Hacker News

Agentic Engineering Best Practices

Hacker News - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 5:26am

If you had to hire a potential engineer only by analyzing their chat with their coding agent, what would be in your rubric?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086128

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Arpa.net

Hacker News - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 5:12am

Article URL: http://www.arpa.net/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086016

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: 17MB pronunciation scorer beats human experts at phoneme level

Hacker News - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 4:57am

I built an English pronunciation assessment engine that fits in 17MB and runs in under 300ms on CPU.

Architecture: CTC forced alignment + GOP scoring + ensemble heads (MLP + XGBoost). No wav2vec2 or large self-supervised models — the entire pipeline uses a quantized NeMo Citrinet-256 as the acoustic backbone.

Benchmarked on speechocean762 (standard academic benchmark, 2500 utterances): - Phone accuracy (PCC): 0.580 — exceeds human inter-annotator agreement (0.555) - Sentence accuracy: 0.710 — exceeds human agreement (0.675) - Model is 70x smaller than wav2vec2-based SOTA

Trade-off: we're ~10-15% below SOTA on raw accuracy. But for real-time feedback in language learning apps, the latency/size trade-off is worth it.

Available as REST API, MCP server (for AI agents), and on Azure Marketplace.

Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/fabiosuizu/pronunciation-asses...

Interested in feedback on the scoring approach and use cases people would find valuable.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085899

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

State of Generative Media

Hacker News - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 4:56am
Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: Chowser – A lightweight macOS browser chooser

Hacker News - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 4:24am

Hey HN,

I vibed Chowser because I was tired of links always opening in my "default" browser when I wanted them in a specific session (work, personal, research, etc.).

Chowser is a lightweight macOS app that acts as your default browser. Instead of opening a link immediately, it pops up a sleek picker that lets you choose which browser to use for that specific link.

Key Features: Lightweight & Native: Built with SwiftUI/AppKit. It lives in your menu bar and uses zero resources when idle. Keyboard First: Press ⌘⇧1 through ⌘⇧9 to snap-select a browser instantly. Set & Forget: Once it's set as your default browser, it stays out of your way until you click a link. Open Source: Fully open source under MIT. Tech Stack: Swift, SwiftUI, and AppKit. I wanted something that felt like a native part of macOS, not a heavy web-wrapper.

Check it out: GitHub: https://github.com/bsreeram08/chowser Download (DMG): https://github.com/bsreeram08/chowser/releases

Thanks! sreeram

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085628

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

I Donut Belive

Hacker News - Fri, 02/20/2026 - 4:19am

Article URL: https://idonutbelieve.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085596

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Categories: Hacker News

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