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Top stories from https://news.ycombinator.com (with 100+ score) Contribute to the development here: https://github.com/phil-r/hackernewsbot Also check https://t.me/designer_news Contacts: @philr
Show HN: A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' written in Emacs Org Mode (Score: 150+ in 22 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xTSS
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xTSS
I authored and developed an interactive children's book about entrepreneurship and money management. The journey started with Twinery, the open-source tool for making interactive fiction, discovered right here on HN. The tool kindled memories of reading CYOA style books when I was a kid, and I thought the format would be awesome for writing a story my kids could follow along, incorporating play money to learn about transactions as they occurred in the story.
Twinery is a fantastic tool, and I used it to layout the story map. I really wanted to write the content of the story in Emacs and Org Mode however. Thankfully, Twinery provided the ability to write custom Story Formats that defined how a story was exported. I wrote a Story Format called Twiorg that would export the Twinery file to an Org file and then a Org export backend (ox-twee) to do the reverse. With these tools, I could go back and forth between Emacs and Twinery for authoring the story.
The project snowballed and I ended up with the book in digital and physical book formats. The Web Book is created using another Org export backend.
Ten Dollar Adventure: https://tendollaradventure.com
Sample the Web Book (one complete storyline/adventure): https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/
I couldn't muster the effort to write a special org export backend for the physical books unfortunately and used a commercial editor to format these.
Twiorg: https://github.com/danishec/twiorg
ox-twee: https://github.com/danishec/ox-twee
Previous HN post on writing the transaction logic using an LLM in Emacs: https://blog.tendollaradventure.com/automating-story-logic-w...
Twinery 2: <https://twinery.org/> and discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32788965
Doing Hard Things (❄️ Score: 153+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xKv9
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xKv9
Mistral Releases Deep Research, Voice, Projects in Le Chat (🔥 Score: 152+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xW6e
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xW6e
Upcoming coordinated security fix for all Matrix server implementations (Score: 150+ in 6 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xVkw
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xVkw
I was wrong about robots.txt (Score: 150+ in 16 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xUg7
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xUg7
My bank keeps on undermining anti-phishing education (🔥 Score: 158+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xVwt
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xVwt
The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer, Annotated (1996) (❄️ Score: 150+ in 4 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xDAa
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xDAa
The annotations are at https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel-annotated/node2.....
Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon (Score: 151+ in 14 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xTqd
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xTqd
“Reading Rainbow” was created to combat summer reading slumps (Score: 153+ in 6 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xUh5
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xUh5
What's happening to reading? (❄️ Score: 150+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xFHt
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xFHt
I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022) (Score: 151+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xTHv
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xTHv
Young graduates are facing an employment crisis (Score: 150+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xTAs
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xTAs
Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction (Score: 156+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xSXw
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xSXw
Company announcement: https://bedrockrobotics.com/news/introducing-bedrock-robotic...
LLM Daydreaming (Score: 150+ in 15 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xQWY
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xQWY
AWS open-sourced Postgres active-active replication extension (Score: 154+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xRE3
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xRE3
How I Use Kagi (🔥 Score: 156+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xWbV
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xWbV
ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action (🔥 Score: 157+ in 1 hour)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xWw6
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xWw6
Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network (🔥 Score: 154+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/c/6xWhy
If you have the Notion Desktop App installed, you may have started to notice a "In a meeting? Start AI Meeting Notes" notification pop up exactly when you are joining a virtual meeting (e.g. joining a Google Meet on Firefox).
At first, I assumed it must have been using my Google Workspace account to snoop on my calendar. But then I started to notice it would notify exactly when I joined even if I was late and the meeting had previously started.
This was the response from Notion Support after they worked with the Notion Engineering team.
> Meeting Detection Architecture:
> - The system uses a sophisticated dual-detection approach: microphone monitoring combined with network port analysis
> - Detection is implemented separately for macOS and Windows at the native operating system level
I've uninstalled the Notion Desktop App...
How and where will agents ship software? (Score: 150+ in 23 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xTaL
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xTaL
The linked article explains this in detail, but today we're releasing:
1. An API to spin up apps programmatically. This is great if you are building platforms, where you can spin up databases and backends with 0 additional compute
2. An MCP server, which lets you and your agents talk to Instant and create apps
3. Agent rules, which tell agents how to use Instant
If you want to try this yourself, we have a tutorial that lets you run Instant in your own workflow: https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial. Let us know what you think!
Hand: open-source Robot Hand (🔥 Score: 157+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xVx7
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xVx7
Retro gaming YouTuber Once Were Nerd sued and raided by the Italian government (🔥 Score: 151+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xVpw
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xVpw
Wttr: Console-oriented weather forecast service (Score: 150+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xUPp
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xUPp
Show HN: Improving search ranking with chess Elo scores (Score: 150+ in 17 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xSqY
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xSqY
Hello HN,
I'm Ghita, co-founder of ZeroEntropy (YC W25). We build high accuracy search infrastructure for RAG and AI Agents.
We just released two new state-of-the-art rerankers zerank-1, and zerank-1-small. One of them is fully open-source under Apache 2.0.
We trained those models using a novel Elo score inspired pipeline which we describe in detail in the blog attached. In a nutshell, here is an outline of the training steps:
* Collect soft preferences between pairs of documents using an ensemble of LLMs.
* Fit an ELO-style rating system (Bradley-Terry) to turn pairwise comparisons into absolute per-document scores.
* Normalize relevance scores across queries using a bias correction step, modeled using cross-query comparisons and solved with MLE.
You can try the models either through our API (https://docs.zeroentropy.dev/models), or via HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/zeroentropy/zerank-1-small).
We would love this community's feedback on the models, and the training approach. A full technical report is also going to be released soon.
Thank you!
Artisanal handcrafted Git repositories (Score: 151+ in 11 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xTvJ
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xTvJ
MARS.EXE → COM (2021) (❄️ Score: 150+ in 4 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xDkQ
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xDkQ
AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds (❄️ Score: 154+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xFJx
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xFJx
Tin Can – The landline, reinvented for kids (Score: 152+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xTNL
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xTNL
Altermagnets: The first new type of magnet in nearly a century (Score: 154+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xSA5
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xSA5
Related: https://phys.org/news/2024-02-altermagnetism-magnetism-broad..., https://www.ictp.it/news/2025/1/altermagnets-new-magnetic-ph...
I'm Switching to Python and Actually Liking It (Score: 152+ in 9 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xRup
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xRup
Thunderbird: Fluent Windows 11 Design (❄️ Score: 155+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6xFPf
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6xFPf