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“Reading Rainbow” was created to combat summer reading slumps

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/to-combat-summer-reading-slumps-this-timeless-childrens-television-show-tried-to-bridge-the-literacy-gap-with-the-magic-of-stories-180986984/
126•arbesman•5h ago•33 comments

Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/16/ex-waymo-engineers-launch-bedrock-robotics-with-80m-to-automate-construction/
274•boulos•13h ago•221 comments

Original Xbox Hacks: The A20 CPU Gate

https://connortumbleson.com/2021/07/19/the-xbox-and-a20-line/
31•mattweinberg•2h ago•0 comments

I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)

https://smallandroidphone.com/
169•asimops•8h ago•232 comments

I was wrong about robots.txt

https://evgeniipendragon.com/posts/i-was-wrong-about-robots-txt/
55•EPendragon•5h ago•47 comments

Altermagnets: The first new type of magnet in nearly a century

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2487013-weve-discovered-a-new-kind-of-magnetism-what-can-we-do-with-it/
312•Brajeshwar•14h ago•76 comments

Show HN: A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' written in Emacs Org Mode

https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/
97•dskhatri•7h ago•9 comments

A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/06/1960s-schools-experiment-created-new-alphabet-thousands-children-unable-to-spell
33•Hooke•1d ago•26 comments

Inside the box: Everything I did with an Arduino starter kit

https://lopespm.com/hardware/2025/07/15/arduino.html
32•lopespm•1d ago•2 comments

Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon

https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2025/07/intels-retreat-is-unlike-anything-its-done-before-in-oregon.html
117•cbzbc•10h ago•177 comments

Mistakes Microsoft made in the Xbox security system (2005)

https://xboxdevwiki.net/17_Mistakes_Microsoft_Made_in_the_Xbox_Security_System
46•davikr•5h ago•13 comments

Pgactive: Postgres active-active replication extension

https://github.com/aws/pgactive
281•ForHackernews•20h ago•71 comments

Show HN: Improving search ranking with chess Elo scores

https://www.zeroentropy.dev/blog/improving-rag-with-elo-scores
145•ghita_•15h ago•48 comments

Artisanal handcrafted Git repositories

https://drew.silcock.dev/blog/artisanal-git/
137•drewsberry•10h ago•33 comments

How and where will agents ship software?

https://www.instantdb.com/essays/agents
117•stopachka•12h ago•56 comments

Blue Pencil no. 18–Some history about Arial

https://www.paulshawletterdesign.com/2011/09/blue-pencil-no-18%e2%80%94some-history-about-arial/
23•Bluestein•2d ago•4 comments

I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

https://www.cesarsotovalero.net/blog/i-am-switching-to-python-and-actually-liking-it.html
386•cesarsotovalero•22h ago•577 comments

Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141

https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2025/07/15/shipping-webgpu-on-windows-in-firefox-141/
359•Bogdanp•23h ago•145 comments

Metaflow: Build, Manage and Deploy AI/ML Systems

https://github.com/Netflix/metaflow
5•plokker•9h ago•0 comments

Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk

https://www.sciencealert.com/signs-of-autism-could-be-encoded-in-the-way-you-walk
115•amichail•11h ago•115 comments

A Rust shaped hole

https://mnvr.in/rust
70•vishnumohandas•1d ago•127 comments

Roman dodecahedron: 12-sided object has baffled archaeologists for centuries

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/romans/roman-dodecahedron-a-mysterious-12-sided-object-that-has-baffled-archaeologists-for-centuries
56•bookofjoe•2d ago•87 comments

Where the Horses Swim: On Barbados' Pebbles Beach, Racehorses Train in the Ocean

https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/issue-30/horse-racing-barbados
4•speckx•2d ago•0 comments

Chain of thought monitorability: A new and fragile opportunity for AI safety

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11473
111•mfiguiere•15h ago•50 comments

Scanned piano rolls database

http://www.pianorollmusic.org/rolldatabase.php
41•bookofjoe•4d ago•10 comments

Show HN: 0xDEAD//TYPE – A fast-paced typing shooter with retro vibes

https://0xdeadtype.theden.sh/
71•theden•4d ago•19 comments

Remembrance of Scents Past

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/onward-and-upward-with-the-arts/remembrance-of-scents-past
10•prismatic•2d ago•1 comments

Show HN: Cobble – A hard daily word game

https://wilf.live/cobble/
15•wolfred•4h ago•7 comments

Gaslight-driven development

https://tonsky.me/blog/gaslight-driven-development/
110•theodorejb•5h ago•71 comments

Tilck: A tiny Linux-compatible kernel

https://github.com/vvaltchev/tilck
275•chubot•1d ago•53 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' written in Emacs Org Mode

https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/
97•dskhatri•7h ago
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

Comments

laurentlb•7h ago
Interesting project!

When I looked into CYOA, I opted for Ink. It's using a nice text-based language, a bit like markdown. It worked well for me, and I think it's a good option if you want to use a text editor.

I wrote about my experiments here: https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/my-adventures-with-narrative...

dskhatri•6h ago
Ink looks iteresting! Twinery provides a nice visual editor for the passages and branches which I found appealing. Ultimately, I used Mermaid to create visual snapshots of the story which were useful when editing the physical book.
chrisweekly•7h ago
This is awesome! Thank you for sharing the backstory, and open-sourcing the tools you built. THIS is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to HN more often than I should.
dskhatri•3h ago
Thank you! I have been an Emacs user/consumer for many years. This project finally got me into the proverbial weeds, a fun venture, learning elisp, exploring the Org code base especially around the export backends [1]. It was useful going through the one.el source code as well, and I now write my blog in Emacs, rendering it using this package [2].

[1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/org/o... [2] https://github.com/tonyaldon/one.el

everybodyknows•3h ago
Bug report for https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/

Daphne's eyes are brown, except in the supermarket scene, where they're grey.

How were the images produced?

dskhatri•1h ago
Thanks! The story images were made in Google Whisk. The tool allows you to generate a character and then apply the character to a scene separately defined. While more advanced than other image generation platforms, it isn't perfect and the images required lots of editing in GIMP. The vectors (achievement stickers, play cash) were made in Inkscape.
a_e_k•3h ago
Neat! IF-wise, there's also

M-x dunnet

which has shipped with GNU Emacs since 1994.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunnet_(video_game)

babuloseo•1h ago
Ai slop for art, people really need to stop buying these products. Atleast publicize or disclosed you used ai for the art.
Loic•9m ago
Sorry to hijack a bit the thread. I have been using Emacs for the past 20+ years. Before I could live in Emacs, now, I find it harder (software forced on me by external customers, AI tools, ...).

I try everywhere I can to install an Emacs mode for code/text navigation. But they tend to be inconsistent and for some software, it is simply not possible.

Do you have good resources to help there (running Linux/Gnome)? Do you keep the faith or switched "out"?