News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

loremm

Re:Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech says hello on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @12:25PM (#49818502)
It's cool technology and I read a lot of audiobooks, even hundreds of hours of TTS. I feel like my brain can fill in the character voices from the text - on the page it's not like they're different fonts.

I understand audiobook narrators often do it, and that's fun. But it's not so critical in my opinion

yeah I do the same, very helpful and easy
Re:Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30 on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @08:47PM (#49457980)
I truly have no idea what this website is saying https://generalresearch.com/
I find a telegram bot useful, it's just easy to start typing. Then can store right into a Google spreadsheet

For instance it can text and have me rate some symptom or can put structured text into a special part of the spreadsheet

Re:Ntfy – open-source Push to Mobile on Friday August 14, 2026 @09:26PM (#49306672)
Not nitpicking but I have curl send telegram, it's not bad but I agree pushover looks nice

I have it so it can send email, telegram, or twilio call depending on urgency

Anyone know of something like spacemacs which does the chording well? I've gotten used to it but it's starting to feel like it's not being updated, but I have all the muscle memory
Re:FreeInk: Open ecosystem for e-readers on Tuesday July 21, 2026 @04:04PM (#48997481)
it is pretty fun I was surprised. It's just nice it's so pocketable. I thought it'd be too small but I turn the font up so I am constantly flipping and I don't seem to notice. The page flips are fast

But also, I didn't understand how much the lightness is amazing. A kindle is light and one handable but it's noticable, this is so light I just can hold it up. I've heard in the ultralight mouse (for gaming), there's a point you just feel like you're moving your hand and don't notice the mouse. This is how I feel for this and it's worth something

I have found that the most reliable way I like is to just construct the command externally and then pass to gnu parallel (mostly for --eta and --tmuxpane). And the great thing is, as others say, xargs -I. I prefer for shortness (and few collisoins), '@'

seq 1 10|xargs -I@ echo 'bash run.py @'|parallel -j 10

I know the echo is a little silly but then I can remove the |parallel and see if it's right. And if I don't want parallelism, I just pass to bash

Re:Why I email complete strangers on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @10:02AM (#48555472)
Also authors. Not the mega superstars of the world but even very bestselling novels as long as you show that you thought about it or actually did read the book
I don't know if this is the case but trying to export RCS images is so difficult

It takes up space on android phones and I don't know how to backup completely and then remove

To be fair, same for iphones, when I help my family/relatives, I can use Google photos to export then delete photos but don't know what to do for imessage

Really nice and OET is great

For north america also look at this https://geovizzydesigns.myportfolio.com/electricity-grid-of-... , more complete only in the US since not rely on OSM

Not yet I'll post later, need to make sure I didn't hard code anything

I need to talk to claude and read the oauth docs, but when I kept it entirely client side, I had to reauth/re login with gmail every ~ hour. Did you run into that?

I feel like I ran into this in the past and need to have my server renew the token? Or use the service worker? I'll read your code to see how you did it

also the nice thing about making personal apps is I can make it entirely keyboard shortcut oriented and harcode the vimium like navigation (f, then modals pop up, then click to go to that email). I got the loading down time to feel instant
I made a version of this also bare gmail API -- not that I can't use imap but I often have emails related to tasks I want to keep open. But if I have many GMail tabs open, it kills my ram.

I also habitually want to open a new GMail tab to check for new email, but waiting for the heavy webapp to load takes forever. So a simple client-side only app which calls the gmail api for the top 20 emails and allows to search (so find the email and then leave that tab open) works great

Re:Why I love NixOS on Sunday March 22, 2026 @01:33PM (#47479942)
This is niche and HN is full of these back and forth comments. One thing which a particular type of crowd will appreciate is being able to apply simple patches to constantly-up-to-date packages.

For an example, I love atuin but it, by default, skips commands starting with space. Currently it's not configurable and while I wait for time to submit a PR or for the issue to be resolved, make a single line `patch` which just removes the part of the `if` statement which checks if it starts with space. So easy, took 5 minutes (also had to comment out 1 test).

And now on home-manager debian or nixos server, I get up to date atuin with that one patch. It downloads rust, etc, compiles, and then that's garbage collected away

ooh so nice
For intersect I also wonder if you add a filter that the books are within the top rated. Like if I give my favorite books and want to find someone who has my same taste, it doesn't help if they hated (all/most/some) of those books. Tricky in that not all users give star ratings
Re:Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years? on Friday September 19, 2025 @05:56PM (#45307180)
Oh no! What field? Are you going to more industrial jobs
Re:Show HN: AgentMail – Email infra for AI agents on Thursday July 31, 2025 @04:19PM (#44749692)
Keep in mind that default Gmail allows webhooks for any changes (email received but also changing labels, etc), for free using Gmail pubsub. I use it a lot because it's the only way of getting programmatic notifications from credit card purchases (turn on purchase alerts to all cards, send to Gmail, have a filter archive but capture the reception in webhooks. Parse with simple regex)

Super fast low latency very satisfying. Pubsub scales well and free :)

Re:Continuous Glucose Monitoring on Monday June 30, 2025 @12:40AM (#44419457)
Is that true? I have no perspective but it's relied on by diabetics and if since they can't regulate it themselves, if the readings are off and they gave themselves insulin, they would know it is wrong. Maybe the OTC ones is different than the diabetic one but I didn't think so
Re:Fun with uv and PEP 723 on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @03:19PM (#44380944)
This is a hack but I still found it helpful. If you do want to force a certain version, without worrying about flakes [1] this can be your bash shebang, with similar for nix configuration.nix or nix-shell interactive. It just tells nix to use a specific git hash for it's base instead of whatever your normal channel is.

For my use case, most things I don't mind tracking mainline, but some things I want to fix (chromium is very large, python changes a lot, or some version broke things)

``` #! nix-shell -i bash -p "cowsay" '(import (fetchTarball { url="https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/eb090f7b923b1226e8b... sha256 = "15iglsr7h3s435a04313xddah8vds815i9lajcc923s4yl54aj4j";}) {}).python3' ```

[1] flakes really aren't bad either, especially if you think about it as just doing above, but automatically

Re:Fun with uv and PEP 723 on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @03:16PM (#44380916)
and I've been using nixos on hetzner, nothing crazy but it's always worked great :-). A nice combination with terraform
would love support for linux, even if it required hacks or was not as seamless
I think there is a lot of hope because, in a purely research setting, this is extremely routine. The field of genomics is vast but the protocols are somewhat cheap and well understood. It's always hard to do a trial, and the tools are still often aimed at scientists (who are willing to spend months doing a single novel analysis), not point and click for a clinician. But even some relatively low hanging fruit will be extremely effective I think

Not viral/bacterial but human mutations but this is an inspiring study --- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31019026/ , https://radygenomics.org/2021/13-hours-rady-childrens-instit...

A child is born with potential rare genetic disease. They sequence their DNA within 13 hours and come back with a diagonsis in some proportion of cases (they give lots of stats, it's small sample size, maybe 1/4 improved outcomes, maybe 2/3 have immediate change to their care)

For gmail, there's also an amazing thing where you can hook it with pubsub. So now it's push not pull. Any server will get pubsub little webhooks for any change within milliseconds (you can filter server side or client side for specific filters)

This is amazing, you can do all sorts of automations. You can feed it to an llm and have it immediately tag it (or archive it). For important emails (I have a specific label I add, where if the person responds, it's very important and I want to know immediately) you can hook into twilio and it calls me. Costs like 20 cents a month

Not for speed (that was only allowed in past versions of macos) but even now, you can go Accessibilty -> Reduce motion blur and it at least won't do the horrible slide animation, just fade in and out. The other one made me nauseous if I was doing it so often
I agree, they are both good and expensive. Audiobooks are in general, which is unfortunate although makes sense considering you need, in this case, so many people producing 10-20 hours of content

Audiobooks.com can be much cheaper, click through from Google shopping

Re:℘ on Thursday November 14, 2024 @01:39PM (#42139564)
As a first foot-hold I recommend highly https://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

(I think I saw there was a newer one, but don't remember how)

You draw the symbol and get the TeX symbol name. I tried this one and it does give the right \wp (which in this case is confusing and you'd have to look up more about why it's named that)

But for classic ones, for instance the "upside down A" -> "forall" is very helpful and shakes newcomers to math syntax

Re:Show HN: A journaling service that runs over WhatsApp on Monday September 23, 2024 @11:49AM (#41627385)
And I think you can do more about E2E encrypting it. Or at least trying to. At some point, people don't want plaintext journals floating around stored permanently. Although I know it starts as cleartext on whatsapp's servers
Re:Show HN: A journaling service that runs over WhatsApp on Monday September 23, 2024 @11:48AM (#41627371)
Huh yeah that's good to hear. As a small note, on my personal bot I set up a simple journaling (and then just used google sheets as the backend!) includes a nominal 'rating' 1-10 so I can see how my mood fluctuates.

Especially if they do it every day/most days, having the option to see what you wrote "on this day" 2-3 years back is great. Especially when I try to include people's names who I was interacting with (but who are easy to forget 3 years later). It can be a nice reminder to text them and say you were "just randomly", unprompted, thinking about them -- 'How's it going?'

Older »