skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Raven – automatically organize your book notes
Hi HN! We are Tiago and Patrik. We're building an application to improve the process of taking notes and personal knowledge management. We met through the YC Co-Founder matching platform and we had a common interest of being heavy book readers. We also suffered from the same problem: using notes from books we read.

The biggest problems with note-taking are:

- Notes in physical books are hard to digitize without introducing significant friction.

- People rarely revisit their notes due to poor organization, leading to notes being dumped into files that quickly become gigantic, unusable, and eventually forgotten.

- Organizing notes requires a lot time and work.

We are solving this by creating a system for the entire note-taking process. We make digitization easy with OCR and UX for selecting the desired text. Post-digitization, we use LLMs to effectively organize the content into an organized database.

We categorize content by creating several layers of information that can be used at different times for different purposes:

- Title: A short, one-sentence description of the entire note. This is very useful when searching through many notes.

- Summary: A single paragraph that distills the information, acting as a thumbnail of the captured information.

- Tags: Allows grouping notes based on common topics, regardless of the source.

The goal is a system to make content as easy and efficient to navigate and use as possible, automating the process to save time and effort.

We differentiate ourselves from other platforms by not overly focusing on AI for its own sake. While many solutions concentrate primarily on summarizing information, we view AI as a tool that supports the overall UX. Our primary focus is on understanding the entire note-taking process holistically—how to capture, search, navigate, and utilize information most effectively.

To start with we’re targeting book readers, as this is the most straightforward application. However, we plan to expand this system to accommodate various types of content, including academic papers, articles, podcasts, and more.

We’re launching our MVP and gathering feedback from our first users. If you’re interested, you can try it here: https://ravenapp.ai

Any feedback is very welcome!
Very cool, thanks for the link
AI is making children even dumber.

The death of reading culture, the rise of video games, then smartphones, then social media and doomscrolling, and the lack of tactile physical contact with the environment, and decline in socialization had already made kids much dumber.

Case in point, someone will retort by pointing to IQ scores, or how school knowledge doesn't matter because we can always Google it (or, in 2024, ask AI). That person would be the product of earlier, pre-AI, dumber-ing processes.
Old way: two cups and string.

New way: chinese whispers.
"Although the designs were never finished and no models ever went into production", so it was researched but not done..?
Just saying that’s life. Earning is a useless question.
makes sense thank you!
> a Personal Knowledge Management system.

It can not be any proprietary system which use to exhibit too many notifications, typically for the vendor's profit.
> The separatists even talked with Putin that promised 10.000 Russian soldiers to keep the violence alive and "defend" the new micro-estate in exchange for a few favors

Were they to be flown or sailed to Spain ?
The one area that I think Apple might be setting themself up well for is the longer term edge device AI race. It’s reasonable to think that AI will become more and more embedded in all aspects of computation and communication, and with that, it seems plausible to think that running and executing inference at the edge on devices with low power and compute capabilities relative to what’s available in the cloud will be a desirable deployment methodology - cost, bandwidth, robustness, etc etc.

Obviously there’s nothing of the sort in the works now, but it’s not totally implausible to think that the expertise and infrastructure apple is developing now might be setting themselves up to also handle inference for things like home automation systems, industrial sensors and actuators, etc which may all need edge inference capabilities. Chips like the M Series or on the other side the NPU will presumably be coming to many devices outside of the mobile/pc market and it doesn’t seem totally insane to me to think that Apple might want to get into that world.

Again, this is all just speculation about long term pathways that might be unlikely after all.
No, but this matters how? It’s just an example of life being unfair.
Osr: Memory efficient multi-mode OpenStreetMap router
If you left his plastic straw alone, he wouldn't have to make it about straws, would he? Now all he has is a soggy paper straw that he got from a plastic wrapping.
>The problem with that idea is that you won't be legally allowed to launch again until you root cause and fix the failure,

Only if you want to launch from US. I guess with a 160 countries there will some with the right area for a launch pad with way laxer requirements.
The O in CO2 is for Oxygen, it’s not a zero. I get the sensation you might not know what you’re talking about if you don’t know such a basic thing.
If it exists for more than 2 seconds, there's going to be a fungus that will eat it.
Conversely, I spent years convincing my parents to buy a computer precisely so I could read Wikipedia. It was pretty much my main hobby between the ages of 14 and 16.
Author here: most websites that have valuable data targeted by scrapers implement some sort of anti bots mechanisms. In particular they will force the user to execute different JS proof of works and run different browser fingerprinting tests to verify the nature of the browser.
Because these companies simply would not exist without them?
There's a very implicit assumption in this text that the encyclopedia you buy in 2024 does NOT contain all sorts of AI-generated stuff.

Not sure I have that much faith in the world anymore to trust that to be true.
Russia is doing quite well getting around the dollar. Others are following their lead.

You are likely correct in other parts of your reply. Only time will tell. I think the trending direction is clear...

Also, rule of law in the U.S. just isn't what it used to be. Many other countries have seen what the U.S. has done with Russian money kept in Western banks.
Counterpoint: both Xcode and Visual Studio are much slower for certain things than Visual Studio Code (most notably: startup time).

Application performance is less a technical problem than an organizational and cultural problem (at least if performance has become so bad that it starts to be annoying - e.g. I'm sure at some point in the past both Xcode and VS started much faster than now, and on much slower computers).

If the team cares about performance they will find ways to improve it no matter the technology they use, they "just" need to make time for performance investigation and optimizations. There's usually a lot of low hanging fruits to pick before switching to a more efficient tech stack will enable further improvements (and at that point you're probably deep in diminishing returns territory).
Interesting, I remember (u?)xterm being screen tearing fast at the Athlon times. Wondering what changed since then, cause blitting glyphs onto a surface at 60-144 fps wasn’t a big deal even then.

Modern terminals feel like dot matrix printers compared to it, but I always assumed it’s because of using GtkTextView or something like that for rendering. Requiring a GPU and not just some form of direct-blit API is something insane to me.
<pre> blocks don't depend on the OS, that would be ridiculous.
To be fair, if the app isn't in the nixos distro, it's rarely that useful. The only one I had to figure out was a proprietary logic analyser interface, but it wasn't too hard.
Being unable to have a meaningful conversation sounds like general technological skepticism to me. I don't see any reason to think talking to chatbots will erode our conversation skills, anymore than the internet or TV or books has in the past. People interact in the real world much in the same way they did 100 years ago. As for having the skills to research a problem, is chatGPT much different than the adoption of search engines? Many adults probably couldn't find information in a library very easily these days, but if they have no need for this skill anyway, I don't see that as a loss.
I believe they've somewhat fixed this, it prompts you on first-run whether you want to accept analytics or not. Makes it quite explicit if you want to opt-in or opt-out.

The docs have been updated too, https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics states

> Homebrew gathers anonymous analytics using InfluxDB. You will be notified the first time you run brew update or install Homebrew. Analytics are not enabled until after this notice is shown, to ensure that you can opt out without ever sending analytics data.
> No, most cars of yore only had manuals available to dealership technicians, and no one else. Genuine manufacturer-made manuals were difficult or impossible to find.

> Everyone else bought Haynes or Chilton "manuals" which were really done by reverse-engineering.

They did the job and it was hardly difficult to access dealership manuals .. which were more often than not close to the Haynes manuals.

There's a healthy trade in manuals and photocopies of such. The nearest city had an entire shop soley devoted to car manuals back in the 1980s .. it might still be there or not (given the torrents of manual PDFs kicking about today).

I currently live in a town with a large motor museum (rocket cars and steamers and all sorts) and a wealth of machines from 100+ years of agriculture .. plenty of sheds with shops; old tractors, the last holden V8's, even one iteration of the sheep shearing robot we built (in the 1980s).

It's not that difficult to maintain old cars, the parts can be hard to scrounge at times, failing that it can be a wait on a machinist to fab a replacement, but overall there's less mystery than with more recent vehicles.
There's a Sabine Hossenfelder youtube just out that is more interesting than the linked article about it. "Is the Intelligence-Explosion Near? A Reality Check." https://youtu.be/xm1B3Y3ypoE
I think you've just reinvented the notebook.
Thanks for the feedback everyone, we have now removed this paragraph and the whole package is now under GPL regardless of usage!

The idea was to get in touch with enterprises looking to make heavy use of the project - but you're right that this may have unintended effects.
I don't get it. Does the set he purchased have the lost Beatles song? If not, what's the point?
Amazing piece of (high quality) software! If you're spending more than 100$/month on github actions or just want faster builds in general, you should give this a try. I was amazed how easy it was to setup (just need an AWS account and 30 minutes). Founder is also very responsive to feature requests and suggestions.
We're in the process of replacing our k8s based ARC Runner with runs-on.com, hoping to reduce maintenance burden and CI cost by thousands of $ month.
Yet they feel threated enough, to have started Fleet and SpaceCode.
Unless your kitchen is flooded, plastic food packaging generally doesn't face the sort of warm, wet environments needed for most fungi and microorganisms to grow. (The sterilized and/or nutrient-deficient insides of food packaging doesn't count.)

Marine uses of plastic (fishing nets, ropes, swimwear, buoys, etc.) seem likely to be impacted first. Along with infrastructure (sump pumps, farm irrigation equipment, ...). Then general outdoor uses.
I'm pretty sure CCP's economist has been gone for a while. And the economy reflects that.
Why the lying?

Kamprad was adjacent to Nysvenska rörelsen, a lifelong friend of it's founder Per Engdahl, who also supplied the initial funding for IKEA.

It's insane to claim that Olof Palme caused a shift away from parliamentary reformism.

And no, we've never had anyone pay "more than 100% in taxes". That's a myth, based on Astrid Lindgrens pretty weird propaganda story about it.

The antagonism between labour and capital is inherent, and you either apply force to subdue the exploited party to this conflict, or you negotiate a deal or parliamentary decision. The latter was the core of Saltsjöbadsavtalet, the reformist position represented by the trade union confederation and the Social Democrats. The radical position would be to form militias and engage in militant revolutionary activities, something which the strong reformist movement managed to guard us from.

The right and the fascists didn't think that was enough, however.

It's absurd to blame the victims of fascism for the rise of fascism instead of those who gain from it.

As for the reasoning behind the löntagarfonder, it's quite obviously immoral for people to become rich and powerful by disenfranchising and exploiting other people. Which is how late modern corporations work, you have owners that take the value produced by other people for themselves. The right agrees that this is a correct description, which is why they made sure pensions and wages have been invested in stock markets and investment funds, so every worker is now forced to participate in the casino.

You could disagree with the particular construct of löntagarfonder, but you would need to be very religious to claim that nature or some god made it good and right that the rich get to keep generational wealth and persist in disenfranchisement and exploitation of other people. It's close to the idea of divine right of kings.
Depends where you live in tbe countryside. In Austria single family homes are definitely more of an upper class purchase.
There will be nowhere to do business in, perhaps. /s
I always find that whenever such topics come up for discussion Ted Gray had the best take - https://theodoregray.com/BrainRot/.

With AI and specifically LLMs, I feel many of the points raised here about 25 years ago still stands. Any LLM based learning isn't meant to push students into thinking about the problem or even guiding students along the path to the correct answer. It's mostly about returning some answer -- mostly right but not really of a good quality. As pointed out in Ted Gray's article, any assisted learning mechanism should work towards making the student think about the problem at hand and reason their way through it. It's an aide to the human teacher because, it being a machine and most importantly software, can adapt to each and every single student's ability and work at the student's pace instead of 3 periods of an hour each per week. An LLM by definition is the opposite. It gives you the next most probable character without any idea of what it's saying. There is a lot of work being done on this ofc, but what's available today isn't a reasoning aide/teacher.
Another one worth checking out:
https://search.marginalia.nu/
> paid for by inflation rather than taxes

How does inflation pay for services and infrastructure?
As does a healthy middle class who get what they want (e.g. homeownership).
That's a good point, yes. Tools are an important part of the equation, and people need to make the right choices for those. That's why I mostly recommend Obsidian. There are many valid alternatives of course, but I Obsidian ticks the right boxes
This article is little more than a bunch of quotations from the linked article, which is worth reading instead: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/06/10/generative-ai-is-not-g... .

It's a compelling read for engineers, but I suspect it's not the kind of thing that managers will take note of.
>AI hasnt been around long enough to have this effect

Doesn't have to be much. A year or a couple of years of it being around, is enough to see results in the kids in middle school and above.
> You should be able to see for yourself that your argumentation is nonsense.

I think the same about yours. Any country can pretend to do research in nuclear energy and secretly work on nuclear weapons. Or just secretly do it. It's not like they need to make energy for that.

> You can find out. There is enough information about this topic.

It was a rhetorical question. I know Germany relies on fossil fuel to compensate and imports when needed (e.g. from France...). You can see it real time, there are interactive maps.

> A renewable energy landscape is more than just "wind & sun".

How do you compensate the intermittent production of wind and sun with renewables, then? And if you have another renewable that compensates entirely, why don't you just do that instead of wind and sun?
What if you live in a humid, warm, tropical environment?
> It’s not just AI, it’s the internet in general.

> My students (7th grade) have a difficult time answering a personal prompt like “Who was the last person you had an argument with? Why did you argue and how did you resolve the argument?”

> They immediately jump on Google like it’s an answer they can find on the internet.

Well, I'm horrified. Is the IPad baby to AI schooling pipeline the final iteration of the behavioural sink?
Consider that this may be hard to do. Especially if it is someone in a position of power over you, if it could affect your own job/position, etc.

It's not exactly easy either to take it upon yourself to be the "usurper" (for lack of a better word).
> freed of its shackles and allowed to appreciate again. Some of this would be immediate, as thousands of dollars in taxes shift away from land and back onto labour, enterprise, and commerce

Oh not again with the trickle-down story. It doesn't work, it never worked.

The only way that money trickles is in the pockets of the landowners, from there it will be used to lobby politicians or stored in some fiscal haven.

On the other hand, as long as that money is taxed it can be used by the state for the people. Build infrastructure, improve education, healthcare, etc.

That's how you get money to "trickle down". That is, of course, if the state isn't to o busy making arms manufacturers rich.
In fact, things get rather bad when that money is realized at once. Hype is accurate.
I hate tech hyperbolizing...
Is there a way to orient assignments that can't be solved easily by ai?

Maybe classes will have to have more non-computer exams to test pupils ability to do tasks like solve mathematic questions without ai.
If the team doesn't care about performance, they will just as easily create a low-performing application in C++/Qt as they would with Javascript/Electron. The problem isn't mainly technical, but cultural/organizational (for instance chasing new features instead of improving existing code).
Without gov help Ford and GM would have gone bankrupt also. Not to mention the space industry entirely.
The temperature cold be a big factor, I remember sleeping very well with AC all night.

OTOH I like fresh air, but then you get some light in from moon, lights from the street, and maybe the bit of wind stops at 3am...
It will also be completely open source. The Z80 emulator I'm using is GPL, so all the firmware I write will be GPL.

And the Schematics, PCB and Gerbers will all be available as a KiCad project for people to play with and even get assembled themselves.
> so yes it did end up in the ocean

It was a European plastic straw? Was there an address on it, or how can you tell?

The point the person you responded to was making wasn't about plastic straws, but rather about the fact that European trash almost never lands in the ocean: https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
Saying that human nature in the absence of societal pressures is the true human nature is questionable

We are social animals, taking us out of an environment where we're part of and accountable to a community is our true nature is like taking a fish out of water to study its true behavior
right, because companies stealing from the german government is clearly giving giving the nation a competitive advantage.

Totally true, anything else insight worthy from your side?

The German government was defrauded by German companies collaborating with Chinese companies.

Calling that a competitive advantage is like saying German companies have a competitive advantage because some have been stealing billions of taxes over the last few years via CumEx.

It'd also be the same as saying that India's medicine factories have a competitive advantage because they're able to illegally dumb toxic waste in rural areas, which is currently the world's biggest breeding ground for super bacteria (resistant to antibiotics)

The article doesn't blame China, it's just plainly stating that the currently undertaken initiatives in China are almost all fraudulent. That doesn't mean that Chinese government is stealing from Germany.
Felix's upcoming work is intriguing and would enable a much nicer integration of Python into the Excel ecosystem. The use of PyOdide and WASM enables execution of the Python logic on-device. The same tactic is used by PySheets and taken a bit more to the extreme by implementing the cell functions, but also the entire sheet UI and logic in Python. Check it out if you are approaching the space from the perspective of a Python programmer, rather than an Excel user. See https://pysheets.app
Part of me wonders if this will make older employees more desirable- if lots of new grads are completely incompetent and incapable of learning, perhaps a selection bias may emerge in favor of older applicants
That's not a problem with land taxes, that's a problem with the pensioners declaring that they should stop working at what turned out to be an economically unfeasibly low age after we extended life expectancy. Often with crazy stuff like final salary pensions that they obviously never paid anywhere near enough for. That no generation, before, and probably after, will be able to afford to be economically inactive for 20-30 years + the 15(+) years from childhood in unskilled or low skilled jobs.

At least until we (hopefully) make a post-scarcity economy.

Young people used to be able to afford a home at 25. Old people used to be able to afford property taxes in their retirement for their family sized home. The old people are in the same boat as everyone else. It's just manifesting differently for them. And the root cause is having to pay for an aging population, which is them!

On top of that, that home might have been modest when they had a family and a job, now it's extravagant. Now they should downsize out of the family sized home they're occupying with 1-2 people. And they'll still make a ton of money out of it.

Again, this is the first generation that can live like that. On previous generations the family home would have had the next generation living in it by now, instead 1 or 2 people are taking up a huge amount of land and rooms when they could be living in a flat.
> Software is an apprenticeship industry. You can’t learn to be a software engineer by reading books. You can only learn by doing…and doing, and doing, and doing some more.

Nonsense, software is the only industry where you can become a great engineer through sheer talent and hard work. Most other industries do not allow you to "skip" steps like software engineering. If you are talented, you can build software that changes the world and capture tremendous value. In fields like traditional engineering/accounting/medicine/ investment banking/law/management consulting, you have to "do your time" by playing gofer to seniors and working overtime. Software engineering is a true meritocracy than a lot of other similarly lucrative fields.
Leslie Lamport's TLA+ comes from MSR. You have likely directly benefited from this project, since it's been used to prove the correctness of many distributed systems, including pieces of AWS.

Z3 is a very popular open source SMT solver, also originating from MSR.

There's probably dozens of similar examples. You might not know about some of the work coming out of MSR, but it's probably impacting you indirectly.

It's similar to how we indirectly benefit from fundamental nuclear physics. Places like CERN have to solve engineering issues and those solutions trickle down to everyone.