MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Axiom – structural OCR for handwritten STEM notes
by mrajatnath | 2026-03-02 08:12:52+00:00
I built Axiom after repeatedly running into the same problem with my own handwritten STEM notes.

On paper, everything looks clean — equations aligned, steps grouped properly, tables laid out clearly. But the moment I scanned those pages and ran them through OCR (including LLM-based tools), the structure would fall apart. The characters were mostly correct, but the layout — which is what actually makes math readable — was gone.

Aligned equations would lose alignment. Multi-step derivations would collapse into a single paragraph. Numbered problems would merge together. Tables would turn into plain text. Technically it was “extracted,” but practically it was unusable without manually fixing everything in LaTeX.

That gap is what Axiom tries to solve.

Instead of focusing purely on transcription accuracy, I focused on structural preservation. The current pipeline looks roughly like this:

1. OCR from image or PDF.

2. A structural prompt tuned specifically for math alignment, derivation grouping, numbered block preservation, and table detection.

3. A post-processing layer that normalizes LaTeX/Markdown output, merges math blocks, protects numbering tokens, and stabilizes table columns.

4. Export as compile-ready LaTeX, Markdown, or searchable PDF.

The hardest part wasn’t getting the characters right. It was preventing structural drift — especially with aligned equations and multi-line derivations. I added alignment pattern detection, atomic pagination for LaTeX environments, and normalization passes to keep math blocks intact across pages.

The goal isn’t “AI transcription.” It’s making handwritten STEM notes survive digitization without losing their mathematical structure.

It runs entirely in the browser:

https://www.useaxiomnotes.com
by bendmorris | 2026-03-02 08:12:55+00:00
>I had actually just been told by management this last week that I need to become AI 'fluent' as part of future performance evaluations and I have been deeply conflicted about it.

I hear this and FWIW, if there aren't very specific things being asked of you, using AI as a stack overflow replacement as the OP admits to doing is as "AI fluent" as anything else in my book.
by mrajatnath | 2026-03-02 08:14:28+00:00
I’m Rajat a solo developer and also a cs undergrad working on this.

The early versions were basically OCR + prompting, but I kept running into the same structural issues. Most of the work ended up being in post-processing and block detection rather than the OCR layer itself.

Still working on better handling of diagrams and more complex chemistry-style layouts.
by edflsafoiewq | 2026-03-02 08:15:00+00:00
You also need the group structure, ie. a(bG) = b(aG) = (ab)G.

But AFAICT, elliptic curve groups really are the best known groups where DH is hard. The "Why curves win" section talks about it terms of key size, but the reason other groups require larger keys is they have some kind of structure which can be exploited to attack the "hard" direction (eg. in a finite field, the ability to factor over primes can be used to solve discrete logs), so the group size has to go up to compensate.
by rramadass | 2026-03-02 08:15:01+00:00
Right.

Unfortunately, a lot of system level knowledge like this is not found in a single place but spread over many articles/manuals/books/etc.

However, the book Advanced C and C++ Compiling: An Engineering Guide to Compiling, Linking and Libraries using C and C++ by Milan Stevanovic brings together a lot of information which you might find interesting.
by friedtofu | 2026-03-02 08:15:16+00:00
Really? That seems odd, where are you looking? Through your Carrier or just for unlocked devices? Depending on who you're with, usually you can just grab an unlocked device and your Carrier to register the device. I've only ever used Google Fi and AT&T though I'm not sure about the others.

Searching duckduckgo for 'Unlocked {device}' returns a lot of results on the shopping tab for phones on Amazon and eBay like the pixel 8/9 plus plenty of other "recent" android devices. Walmart and Bestbuy seem to still have dedicated sections for unlocked phones as well.
by aucisson_masque | 2026-03-02 08:16:43+00:00
So ? People didn't vote to spend billions on Israel wars.

Trump said he was against wars, that 2003 Irak war was a mistake, yet he's once again trying to make another country change government by dropping bombs on them.

Polls show that a majority of Americans are against that war.

What more do you want to understand that Americans didnt vote for it and are against it.
by arjie | 2026-03-02 08:17:40+00:00
Huh, that's a pretty interesting request. And it makes sense to me. I've enabled it on my RSS feed. I wanted to see if I could add my blog feed to it to test but when I went to do so I had to install a Chrome extension on your app to do it. All right, if someone wants my blog for whatever reason that badly, they can now do it.
by redbell | 2026-03-02 08:17:52+00:00
> Our game, Celeste

I was really enjoying reading this piece until I read the above, then I realized I am reading for a big developer, the maker of, Celeste [1]. I am definitely adding this to my list of favorite articles about making games.

Also, you may want to check a previous discussion from nine months ago (573 points, 246 comments ): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44038209

_____________

1. https://store.steampowered.com/app/504230/Celeste/
by trelliumD | 2026-03-02 08:18:21+00:00
electric bicycles, are just smartly marketeered motorcycles as bicycles. Give it the health sauce of a bicycle, and the comfort of a motorcycle. You excercise but dont get tired at all, you dont sweat, the bike works for you... to me that sounds like electric fitness, where you do power assisted weightlifting, so that you can do more reps, and lift more weight. Beeing a cyclist who regularly cycles with an unassisted bike distances over 200 km i see no added value of an electric bicycle over a normal bike. Disclaimer, it is a velomobile
by sam_goody | 2026-03-02 08:18:28+00:00
There is a popular [excellent non vibe-coded] web server called FrankenPHP; A port of PHP to Go bundled with Caddy.

Are there any other FrankenProjects out there that have had any success?

Were we so impressed by the concept of the original Frankenstein?

Is this a Freudian slip, that we are expecting these AI projects to turn on their creators?
by andersmurphy | 2026-03-02 08:18:32+00:00
Whats the obsession with concurrent writes?

Single writer will outperform MVCC as long as you do dynamic batching (doesn't prevent logical transactions) and all you have to do is manage that writer at the application level.

Concurrent writers just thrash your CPU cache. The difference between L1 and L3 can be 100x. So your single writer on a single core can outperform 10-100s of cores. Especially when you start considering contention.

Here's sqlite doing 100k TPS and I'm not even messing with core affinity and it's going over FFi in a dynamic language.

https://andersmurphy.com/2025/12/02/100000-tps-over-a-billio...
by pjmlp | 2026-03-02 08:18:59+00:00
Yeah, and as you well put it, it isn't even some snowflake feature only possible in C.

The myth that it was a gift from Gods doing stuff nothing else can make it, persists.

And even on the languages that don't, it isn't if as a tiny Assembly thunk is the end of the world to write, but apparently at a sign of a plain mov people run to the hills nowadays.
Show HN: Securos – Security-focused platform with hardened architecture
by temple_ent | 2026-03-02 08:19:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m introducing Securos, a security-focused platform built around disciplined engineering and hardened system design.

The project emphasizes controlled infrastructure ownership, structured deployment practices, and long-term maintainability rather than rapid feature iteration. The goal is to create a stable foundation for security-oriented tooling and services.

Securos is part of the broader Temple Enterprise portfolio, where each platform follows consistent engineering and operational standards.

I’m looking for technical feedback, especially around architecture decisions, security assumptions, and overall direction.
by orig_flipster | 2026-03-02 08:20:29+00:00
The internet is divided, one half has gone full-blown Coding Agent Mode, adamant not to touch any code ever again and the other half is skeptic AF and trying to convince everyone that AI generated code still mostly sucks. So, this is just me trying to see for myself and sharing my experience after my first actually successful result from Vibe Coding or Agentic Engineering or whatever.
by IOT_Apprentice | 2026-03-02 08:20:32+00:00
And then France sent Khomeini back to Iran on a chartered Air France 747 & stifled that. France also built Dimona nuclear plant in Israel in 1963 and then tested multiple times nuclear weapons in Algeria from 1960-1966 in the Algerian Sahara & mountains & allowed Israel to observe these explosions.
by arjie | 2026-03-02 08:20:52+00:00
I just post these things on my blog and then use the built-in search engine. One thing I do with my email and Reddit comments is that I use the GDPR/CCPA data request forms and then run them through GPT Embedding and stick it in a sqlite/duckdb (there's no real difference for me between the two) and then put that on a recurring job where my claw can read from it via a skill. This has proven strangely useful.

I haven't found a way to automate this import of my data, but most of the magic is in the history not in the present. It really is incredible. I'll ask the claw to find what I said about the SFPD cruiser I once saw in the TL and boom! It's there! A mild annoyance with using my Mediawiki-based blog (which I chose because it has good support for allowing users to edit it) is that authoring is still a lot of work and I keep forgetting Draft namespace articles.
by zrwusa | 2026-03-02 08:22:17+00:00
Hi HN! I built a data structures library for JavaScript/TypeScript that I've been refining for 2+ years.

*Why another one?*

Native JS only gives us Array, Map, Set, Object. When you need a sorted map, priority queue, or graph algorithms, you're stuck with either:
- Half-baked npm packages with poor TS support
- Porting Java/C++ code yourself
- Libraries that expose too many internals

*What's different:*

1. *Native API feel* - TreeMap/TreeSet work like Map/Set, just sorted:
```ts
const map = new TreeMap([['b', 2], ['a', 1], ['c', 3]]);
[...map.keys()] // ['a', 'b', 'c'] - sorted!
```

2. *Java-style navigation* - `floor()`, `ceiling()`, `lower()`, `higher()`, `rangeSearch()`

3. *Full TypeScript* - No `any` types, proper generics throughout

4. *Performance* - Red-Black Tree backed, ~2x faster iteration than js-sdsl

*Included:*
- Binary Trees: BST, AVL, Red-Black, TreeMap, TreeSet, TreeMultiMap
- Heaps: Min/Max Heap, Priority Queue
- Graphs: Directed/Undirected with Dijkstra, Bellman-Ford, Tarjan, etc.
- Linear: Queue, Deque, Stack, LinkedList
- Others: Trie, HashMap

npm: `npm install data-structure-typed`

Happy to answer questions about implementation details, performance tradeoffs, or TypeScript typing challenges!

---

## Alternative shorter version:

*Title:* Show HN: TreeMap, Heap, Graph for TypeScript – native API feel, full type safety

*Text:*
After 2 years of refinement, sharing my TypeScript data structures library.

TreeMap/TreeSet work like native Map/Set but sorted. Includes Java-style navigation (floor, ceiling, rangeSearch). Also: Heap, PriorityQueue, Graph with Dijkstra/Bellman-Ford/Tarjan, Trie, and more.

Red-Black Tree backed, ~2x faster iteration than js-sdsl.

Would love feedback, especially on API design choices!
by imtringued | 2026-03-02 08:22:19+00:00
>I often find the default feature implementations in large engines like Unity so lacking I end up writing my own anyway. Eventually, my projects end up being mostly my own tools and systems, and the engine becomes just a vehicle for a nice UI and some rendering...

I honestly don't see anything wrong with using the engine for its UI and "some rendering" kind of sweeps a lot of the complicated 3d light handling under the rug. I think the biggest mistake large engines have made is baking in features as first class citizens instead of those features being part of a standard plugin you could have written yourself from scratch once you reach that stage.

I've contemplated building my own editor UI, but after four weeks I realized that I'm just rebuilding the same UI structure you see in FreeCAD, Blender, Isaac Sim, Godot, etc. There's always a 3D viewport, there's a scene tree and there is an inspector panel for looking at the properties. So why not just use the Godot editor as a UI and provide my own custom nodes? By the time I've outgrown the training wheels, I've spent months working on the actually differentiating features.
by ensocode | 2026-03-02 08:23:51+00:00
sounds unrealistic to me. For military and industrial use cases yes but I think we are at least 5 probably 10 and more years away from that moment. I think there is not enough data, and hardware is not software so the scaling will be more difficult and use cases are so wide that I can not imagine a humanoid cooking and mowing the lawn and repairing the roof. Look how long the autonomous driving takes and this is just moving a car.
by eloisant | 2026-03-02 08:24:02+00:00
HN is mostly US and apparently in US even geeks have given up on Android.

Anyway, here is my experience when I upgraded from a Pixel 8 to Pixel 10 Pro: login to my Google account, let the backup restore happen then my new phone was identical to the old one.

I only had to do the login process to a few messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp, and my home settings on Smart Launcher had to be manually imported but that's pretty much it.

Basically, a lot of what OP lists as "bare minimum requirements" are just preferences. If he used his Android phone like an iPhone, and like most people use it (with minimal tinkering) then the migration would have been just as smooth.
by ezst | 2026-03-02 08:24:08+00:00
> But hey, your definition is much better established, right?

I don't like this manner of baselessly singling me out. Once again, there is no "my definition" of AI. Here is the one from wikipedia, that matches the academic definition with which I am aligned "It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals."

My whole point is that the current AI-craze boils down to one single highly-specific method that got added the AI toolbox. It has clear shortcomings and limitations that major tech corporations hide or disguise knowingly, for their profit and our own deception. My take is that we collectively benefit from calling the current breed of AI products what they are: LLMs. For transparency's, correctness' and honesty toward consumers' sakes. The marketing around those products needs to be regulated accordingly.

Now I want to elaborate on why the commonly used taxonomy of AI, as formalised by scientists, or, what you call "my definition" is the only one that matters (with the practical consequence that nobody in the field uses the term "AI" without more qualifiers). Say, you develop a program to play tic-tac-toe. It is something whose complexity is low-enough that it has an analytical solution, with all the states of the game that can be stored and look-up. It could also be trained via convolutional neural networks, a family within machine learning, within AI, on lots of games. Would you call the resulting capability of playing tic-tac-toe "AI"? Theoretically yes, you must (and myself as well). Where we differ is in the importance of specifying how this ability is accomplished. The analytical implementation will be fully explainable, while the neural-network won't. In other words, we won't be able to tell whether the answer from the latter is faithful and desired, or subject to what we nowadays call "hallucination" in a turn of the tech giants to further anthropomorphise LLMs.

Now, maybe more about where I'm coming from. I researched computer vision algorithms for self-driving vehicles for several years. The trolley dilemma and other considerations about what it means for machines to behave "morally" has been ingrained through my formative and academic years. As Engineers and machine learning scientists, we have been evolving our field from predictable analytical methods to new ones with better results but less introspectability. I'm of the standpoint that this is only fine as long as the society is educated on those matters and willingly commits to using those methods with there trade-offs, for about the same reasons we put labels on food products and list known side-effects and their occurring changes in our medication. Because now those computational methods affect us in the real world in very material and tangible manners.
by dataviz1000 | 2026-03-02 08:24:30+00:00
I use either Bob's Red Mill Steel Cut Oats which are cheaper and organic or McCann's steel cut oats. I don't know if I could tell the difference in a blind taste test but I think McCann's are creamier and nuttier in flavor.

> no sense dirtying the Pot too

I cook all meals at home so I run the dishwasher machine every night and put it in. I might try the bowl trick with single serving of rice.

Interesting that oats suffer the same economics as yellow bulbs in stop lights where they are used much less meaning it costs more to switch them to led than the electricity costs saved. Genetically modified (GMO) oats are not commercially available because the cost of developing them doesn't meet the low demand.

I also sometimes fry and egg and put it on top the oatmeal with maple syrup. I know it sounds gross but I like it.
by fastball | 2026-03-02 08:25:17+00:00
I don't think MCPs have legs long-term, but they are a great middle ground during this somewhat turbulent transition period we find ourselves in, precisely because they are not the existing tooling (they are greenfield).

An existing company that has an API/CLI might not have everyone on the team on-board with LLMs and agents and what have you – it might be hard to get buy-in to modify those existing surface areas to be more "agent compatible".

Meanwhile, a team within a company that wants to make their company more "agent forward" can build an MCP tomorrow and it is clear what it is for: is a new surface, meant to be consumed by agents, with the needs of agents top-of-mind. It avoids confusing interop issues with existing tooling while maximizing said teams ability to ship changes/experiments quickly.
by close04 | 2026-03-02 08:25:22+00:00
> the scale of indiscriminate nature of data capture and the volume of data being captured

It took a lot of naivete, to put it gently, and head-in-sand attitude to believe otherwise. Flock had everything in place to collect a treasure trove of data but they would decide not to do it? Out of principle? Or even the very charitable interpretation that they don't do it today but also they'll never cave in to the pressure to do it?
by jedberg | 2026-03-02 08:25:37+00:00
Sort of, depending on if your spec includes technology specifics.

For example it might generate a plan that says "I will use library xyz", and I'll add a comment like "use library abc instead" and then tell it to update the plan, which now includes specific technology choices.

It's more like a plan I'd review with a junior engineer.

I'll check out that repo, it might at least give me some good ideas on some other default files I should be generating.
by linker3000 | 2026-03-02 08:27:44+00:00
The Motorola phones are generally good performers and value for money. My only gripe is that they cannot have their batteries replaced easily - even by phone repair shops.

I understand that this is because you have to disassemble / un-glue the phones through the front and remove the display. For this reason, the repair shops I have asked have said they don't 'do' Motorola phones because there's too much risk in breaking the display.

This effectively means that the life of the phone is determined by the ageing of the battery.
by strosz | 2026-03-02 08:27:48+00:00
You can host one instance yourself and that instance can handle thousands of ccu if your server is coded efficiently and if your server is fast probably even more. They hve a rolling open source scheme so their releases becomes open source after some time (already source available). Wish as well it was free, but understandable they need some defence against Amazon etc. SpacetimeDB has worked very well in my game so far.
by aucisson_masque | 2026-03-02 08:28:09+00:00
Hopefully wireless payment do work on these, and they have face unlock working. That's really the 2 issues I have with grapheneos.

I know it's supposed to be for privacy nerd, and they will tell you you shouldn't use Google pay because it's bad for privacy and so on... But it's not the majority of people, most are willing to trade some privacy for convenience.
by jedberg | 2026-03-02 08:28:22+00:00
> At this point, I either jump back to new design/plan files, or dive into the debug flow. Similar to the plan prompting, debug is instructed to review the current implementation, and outline N-M hypotheses for what could be wrong.

I'm biased because my company makes a durable execution library, but I'm super excited about the debug workflow we recently enabled when we launched both a skill and MCP server.

You can use the skill to tell your agent to build with durable execution (and it does a pretty great job the first time in most cases) and then you can use the MCP server to say things like "look at the failed workflows and find the bug". And since it has actual checkpoints from production runs, it can zero in on the bug a lot quicker.

We just dropped a blog post about it: https://www.dbos.dev/blog/mcp-agent-for-durable-workflows
by watwut | 2026-03-02 08:29:15+00:00
Author actually frames the situation as more dire level of hunger then just "dinner was late by two hours" kind of hunger. The state of euphoria he describes when he could steal some basic food suggest hunger was quite serious. Not eating enough is actual health hazard, especially in the puberty even if you are not in the "loosing muscle, brain matter and veins material due to body eating itself" starving level.

Second, I am comparing it to the baseline in article - eating peanut butter, beans and hot dog sausage. I am not saying it will instantly kill you.
by abcde666777 | 2026-03-02 08:29:18+00:00
My experience with making your own engine vs using an off the shelf solution - the former can be viable and even superior on the condition that you know what you're doing. That is if you've built entire games or engines before, or have enough experience with the internals of one.

Otherwise it can be a dangerous fool's errand on which many projects go to die. My younger naive self can attest to this, he loved trying to build his own overly-ambitious engines. But he never finished any games.

Another thought if you do roll your own - keep it simple stupid. When your brain tells you that some amazing nested scene graph with integrated occlusion culling would be the coolest thing in the world, but you lack evidence that you'll actually need all that functionality, tell your brain that it's being stupid and just implement some kind of basic flat scene structure. You can always retrofit it later.

Also - study the code of the likes of Carmack. Consider that he produced the likes of the quake engines in only a couple of years. Reflect long and hard on the raw simplicity of a lot of that code.

Do not worship complexity.

These are the words of someone who has walked both roads!