MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: SpatialRead – A Research Paper Reading Tool
by atalw | 2025-11-12 06:45:49+00:00
This is SpatialRead, a non-linear research paper reading tool that is truly yours.

I tried all the "Chat with PDF" apps. They're useful, but I always felt... trapped. My research process isn't a single, linear chat log. It's a branching, messy, and visual process of connecting ideas. I'd get a great explanation from an AI, but it would just get lost in the chat history. I was still stuck copy-pasting insights into a separate app. Not to mention the subscription lock-ins.

I built SpatialRead to fix this. It’s built on a simple idea: Your research tool should work like your brain, not like a chatbot.

SpatialRead combines a PDF reader with an infinite spatial canvas, all supercharged by AI. Instead of just "chatting," you can highlight any piece of text (from your original PDF or from a previous AI-generated answer) and use actions like Simplify, Explain, or Expand. Each new insight is added to the canvas as a new, connected node. You can literally watch your knowledge graph grow as you dive deeper into a topic.

Here are the features that make SpatialRead a great tool:

- Multimodal Diagram Explanations: This is one of my favorites. Screenshot a complex diagram, chart, table, or figure (like the Transformer architecture in our demo) and just ask, "Can you explain this?"

- AI Knowledge Graphs: Highlight any text and click "Expand" to go one level deeper. Then "Simplify" that new explanation. Then "Expand" a new term from that answer. You're building a branching tree of knowledge, not a flat list.

- Infinite Spatial Canvas: The heart of SpatialRead. Drag & drop PDF research papers or books, use the Text node for articles and essays, or simply start a canvas with a chat prompt. Organize your thoughts visually, not in a list.

- Bring Your Own Key (BYOK): SpatialRead is not a wrapper on a single model. Plug in your own API keys for OpenAI (GPT), Google (Gemini), Perplexity (Sonar), and Anthropic (Claude). You get full control over your cost, privacy, and access to the best models. New models are added as soon as they are released.

- Full Organization Tools: You can organize your library in customizable folders (with colors and icons) and switch between a beautiful light and dark mode.

SpatialRead has genuinely changed the way I research, turning it from a passive act into an active, creative one. And if you ever felt trapped by subscriptions or platform lock-ins, you'll love SpatialRead.

Here is a demo video: https://youtu.be/Z9x237wWAOo

Hope you like it!

P.S. It is priced at $49 for the first 100 users and there is a 20% student discount.
by DeathArrow | 2025-11-12 06:45:51+00:00
>One issue the demos reveal is, it doesn't _feel_ like the web. That is, I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink.

That's because MAUI is intended for mobile and desktop apps.

If you want to use .NET for front-end web SPA, you can use Blazor which will behave exactly like you asked.
Show HN: CellARC Measuring Intelligence with Cellular Automata
by mireklzicar | 2025-11-12 06:46:30+00:00
CellARC, a synthetic benchmark for abstraction and reasoning is built from multicolor 1D cellular automata (CA). Each episode has five support pairs and one query serialized in 256 tokens, enabling rapid iteration with small models while exposing a controllable task space with explicit knobs for alphabet size k, radius r, rule family, Langton's lambda, query coverage, and cell entropy. We release 95k training episodes plus two 1k test splits (interpolation/extrapolation) and evaluate symbolic, recurrent, convolutional, transformer, recursive, and LLM baselines. CellARC decouples generalization from anthropomorphic priors, supports unlimited difficulty-controlled sampling, and enables reproducible studies of how quickly models infer new rules under tight budgets.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07908 Code: https://github.com/mireklzicar/cellarc Baselines: https://github.com/mireklzicar/cellarc_baselines Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/mireklzicar/cellarc_100k X Thread: https://x.com/miroslavlzicar/status/1988502075664105561?s=20 Web & Leaderboard: https://cellarc.mireklzicar.com/
by dave333 | 2025-11-12 06:48:56+00:00
In work life as in the rest of life there is a mid-career crisis thing where you plateau and realize this is likely the best you will ever do. Crazy things can happen or you may float until there's a downturn and/or layoff but likely at some point the same old same old may appear to be a friendly shore you would not mind landing back on to finish your career. A side hustle can be a good way to do something you feel passionate about.
by scrubs | 2025-11-12 06:49:06+00:00
The first 51% of happiness is knowing what you like/need/value and not giving a damn if the other side doesn't see it or agree.

Important: values change in time. It's critical be self aware on that point. What used to work will stop working.

Once you get there the world will seem nicer. You'll be nicer too.

Related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894588
by wahern | 2025-11-12 06:51:29+00:00
> Belief in ESP back then is more understandable since they didn't have the experiments that disproved it, or the knowledge of biology that doesn't show a mechanism.

IMO, quite the opposite. They had more than sufficient knowledge about biology to entertain hypotheses about how it could work in theory, e.g. electrical signals leaking from the brain, etc. And there was plenty of "science" purporting to show an effect, if not the mechanism. OTOH, every generation since before time immemorial[1] has been burned by people making and profiting from these and similar claims. So just paying attention to what the old timers tell you, and keeping tabs on claims as you age, remembering how they pan out, can go a long way to honing one's B.S. detector. (This current ESP fad and the "tests" used to prove it seems to mirror identically a similar wave of claims I remember hearing about on the news and TV talk shows as a kid in the 1980s.) But some generations get carried away more than others, perhaps because of excessive optimism during periods of rapid technological advancement. Even stone cold geniuses can be too credulous; being optimistically credulous may even positively correlate with success in advancing fields of endeavor.

[1] 1189 to be specific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1189 Skeptics since at least the time of the Romans have lamented magic grifts.
by beefnugs | 2025-11-12 06:51:37+00:00
No this is obviously not corporate marketing, this individual is doing many things wrong by their own choice:

"creating an svg is surprisingly revealing" No it is not. They all do the same thing, they add suns and movement lines, and some more details. Like they were all trained on the same thing.

he makes up his own definition of "agent" there are at least 6 different definitions of this word now in this space. And his is again new for no reason.

The core idea here is "being vague and letting the models make weird random choice" This is the exact opposite of ALL direct instructions from the major model and coding agent programs at this time.

Actual interesting methodology would have been to create all combinations of the variables: let them use different svg to image tools and compare them, try many many different prompts with more specific instructions like "try to be more mechanically accurate"

Analysis is baseless assumptions: It is not "adding realism" all the models just had more pictures of roads trees suns and clouds... so it kept going back to the training data to add more like you keep telling it to do. It certainly wasn't understanding "more mechanically coherent" If it started focusing on the bike, it had more detailed bike pictures in the training data with chains.

This is why all the ai stuff is infuriating, people are mistaking so much for "good" or "useful" . At best this is a laugh once joke about how bad it is.

I admit the first time I saw that big george carlin generated video/stand up comedy, there was a special new feeling about "what on earth did they prompt to get this combination of visual and audio?" But that was such a fleeting thing I never need again
by maxlin | 2025-11-12 06:54:11+00:00
Stickers themselves can be fun and quirky, but I for the life of me can't figure out why people would put such extremely divisive and workplace-unnecessary messaging on their MAIN WORK DEVICE as many of these have.

The kind of lack to integrate to a team having your pride flags, literal death threats to perceived enemies, furries, loli anime, etc on a thing you intend to bring to the workplace to do all your work on isn't good for your career and sure as hell won't not be noticed by people whose responsibility is to judge risk and liabilities for example.

Tech stacks, not party flags.
by kakacik | 2025-11-12 06:54:12+00:00
What is more critical as Ukraine has shown is ammunition, ie artillery shells, and of course any anti-drone ammunition (missiles are extremely expensive solution that should be reserved for ballistic missiles and not cheap drones).

More tanks on Ukraine's side wouldn't change current battlefield massively, drones limit how much use from tanks you can get. If you can scale your production to 10-50x within weeks then all is fine but thats almost impossible practically.

If anybody thinks we are heading for a peaceful stable decade without need of such items in massive numbers must have had head buried in the sand pretty deep.
by antirez | 2025-11-12 06:54:34+00:00
The "far" here means "with vectors having a very low cosine similarity / very high distance". So in vector use cases where you want near vectors matching a given set of filters, far vectors matching a set of filters are useless. So in Redis Vector Sets you have another "EF" (effort) parameter just for filters, and you can decide in case not enough results are collected so far how much efforts you want to do. If you want to scan all the graph, that's fine, but Redis by default will do the sane thing and early stop when the vectors anyway are already far.
by solatic | 2025-11-12 06:55:08+00:00
> searchable archive

Have fun with that. At the end of the day you run into the same problem as most wikis, where people just "threw stuff over the wall" into a big wiki database, and it gets to be really difficult to find relevant decisions. Eventually people add a new decision that contradicts an older decision that they didn't find, then later on someone with better search skills finds both contradicting decisions. It doesn't help anyone. All you did was increase the cost of making a decision by forcing a higher documentation cost, which slows down the business.

Most companies looking at structured decision making are better off with a better approach to writing internal policy, which is a kind of technical documentation. You need someone to own the meta/framework surrounding policy (clean presentation, different ways for different questions to reach the same policy, handling the workings of how different owners have permissions to control their areas of policy, making sure stakeholders are notified of changes, etc.), and a culture of collaboration which encourages people to propose changes to outdated policy (and not just dismissing them out of hand). Good policy simplifies decision-making: either it's already allowed by policy and people are free to continue without bureaucracy, or a proposal to change policy results in a tangible artifact already in the relevant place, either the accepted proposal or an addendum to the policy explaining why alternatives were rejected.
by XorNot | 2025-11-12 06:56:24+00:00
Publicizing vulnerabilities is the problem though. Google is ensuring obscure or unknown vulnerabilities will now be very well known and very public.

This is significant when they represent one of the few entities on the planet likely able to find bugs at that scale due to their wealth.

So funding a swarm of bug reports, for software they benefit from, using a scale of resources not commonly available, while not contributing fixes and instead demanding timelines for disclosure, seems a lot more like they'd just like to drive people out of open source.
by dns_snek | 2025-11-12 06:57:57+00:00
> It really amazes me how people whose job it is to take blood pressure don’t recognize the stress situations that people are in might result in abnormal readings.

I've had a doctor measure my heart rate right after remarking on my "elevated HR during intake" (I walked there and I was running late), after telling me some slightly distressing news on what was already a very stressful day, knowing about my white coat anxiety, and right around the time of peak effects of stimulant medication which they also know about. Wouldn't you believe it, my heart rate was high (110)!

Then I got a front seat to watch their confirmation bias kick in, and have them make some really faulty assumptions based on this bad information. They were quite sure that I had developed a certain medical condition but the lab tests quickly proved them completely wrong.
by maxnoe | 2025-11-12 06:58:41+00:00
Completely new tunnel, but it will be connected to LHC, as they will use LHC to pre accelerate the particles.

Almost all accelerators built at CERN are still active and are a chain of pre-accelerator for LHC now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#/media/F...
by mayoff | 2025-11-12 06:58:47+00:00
Swift gained limited support for “typed throws” in Swift 6.0 (2024).

https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo...

I say limited because the compiler doesn't (yet, as of 6.2) perform typed throw inference for closures (a closure that throws is inferred to throw `any Error`). I have personally found this sufficiently limiting that I've given up using typed throws in the few places I want to, for now.
by weq | 2025-11-12 06:59:43+00:00
Greenfields projects where this was possible only make up a tiny fraction of the stuff devs work on. Good devs find it easier, quicker, and more reliable writing the code themselves then explaining the context of the situation to someone.

At some point the idea of coupling your buisness to a set of tokens to an ai company that cant make profit on the tokens they sell to you - is going to crash. AI companies have an incentive to generate LoC because thats how they get paid. LoC = context. Your greenfields project turns into a unmaintainable bloated legacy codebase sooner then you expect. Like every other tech innovation in the last 10yrs, after the honeymoon period ends so do those perks that you enjoy today. Just imagine in 5years that time your AI will only recommend libraries they can yeild off, and will charge an even more premium price then you can imagine today to enjoy the benifits of ad free code generation. By that time your skills could be replicated by AI, because you keep training their AIs, and they will be worthless. Only those devs who maintain there understanding of code will be worth anything, and they will be brought in to cleanup the mess.

</end musings>
by asimpleusecase | 2025-11-12 07:00:45+00:00
From the privacy page of the app developer

“ In addition, according to relevant laws, regulations and national standards, we may share, transfer, and publicly disclose personal information without your prior authorization and consent in the following situations:

Those directly related to national security and national defense security; Directly related to public safety, public health, and major public interests; Those directly related to criminal investigation, prosecution, trial and execution of judgments; In order to protect the life and property of the personal information subject or other individuals, but it is difficult to obtain the consent of the individual; Personal information subjects disclose personal information to the public on their own; Collect personal information from legally publicly disclosed information, such as legal news reports, government information disclosure and other channels.”

Under Chinese law everything is national security if the state asks for it.

The last sentence looks like they give themselves permission to collect as much information about there users as possible

In any case I can’t see any way they are compliant with GDPR.
by bonesss | 2025-11-12 07:02:12+00:00
Well summarized, and just as shocking today as it was every minute while it developed.

Someone needs to remind those cats that they own the platform. Being able to sanely develop apps for and on that platform should be possible, and UI kinda-sorta matters for that. At a certain point with the MFC they had it dialled in, while pioneering asynchronous browser tech, with many best in class tools. Decades later with a cross-platform cloud-centric stack they have a shrug emoji as big and wide as the eyes can see, and no sense this basic question of development will ever get improved.

Ballmer chanting ‘developers, developers, developers …’ springs to mind.
by soganess | 2025-11-12 07:03:07+00:00
Wait, what? Of course you were!

Heck, you still are; "Read other people's experiences and feel your own body." That is a mode of interacting with the external world and processing knowledge. You didn't even suggest I do it; your sentence was a directive. Furthermore, it was packaged in that cool detached "above it all" way that humans sometimes use to convince others.

It's good/okay/whatever to try and sell people on your worldview. I was engaged and conversing that is the social cue to do so. The fact that you didn't convince me is whatever on the internet. But playing it off like you weren't doing that... why?

I'm pretty sure the number of times someone has been convinced on the internet wouldn't even correctly round in IEEE double-precision floating point.
by GaryBluto | 2025-11-12 07:03:48+00:00
It's annoying to me that you're not allowed to even slightly critique things anymore without people blurting out the thought-terminating cliché "Let people enjoy things!", which attempts to do nothing more than shut down interesting conversation because somebody doesn't like said conversation. (Let people enjoy critiquing?) It's behaviour like this that makes me dread the inevitable Reddit exodus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-11-12 07:03:57+00:00
No, it's not. As your quote says, the Department of Defense was created by Congress; the President has no authority whatsoever to rename it or designate a secondary name for it. Writing the words "executive order" on a document doesn't make it legally effective.

Any citizen, of course, can use whatever fake names they'd like for people or places or government organizations. It's a free country. But I don't see any reason to choose this particular fake name except for the purpose of delivering propaganda to your readers.
by tpmoney | 2025-11-12 07:06:39+00:00
Hands on work like filing a detailed bug report with suspected line numbers, reproduction code and likely causes? Look, I get it. It would be nice if Google had filed a patch with the bug. But also not every bug report is going to get a patch with it, nor should that be the sort of expectation we have. It's hard enough getting corporations to contribute time and resources to open source projects as it is, to set an expectation that the only acceptable corporate contribution to open source is full patches for any bug reports is just going to make it that much harder to get anything out of them.

In the end, Google does submit patches and code to ffmpeg, they also buy consulting from the ffmpeg maintainers. And here they did some security testing and filed a detailed and useful bug report. But because they didn't file a patch with the bug report, we're dragging them through the mud. And for what? When another corporation looks at what Google does do, and what the response this bug report has gotten them, which do you think is the most likely lesson learned?

1) "We should invest equally in reporting and patching bugs in our open source dependencies"

2) "We should shut the hell up and shouldn't tell anyone else about bugs and vulnerabilities we discover, because even if you regularly contribute patches and money to the project, that won't be good enough. Our name and reputation will get dragged for having the audacity to file a detailed bug report without also filing a patch."
by Someone | 2025-11-12 07:07:20+00:00
> isn't it strange that you don't know the exception type?

Java experience taught us that, when writing an interface, it is common not to know the exception type. You often can’t know, for example, whether an implementation can time out (e.g. because it will make network calls) or will access a database (and thus can throw RollbackException). Consequently, when implementing an interface, it is common in Java to wrap exceptions in an exception of the type declared in the interface (https://wiki.c2.com/?ExceptionTunneling)
by rzk | 2025-11-12 07:07:26+00:00
Here is an interesting related read (author is a researcher at OpenAI): Building AGI Using Language Models (2020) — https://bmk.sh/2020/08/17/Building-AGI-Using-Language-Models...

It makes the case that perfecting language prediction might be the path to AGI — because to predict language well, you have to understand the world it describes.
by gorgolo | 2025-11-12 07:08:24+00:00
I didn’t really understand the writer’s comments with exceptions and I don’t code in C++.

Their main complaint about exceptions seems to be that you can’t handle all of them and that you don’t know which you’ll get? If we compare this to python, what’s the difference here? It looks like it works the same here as in python; you catch and handle some exceptions, and others that you miss will crash your program (unless you catch the base class). Is there something special about C++ that makes it work differently, or would the author have similar problems with python?
by kirillkosolapov | 2025-11-12 07:08:37+00:00
As the founder of a local cloud very similar to Heroku, I understand Heroku's limitations. It's a balance between control and convenience. The simpler everything is, the better it's suited for small projects, but the less control you have for complex projects. Unless you're just running a hobby project, you'll be using Kubernetes and similar services with full control and the complexity that comes with it. Heroku uses AWS, which means they can't make computations cheaper, otherwise the economics don't add up.

In my experience, we (I won't advertise) have prices several times lower, and we try very hard to accommodate more serious projects, but 99% of projects are small and consume less than 200 MB of RAM. This is simply the nature of this market and product.
by almosthere | 2025-11-12 07:08:44+00:00
> brand new jet acts up and results in crashes

The thing is, we waste so much money it's better to crash 15 jets but build 2000 of them than waste the same amount of money and build 5 jets.

Even us SWEs out in the wild, we sometimes... disable tests (gasp heard everywhere) so that a refactor can work.

I mean it's why we have the expression "sometimes you have to crack a few eggs".
by lynx97 | 2025-11-12 07:09:03+00:00
I tried to use Neovim several times. However, it appears to not be very friendly for my usecase, which is using it with a Braille display. A lot of Neovim UI elements only use background/foreground color to indicate highlighted positions, instead of making use of the cursor. I couldn't even use the intial plugin menu. Emacs is much better in thsi regard.