Hacker News: floathub

Private AI Document Analysis (even in the browser)

floathub — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:26:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.pdflayout.ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690712

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by floathub in "Emacs-libgterm: Terminal emulator for Emacs using libghostty-vt"

floathub — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:07:25 +0000

And then in vim you can spawn a shell to run ... oh, never mind.

New comment by floathub in "Coding agents could make free software matter again"

floathub — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:30:49 +0000

Free software has never mattered more.

All the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is essentially all open source.

Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc., etc., etc. And one can easily see a day where something like a local sort Claude Code talking to Open Weight and Open Source models is the core dev tool.

New comment by floathub in "How the world’s first electric grid was built"

floathub — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:45:22 +0000

The power generated from Niagara river stations was traveling on an international "grid" between Canada and the US in the late 1890s.

New comment by floathub in "Malus – Clean Room as a Service"

floathub — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:48:33 +0000

Man, how could they not wait 2.5 weeks until April 1 !!!

New comment by floathub in "The dead Internet is not a theory anymore"

floathub — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:42:27 +0000

Emacs will solve this too:

https://github.com/tanrax/org-social

:-)

Olympics Champ Norway prohibits competitive sports < 12

floathub — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:08:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/feb/26/norway-winter-olympics-message-for-us-all

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47167115

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by floathub in "Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e"

floathub — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 22:11:45 +0000

This may help, it has an example pizauth config (scroll down to "Authenticating with pass and pizauth"):

https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html

New comment by floathub in "Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e"

floathub — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 13:50:06 +0000

This another similar resource with some additional stuff about using mu4e-org:

https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html

New comment by floathub in "EmacsConf 2025"

floathub — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 23:31:42 +0000

The "watch" method is so awesome:

    mpv https://live0.emacsconf.org/gen.webm

New comment by floathub in "Editing Code in Emacs"

floathub — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 23:36:11 +0000

I used Emacs for several years before I discovered "project" (it's built in). If you're navigating dired trees or similar to find files or grep for strings in groups of files, this is like magic:

C-x p f (find any file in the current "project", e.g. git repo)

C-x p v (grep the whole project super fast)

It's embarrassing how long it took me to realize it was there all along. :-)

New comment by floathub in "The Diary of Samuel Pepys"

floathub — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 22:15:09 +0000

Thank you, that is greatly appreciated.

New comment by floathub in "AI company files for bankruptcy after being exposed as 700 Indian engineers"

floathub — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 12:57:27 +0000

Apparently Microsoft put half a billion dollars into this.

New comment by floathub in "The Gmail app will now create AI summaries"

floathub — Fri, 30 May 2025 21:02:24 +0000

Keep going. Here's the next step after Thunderbird:

https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html

(Hint: Emacs)

:-)

New comment by floathub in "The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority"

floathub — Tue, 13 May 2025 22:45:12 +0000

  > npx create-expo-app@latest --template blank HelloWorldExpoReact

  > du -h HelloWorldExpoReact/

258M! A quarter of a gigabyte for a HelloWorld example. Sheesh.

New comment by floathub in "Starcloud"

floathub — Tue, 13 May 2025 22:35:45 +0000

Canadian north makes sense (very cheap electricity, ridiculously easy heat management).

Space? I really don't get it.

New comment by floathub in "Minimum Viable Blog"

floathub — Sat, 03 May 2025 12:44:06 +0000

If you're already using Emacs and/or org mode, then this is a useful guide to setting up a blog/site that is super easy to maintain/push/etc, including free hosting at github with a custom domain name:

https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/how.html

New comment by floathub in "Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup"

floathub — Thu, 01 May 2025 12:50:07 +0000

The answer, as always is Emacs :-)

With mu4e (an Emacs package), you can have lightning fast searching across multiple mail accounts. And with a bit of work (https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html) it will happily interoperate with Microsoft Exchange systems that require the OATH2 dance.

The New American Surveillance State

floathub — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 11:54:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/opinion/musk-doge-data-ai.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43843929

Points: 16

# Comments: 2

New comment by floathub in "Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model"

floathub — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 16:47:50 +0000

If you enter:

A farmer has a boat that can transfer up to 500 people or animals. He has a chicken, his dog, his wife, a small leprechaun, a large leprechaun, two ham sandwiches, and a copy of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance (the one with the tiled cover). How can he get them all across the river?

You will get a very detailed answer that goes on for several paragraphs that totally misses the point that there is no challenge here.