MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Cortex – OS-wide AI with instant context input
by andrewfhou | 2025-08-02 17:01:56+00:00
Hey HN! I’m Andrew, and I’ve been building Cortex (https://cortexdesktop.com/) for the last few weeks. Cortex is my attempt to reimagine how we interact with computers - starting with a simple interface, but aiming for something deeper: an AI layer over your OS that understands what you’re doing, remembers it, and helps you dynamically.

Right now, Cortex is just a floating overlay you can summon anywhere on your Mac. It works like an inline ChatGPT, but it lets you instantly send that context into the chat by highlighting text - so you don’t have to explain what you’re doing. Here is a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZEbpysqH2w&feature=youtu.be

That’s all it does today but the reason I’m building it is because I think that the current way we use computers is kind of antiquated - the OS is relatively dumb and memoryless. I feel like it would be so much better of an experience to work with a computer that is contextually and semantically smart.

This started as a tool I was hacking together for myself while context-switching between projects, tabs, and apps. I was using ChatGPT a lot, but every time I wanted to ask something, I had to re-explain what I was doing. “I’m building this project with (these) specs, and (this) stack, help me plan etc etc”

I realized that firstly, it was super tedious to constantly go back to GPT to query, and secondly that it was annoying that I constantly had to feed it context to make it work the way I wanted. Granted, Chat GPT does have a certain amount of memory nowadays but I mean something far more granular - file diffing, text changes, differences in entire workflows, etc.

I feel that the OS should have memory. It should be able to understand semantically, not just react to commands. Eventually, I want Cortex to become the operating system’s memory. A system that watches what you do across apps (files, text, window titles, tabs), builds a real-time semantic timeline of your work, and lets you ask questions like “What was I working on Thursday before lunch?” Or say “Open the Figma file I was editing after that Zoom call”.

I am technically getting ahead of myself, as right now I’m just trying to test the one use case of having access to AI anywhere in the OS. This is definitely an early-stage product. It’s glitchy in spots. But if you like trying new interfaces and imagining what comes next - I’d love your feedback.

You can use it free for 7 days — no signup needed. I’d love to hear your feedback, ideas, critiques, or even thoughts on how you’d want your computer to "remember."

Thanks!

-Andrew
by stoneman24 | 2025-08-02 17:02:14+00:00
For me, any position which requires the full maximum 20 moves to solve would qualify as the perfect shuffle.

I wonder how many positions qualify (perhaps only 1 discounting symmetry as there is 1 fully solved cube, again discounting symmetry). But that’s a rabbit hole that I am not going down.

But I can appreciate the choice made in the article.
by shash | 2025-08-02 17:02:14+00:00
The amount they seem to have made from the offence is 45 million, so the fine is twice that plus some more. I guess the idea is that you fine them enough that this particular business they’re doing is no longer feasible and hope they drop it.

The fine doesn’t need to be a significant portion of their earnings, just like a parking ticket needn’t be a significant portion of your wealth. It just needs to be high enough that the action that caused it makes them less than the act of not doing that.
by cshokie | 2025-08-02 17:02:39+00:00
WinRT is not the same thing as managed .NET code. There is no requirement that a UWP is .NET. There are many examples of unmanaged C++ UWPs, including the open source Windows Terminal.

WinRT is a mechanism to express APIs in a way that is amenable to cross-language usage. It is built on top of COM, and is not a replacement for COM.
by endoblast | 2025-08-02 17:02:40+00:00
I go for a decent walk most days and it doesn't require effort or get boring. It goes well with listening to headphones and relaxing the eyes on the horizon plus seeing a bit of nature and humanity in action.

This does me a lot of good however the only upper body exercise I get is playing the piano! I can't see myself joining a gym or doing press-ups reliably in the long-term. I need to find a suitable hobby which has upper body + other benefits while being fun/interesting and low-risk. Carrying logs has helped but we have enough firewood now.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-08-02 17:03:22+00:00
I have about two weeks of using Claude Code and to be honest, as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. It has a learning curve. You need to learn how to give it proper context, how to chunk up the work, etc. And you need to know how to program, obviously. Asking it to do something you don't know how to do, that's just asking for a disaster. I have more than 25 years of experience, so I'm confident with anything Claude Code will try to do and can review it, or stop and redirect it. About 10-15 years ago, I was dreaming about some kind of neural interface, where I could program without writing any code. And I realized that with Claude Code, it's kind of here.

A couple of times I hit the daily limits and decided to try Gemini CLI with the 2.5 pro model as a replacement. That's not even comparable to Claude Code. The frustration with Gemini is just not worth it.

I couldn't imagine paying >100$/month for a dev tool in the past, but I'm seriously considering upgrading to the Max plans.
by stouset | 2025-08-02 17:04:01+00:00
This is more fuel for my thesis that every single feature of golang was considered in isolation, and zero thought was put into how any of them would work together.

I’m not sure how else you can explain perfectly idiomatic code (a loop, or a reused err variable, or a closure) causing a program to fall on its face simply by dropping in go’s namesake feature, whose entire purpose was supposed to be that you could simply drop it in.

To actually use `go` you have to do minor contortions like always remembering to copy your loop variables, make new error variables, and also not accidentally capture any external variables in a closure.

Go doesn’t actually help you with any of this, of course. You just have to remember to do it right every single time. None of these things are hard (usually), but the fact that you have to do them at all speaks volumes about the amount of forethought that went into it.

And of course doing all of those steps doesn’t save you if one of the things you tried to copy secretly contains a pointer inside of it, like absolutely everything in golang does. You didn’t know, and it wasn’t even a public member so it wasn’t in the docs. But there was a pointer somewhere deep inside the thing you copied so now you’ve got unguarded concurrent mutation of shared memory.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-02 17:04:34+00:00
Time is short, I’ll take the walk and lift the weights but if I can get the results faster using biological engineering, I’m willing to spend and accept greater risk to make it happen (both for metabolic profile management a la GLP-1RAs and muscle growth). There is no extra credit for making life harder than it has to be, and we’re all dead eventually.
by xandrius | 2025-08-02 17:04:53+00:00
To verify any of the words of your long comment, one would simply need to compare deaths caused to others by cars vs deaths caused to others by bicycles (could even add in motorised bikes) and see how many order of magnitude of difference we would find.

Once we have established the danger level of each vehicle then we can go into detail on how to decrease the fatalities of the most deadly one. I'm pretty sure, requiring a license for bicycles is not going to change a thing.
by spencerflem | 2025-08-02 17:05:58+00:00
This comment makes me so sad- I mean this genuinely, looking at your comment history its clear you've fallen into the far right rabbit hole, and this is what "catch you when you say something they don't like" means. No shade to you, there are hundred billion dollar campaigns waged to trap people in ideas like those that are designed to be isolating. But their goal is to push you away from friends and family and towards extremist beliefs.

I emphasize with how it must feel to seem iced out and victimised, it sounds awful! but this is not a normal position to have and most people do not believe the humans around them are fake or gaslighting
by jcarrillo | 2025-08-02 17:06:01+00:00
Location: San Diego, CA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Typescript, Node.js, React, GCP/AWS, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Docker, Firebase

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NHKPxcB73xFLRJ06Vf6Ju7ut...

Email: carrillo.jason.e@gmail.com

4+ YOE owning full-stack web apps with measurable business impact:

--> Delivered a full-stack A/B Test platform that drove ad revenue by 20%.

--> Reduced a business' client processing time by 80%.

--> Cut a sales process from days to seconds.

--> Reduced image delivery times by 90% for 25k+ daily active users.

--> Reduced average incident resolution time by 50%.

Looking for interesting full-stack or backend-focused roles.
by darth_avocado | 2025-08-02 17:06:12+00:00
I injured my knees by running more than my knees could handle. Instead of never exercising again, after a 2 month long break I started incorporating other forms of exercise in my run schedule. Now I run longer and have other parts of my body feel better.

There’s a hundred reasons to not exercise but you only need to focus on the one reason why you need to keep doing it.
by pmarreck | 2025-08-02 17:06:33+00:00
> Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level

My flat feet (and those of my mom, and those of one of her parents, ad infinitum) would beg to differ lol

Also, most of the energy our bodies burn to run just turns into heat, it's all very inefficient... even if sweating itself works pretty well, and even if our heat tolerance is high assuming we have a source of fresh water
by fanf2 | 2025-08-02 17:06:35+00:00
This is one of the features that Ruby cribbed directly from Perl. The Ruby documentation seems really bad, in particular “interpolation mode” is grievously misleading.

Perl’s documentation is far more clear about the consequences:

(https://perldoc.perl.org/perlop#Regexp-Quote-Like-Operators)

o Compile pattern only once. […] PATTERN may contain variables, which will be interpolated every time the pattern search is evaluated, except for when the delimiter is a single quote. […] Perl will not recompile the pattern unless an interpolated variable that it contains changes. You can force Perl to skip the test and never recompile by adding a /o (which stands for "once") after the trailing delimiter. Once upon a time, Perl would recompile regular expressions unnecessarily, and this modifier was useful to tell it not to do so, in the interests of speed. But now, the only reasons to use /o are one of: [reasons] The bottom line is that using /o is almost never a good idea.

In the days before Perl automatically memoized the compilation of regexes with interpolation, even back in the 1990s, it said,

However, mentioning /o constitutes a promise that you won't change the variables in the pattern. If you change them, Perl won't even notice.

Perl 4’s documentation is briefer. It says,

(https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/perl-4.0.00/perl.man#L272...)

PATTERN may contain references to scalar variables, which will be interpolated (and the pattern recompiled) every time the pattern search is evaluated. […] If you want such a pattern to be compiled only once, add an “o” after the trailing delimiter. This avoids expensive run-time recompilations, and is useful when the value you are interpolating won't change over the life of the script.
by raddan | 2025-08-02 17:06:50+00:00
I was struck this past week to the extent that even a mild physical impairment can cause. I overdid it last week on a run and I spent this week nursing a swollen knee. What kind of exercise to do without involving my knee? I lift weights sometimes, but I can’t do that every day, and it also does not give me the mood altering effect that a good run does. I was drawing a blank glumly in an armchair when my wife suggested swimming at the local pool with pull buoys (so that I can keep my knee immobilized).

After a few experiments that felt more like drowning than swimming I finally got the hang of it. But it left me seriously worried about exercise in my future. After all, joint problems are likely going to happen again in my future. And I started to wonder: how do disabled folks do this? It must be incredibly difficult (and expensive!). I really am incredibly lucky across multiple fronts to have the life that I have.
by gosub100 | 2025-08-02 17:07:09+00:00
Computers and software used to be extremely expensive about 30 years ago, yet private industry advanced the state of the art and brought the prices down.

There seems to be very little talk about making medical education cheaper and more accessible. Why wouldn't it be cheaper if we had more MDs and nurses? What if we made it easier to become an MD ?

The insurance system is a cartel and they are greedy. However the regulations (upheld by the government) enable it.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-02 17:07:17+00:00
Yes I agree about using a dedicated new blockchain but as I noted, that's as good as a sqlite torrent and so I mean, maybe people interested can use this but if it means having nodes out of complete charity (sorta as nano) then I do think that it might fall short.

The funny part is that I was thinking about creating a dedicated new blockchain but I felt "spamming" (honestly fair critique) was easier and more practical and currently more decentralized.
by dayjah | 2025-08-02 17:07:25+00:00
If you only ever look at the way a system works at a specific point in time you only observe it at that point in time.

America has had multiple attempts at solutions for healthcare over the years, each started with good intent and then waylaid by various causes to produce what we have right now.

A sibling comment mentions political compromise to pass the ACA, as an example of this.

Another example is that HMOs were started with inherent goodness, but got “corrupted” (in my mind) by profit seeking.

To directly answer your question: a core tenet of the Republican tent is minimal government involvement in day to day lives of the citizenry. Ergo, the Swiss system won’t work because it involves a lot of bureaucracy. Republicans link bureaucracy to cost, and feel this is not an appropriate use of tax payers dollars.

The holes in this political doctrine are not part of my answer here fwiw. Please no “but…” comments to that end :)
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-08-02 17:07:28+00:00
Lost causes are worth fighting for and keeping in the public eye, in the history of ideas being written off or challenges being considered impossible to overcome many end up swinging back hard the other way as long as they are ripe (the framework is preserved and still championed) and there is an inciting incident that swings public sentiment.

Defeatist attitudes and throwing in the towel almost never makes sense, engaging at a lower degree of time commitment is sensible for some, the meta commentary about it being hopeless is one of the worst types of self defeating comments a person can make, especially if they aren't in opposition, whose time are you trying to optimize with the comment? To what point and purpose are you saying this except to further deflate sails on an already still day?

The zeitgeist isn't purely rational or stable, change is often non linear, I've seen small subcultures with "impossible" headwinds completely own the space within my lifetime, we're just at the heel turn now and it's not universally popular, many people don't speak up because they are just getting vpns or moving to other forms of non-violent non-compliance.
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-08-02 17:08:34+00:00
> XZ has nothing to to with a lack of vetting and even if it was it would be an argument for it because it got caught in testing.

This is absolutely false, it was not caught in any sort of regular testing whatsoever.

It was caught by - of all people - a Microsoft employee who noticed SSH logins were taking a split second too long. Not distro packagers. The packages were already staged in the testing branches of the distros they were targeting and could have easily made it into the LTS versions had this one curious MS guy not noticed.
Show HN: Conway's Game of Life in JavaScript with efficient implementation
by gkoos | 2025-08-02 17:08:35+00:00
I built a Conway’s Game of Life implementation in plain JavaScript with no frameworks or dependencies. The code is modular and easy to follow, with a focus on performance and clarity.

The project is intended as a clean example of how to implement cellular automata with modern JS, optimized for speed but easy to understand and extend.

Live demo: https://gkoos.github.io/conway/ GitHub repo: https://github.com/gkoos/conway

Would love feedback on the code structure, algorithm efficiency, or any suggestions you might have!
by ralferoo | 2025-08-02 17:08:49+00:00
I mean, it's an interesting problem for Icelandic sites, but because he's explaining the basic concepts of how declensions work, it seems like he's aiming this at non-Icelandic developers. If they were to use this, no doubt it'll end up butchering names in some other language and lead to all manner of hard to track down bugs.

For example, if an English person called Arthur uses the site in Icelandic, I'm not sure they'd expect their name to be changed to presumably "Arth", "Arthi" or "Arthar" even if they were a keen learner of Icelandic. Their name is their name. So, as well as storing someone's name, you also have to ask them what language their name is, or guess and get it wrong. At that point, you might as well just ask them for all the different forms for the name as well, and then you don't have to worry about whether their name is on an approved list or not.

And if the website isn't localised into Icelandic, I've also got to wonder if Icelandic visitors would have an expectation of Icelandic grammar rules being applied to English (or whatever) text. Most Icelandic people I've spoken to before have an excellent command of English anyway, and I'm sure they'd understand why their name isn't changing form in English.
by thepryz | 2025-08-02 17:08:55+00:00
In my experience, these facilities are all in crisis. They can't find people to staff the facilities and provide care and when they do, they can't afford to pay them.

My father has a neurodegenerative disorder and we've struggled to find a place that will provide consistent care. My mother, a retired nurse, is the one who tends to do a significant amount of the work to feed, clean, and otherwise care for him despite paying over $10k/month. It's infuriating.
by mrangle | 2025-08-02 17:08:56+00:00
SLP here. I hear you. But the reality is greyer. Yes, it's easy for anyone and everyone to see the financial layer of developmental services. But virtually 100% of working SLPs care about getting clients to their goals, even if that client's access to services is determined by insurance.

Money is an inescapable reality for every service in society. But most clinics are busy, and so there isn't a real incentive to try to slow walk clients. Which would be radically corrupt on a number of levels. Even if some backroom financial functionary in a clinic were to have that thought on occasion. I've never heard it verbalized nor seen any evidence of it trickling down from management.

Moreover, most (but not all) clients will be perpetually slightly behind if they start behind. Even if they catch up at a faster rate, with the help of services. Thereby justifying services if the family wants them. But that's not the same as clinic level corruption. It's just a fact of cognitive development. But there's no better advertisement for a clinic or clinician than graduating a client.

Although I can't speak to reading in the following regard, I agree that there are sometimes lesser supported therapy methods for some delays. This is where the art of picking one's therapist is important, as they differ and what they use is within their discretion. As is the case across the rehab field.
by Nathanba | 2025-08-02 17:09:05+00:00
AI is also real to me. My emotions around AI are also real, I deeply appreciate when the AI helps me figure something out or talks to me. I think this type of response will get rarer as AI develops further and people realize that there is now competition and these sentimental reasons will have much less weight. I also have no idea what you mean by "benefits to socializing", I don't see much of any benefit compared to socializing with an AI. Also saying things like "accepting flaws is maturity" is the sort of things that you say when you have no alternative. Once people realize that they can indeed pick an AI friend as their personal best friend suddenly you don't have to put up with all these human flaws anymore.
Ask HN: Does "vide coding" for Hardware exists?
by byebyetech | 2025-08-02 17:09:38+00:00
I always wanted to make cool gadgets but learning electronics

and make my own PCBs always felt daunting. Are there any

vibe coding equivalent AI tool that automatically design PCBs

based on what you want? I think it would be be great to go

from "Anyone can code" to "Anyone can make anything.
by reactordev | 2025-08-02 17:09:51+00:00
Watch what happens to the GDP if they don’t tackle the health care problem. You think it’s expensive now? Negotiating drug prices isn’t going to solve the problem. Having “health insurance” isn’t going to work when an AI decides whether your illness warrants saving you.

You all need to think about what’s going to happen to you when you can’t move anymore. Will you have enough money? Triple it. Maybe 6x it. Only the rich will be able to live healthy unless you’re diligent about your own health or strike it rich in an IPO.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-02 17:09:53+00:00
> Jan Boehmermann who is very critical but still employed by state-financed TV.

What did he criticize? Did he ever criticize all the crimes due to illegal migrants? Of course not because that's not allowed by the state.

He is just a government mouthpiece acting like a jester to give people the illusion that the government allows criticism, but he's not a proper critic of the government, as those are banned.
by vmg12 | 2025-08-02 17:10:17+00:00
It would take a lot of different drugs to simulate what exercise does.

- Impact and stress strengthening the muscles, bones and tendons / ligaments

- energy use that leads to better sleep

- increased blood flow, development of new capillaries, stretching of blood vessels

- if you exercise outside, exposure to sunlight

- the release of all the associated neurochemicals

I have a suspicion that anything designed to mimic exercise would hurt as much as the actual thing given that so many of the benefits of exercise involve damaging bone and tissue then repairing it
by zhivota | 2025-08-02 17:10:23+00:00
What you're missing is that the activities you're doing were not the activities people were largely doing 10-20 years ago to be social. Going to bars was probably at least 100x more popular than hiking, so even if you see a 10x growth in hiking, if going to bars goes down even 10%, it dwarfs hiking's contribution to overall social activity of the population.
by otterpro | 2025-08-02 17:10:58+00:00
Exercise "simulate the arduous tasks that were once necessary to make it through a life" makes sense, as most of our ancestors were blue-collar workers and farmers. I try to integrate more physical activity in my life, which seemed like labor before, but now feels like life-saving activity. For example, I am intentionally trying to fix/diy things with my house like painting my garage, mowing my lawn instead of hiring someone else to do it, and even learning woodworking and gardening. Even in the heat of the summer, I feel more invigorated working outdoor whenever I can, and helps offset the sluggishness I feel after a day of sitting, coding, and staring at the monitors at work.