneously, the SQL queries will time out. Take a look at WP's insane schema to figure that one out.

Gutenberg promises to have WYSIWYG editable React components, which is a big deal, but they made insane decisions like storing the attributes in HTML, rendering HTML in the database, and requiring component developers to keep an array of deprecated changes when they want to modify anything on the component.

There are some people trying to untangle Wordpress by refactoring and bolting Laravel onto it[1], but every layer is just a nightmare; the authors of different parts can barely assess why things randomly break.

You might find WP appealing for the plugin ecosystem, but the plugins are completely random in implementation, so you're likely to get a bloated scramble of CSS and JS pushed to your users.

I moved to Directus and Astro, but I would probably use a Laravel-based CMS like October or Statamic for more generalized PHP deployment.

[1]: https://roots.io/