MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I Built Raycast for Windows (Microsoft Store)
by NabilChiheb | 2025-10-20 12:04:07+00:00
I built AskDesk because I wanted a simple way to talk to my computer without all the setup. It’s kind of like Raycast for Windows — you can type or speak commands like “clear temp files,” “open Spotify,” or “remind me to call my wife in 10 minutes.”

It also supports custom shortcuts, clipboard actions, and AI-powered commands. The AI part helps with things like searching, summarizing, or running smarter actions, but the core shortcuts are free forever.

Available now on the Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/9N8FPGKNWLFQ
by arielcostas | 2025-10-20 12:04:15+00:00
But they aren't abusing their market power, are they? I mean, they are too big and should definitely be regulated but I don't think you can argue they are much of a monopoly when others, at the very least Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Cloudflare (depending on the specific services you want) and smaller providers can offer you the same service and many times with better pricing. Same way we need to regulate companies like Cloudflare essentially being a MITM for ~20% of internet websites, per their 2024 report.
by xandrius | 2025-10-20 12:04:19+00:00
Chemtrails definitely not a hoax. Perhaps the effects on anything breathing their remains are unknown, and probably not for widespread mind control but governments do not shy away from mentioning in their reports the use of chemtrails for weather modification. A more know example was at the Beijing Olympics where they used cloud seeding techniques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Weather_Modification_O...
by 59nadir | 2025-10-20 12:04:38+00:00
I suppose I was unclear. It is OTP-style `gen_server` processes that I'm talking about.

> OTP processes communicate via the actor model by sending messages of any type. Each actor is responsible for pattern-matching the incoming message and handling it (or not) based on its type. To implement static typing, you need to know at compile time what type of message an actor can receive, what type it will send back, and how to verify this at compile time.

This is trivial, your `start` function can simply take a function that says which type of message you can receive. Better yet, you split it up in `handle_cast` (which has a well known set of valid return values, you type that as `incomingCastType -> gen_server.CastReturn`) and deal with the rest with interface functions just as you would in normal Erlang usage (i.e. `get_user_preferences(user_preference_process_pid) -> UserPreferences` at the top level of the server).

Here is an example of a process I threw together having never used Gleam before. The underlying `gen_server` library is my own as well, as well as the FFI code (Erlang code) that backs it. My point with posting this is mostly that all of the parts of the server, i.e. what you define what you define a server, are type safe in the type of way that people claim is somehow hard:

import gleam/option import otp/gen_server import otp/types.{type Pid} pub type State { State(count: Int, initial_count: Int) } pub type Message { Increment(Int) Decrement(Int) Reset } pub fn start(initial_count: Int) -> Result(Pid(Message), Nil) { let spec = gen_server.GenServerStartSpec( handle_cast:, init:, name: option.Some(gen_server.GlobalName("counter")), ) gen_server.start(spec, initial_count) } fn name() -> gen_server.ProcessReference(Message, String) { gen_server.ByGlobal("counter") } pub fn count() -> Result(Int, Nil) { gen_server.call(name(), fn(state: State) -> gen_server.CallResult(State, Int) { gen_server.CallOk(new_state: state, reply: state.count) }) } pub fn increment(count: Int) -> Nil { gen_server.cast(name(), Increment(count)) } pub fn decrement(count: Int) -> Nil { gen_server.cast(name(), Decrement(count)) } pub fn reset() -> Nil { gen_server.cast(name(), Reset) } pub fn init(initial_count: Int) -> State { State(count: initial_count, initial_count:) } pub fn handle_cast( message: Message, state: State, ) -> gen_server.CastResult(State) { case message { Increment(count) -> gen_server.CastOk(State(..state, count: state.count + count)) Decrement(count) -> gen_server.CastOk(State(..state, count: state.count - count)) Reset -> gen_server.CastOk(State(..state, count: state.initial_count)) } }

It's not nearly as big of an issue as people make it out to be; most of the expected behaviors are exactly that: `behaviour`s, and they're not nearly as dynamic as people make them seem. Gleam itself maps custom types very cleanly to tagged tuples (`ThingHere("hello")` maps to `{thing_here, <<"hello">>}`, and so on) so there is no real big issue with mapping a lot of the known and useful return types and so on.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-10-20 12:05:55+00:00
That's exactly my point! My whole time in the academia I have not once cited a paper I hadn't read and I think doing so is a little bit dishonest at best.

They wrote the paper in German, so honest people who don't know German can't cite it directly. This is only even worth remarking on because Schmidhuber is annoyed for missing out on those specific citations.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2025-10-20 12:06:36+00:00
That may be true if IP is not your core business but it is basically the core business of pharmaceutical companies. I don't speak from experience but it would seem surprising to me that any major pharma would outsource IP protection in a major market to contractors they can't sue for billions if they mess up.

It seems much more likely to me that they did it on purpose, as they claim to have.
by tim333 | 2025-10-20 12:06:37+00:00
>I feel like when I'm awake, I'm building up a context window of stuff that's happening during the day. But when I go to sleep, something magical happens where I don't think that context window stays around.

>There's some process of distillation into the weights of my brain. This happens during sleep and all this stuff. We don't have an equivalent [in LLMs] (23:09)

Seems to me that's one of the big things lacking in LLMs vs human thinking. People say LLMs can't lead on to AGI but that kind of thing is an avenue they could explore.
by jonhohle | 2025-10-20 12:06:49+00:00
I gave a talk at Game On Expo about decompiling Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (https://github.com/xeeynamo/sotn-decomp ) earlier this year and talked a little bit about exactly this. Almost everyone who works on loves the game. After that, motivation varies: some want to see ports, some want to mod, some want to learn everything they can, some want to preserve. Along with those I also like the challenge (not unlike sudoku).

Doing it long enough requires learning compiler history and theory, understanding business and engineering pressures of making the game, and occasionally reveals why parts of the game work the way they do.

I stream working on SotN and am happy to answer any questions in chat if you’re interested in learning more - https://m.twitch.tv/madeupofwires/home
by actionfromafar | 2025-10-20 12:07:16+00:00
Isn’t structure lost in the compilation process?

I mean, we already have bits and pieces of what you want, like an assembler to C decompiler, but the output isn’t very nice without the types.

And how many languages can run on the CIL in dotnet. Say we create a CIL to lambda calculus compiler. Where do we go from there?
by alfanick | 2025-10-20 12:07:57+00:00
If the author agrees, I could try to learn Serbo-Croatian (I'm Polish, good with languages) and translate it to English. I'm kinda a burnout Linux geek, who cannot look at computers much more. Translating a book would be fun, but I would need some sponsoring. Amadeusz at [the old name of icloud].com
by psychoslave | 2025-10-20 12:08:15+00:00
Well, that is exactly what resilient distributed network are about. Not that much the technical details we implement them through, but the social relationship and balanced in political decision power.

Be it a company or a state, concentration of power that exeeds the needs for their purpose to function by a large margin is always a sure way to spread corruption, create feedback loop in single point of failure, and is buying everyone a ticket to some dystopian reality with a level of certainty that beats anything that a SLA will ever give us.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-20 12:09:22+00:00
> "I'll look into it, but without knowing more about it, stastically we have a 50% chance of it being back up in an hour"

This is exactly what I don't think is right. This particular outage has the same a priori chance of being back in 20 minutes, in one hour, in 30 hours, in two weeks, etc.
by hrgdevBuilds | 2025-10-20 12:11:45+00:00
I built a small tool to clarify how much late fee a landlord can legally charge (and when) in each U.S. state.

Rent laws vary widely: some states set a fixed dollar cap, others a percentage, and a few use only “reasonable” language that’s open to interpretation. Many renters and landlords have no easy way to check what’s actually allowed without reading the statutes themselves.

This project compiles those laws into an instant calculator. Enter rent amount, due date, payment date, and state — it shows the lawful late fee limit, grace period rules, and citation.

It started as a curiosity after seeing conflicting answers online. The goal is transparency, not advocacy; all data is drawn from current state statutes.

The app is lightweight, built in Replit, and runs entirely client-side. I’d be interested in feedback on legal interpretation consistency, data sourcing, or UI clarity.
by breadislove | 2025-10-20 12:13:29+00:00
For everyone wondering how good this and other benchmarks are:

- the OmniAI benchmark is bad

- Instead check OmniDocBench[1] out

- Mistral OCR is far far behind most Open Source OCR models and even further behind then Gemini

- End to End OCR is still extremely tricky

- composed pipelines work better (layout detection -> reading order -> OCR every element)

- complex table parsing is still extremely difficult

[1]: https://github.com/opendatalab/OmniDocBench
Show HN: Remove Sora watermarks in 5 seconds – without quality loss
by watree | 2025-10-20 12:13:52+00:00
Hey everyone! I built a tool that removes Sora watermarks in about 5 seconds, and I'd love to share the story behind it. How it started: I've been watching people make money with Sora2 in wild ways - selling invite codes for thousands a week, generating instant product ads with UI screenshots, automating social media workflows with n8n... it's crazy out there. Check out r/SoraInviteCodes if you don't believe me. But here's the catch everyone hits: even as a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, you're stuck with that watermark. And when you think "okay, maybe it's for copyright reasons," OpenAI hits you with the reality - $200/month for Pro membership to go watermark-free. The complaints across Reddit, X, and Discord are... intense. So I built: https://www.removesorawatermark.online What makes this different: Most tools out there use open-source AI models to "paint over" the watermark - it's slow (1+ minutes) and quality is hit-or-miss. Mine pulls the actual original video from Sora's servers - the same clean file Pro users get. It's basically lossless, and it's fast. Why does this matter? Sora2 videos are so realistic that once you remove the watermark, you can post them on social media without the AI label. With platforms competing against Sora, they're surprisingly open to this content right now. I've seen people getting real engagement. Real talk: I'm not saying "get rich quick." But I am saying: Sora2 just dropped, and early adopters are already moving. Whether you're a content creator, marketer, or just someone who wants to experiment - why stay on the sidelines? How it works: Paste your Sora share link Wait ~5 seconds Download the clean video Currently running it as a freemium model with daily limits for free users.It's enough for daily needs, but you can comment here if you need more limits. Why I'm posting here: I built this in a few weeks, and I'm curious what the HN community thinks. Is this solving a real pain point? Are there legal/ethical concerns I'm missing? Would love honest feedback. Also - if you're tech-savvy, you probably noticed the smart folks already registered sora3.com and sora4.com domains. Just saying Try it out and let me know what you think!
by hubertzhang | 2025-10-20 12:14:23+00:00
My reflections on the AWS us-east-1 outage.

Yesterday I posted a Show HN introducing our MongoDB-compatible database EloqDoc (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45634638 ). Today’s AWS us-east-1 outage was a strong reminder of why relying on local NVMe as primary database storage is risky—and why OLTP databases should consider object storage as the durable foundation instead.
by jncfhnb | 2025-10-20 12:15:04+00:00
Eh. I think fluff. A lot of nostalgia pieces point to one specific thing and try to imply that everything used to be as good as that one thing.

Wilder’s Wonka was great. But psychedelic weirdness was never the norm. Children’s shows have pretty much always been largely moralized.

The TV of today has a lot more content that is genuinely good and not just a constant ad for sugar and toys.

This line also bothered me

> Many experts believe that one of the causes of the mental health crisis among children stems from their lack of comfort with having dark or complicated feelings. When they do experience this, they often jump to believing that something is wrong with them and may go on to identify with a clinical diagnosis, which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of believing themselves to be sad or scared because life is a hot mess and hard and dark feelings are to be expected, they see themselves as having depression or anxiety and begin to filter all of their experiences through that lens.

I struggle to see the nuance between this and telling kids to suck it up. We are not in the 80s anymore where the general social narrative is rapid growth. Being a kid has a much more dismal perspective than the 80s provided.
by psychoslave | 2025-10-20 12:15:28+00:00
>Let me ask you: how do you prepare your website for the complete collapse of western society?

That's the main topic that going through my mind lately, if you replace "my website" with "Wikimedia movement".

We need a far better social, juridical and technical architecture regarding resilience as hostil agendas are in the rise at all level agaisnt sourced trackable global volunteer community knowledge bases.
by ShortStretto | 2025-10-20 12:15:31+00:00
I and many others have zero need for more storage, this machine beats any non-oled windows laptop for screen at the pricerange, the CPU/GPU combo beats it on speed. Battery is a non-discussion (although my only windows laptop experience is work laptop, 4 hours on a good day).

Just buy more if you need it or cloud storage or a nas idk man, theres solutions.

Or buy windows, the choice is there.
by js8 | 2025-10-20 12:15:40+00:00
I think this is great. I think you should write a paper on it.

I suspect it might need some kind of commutative diagram proof, i.e. if you express things in CoC formalized within BLC you will get the same result as when you express in BLC formalized within CoC, I am not sure from the top of my head.

(Kind of similar to showing that self-interpreting quoted interpreter on quoted program is the same as quoting the result of running the interpreter on the program.)

And of course, this proof of equivalence should have formalization both in CoC (Lean?) and BLC.

My hope is eventually someone writing a book on logic where the metalogic will be just untyped lambda calculus. Proofs will be just beta-reduction and judgemental equality. And everything will be in the form, let's study properties of these lambda terms that I came up with (the terms will of course represent some other logic such as CoC, simply typed LC, or even LC itself etc.).
by loaderchips | 2025-10-20 12:16:25+00:00
Great work guys, how about we replace the global encoder with a Mamba (state-space) vision backbone to eliminate the O(n²) attention bottleneck, enabling linear-complexity encoding of high-resolution documents. Pair this with a non-autoregressive (Non-AR) decoder—such as Mask-Predict or iterative refinement—that generates all output tokens in parallel instead of sequentially. Together, this creates a fully parallelizable vision-to-text pipeline, The combination addresses both major bottlenecks in DeepSeek-OCR.
by pie_flavor | 2025-10-20 12:16:28+00:00
Do One Thing*†‡ And Do It Well⹋ * Parsing text formats counts as zero things † UX counts as two things ‡ APIs that do multiple operations that people might want to split, with no individual APIs for the parts, count as doing one thing ⹋ Something that relies on cooperation from every other process on the system but has no way to enforce it counts as done well

Nobody bothers with this argument when the library is for, like, HTTP clients, or PKZIP containers. Unix philosophy, like most philosophy, exists mostly to be debated, and to be related to the history of the world, rather than to be actually implemented in the modern day.
by heyjamesknight | 2025-10-20 12:16:32+00:00
At this point, you’re describing a machine which depends on a level of physics that simply isn’t possible. Even if it were theoretically possible to reconstruct the state of a human mind from physical components, we are so far from understanding how that could be done it is closer to the realm of impossible than possible. Your theoretical math box that constructs affective qualia from bit strings isn’t a better description than saying the angels did it. And it bears zero resemblance to the models running today, except for, again, in a theoretical, mathematical way.

Back of the envelope math puts an estimate of 10^42 bits to capture the information present in your current physical brain state. Thats just a single brain, a single state. Now you need to build your mythical decoder device, which can translate qualia from this physical state. Where does it live? What’s its output look like? Another 10^40 bitstring?

Again, these arguments are fun on paper. But they’re completely removed from reality.
by progbits | 2025-10-20 12:16:34+00:00
Also it's actually simpler than it might seem, especially if you are not doing anything high-power or high-frequency (which, again, if it's a bunch of breakout boards connected over 0.1inch headers they clearly aren't).

Watch a few YT videos, copy-paste the reference schematics for all those boards, delete what you don't use and you are almost done :)
by temp20251020 | 2025-10-20 12:16:48+00:00
The `less` command can toggle line numbers (`-N`, either as a command line argument, or while running it interactively) and toggle line wrapping (`-S`, again either way). It can also receive streamed output with `+F`, making it a viable alternative to `tail -f`. (I'm not sure if what you meant by static output is that it all has to be available before the command can read it.)

It can't adjust the columns in a table, but then I don't believe that `bat` can either, and I'm not aware of any similar program that can. (If there is one, please let me know.)

In the case of `bat` (or `man` or other programs that use a pager) it often requires no extra typing either, since `bat` will pipe it's output to `less` by default (or whatever you specify with the `PAGER` environment variable).

The `less` command can be quite a bit more powerful than it initially looks. I'd recommend looking over the man page sometime -- you might be surprised. In fact, looking over the `minus` page, other than being able to be compiled into another program so it doesn't have to be shipped separately on Windows, I'm not sure what it can do that `less` cannot. (If I'm missing some killer feature, please let me know. I'm not trying to bash `minus`, I just don't know what more it offers.)
by noir_lord | 2025-10-20 12:17:51+00:00
Yep, when I was a young programmer I lived in dread of an outage or worse been responsible for a serious bug in production, then I got to watch what happened when it happened to others (and that time I dropped the prod database at half past four on a Friday).

When everything is some varying degree of broken at all times been responsible for a brief uptick in the background brokenness isn't the drama you think it is.

It would be different if the systems I worked on where true life and death (ATC/Emergency Services etc) but in reality the blast radius from my fucking up somewhere is monetary and even at the biggest company I worked for constrained (while 100+K per hour from an outage sounds horrific - in reality the vast majority of that was made up when the service was back online, people still needed to order the thing in the end).
by robocat | 2025-10-20 12:19:03+00:00
People focus on the wrong issue so most quotes about evolution are highly misleading: the keyword should be about reproducing. Survival is almost irrelevant. Darwin awards in particular should never be given to anyone with kids (unless they kill their kids too).

"Most grandkids" is good but not catchy.

Or Idiocracy "evolution began to favor those who reproduced the most".
by grayhatter | 2025-10-20 12:19:25+00:00
If you don't understand exactly what the parameters are, how can you 1) be sure you're doing it correctly, and not still in violation i.e. has ofcom publicly stated they've reviewed it and agree it's acceptable, or have they just moved on while ominously stating they'll be watching? Seems like a needless risk to hope ofcom doesn't decide they did it wrong and demand retroactive fines. 2) defend the action if they do later to continue or change their mind about if any action is enough?

It's a mistake to ignore the problems and realities of some solution, or half solution, caused a legal demand from without a reasonable claim of jurisdiction.

Honestly, It's a wild take to assert that an ip based geoblock that's guaranteed to be buggy is fine or acceptable just because ofcom hasn't figured out how buggy it actually is yet. Just as it is equally insane to suggest that a foreign government should be able to compel, (or willing to demand) some action by anyone.
by jonhohle | 2025-10-20 12:20:06+00:00
I’m not sure if EFF has made any statements about it, but I would be concerned with the copyright aspects. Decompilation works (legally) because a new creative work is being produced.

It would be easy to argue LLMs are producing derivative, non-transformative works. AI companies have not made that any easier by paying publishers huge royalties to license training data.

I personally would stay away from it to avoid the risk, but I’d imagine if it became “easy” enough to produce a matching decomp with an LLM, we would get a more specific legal precedent pretty quickly.
by nomilk | 2025-10-20 12:20:10+00:00
I might be too informed by headlines than reality, but is my perception correct that the Windows experience is worsening by the year, particularly with regard to installation, configurability, UX, and privacy?

Apple certainly isn't perfect and has released some tripe lately (iOS 26) but I trust they'll work through the kinks. Apple seems to undulate, whereas Windows's trajectory seems net downward.