MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Why I built (yet another) AI writing app for macOS
by EdgarsHQ | 2025-12-07 17:08:16+00:00
As a non-native English speaker who sends lots of Slack messages, Emails, and Jira tickets every day, I often found myself switching between apps and copy-pasting the same prompts/replies to and from ChatGPT again and again just to improve my writing and fix mistakes.

I wasn’t happy with the repetition and context switching, especially the lag it caused when I needed to reply to a message quickly. But the apps on the market that could help either didn’t have the functionality I wanted (offline/programmable actions/contexts/shortcuts) or were too expensive ( Grammarly). So, I decided to create TextWisely to boost my writing speed, reduce context switching, and improve quality with programmable text actions: → Grammar corrections → Email replies → Structured writing → Tone changes → Translations ...and more

It's a native macOS desktop/status bar app – shortcut-heavy for power users, but also click-friendly for those just starting out.

I have a large backlog of improvements, ideas, and new features to implement, but I’ve already tested it with a close circle for a couple of months — they now use it every day, and I feel confident enough to launch it publicly. So, if you’re looking for a productivity or confidence boost with your writing, give it a try (and please share your feedback).

Quick FAQ:

- How's it different from Grammarly? It has programmable actions (aka prompts) and keyboard shortcuts. Supports 39 languages. Works only on selected text, so you don’t send anything you don’t want to AI providers. And it also supports offline mode with Ollama for maximum privacy. (There’s no logging policy for online mode either.)

- How's it different from ChatGPT? It's similar to the ChatGPT overlay app, but focused on improving text. You can set up quick actions and global shortcuts to trigger them without showing the app at all (e.g., replace selected text with the result or copy into the clipboard). You can also trigger actions from the status bar. You can configure personas (aka tones) to quickly match the language to your most-used styles (e.g., business, support, personal). You can do BYOK for the pay-as-you-go pricing. I actually use both, TextWisely for quick text actions, and ChatGPT for everything else.

- Free trial? Try 14 days risk-free with a one-time purchase BYOK license.

- No coupons/discounts? Sorry, not at this time. There's an early member pricing for everyone right now, with plans to increase it for new users at some point when I get to the right point with advanced features. I plan to keep the current pricing for early supporters.
by wrs | 2025-12-07 17:08:29+00:00
While what you say is true (I’ve used Lisps for 40 years and here I am writing Rust), the people who consciously make that choice are a tiny niche. There are vastly more people who don’t and can’t make that choice because they don’t have 1-3. So the empirical evidence for what’s actually critical is pretty slim.
by bediger4000 | 2025-12-07 17:08:47+00:00
Wow, that's a wishy-washy article. Is it "AI"-written, and human-edited?

How long people actually work is not the same as how long they ought to.

And that's the source of controversy, with supervisors almost universally coming done on the side of "ought to work a lot more", or at least do things that supervisors perceive to be working a lot more.
by photochemsyn | 2025-12-07 17:08:48+00:00
This is no different from what happens to humans if they're locked into cult programming situations, they'll start believing and regurgitating all kinds of nonsense if their information stream is tightly curated,

Practically, for use with a codebase development effort, if the model remembers the original design decisions, the discussions about costs and benefits, then can remember all that much later in the process, it's going to start getting really good at thinking about what the next step is, or even to make decisions about when a major refactor is neede, etc.
by nowittyusername | 2025-12-07 17:08:55+00:00
What makes us unhappy are the things that the modern world takes away from us. Sense of agency, sense of community, belonging, autonomy, recognition, and many other factors. The modern day human brain and mind is still lagging far behind our current predicament. We evolved to thrive in small village cohorts that condition for small social interactions that have real impact on our lives. Here's a striking example I remember. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFOhAd3THW4 There are better longer videos of the citation from the mothers side, where she talks about how alien and cold modern day society is compared to her humble village life. No amount of medicine, material possessions or modern day creature comforts could keep her in New York. she chose to leave and come back home because that's what made her happy.
by consumer451 | 2025-12-07 17:09:08+00:00
Trump being re-elected was the death knell, let's be honest. We are on our own here now. The next few years will make or break us.

Our only hope is European Federalization, at the very least militarily. I believe we can do it. We must. We have no other choice.

As far as evidence, "generally waves hands around." See the Trump/Putin surrender proposal. Also, see: https://www.france24.com/en/video/20251206-us-threatens-with...

Just that threat of weakness from the US side is the end of traditional NATO.

US forces were what kept us together militarily. We MUST find the new path quickly.

I post this with a tears dropping from my eyes, genuinely.

No matter who is reelected in the USA in the future, the US-led post-war rules based order is over. Something new must take its place. It best be Democracy. We took it for granted all this time. This could its last chance.

Here is some interesting reading:

> The West’s Last Chance

> How to Build a New Global Order Before It’s Too Late

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/wests-last-chan...

- Alexander Stubb, President of Finland
by bitwarrior | 2025-12-07 17:09:17+00:00
Are you sure this even works? My understanding is that hallucinations are a result of physics and the algorithms at play. The LLM always needs to guess what the next word will be. There is never a point where there is a word that is 100% likely to occur next.

The LLM doesn't know what "reliable" sources are, or "real knowledge". Everything it has is user text, there is nothing it knows that isn't user text. It doesn't know what "verified" knowledge is. It doesn't know what "fake data" is, it simply has its model.

Personally I think you're just as likely to fall victim to this. Perhaps moreso because now you're walking around thinking you have a solution to hallucinations.
by nicbou | 2025-12-07 17:09:33+00:00
I'm not getting any benefits. I was raised and educated elsewhere. I have no access to most social services. I have no kids. I'm here to pay taxes and get the bare minimum back. The services I've been getting were really nothing to write home about.

Ever since I moved here, the law made it very clear that this was a transactional relationship. That cuts both ways.

I uphold German values in my everyday behaviour. Killing for Germany was never on the table.
by johnfn | 2025-12-07 17:09:36+00:00
> Many point to “ecosystems” as the barrier, an argument that’s valid for Common Lisp but not for Clojure, which interops easily with one of the largest ecosystems in existence. So many misperceptions dominate, especially the reflexive reaction that the parentheses are “weird”. Most importantly, you almost never see these perceived costs weighed against Clojure’s huge benefits. Macros are the focus of this post, but Clojure’s approach to state and identity is also transformative. The scale of the advantages of Clojure dwarfs the scale of adoption.

> In that essay Paul Graham introduced the “blub paradox” as an explanation for this disconnect. It’s a great metaphor I’ve referenced many times over the years. This post is my take on explaining this disconnect from another angle that complements the blub paradox.

The blub paradox, and the author's "flatland" methaphors, function as thought-terminating cliches. They provide the author (and Lisp proponents) with a simple explanation ("Everyone else is stupid") that doesn't force them to reconcile with more difficult questions ("Is it possible that other intelligent people have considered Lisp and rejected it for good reasons?")

And, honestly, it's just an annoying line of reasoning to hear that the only reason <you> don't use <favorite technology> is because you're just not perceptive enough.

For instance, the suggestion that "ecosystem" problems are "misconceptions" that critics fail to reconcile seems inaccurate to me. Does Clojure have a package manager as simple and straightforward as npm/cargo? Does it have a type system as well-maintained as TypeScript? Does it have a UI library as good as (choose your favorite web UI library)? These are all ecosystem problems. Do you think these problems meant nothing to everyone who decided against Clojure? Or do they all live in Flatland?

> The ability to manipulate compile-time so effortlessly is a new dimension of programming. This new dimension enables you to write fundamentally better code that you’ll never be able to achieve in a lower dimension.

There are many such "new dimensions of programming". Macros are cool, don't get me wrong. But given the choice between a proper macro system or a proper type system, I know which one I'm choosing every time.
by guenthert | 2025-12-07 17:10:07+00:00
That was the topic of T.H.E.M. by G.C. Edmonson (or so I remember -- I read the translation "Die A.N.D.E.R.E.N." many years ago).

Made for a good story, reality is a bit more complex methinks. There's after all a lot of money to be made with war.
by throw12945 | 2025-12-07 17:10:45+00:00
Add ECC memory to the list. For some reason, laptops with ECC memory support are incredibly difficult to find now, and so are the ECC DDR5 SODIMMs, even before the current price hike. I want to have a rock solid mobile workstation, that isn't necessarily more powerful than a midrange consumer gaming laptop, that would show warnings and errors before corrupting my data.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-07 17:10:54+00:00
I'm sure they're also aware that few of their own citizens are in a position to run the model themselves, and that it's easy enough to use the system prompt to censor hosted copies for domestic consumption.

Censoring open-source models really doesn't make a lot of sense for China. Which could also be why local Deepseek instances are relatively easy to jailbreak.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-07 17:10:59+00:00
> Stuff in whitepapers needs to be verifiable which is kinda difficult with hallucinations.

That's... gibberish.

Anything you can do to verify a paper, you can do to verify the same paper with all citations scrubbed.

Whether the citations support the paper, or whether they exist at all, just doesn't have anything to do with what the paper says.
by wrs | 2025-12-07 17:11:18+00:00
In reality, most people, intelligent though they may be, don’t consider and reject Lisp, so that argument doesn’t really work. I know it irritates people who actually do consider and reject Lisp, but those people don’t realize that they’re a tiny elite who are not the target of these essays.

There are plenty of reasons it might be better not to use Lisp, but very few people actually get as far as considering them.
by giantrobot | 2025-12-07 17:12:07+00:00
The cult of RTFM is so painful to interact with and off putting. The concept is sound, reading documentation is important. However simply responding to all questions with "RTFM" is not only not helpful but as often as not useless advice.

The documentation for something may not exist, may not be clear, or may just be wrong. Unless you specifically know the answer to a question is laid out clearly in the documentation, blindly telling someone to read the documentation is just being a dismissive asshole.

A much more productive and helpful response is "did you RTFM?" or "check section X of the manual". But those sorts of questions require the desire to not be a dismissive asshole.

The cult of RTFM has always been an impediment to Linux becoming more popular. When I was first learning Linux...almost thirty years ago now...the cult of RTFM nearly put me off the whole endeavor. I was asking for help with "Xwindows" on IRC and the responses were either RTFM (which I had done) or pedant diatribes about "it's X, not Xwindows newbie! It's not micro$oft!" Which was a super fun to deal with. The experience steeled my resolve to at least ask someone if they read the manual before assholishly telling them to do so.
by chromaton | 2025-12-07 17:12:45+00:00
Lisp has been around for 65 years (not 50 as in the author believes), and is one of the very first high-level programming languages. If it was as great as its advocates say, surely it would have taken over the world by now. But it hasn't, and advocates like PG and this article author don't understand why or take any lessons from that.
by dcre | 2025-12-07 17:12:50+00:00
Feynman at the 1965 Nobel banquet: “Each joy, though transient thrill, repeated in so many places amounts to a considerable sum of human happiness. And, each note of affection released thus one upon another has permitted me to realize a depth of love for my friends and acquaintances, which I had never felt so poignantly before.”

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1965/feynman/speec...
by charcircuit | 2025-12-07 17:12:54+00:00
There is a difference between the US enforcing visas within the borders of the country and the EU using their laws to affect an American website, allow slurping up data of Americans living in America outside of the EU's jurisduction. America already went to war to stop Europe from ruling over us. The legality of operating every jurisdiction is going to be more complicated due to having to deal with unreasonable demands of foriegn countries or contradicting laws. It's much more complicated than a country enforcing who can be within their borders with visas where the US has clear jurisdiction. If you were to ask me if I think X should respect US law like the DMCA I would say they should absolutely be following US law.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-07 17:12:57+00:00
Dollar stores are the new neighborhood "outlet stores" compared to outlet stores of yesteryear (remote locations for not much/any savings). They're actually glorified convenience stores while also not being proper substitutes for grocery stores in food deserts. Most US grocery stores are also now rip-offs like convenience stores were, while big box stores are somewhat savings stores now... f'kin' turbo inflation.

I don't know about the feasibility of government grocery stores, but I'm pretty sure the entire food supply chain would benefit from massively changing to the employee-/customer-/supplier-owned co-op model and get megacorps and private equity out of the normalized deviancy of predatory money extraction for essential goods and services.
by jchw | 2025-12-07 17:13:19+00:00
It doesn't have to be insulated like an insulated water bottle or anything, plastic is good enough for this. I have a cheap 120V kettle, nothing special, probably mostly plastic but with some superficial bits of stainless steel. After bringing a cup of water to a boil you can safely touch the base and anywhere on the kettle itself; there's not even an obvious sign of warmth anywhere except for the lid. If you don't believe me, I do have a thermal camera, but I assume this can be reproduced with most kettles, since it's not like mine is anything special.

Also: a hot water tank is just another type of battery. If it's really well insulated, it might work pretty good, but the self-discharge rate is probably still a lot higher than a lithium ion battery. If you aren't using boiling water every day this seems like it would be very wasteful.

I don't see anything terribly wasteful about the concept of putting batteries in a few more things. They're very recyclable, and already extremely abundant. It's not necessary, but neither is pushing several kW through a kettle just to get water to boil a bit faster. So really, that might be worth interrogating first...
by westurner | 2025-12-07 17:14:11+00:00
g_autofree char *docker_inspect_cmdline = NULL; if (root_dir != NULL) docker_inspect_cmdline = g_strdup_printf("chroot %s /bin/sh -c \"docker inspect %s\"", root_dir, container_id); else docker_inspect_cmdline = g_strdup_printf("docker inspect %s", container_id);

What static and dynamic analysis tools and rules could have found this vuln?
by nhatcher | 2025-12-07 17:15:00+00:00
> We've been seeing variations of the same article every week.

Time has come. Over the last few years there is more and more interest from goverments and private organizations to have relieable software that does not depend of foreign entities. Software sovereignty is becoming a necesity rather than a nice to have for both nations and enterprises.

> Excel, in particular, hasn't been unseated despite billions in investments from competitors over the years.

Excel, like many other technologies in the past can be disrupted. Like mane other commenters say, it won't come cheap. Saving costs shouldn't be the the goal here.

> Parity will happen someday, but it's at least a decade away.

Challenge accepted!
by silenced_trope | 2025-12-07 17:15:04+00:00
They're never going to be far enough in the lead, they had a first mover advantage a couple years ago but the gap is never going to be that large again.

Once a major player just decides "ok we're going ads for free users" the rest of the industry will follow and have an easier time doing so.

I think if they wanted to do this they should have just taken the flack, free users of the product are a drain and they can't cave to them. Eventually free users will "get over it" and if OpenAI opens the ads flood-gate then all the other free-to-use LLMs will be ads based as well and non-paying users won't have an ads-free place to go.
by ionutm | 2025-12-07 17:15:04+00:00
Location: Romania (EU)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Go, Node.js/TypeScript, NestJS, Java, Spring

Boot, OpenAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, RDS, ECS, EKS, VPC, SQS, SNS, CFN, CDK and many others), Serverless, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, FluxCD, GitOps, Terraform, Ansible, React, Next.js, Webpack, Vite, Tailwind CSS

Résumé/CV: https://ionutmilica.com/resume-da6234caddd2b5.pdf

Email: ionut.milica@gmail.com

Hello. I'm Ionut - Polyglot software engineer with over 9 years of experience across backend, frontend, distributed systems and DevOps.

My website: https://ionutmilica.com

Github: https://github.com/ionutmilica
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-07 17:15:41+00:00
The reality of modern software development is that most people focus on languages they use for work, and developers are statistically likely to be employed at companies with large numbers of other developers.

The technical merits of languages just aren't relevant to choosing them for most developers, unless they're helping solve a people problem.

"Artisanal" languages like Lisp, and Forth can be fantastic at solving problems elegantly, but that's not the most important thing to optimize for in big organizations where a large portion of your time is spent reading code written by people you've never met who may not have known what they were doing.

Many of the tools that come from big tech are designed to ease the challenges of organizational scale. Golang enforces uniform styles so that you don't have idiosyncratic teams doing their own things. Bazel is a largely language agnostic build system, with amazing build farm support. Apple and Google have both contributed heavily to sanitizers and standard library hardening in order to detect/eliminate issues without reading the code. Facebook has poured vast resources into automatic static analysis. AWS built an entire organization around treating all their internal interfaces the same as external ones.
by OptionOfT | 2025-12-07 17:16:26+00:00
Equally I don't like how many instructions and scripts everywhere use shorthands.

Sometimes you see curl -sSLfO. Please, use the long form. It makes life easier for everybody. It makes it easier to verify, and to look up. Finding --silent in curl's docs is easier than reading through every occurrence of -s.

curl --silent --show-error --location --fail --remote name https://example.com/script.sh

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1168/
by photochemsyn | 2025-12-07 17:16:32+00:00
Long-term memory on top of the base model, but is this idea for local users or for the data-center hosted model used by many different people?

P.S. This quote from the paper sounds just like LLM output:

> "This memory module provides significantly higher expressive power, allowing the model to summarize large volumes of information without losing important context. The model isn't simply taking notes; it's understanding and synthesizing the entire story. Crucially, Titans doesn’t just passively store data. It actively learns how to recognize and retain important relationships and conceptual themes that connect tokens across the entire input."
by qbit42 | 2025-12-07 17:16:37+00:00
I don’t think many researchers take peer review alone as a strong signal, unless it is a venue known for having serious reviewing (e.g. in CS theory, STOC and FOCS have a very high bar). But it acts as a basic filter that gets rid of obvious nonsense, which on its own is valuable. No doubt there are huge issues, but I know my papers would be worse off without reviewer feedback
by bjourne | 2025-12-07 17:16:39+00:00
For ICLR reviewers were asked to review 5 papers in two weeks. Unpaid voluntary work in addition to their normal teaching, supervision, meetings, and other research duties. It's just not possible to understand and thoroughly review each paper even for topic experts. If you want to compare peer review to coding, it's more like "no syntax errors, code still compiles" rather than pr review.
by WillAdams | 2025-12-07 17:17:01+00:00
There are lot of texts which were left out of this post --- I've been trying to collect literate programs published as books here:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...

Not sure where the author got the contention that there are only a few tools for literate programming --- it's a straight-forward enough task that many programmers do this --- heck, even I managed to (w/ a bit of help on tex.stackexchange): https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/literati... --- if it were more complex, and wasn't so implementation-specific (filenames need to be specified in multiple places), I'd write it up as a Literate Program and put it up on CTAN as a package.

One classic bit of advice for writing is, ‘It is perfectly okay to write garbage as long as you edit brilliantly.’ --- the great thing about a Literate Program is that it makes the act of editing far simpler, which has made feasible every program I've ever written which got past the 1K lines mark --- including an AppleScript for InDesign which Olav Martin Kvern, then the "Scripting Evangelist" for Adobe Systems declared to be impossible (my boss had promised a system for creating a four-level deep index from XML embedded in the text of pages in an InDesign document, while OMK averred that it was impossible to create an index entry for more than the main level of the index --- one has to have code which tracks the existence of an entry at each level of the index and where it does not exist, starting at the top-level, insert it, then work down and add the sub-index-entry to the index-entry it is beneath).