Hacker News: samuelzxu

Show HN: Knowable, the AI tutor that follows your work on paper

samuelzxu — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:15:43 +0000

I'm building the AI tutor that I wish I had when I was a kid. It's capable of following your thought process through the MacOS webcam as you do rough work and propose meaningful hints. You can download it on the Mac App Store for free, and use the free version without signing up for a free trial of a paid version.

Open sourced - note, readme's are out of date.

https://github.com/samuelzxu/Knowable https://github.com/samuelzxu/knowable-be

Ping me at `samuel at knowable dot ca` for suggestions and feedback!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405366

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by samuelzxu in "Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground"

samuelzxu — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:44:50 +0000

I think we just haven’t spent enough time creating the systems to help people learn faster - so far, only the systems that teach AI to know more and for people to rely on AI to retrieve information.

New comment by samuelzxu in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

samuelzxu — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:54:04 +0000

AI + Education is really interesting but also pretty tough to get right. Working on something that is hopefully going in the right direction: https://knowable.ca

New comment by samuelzxu in "Knowable – Open-Source Personal AI Tutor on macOS"

samuelzxu — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:07:27 +0000

I'm working full-time on a personal AI tutor that just requires a recent Macbook, available for free on the Mac App Store! You'll get a full ~60 minutes. Vision LLMs are awesome.

Happy to hear some feedback!

Supported so far:

Macbook Pro 2024+, Macbook Air 2025+, or (a recent MacOS + iPhone continuity camera)

Code:

https://github.com/samuelzxu/Knowable https://github.com/samuelzxu/knowable-be

For feedback please email me at: samuel at knowable dot ca

Knowable – Open-Source Personal AI Tutor on macOS

samuelzxu — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:07:27 +0000

Article URL: https://knowable.ca/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48386652

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by samuelzxu in "Claude Evolve: ShinkaEvolve code evolution on only Claude Code"

samuelzxu — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:42:53 +0000

Been using Shinka Evolve for a while now, but sometimes I just want it to use claude code only (they require lots of API keys for a model ensemble). So, I made claude-evolve, a claude code plugin for doing the same thing. The model ensemble is less powerful (thinking effort x [opus, sonnet, haiku]) but I've been using it and it's been useful enough to share it with some folks!

Claude Evolve: ShinkaEvolve code evolution on only Claude Code

samuelzxu — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:42:53 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/samuelzxu/claude-evolve

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47847015

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by samuelzxu in "Space Elevator"

samuelzxu — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 19:45:32 +0000

Sprites are AWESOME! They look so cool, does anyone know a good place apart from wikipedia to read about them?

New comment by samuelzxu in "NaturalSpeech 2: Zero-shot speech and singing synthesizers"

samuelzxu — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 17:22:43 +0000

Woah! How is this not more popular? I don't see it referenced in the naturalspeech2 paper anywhere.

New comment by samuelzxu in "NaturalSpeech 2: Zero-shot speech and singing synthesizers"

samuelzxu — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 17:19:16 +0000

Does anyone know how many words would correspond to the diffusion model's batch size of 6000 frames?

NaturalSpeech2: LDMs are Natural and Zero-Shot Speech and Singing Synthesizers

samuelzxu — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 20:20:54 +0000

Article URL: https://speechresearch.github.io/naturalspeech2/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35619474

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by samuelzxu in "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman"

samuelzxu — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 01:12:06 +0000

Curious to know whether anyone else here have read this, and their thoughts on it. I've just finished my first reading and found it entirely impossible to stop until I had read the whole thing. I've left a comment to kick off a discussion:

- There's an obvious symmetry with our own times, where stories and facts are smeared together. It's touching how clear it rings of "we see what we want to see" in the modern world of an infinitude of hot takes and narratives. Of course, even more recently, generative AI puts an even more literal spin in this direction.

- Desire and Will. In this book these two are differentiated in that desire cannot be changed, whereas you can will a desire into existence. I'm not sure about the philosophical basis of this - I've not read The World As Will and Representation - but I have a feeling it might strike some similar notes.

- In the interest of not spoiling the book, I'll say the carnal stuff is very in-your-face and deliberately so. The author was definitely shocking when she tried to be.

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

samuelzxu — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 01:12:06 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infernal_Desire_Machines_of_Doctor_Hoffman

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35321696

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by samuelzxu in "Show HN: Unscribbler – Simple Handwriting Reader"

samuelzxu — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 14:27:59 +0000

Thanks for the feedback! I tested the app out on my android tablet, and my S pen worked fine on my tablet. I'm not sure about Windows though ...

New comment by samuelzxu in "Show HN: Unscribbler – Simple Handwriting Reader"

samuelzxu — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 14:26:24 +0000

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, it fails in some very simple cases, but does really well in others. I believe it does the best if your letters are tightly grouped, and can even recognize cursive pretty well, but space the letters out and it fails pretty easily ;)

New comment by samuelzxu in "Show HN: Unscribbler – Simple Handwriting Reader"

samuelzxu — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 21:45:32 +0000

This is a handwriting-to-text converter! Just follow the instructions on the page and you're good to go :)

Background: I've been tutoring on the side for a while and it's apparent that the whole process can be smoothed out, with the end goal being an AI tutor buddy with a stylus interface. This is a little step in that direction.

As for implementation details, I forked excalidraw (at https://github.com/excalidraw), got a gcp free tier instance running, and scraped together a Google K8s Engine cluster serving with torchserve. Luckily there's a great deal on the public preview of c3 cpus at the moment. For the model, I'm using trocr-base-handwritten ( https://huggingface.co/microsoft/trocr-base-handwritten ).

Let me know if anyone has any ideas, suggestions, and/or tips!

Show HN: Unscribbler – Simple Handwriting Reader

samuelzxu — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 17:21:14 +0000

This is a handwriting-to-text converter! Just follow the instructions on the page and you're good to go :)

Let me know if anyone has any ideas, suggestions, and/or tips!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35264204

Points: 17

# Comments: 7

New comment by samuelzxu in "High-res image reconstruction with latent diffusion models from human brain"

samuelzxu — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 22:53:14 +0000

There's also this paper with very similar methodology called Mind-Vis, and also accepted to CVPR 2023. https://mind-vis.github.io/