MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I'm building an app to replace Overleaf and Notion
by WolfOliver | 2025-06-19 10:33:44+00:00
Hi HN,

Since 2019, I’ve been working on a writing platform designed for creating complex documents (e.g., theses). I personally use it for everything as it also allows to classify documents in categories so you can organize them efficiently. As of a few months ago, the app is also available in the browser, and you can now invite coworkers to collaborate on a document in real time.

The app is somewhat inspired by LyX. It offers an intuitive, modern editor, but users don’t need to know any LaTeX. When it’s time to export, they can choose from a range of templates (IEEE paper, thesis, etc.).

A few highlights:

- It uses a custom-built block editor that performs well with large documents. Each block is its own contenteditable element (instead of having one massive contenteditable for the whole document)

- If you prefer plain text - you can insert a Markdown block and write using Markdown instead

- Built-in citation management

- Support for cross-references and footnotes

- Mermaid diagrams, inline LaTeX equations, and display math are all supported

- "To-do" sections help you stay organized while writing

You can try it out here: https://www.monsterwriter.com/
by tlb | 2025-06-19 10:33:57+00:00
Yes, and (some near-future) AI is also more patient and better at multitasking than a reasonable human. It can make a change, submit for full fuzzing, and if there's a problem it can continue with the saved context it had when making the change. It can work on 100s of such changes in parallel, while a human trying to do this would mix up the reasons for the change with all the other changes they'd done by the time the fuzzing result came back.

LLMs are worse at many things than human programmers, so you have to try to compensate by leveraging the things they're better at. Don't give up with "they're bad at such and such" until you've tried using their strengths.
by noosphr | 2025-06-19 10:34:14+00:00
Reading the actual article reminds me of the old soviet joke:

Q: Is it true that Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov from Moscow won a car in a lottery?

A: In principle yes, but: 1). it wasn't Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov but Aleksander Aleksandrovich Aleksandrov; 2). he is not from Moscow but from Odessa; 3). it was not a car but a bicycle; 4). he didn't win it, but it was stolen from him.
Ask HN: How do you defend support AI agents from voice prompt injection?
by theHolyTrynity | 2025-06-19 10:35:07+00:00
We are securing a customer support agent that does the following: - retrieve data around company services from a RAG - is connected to a few tools to escalate to humans and write support tickets - has voice (11labs)

we did complete assessment for normal prompt injection with our tools

but is there any solution for voice attacks?
by arghwhat | 2025-06-19 10:37:56+00:00
> Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again.

But it would also never land on Mars, so it would be a waste to build it for that. Build it for what it will actually spend its life doing.

Not saying SpaceX won't go to Mars, but if/when they do it will likely be several rocket generations later and possibly with specialized rockets, with a significant portion of it being one-time-use as you ain't returning.
by surgomat | 2025-06-19 10:37:57+00:00
Ahahah hell yeah! Nerds with routines, spreadsheets and gains let's keep pushing both code and plates

Honestly, I think it's also tied to growing awareness around how much time we all spend sitting. Yesterday i was sitting 19h.

More devs and tech folks are realizing that staying active is kind of essential if we want to feel good and stay "sharp" long-term let's say.
by andy12_ | 2025-06-19 10:38:29+00:00
It really is an obvious hint. Anyone can check that since the blackout there is never less than 4000 or 5000 MW of nuclear at all times (compared to 3000 MW of nuclear in the days before the blackout).

Also combined cycle. On the day of the blackout there was very little, about 1600 MW. Now there is usually never less than 3000 MW of combined cycle even at peak hours of solar generation.

Even in the report they released they talk about how just 10 minutes before the blackout they were scrambling to put online more conventional generators to stabilize the grid (they never had the change to go online before the blackout happened). [1]

"At 12:22 h when the system recovers from EVENT 2, it is observed how the system voltage starts to rise, but within the operating margins. In view of this situation, the REE Control Center begins to couple reactors in several substations to counteract this rise. [Likewise, [...] the decision is taken to couple more conventional generation that complies with P.O. 7.4 mainly in the south, asking for coupling times. A CCC group is chosen in Andalusia, which gives 1 h and 30 minutes of coupling time to the grid, technical minimum at 14:00h. This measure was never implemented due to the zero voltage. Coinciding with this decision, a control center reported that a nuclear group was oscillating a lot with the oscillations and that it could trip. As a precautionary measure, advance notice was requested to couple to another CCC group in the North zone. Then, another control center indicated that a CCC group in Andalusia needed between 2 and 2.5 hours to couple and asked to modify the offer to make it cheaper. After this, the first control center confirms that the northern CCC group would couple at 15:00 h. [...] As a result of all the above events, the system was at a very different operating point from the initial one, with low damping and less flexibility in voltage control. [...] The corrective measures taken could not be fully implemented, e.g. synchronization of the two groups."

[1] https://d1n1o4zeyfu21r.cloudfront.net/WEB_Incidente_SistemaE...
by PeterStuer | 2025-06-19 10:38:47+00:00
Define non-essenti

The way I see dependency in office ("knowledge") work:

- pre-(computing) history. We are at the office, we work

- dawn of the pc: my computer is down, work halts

- dawn of the lan: the network is down, work halts

- dawn of the Internet: the Internet connection is down, work halts (<- we are basically all here)

- dawn of the LLM: ChatGPT is down, work halts (<- for many, we are here already)
by karmakaze | 2025-06-19 10:38:50+00:00
> They're not in open source as a cooperative venture, they are using it to make money

> Existing open source licenses, practices, and culture don't draw this distinction

I disagree for the most part. Corporations avoid copyleft licenses like the plague. It's the term open-source that includes 'free beer' licensed software that created this confusion.
Show HN: Tap-It – Map keys to clicks
by superdhawan | 2025-06-19 10:39:27+00:00
Tap-It is a simple Chrome extension that lets you map keyboard keys to click specific elements on websites. Create custom shortcuts for your favourite sites! + These configs are shareable too!

My current uses: F -> Focus mode on chess.com S -> Click on search bar & directly start typing (netflix, primevideo, youtube etc) N -> Click the next button which pops up at the end of a netflix series episode

(Motivation + more details in readme)
by metalman | 2025-06-19 10:39:53+00:00
I'm with you, but my take is that advertainment only scales big, so we are mostly collateral noise to the designers who have to balance many different factors, the main one bieng that the market they have brainwashed is as a result, fickle, and insists on bieng entertained, with most of the work force in advertising also consuming the product in a world of always almost, never quite satiated quest for the something™ that will get them off the treadmill. The very fact that anything imaginable is availible, anywhere, right now, up front, delivered ,only highlights the sameness of it all, where the tracking and fingerprinting results in people buying whatever they glanced at,casualy and inocently, but now own some glitzy cheap, likely broken facsimily, and are now under intense pressure to buy another one. So advertainment gives it's reek of edgy mindless frustration to the whole world. So ya, turn off scripts and storage, run some blockers, and remember to be nice to all the people actualy helping and doing things in the real world.
Show HN: A color name API that maps hex to the closest human-readable name
by meodai | 2025-06-19 10:40:01+00:00
I built this API to return the closest named color for any hex value—using curated lists like my own [1], XKCD [2], and others.

I made it from scratch without Express or any frameworks because:

- I’m a frontend/interaction dev and wanted to learn how to build an API from the ground up. - Existing APIs didn’t guarantee unique names per color—mine does. - It also supports WebSocket updates, gzip responses, and multiple name sets.

I’ve been collecting color names for over 10 years [1]. With ~30,000 entries, bundling them into every color-related project became excessive. This API keeps things lightweight—for me and hopefully for others too.

GitHub: https://github.com/meodai/color-name-api

Would love feedback on naming logic, accuracy, performance, or backend best practices I might’ve missed.

[1] Large Color Name List: https://github.com/meodai/color-names [2] XKCD color survey results: https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/
by surgomat | 2025-06-19 10:40:35+00:00
The error should be fixed, thanks for the screenshot mate. As a digital nomad, i totally hear you on the traveling with bands situation and yeah, repeating the same 3 workouts gets old reeeeally fast.

One of the goals with Workout.cool is to offer more "variety" and inspiration let's say. Planning to add 5 to 10 exercices per week.
by eszed | 2025-06-19 10:40:56+00:00
I haven't seen this, but going by the linked summary, I'd say 'no'. I'm sure it's very clever, but pastiches depend upon familiarity with the source material to work. They also - this is why they're fun! - change the source in material ways, as it seems this does.

Students need to experience plays the way they're meant to be experienced: as plays. Live events, with human interaction at their heart. Anything else is... Missing the point.
by DimKat | 2025-06-19 10:41:18+00:00
Hi, I'm Dmytro — I recently built Wallper, a native macOS app for live 4K video wallpapers.

I created it because I couldn't find anything simple, high-quality, and Apple-like for animated desktops. Most options I tried felt clunky, used too much power, or just didn’t integrate well with macOS.

Wallper started as a side project I made for myself, and now it’s public. There’s a free version you can try — I’d really appreciate any feedback, suggestions, or thoughts from this community.

What do you think?
by sensanaty | 2025-06-19 10:41:56+00:00
There's also those instances where Microsoft unleashed Copilot on the .NET repo, and it resulted in the most hilariously terrible PRs that required the maintainers to basically tell Copilot every single step it should take to fix the issue. They were basically writing the PRs themselves at that point, except doing it through an intermediary that was much dumber, slower and less practical than them.

And don't get me started on my own experiences with these things, and no, I'm not a luddite, I've tried my damndest and have followed all the cutting-edge advice you see posted on HN and elsewhere.

Time and time again, the reality of these tools falls flat on their face while people like Andrej hype things up as if we're 5 minutes away from having Claude become Skynet or whatever, or as he puts it, before we enter the world of "Software 3.0" (coincidentally totally unrelated to Web 3.0 and the grift we had to endure there, I'm sure).

To intercept the common arguments,

- no I'm not saying LLMs are useless or have no usecases

- yes there's a possibility if you extrapolate by current trends (https://xkcd.com/605/) that they indeed will be Skynet

- yes I've tried the latest and greatest model released 7 minutes ago to the best of my ability

- yes I've tried giving it prompts so detailed a literal infant could follow along and accomplish the task

- yes I've fiddled with providing it more/less context

- yes I've tried keeping it to a single chat rather than multiple chats, as well as vice versa

- yes I've tried Claude Code, Gemini Pro 2.5 With Deep Research, Roocode, Cursor, Junie, etc.

- yes I've tried having 50 different "agents" running and only choosing the best output form the lot.

I'm sure there's a new gotcha being written up as we speak, probably something along the lines of "Well for me it doubled my productivity!" and that's great, I'm genuinely happy for you if that's the case, but for me and my team who have been trying diligently to use these tools for anything that wasn't a microscopic toy project, it has fallen apart time and time again.

The idea of an application UI or god forbid an entire fucking Operating System being run via these bullshit generators is just laughable to me, it's like I'm living on a different planet.
by al_borland | 2025-06-19 10:42:04+00:00
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t stand using split pane views. I like the way apps like Obsidian handle having a live preview of the LML. Any time I’m opening the file, I want the option to edit it. A view-only method is useful to me for sharing with others, which is generally hosted or done via a chat app that uses markdown formatting, so it all just kind of works.

I can see some value in storing the file as html, for the sake of portability to whatever LML someone may want to use on a given day or era. But then it would be converting every time a file is opened for editing and saved, which seems unnecessary. The editor and the viewer have different goals, and for the files on my local system, I’m always the editor.
by cherryteastain | 2025-06-19 10:42:09+00:00
> but we don't go around throwing such accusations at them

Simply not true. There is plenty of rhetoric about immigrants (even 2nd gen+) in Western countries being accused of being disloyal to their Western citizenship in favor of their ethnic origin countries. Chinese, Indians, Middle Easterners, Latin Americans etc are all accused of this; see the recent riots in LA for a very recent example. Yet this insinuation is made illegal only with respect to one country only for whatever reason.
by v5v3 | 2025-06-19 10:43:26+00:00
In the Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz interview yesterday.

Cruz stated similar to "I was taught at a young age that the bible says whoever helps Israel will be blessed by God and those that don't anger god".

Tucker, a Christian, asked where in the bible it said this as he had no recollection of such. Cruz didn't know.

Turns out it doesn't even say as such in the bible.

This is brainwashing at a very young age that has been going on for decades.
by ben_w | 2025-06-19 10:44:56+00:00
> Yes, that's my fall back as well. If it receives zero instructions, will it take any action?

By design, no.

But, importantly, that's because the closest it has to an experience of time is an ongoing input of tokens. Humans constantly get new input, so for this to be a fair comparison, the LLM would also have to get constant new input.

Humans in solitary confinement become mentally ill (both immediately and long-term), and hallucinate stuff (at least short term, I don't know about long term).
Ask HN: Spreadsheet LLM Understanding
by abelfiori | 2025-06-19 10:45:18+00:00
Hey,

I am working on a financial platform for private investors and I am tasked to create a service that can ingest spreadsheets (financial statement mostly like P&L) and use a LLM to retrieve data, chat about their content, create structured outputs.

Has anyone found a good API?

Direct CSV/File ingestion/ExcelToImage on the main LLMs does not provide a good accurate solution at the moment. Other services like https://unstructured.io/ or llamaindex apis are not accurate either.

This new service may work but I have not tried it yet: https://www.llamaindex.ai/blog/introducing-the-spreadsheet-agent-in-private-preview
by culebron21 | 2025-06-19 10:45:45+00:00
The program looks similar to the Soviet N1 program, in scale, testing and failures. Korolyov was in hurry to get to the moon, and tried to assemble everything and test in actual flight. After 4 failed test flights, the program was scrapped.

This approach had worked with the R7 rocket (the Sputnik and Gagarin's booster, predecessor of Soyuz). But at this larger scale, it seems things break apart much easier if not properly tested in parts.
by ascagnel_ | 2025-06-19 10:46:39+00:00
I'd say the pendulum is swinging in the other direction -- Fortnite is bigger than most everything on Steam, and everything in that game feels like it's designed around you making progress through its battle pass in some incremental way. The world map has puzzles, there's a fishing mechanic, and it comes with a suite of non-combat alternate modes.
by kavouras | 2025-06-19 10:46:54+00:00
Of course its worth making a fuss about it. My social media are private because what's getting shared in it is for close friends and family only. The US government has no right searching through it. This is a big joke and I'm afraid it's only the beginning. Personally, with how things are going, I don't think I'm pursuing a PhD in the US after graduating. What's next, sharing a backup of my private conversations?

I'm afraid we're going into a weird timeline where authoritarian figures in power(not just government) are having immense amounts of data for people, and the technology to go through it without much effort. It's a good time(if it's not to late) for everyone who cares about their privacy to start getting as much as possible outside mainstream social media and centralized accounts(google etc)
by no_wizard | 2025-06-19 10:47:26+00:00
Zed reminds of the days when Atom was big.

It was a good time, but it always left me wondering how long it would last as it leaned heavily on community support for nearly everything useful outside a few packages

Such a situation makes me worry about it keeping up if popularity wanes. With JetBrains for example at least I know that paying for the editor it will keep getting proper updates and support even if it isn’t the most popular (though it is quite popular currently)
by dminik | 2025-06-19 10:47:37+00:00
For Counter-Strike 1.6, source and GO your crosshair would change and indicate that you are aiming at a player. Not sure about CS2, but wouldn't rule it out either.

It's a bit slow, but you could grab the player ID, then check if the player is on your team or not and then fire. Either by sending a mouse input, or if I remember correctly by writing to a specific address.

However, with enough knowledge (which is mostly documented online) you could actually pull out the hitbox, skeleton and animation data and just run the line-box intersection step yourself. Easier to do internally by hooking in-game functions though.
by mort96 | 2025-06-19 10:47:46+00:00
No, we still have software with Internet features. But Internet features went from a solution looking for a problem, to just another tool we can reach for when it's actually useful.

A whole lot of "AI" features today are in that "solution looking for a problem" category. There's a lot of "AI" in places where it really makes no sense at all. Companies and projects are afraid of missing out on what they think could be the Next Big Thing, instead of just trying to make the best software they can.

When the AI bubble bursts, it could end up like Internet features: software gets them when it genuinely makes sense, but they won't be crammed into software which has no need for it. Or it could end up like cryptocurrency: it pretty much just disappears as people realize that they don't really have any use other than to speculate on its value and to buy drugs.

Personally, my bet is that they'll end up more like cryptocurrencies. After all, "AI" doesn't just have to be a useful feature to be worth it. It has a real cost. Companies like Microsoft and Apple and Google, as well as the venture capitalists and investment funds behind the likes of Anthropic, are currently sinking VAST amounts of capital into giving "AI" away for free or heavily subsidized. At some point, it'll need to become profitable, and I don't think many people will find that the value outweighs the real, non-subsidized costs.

But we'll see.
by diggan | 2025-06-19 10:48:11+00:00
> suggests a lack of understanding of these smaller models capabilities

If anything, you're showing a lack of understanding of what he was talking about. The context is this specific time, where we're early in a ecosystem and things are expensive and likely centralized (ala mainframes) but if his analogy/prediction is correct, we'll have a "Linux" moment in the future where that equation changes (again) and local models are competitive.

And while I'm a huge fan of local models run them for maybe 60-70% of what I do with LLMs, they're nowhere near proprietary ones today, sadly. I want them to, really badly, but it's important to be realistic here and realize the differences of what a normal consumer can run, and what the current mainframes can run.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-06-19 10:48:18+00:00
“X might include Y”, “X frequently Z”, “X is often W”: these phrases do not legally define anything, they’re merely vibes. If I argue that a particular statement is neither Y, Z, or W, that doesn’t logically imply that it isn’t X.

If a censor is trying to determine if a particular post doesn’t contain antisemetic content, this paragraph is not helpful.

Well, they do state one negative criterion:

> However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

I have never seen this principle successfully cited as an affirmative defense, however. They give examples that contradict this quote, so I don’t think we’re supposed to take it seriously.
by andybak | 2025-06-19 10:48:26+00:00
It's a wrapper for Claude. What's the moat here? Why this and not one of a dozen similar products? Why not reproduce from scratch? $80M would buy you a decent development team and it doesn't seem like these kind of apps are hard to make.

Is there something especially good about Base44? Or are they paying for the user base or the time to market advantage?
by b112 | 2025-06-19 10:49:12+00:00
Read the comment I'm replying to. Now read mine.

That said, you're upset that I said comparing costs isn't relevant? Isn't that the case you're making right now, that the costs cannot be compared, therefore aren't relevant in this discussion?

My tact on non-relevance, is that saying "it was built on another program's tech!" is not relevant, because everything meets that criterion. For example, as I said, the Saturn was built on decades of German research, including war time research during WWII, into rockets. Saturn's US development costs were a fraction of overall rocket research done by the Germans!

So if upthread is going to argue "but it's all built on the Saturn, and free knowledge!", then the same argument can be carried further back, thus negating this argument. Why?

Because it makes the Saturn cost trillions.