MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I Built an AI Calendar – Focused on Helping You Start, Not Just Plan
by Running4M | 2025-04-23 16:23:09+00:00
Hello Hacker News,

A couple of months ago, I shared a post here about an AI-powered calendar I’ve been working on. Thanks to the feedback and suggestions I received from the community, I’ve made some meaningful improvements that I’m excited to share.

The idea is simple: this calendar is built to help you start your tasks no more staring at a blank page or wondering how to begin. Every morning, it checks your scheduled events for the day. If an event is marked to receive AI assistance, it automatically generates a helpful response for you. That could be a plan, outline, draft, or even just a few suggestions — something to give you momentum and not have to start from scratch. You can still add standard calendar events without any AI involvement. But even for simple tasks, you have the option to request AI help if you want it.

For more complex tasks, all you need is a title and a short description. The AI will then choose an appropriate template (e.g., for "speech writing about penguins," it uses a speech-writing template) and generate a form with short fields and checkboxes. It’s fast to fill out and designed to save you time. You can also upload links or files to give the AI more context.

Another thing I added is Google Calendar sync, so you won’t have to deal with two separate calendars. If you’re interested in seeing how it works, I also put together a quick landing page using Lovable. It includes more details about other interesting features, a short demo video, and a link to a small Reddit community I created for updates, suggestions, and general feedback discussions.

If you’d rather not join Reddit but still want to stay in the loop, you can drop your email on the landing page. I’ll only send two emails total: one thank-you email and another when the calendar officially launches. That’s it. No spam.

Also, I’ll be opening up a small beta testing round before the full launch. If this sounds like something you’d want to try out, you can either join the Reddit community or sign up via the landing page.

Thanks again for the time. If you have questions, ideas, or just want to let me know what you think, I’d love to hear from you.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-04-23 16:24:11+00:00
I think TA's argument fundamentally rests on two premises (quoting):

(a) If we were on the path toward intelligence, the amount of training data and power requirements would both be reducing, not increasing.

(b) [LLMs are] data bound and will always be unreliable as edge cases outside common data are infinite.

The most important observed consequences of (b) are model collapse when repeatedly fed LLM output in further training iterations; and increasing hallucination when the LLM is asked for something truly novel (i.e. arising from understanding of first principles but not already enumerated or directly implicated in its training data).

Yes, humans are capable of failing (and very often do) in the same ways: we can be extraordinarily inefficient with our thoughts and behaviors, we can fail to think critically, and we can get stuck in our own heads. But we are capable of rising above those failings through a commitment to truths (or principles, if you like) outside of ourselves, community (including thoughtful, even vulnerable conversations with other humans), self-discipline, intentionality, doing hard things, etc...

There's a reason that considering the principles at play, sitting alone with your own thoughts, mulling over a problem for a long time, talking with others and listening carefully, testing ideas, and taking thoughtful action can create incredibly valuable results. LLMs alone won't ever achieve that.
by J_Shelby_J | 2025-04-23 16:24:20+00:00
Same. I even built this for my GF to use. You don’t even need to download vscode as you can run it in a free dev container in browser: https://github.com/easy-astro-blog-creator/easy-astro-blog-c...

The only thing I want is to implement a gui for adding and editing posts.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-23 16:24:25+00:00
Video games are made by a lot of non-programmers who will be much more comfortable adjusting values in a text file than they are hex editing something.

Besides, the complaint about not having a heavyweight parser here is weird. This is supposed to be "trusted data", you shouldn't have to treat the file as a threat, so a single line sscanf that's just dumping parsed csv attributes into memory is pretty great IMO.

Definitely initialize variables when it comes to C though.
by Whoppertime | 2025-04-23 16:25:01+00:00
It depends what you mean by rich people. Do you mean people like Doctors and Lawyers who work for their money, or do you mean investors and CEOs who created a company worth millions/billions, and the shares they own in that company mean they are also worth millions/billions. Because I can tell you the former certainly pay income tax, and I have heard from many doctors and lawyers that they weren't planning on working on that weekend because that marginal tax rate made the juice not worth the squeeze so they spent the weekend on the golf course instead
Show HN: AI Chess Coach – Find critical moments in your games
by nightfox1 | 2025-04-23 16:25:17+00:00
Hey HN, I built an AI chess coach that finds 4 critical moments in your Lichess games.

It’s designed to be quick and helpful for casual players and act like a coach. It offers text commentary and TTS.

Would love feedback on the UX, usefulness, and anything that could make it more valuable!

Try it here: https://gm-ai-agent-957169865509.us-central1.run.app/

Thanks!
by db48x | 2025-04-23 16:25:55+00:00
It’s good because they have spent hundreds or thousands of hours polishing and improving it. It’s paid off too, because stable releases never have broken data files any more. Any mistakes that do get made are usually found and fixed before the code is ever committed. Even the experimental branch rarely sees broken data files. It’s more likely to see these error messages when loading save files, because the code to read old save files and convert them for newer versions of the game is the hardest to write and test.

> And a 3rd party library would be just some code taken from the web, or some proprietary solution where you'd once again have to trust the vendor.

Open source exists for a reason, and had already existed for ~15 years by the time this game was begun. 20 years later there are even fewer excuses to be stuck using some crappy code that you bought from a vendor and cannot fix.
by tharkun__ | 2025-04-23 16:26:30+00:00
I haven't had a "TV" for over 25 years now.

I still have a dumb monitor that costs more than a TV that would have a larger diameter with an HTPC that is really just a regular Linux install and that runs open source software on it. Which software has changed over the years, as has what kind of "TV" I get on it, from actually having a cable TV tuner in there to all streaming or local files. Over that time frame, it has become increasingly harder to get things to work "properly".

As in, yes there are caveats to this of course. Like there's no Netflix (/insert your favourite streaming service) app for it and you probably can't get 4k and/or surround sound from in-browser. As in, they're intentionally making the experience of people actually paying money to them worse.

Sometimes you have to make sacrifices.
by Wobbles42 | 2025-04-23 16:26:51+00:00
It certainly won't beat the market in what the market optimizes for -- namely risk adjusted return on capital. It probably won't beat the market on the implicitly coupled metric of "value delivered to customers" either.

The trick here is that "users" and "customers" have become all but totally decoupled when it comes to the modern internet. Not enough people were willing to pay, so the market has turned to other sources of revenue.

I share your skepticism about bureaucratic government agencies creating value, and doubly so when it comes to technology. At the same time, as an individual voter I am beginning to question whether "the market" is optimizing for the same things that I value.

Perhaps there is a natural conflict between maximizing utility for the majority of people vs maximizing utility for the majority of capital.
by lupusreal | 2025-04-23 16:27:28+00:00
Domestic development is an investment in your own country, it develops and pays skilled labor and supporting industries. When you buy jets from America, virtually all of that money is gone from Canada forever, funneled into America with Canada getting nothing out of it besides a jet which will need spare parts also from America, technicians from America, and after some years will need to be replaced with another American jet because after you've stabbed your own domestic industry in the back now you have no other choice than to continue buying foreign.
by TheDong | 2025-04-23 16:27:37+00:00
I can install Jetbrains via most linux package managers, launch it, and pay money. I can install steam and pay for games. I can install sublime text and give em cash.

Arch linux doesn't try to take 30% of all the games I buy on steam, nor does it prevent steam from asking me for my credit card.

Apple reviews all apps to make sure they don't ask for your credit card, don't tell you where you can buy the same good online, and make sure that if you do sell anything, apple gets its 30% cut, even if it's a virtual store like steam. That's the reason you can't buy kindle books on iOS (even though you can buy apple books? Weird? Isn't that illegal anti-competitive behavior?)

It would absolutely not be reasonable for linux package managers to demand that I pay 30% more for all games on steam if I did "pacman -Sy steam" vs downloading steam from valve's website and figuring out how to get it working on arch-linux (taking the deb, extracting it with 'ar', and installing some dependencies)
by ants_everywhere | 2025-04-23 16:27:40+00:00
Yeah I thought this was possible too that's one of the reasons I asked

I checked to see if that pun occurs elsewhere and didn't see it. Someone who doesn't have English as a first language may not know the more obscure usage of check since you don't use it much these days other than as part of phrases and idioms like "checks and balances", which is 18th century English
by anthk | 2025-04-23 16:28:01+00:00
I'd put a Forth interpreter under an esp32 laptop with some disk additions:

https://github.com/howerj/ffs

I learn with DOS an such under Elementary. So, kids today can do the same.

No, no Subleq, but:

- 32MB disk

- 256-1MB RAM

- 64x16 screen

- Forth block interface and prompt

- Printing? Basic PostScript can be set fast from Forth.

No internet, just Forth. The basic of loops, and even basic 'algebra' with the 'fruit balancing puzzle'.

Games? Sokoban under Forth, with a few blocks wasted with code and levels. It would fit under 110KB. 'Adventure' (Collosal Cave) fits under 150KB. Tetris, the same.

Gopher? Ok, doable, even a basic Gopher client too; I'm doing one with JimTCL, and in Forth with a proper stack I'd set one menu based such as:

1 item 2 bar bla bla 3 baz

Enter the number, you enter the link. Easy, no issues.

If you can code a Gopher client, a MUD one it's almost at ease.
by Derbasti | 2025-04-23 16:28:07+00:00
> If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.

But what alternative? There is no European smartphone OS. Windows and Steam OS and XBox are US-american, too.

I suppose Linux, Playstation, and Nintendo, then?
by unethical_ban | 2025-04-23 16:28:30+00:00
I have conservative family who only read/watch Fox news, OAN and some conservative meme site called twitchy, which is like if Fox news tried to be dumber.

They don't see this. There is no true reporting. My mom didn't know about the breadth of tariffs. She didn't know about the DJT crypto scam. I've explained signal to her several times (prior to the news, just getting her to use it). She really doesn't understand anything complicated.

She "knows Trump is a jerk" but wants, and I quote, "America for Americans" and for us to put China in its place and to secure the border.

edit: I told my dad "Why do you think America is so powerful and influential? It's because we invest in the world and welcome students into this country. We aren't the center of the world for no reason". He simply replied, "We are the center of the world."

Our country is filled with people like this, incapable of abstract thought and poisoned by lies.
by philsnow | 2025-04-23 16:28:52+00:00
Löve (lua thing for graphics / games) historically had this but the names were all sex-related (SECS, LUBE, COCK, AnAl, HUMP, Polygamy, Swingers, Quickie). None of the project names were metaphorically related to their functions.

It's toned down lately and a ton of projects have been renamed, though not scrubbed, so the old names are still in the code and some documentation uses the old names. Also, you can't rewrite tens of thousands of forum posts from 2010 that use the older names that show up while searching for issues.
by starkparker | 2025-04-23 16:29:18+00:00
Pixels then become containers and subpixels become quantfiable entities within each pixel. In the apple analogy, each crate contains three countable apples and you can count both the crates and the apples independently.

This idea itself breaks down when we get to triangular subpixel rendering, which spans pixels and divides subpixels. But it's also a minor form of optical illusion, so making sense of it is inherently fraught.

Maybe a pixel is just a pixel.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-23 16:29:35+00:00
It most certainly does.

> Congratulations! You wrote your first decorator. Even if it looks different to what you think a decorator should look like—you usually see them used with the @ notation, which we'll discuss in Part 3—store_arguments() is a decorator.

And:

> A decorator is a function that accepts another function as an argument and returns yet another function. The function it returns is a decorated version of the function you pass as an argument. (We'll return to this definition and refine it later in this decorator journey)

I have no idea why you are claiming something that is plainly false based on the text of the article.
by jeyzolo | 2025-04-23 16:29:50+00:00
Feeling stuck with repetitive wording? Discover the power of AI Reword for instant text transformation. Just paste your content, choose your preferred style, and let our cutting-edge AI breathe new life into your writing. Our advanced technology ensures your original meaning remains intact while enhancing clarity, creativity, and engagement. Whether you need a professional tone for business documents, a casual vibe for blog posts, or a persuasive edge for marketing materials, AI Reword adapts to your needs, making your writing process effortless and efficient. Ideal for emails, essays, or social posts.
by fortran77 | 2025-04-23 16:30:07+00:00
As a person who owns two Teslas (and has no plans to get rid of them) I don't think the author is saying that these protestors were potential customers, I think he's saying that the brand has been impacted negatively by them, and that potential customers are starting to look at the alternatives. (Even I am noticing how nice some of the new GM and Kia and Ford and BMW electric cars look).
by wduquette | 2025-04-23 16:30:19+00:00
Heh. The books on the list would be the ones from which I learned new ways to think about programming. Most of them are now long out-of-date, as witness the discussion on "101 BASIC Games" going on elsewhere on Hacker News.

"101 Basic Games", edited by David Ahl and published by DEC. I learned to program by typing in the code from this book back in the late '70's.

"Write Your Own Programming Language Using C++", by Norman E. Smith. This is about writing a simple Forth interpreter. I used what I learned to write a simple Forth interpreter in C, which I then used as an embedded extension language in a couple of apps I was working on at the time. This was on a VAX, and rather before I'd ever heard of anything like TCL/TK.

"Tcl and the Tk Toolkit", by John Ousterhout, which (among other things) explained how an embedded extension language ought to work.

The O'Reilly X Windows books, and various O'Reilly books with animals on the cover. They were essential references, back in the day.

"The C++ FAQs", by I don't remember who. I never used C++ much; but this book was an excellent introduction to all of the pitfalls in the C++ of the day, and how to use C++ without shooting yourself in the foot--and an even better example of how to write for programmers. It was a big influence on how I later wrote programmer's documentation.

"Refactoring", by Martin Fowler. I've never followed the advice in this book slavishly, but it's tremendously affirming to read a new book encouraging you to do what you were doing already without having a name for it.

"Effective Java", by Joshua Bloch, which I spent a lot of time with about ten years ago; it helped me come to grips with Java and avoid a variety of foot-guns, much like "The C++ FAQs".

Various Lisp books; I don't like Lisp all that much, or Scheme either; but I come back to one or the other every few years and take another look, because I always learn something.

Various other texts on specific programming languages, as I experiment with them; "Learn You a Haskell for a Great Good" sticks out mostly because it has a memorable title.

And "Crafting Interpreters", which I've worked all the way through and then run with. Last month I implemented a simple Datalog implementation in a few days using the techniques from CI; I'll soon be integrating it into a much enhanced version of Nystrom's Lox.
by anthonyrstevens | 2025-04-23 16:30:47+00:00
This is not my experience. I just did a search for "dehumidifer" and ALL of the first 50 results are for dehumidifiers. The 51st result is for:

Vacplus Moisture Absorbers 6 Pack, 10.5 Oz Portable Humidity Absorber Boxes for Your Bathroom, Closet & Car, Dehumidifier with Fragrance

...which is related, no?
by AIPedant | 2025-04-23 16:32:15+00:00
I nominally agree with this point - AGI is theoretically possible according to the Church-Turing thesis, we can “just” solve the Schrödinger for every atom in the human body.

The more salient point is that when a model reads “dog” it associates a bunch of text and images vaguely related to dogs. But when a human reads “dog” they associate their experiences with dogs, or other animals if they haven’t ever met a dog. In particular, cats who have met dogs also have some concept of “dog,” without using language at all. Humans share this intuitive form of understanding, and use it with text/speech/images to extend our understanding to things we haven’t encountered personally. But multimodal LLMs have no access to this form of intelligence, shared by all mammals, and in general they have no common sense. They can fake some common sense with huge amounts of text, but it is not reliable: the space of feline-level common sense deductions is not technically infinite, but it is incomprehensibly vast compared to the corpus of all human text and photographs.
by Whoppertime | 2025-04-23 16:32:18+00:00
Looking at the labor force participation rate it seems like there is a lot of labor to work in the factories U-3, the official unemployment rate only includes people who were actively looking for a job in the last 4 weeks. Meaning if you've been out of work for half a year and you stopped sending resumes the last 4 weeks (because none of the local employers are responding to your resume) you are not included in the unemployment rate
by gamblor956 | 2025-04-23 16:32:45+00:00
I don't need to read minds.

Bush, Obama, and Biden expressed coherent, reasoned ideologies and plans of action, and as presidents, acted consistently with their own words and deeds. I may have disagreed with Bush's policies, but I know that he actually believed that what he was doing was what he thought was best for America based on his ideological beliefs, because he was able to articulate why. (And those ideological beliefs didn't change on a whim and weren't centered around what was best for him personally.)

Trump doesn't issue coherent thoughts. He doesn't use reason. He can't explain why he does why he does because he doesn't act based on reason; he just goes base of whatever feels good in the second it's flashing through his brain. At the start of the month, he changed his mind on tariffs literally dozens of times in a few hours; so quickly and so frequently that even his own White House didn't know what the tariff policy was for several days. The Secretary of Treasury even said that the best place to find out what our tariff policy was is the President's twitter account (never mind that Congress determines tariffs, not the president).

Everybody is great until they're the worst ever. If someone disagrees with him for whatever reason, they're losers and traitors and maybe should go to jail. Every member of his first administration refused to come back the second time around, so he calls them all losers and traitors. He appointed Powell to the Federal Reserve chair, and now he's calling him Biden's puppet for not doing the stupid thing Trump is demanding that he do to bail him out of the other stupid thing Trump is doing. He appointed two of the justices to the SCOTUS and hundreds of federal judges and now he's calling them "out of control" because they won't just roll over and okay the unlawful things he's doing.
by thijson | 2025-04-23 16:33:22+00:00
This guy compared different orientations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AVO1IyfA9M

His conclusion is the vertical generate about 70% of optimal incline cells. The charge profile has two peaks, one in the morning, one in the evening. I can imagine using the vertical orientation for a fence. It would definitely keep them cleaner too.
by bad_username | 2025-04-23 16:33:40+00:00
> notes sync seamlessly across devices

Droobox and similar services have never been seamless for me with Obsidian. There will inevitably be some conflict when the same file gets edited on two machines, and an ugly conflict file will appear, with no easy way to resolve it without a specialized diff tool. Sometimes this conflict file will get unnoticed and a change will fall theough the cracks. Not a deal breaker - but not "seamless" either.
by xvector | 2025-04-23 16:33:41+00:00
How do you expect small businesses to acquire customers? Spending tens of millions of dollars competing in generalized ad space to reach the same audience they can reach today with $1000?

Most small businesses that exist today would become nonviable overnight, and that is a huge chunk of the economy. Sure, you can say "they shouldn't have the right to exist" because they use targeted ads, but I have yet to hear a solid argument for why such ads are an infringement on our fundamental rights such that the whole SMB segment of the economy is worth destroying.
by Wobbles42 | 2025-04-23 16:34:11+00:00
Is my experience unique in that "having someone to call" has historically been of very low value?

I'm an embedded firmware dev, so admittedly I am dealing with an entirely different list of vendors and asking for different things than the typical sysadmin or devops type.

With that said, it has certainly not been my experience that "having someone to call" actually solves my problems all that often. It's occasionally a nice to have, but normally I am reluctant to even start the process because my experience has been that it is usually a net drain on my time and energy to do so.

At this point, I am far more concerned with having access to source code so that I have a fighting chance of creating a workaround for myself, and failing that I don't want to contact my vendor so much as I want to replace them.