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Whatever became of holography? (2011)

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/whatever-became-of-holography
89•cainxinth•3h ago•38 comments

Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers

https://nanolathe.gg
405•jttnr•9h ago•172 comments

Fingerprints are the new cookies

https://royfish.dev/fingerprints-are-the-new-cookies
146•royfish•5h ago•59 comments

Cartographers of North Korea (2019)

https://cartographers-nk.wonyoung.so/
203•edent•7h ago•38 comments

Calculus with Julia

https://jverzani.github.io/CalculusWithJuliaNotes.jl/
16•subset•1d ago•1 comments

The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening

https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/2109361546505966046
296•albertzeyer•7h ago•472 comments

Illustration Beyond Proof

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/11/illustration-beyond-proof/
41•smilelamp•4h ago•0 comments

Tattoos you can turn on and off

https://www.livescience.com/technology/cool-chemistry-trick-allows-new-tattoos-to-turn-on-and-off
19•MortyDev•6h ago•6 comments

Vectorized CLZ and CTZ

https://purplesyringa.moe/blog/vectorized-clz-and-ctz/
21•zX41ZdbW•1d ago•2 comments

Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]

https://teorth.github.io/tao-web/slides/math-2-0-caltech-2026.pdf
342•Anon84•14h ago•388 comments

Google is illegaly cutting forest to build data centers

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/06/google-datacentres-finland-temporary-halt-envi...
222•heyimada•5h ago•48 comments

Passkeys are a trap

https://nonfunctional.substack.com/p/passkeys-are-a-trap-do-not-use-them
352•laurex•5h ago•202 comments

Recursive self-improvement through collective intelligence

https://pub.sakana.ai/mass/
78•hardmaru•5h ago•40 comments

Local Indexing to reduce tool calling and token usage

https://tedhaley.ca/pensieve/
37•TedHaley•3h ago•4 comments

Chapter 1 of "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger (1972)

https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/ch1
86•rafael859•9h ago•14 comments

Programmable pigments: Photochromic nanoparticle inks for rewritable tattoos

https://www.cell.com/matter-light/fulltext/S3117-5848(26)00119-5
32•Bluestein•18h ago•2 comments

So, You’d Like To Sell Your Print Issues Of The Onion?

https://theonion.com/archivehunt/
272•mooreds•7h ago•36 comments

Doory – Open-Source Canva

https://github.com/shaongitbd/doory
16•acley•2h ago•0 comments

NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect

https://www.nyc.gov/main/click-to-cancel
384•gregsadetsky•9h ago•191 comments

500B tokens later: Letting AI agents decompile a first-person shooter

https://momo5502.com/posts/2026-10-09-game-decompilation/
178•davikr•1d ago•127 comments

I guess I'm using WebP now?

https://anderegg.ca/2026/10/08/i-guess-im-using-webp-now
87•Brajeshwar•2d ago•90 comments

The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME

https://disconnect3d.pl//2026/10/02/dont-put-tilde-in-your-path/
226•arusekk•15h ago•144 comments

Safe SIMD in Rust, even on the inside

https://shnatsel.github.io/safe-simd-in-rust-even-on-the-inside/
48•ravenical•1d ago•2 comments

FlowCE: Calculus on your TI-84 Plus CE

https://tommyb3ll.github.io/FlowCE/
38•jgx0•1d ago•18 comments

HashiCorp archives the Boundary open source repo

https://github.com/hashicorp/boundary
52•vmatsiiako•3h ago•12 comments

apsw: Another Python SQLite Wrapper

https://github.com/rogerbinns/apsw
74•tosh•10h ago•15 comments

Show HN: BetterWispr – Free, open-source dictation for Mac

https://betterwispr.com/
168•kartik017•15h ago•95 comments

How I reverse engineered a commercial spatial audio effect

http://epestr.com/blog/reverse-engineering-a-commercial-spatial-audio-effect/
109•epestr•12h ago•34 comments

Shredding JSON columns gave Logfire up to 1000x faster queries

https://pydantic.dev/articles/dynamic-shredding-2026-01-26
11•acossta•5h ago•5 comments

ClickHouse C – Talk to ClickHouse using its native binary protocol

https://github.com/ClickHouse/clickhouse-c
11•saisrirampur•4h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust

https://github.com/storytold/wordcraft
84•espeed•1h ago

Comments

dataflow•52m ago
What is Word used for (or who uses it) nowadays? I don't remember the last time I typed anything on it.
ishtanbul•39m ago
lawyers at a bare minimum
anilgulecha•51m ago
Storytold apps are a gift, and are setting the precedent for AI apps. Everyone was wondering about the relevance of open source in post AI era, and here we have it: a magnitude more ambitious ecosystem.

While Bun proved at-scale rewrite, these are proving huge at-scale re-dos of the entire software ecosystem.

I suspect 24 months from now the landscape of daily software is going to be vastly changed.

hootz•48m ago
And they are already really useful, even in an extremely buggy alpha state. LightCraft is already working pretty well for a photography hobbyist like me. Can't wait to see the state of this software suite in 6 months.
chr15m•40m ago
> extremely buggy alpha state

I'm curious about this part. As a user you're finding them extremely buggy - what kind of bugs are you seeing?

It sounds like you're expecting the bugs to be ironed out in six months. I guess I'm wondering if the same process that led to buggy software in the first place can actually be used to get rid of the bugs without creating more.

aprilthird2021•39m ago
In the issues page of the repos you can see avg type of open source bugs. For the Word clone there is: spellcheck doesn't work, image embedding is broken, etc.
hootz•30m ago
Well, in the case of LightCraft, some basic things like processing raw photos. It seems to be struggling with processing them compared to older software, it's kinda slow and glitchy. But it's in a really early stage, support for the CR3 format (the one I need) was just added like 2 days ago.
antonvs•5m ago
I don’t think it’ll be “the same process”. Someone has to identify the bugs and instruct the LLM to fix them. I doubt that can be automated with GUI software as it stands today - there’ll be a lot of human involvement even if the LLM implements the fixes.

With a human in the loop, iterating on bugfixes can work. It’s just more human-labor-intensive than an initial implementation.

I suppose you could invite users to submit bug reports, give them some guidelines on how to write them, and then have an LLM monitor the bug reports and fix them. But then I think you’d be more likely to see the creation of more bugs, as you say.

hajile•
aprilthird2021•45m ago
Let's add it to the list of predictions then. Wonder what people were predicting 2 years ago
infamouscow•42m ago
Businesses that previously relied upon vendors are going to start hiring engineers to build their bespoke stack in-house.

This is software's radiology moment.

peri-cl•41m ago
What happened in radiology?
aprilthird2021•41m ago
No they won't
root_axis•26m ago
Why would they hire engineers for this?
usef-•39m ago
Note that they're currently a buggy mess in my experience. That's not unusual for an alpha, but I'll personally wait to call them a gift until I see if the team is capable of polish+reliability. I do think their marketing is ahead of their product at the moment.
tyromaniac•32m ago
> bun proved at-scale rewrite

Not so sure about that one

econgs321•48m ago
Very nice!
jubilee33•48m ago
This makes me so happy. Thank you!
lovich•48m ago
So were just done with the original definition of "clean-room implementation" right?

Cause you cant use AI that you cant guarantee wasnt trained on this implementation, and call it a clean-room implementation. At least not if you are going to be honest, but I guess that makes sense given how much these AI companies and their leaders lie.

vhantz•42m ago
Is Microsoft selling the code of its proprietary products for AI trainings? Definitely news to me
lovich•40m ago
Can you tell me what the definition of "clean-room implementation" is?

And after that, can you tell me if you can call something a "clean-room implantation" without disclosing 100% of the training data used for the AI model making this supposedly "clean-room implementation"?

tombert•35m ago
I don’t know about office, but there have been several major leaks of the Windows source code. It seems pretty reasonable to think that that leaked code has made it into Claude or Codex in some form.
jen20•41m ago
How would the source for Microsoft Word be in the training data for (for example) Claude?
hajile•27m ago
pmkary•45m ago
Wow. This is insane.
airstrike•43m ago
Rich text editing and egui. Interesting choice
tombert•43m ago
Damn! I was in the process of doing this after I heard about Artcraft. They beat me to it!
umvi•42m ago
These apps are awesome, but they make me a little nervous. I can just imagine when a "clean room Rust" Oracle DB (re)implementation hits GitHub that Oracle would not just sit there and take it but would instead rain lawyers down from the sky... Ditto for other companies that have hornet's nest legal departments.
phlakaton•35m ago
That doesn't make me nervous at all. I've been waiting for the legal challenges from deep pockets to roll in.

I'm not entirely sure they will, though.

aprilthird2021•42m ago
I don't get why this is so impressive? You have libreoffice as well, but this project, like that one, will find that maintenance and resolving user issues and providing cloud features are the hardest and most valuable parts of document editing software. Not just having something that works like other open source document editors that already exist.

Also look through the issues page and you see issues like spell check doesn't work and image embedding doesn't work.

sbarre•42m ago
Maybe I'm a cynical old man, but all these ArtCraft apps feel a bit too good to be true?

They come out of nowhere (sort of), and they're just a bit long-con trojan horse for some point in the future where the userbase will have to pay the piper.

I hope I'm wrong!

conception•40m ago
Fork and roll your own.
sbarre•36m ago
That's not my point at all.

If these apps eventually have millions of users, most of whom will just be downloading the binary releases and using auto-update to get the latest version through some opaque updater, what's to stop a future update from being nefarious?

ares623•31m ago
Adobe customers are asking that exact same question
_aavaa_•30m ago
This is how software outside gatekept marketplaces always worked.
tombert•11m ago
Isn't that the risk of literally any software?
Waterluvian•41m ago
How does one decide on the layer that each thing lives at architecture wise? Is it just that everything is one layer above whatever subsystems it depends on?
iamgopal•40m ago
AutoDesk is next ?
tombert•37m ago
They already have a CAD thing, so I think that’s a safe bet.
kyriakos•31m ago
https://github.com/storytold/cadcraft they already made one
Rover222•40m ago
You'd rewrite the Bible in Rust at this point
lr0•40m ago
Has anyone of the people spamming these apps by storytold on HN actually tried any of them? I know that any new software can have bugs, but the ones here are really not acceptable for a release, let alone labeling it a 'reimplementation'. The quality of the software is just very embarrassing to anyone who might have used any of the originals, or at least can assess basic software qualities. I have tried some of them and really everything is buggy, a lot of options and buttons make the whole thing crash, the UX is very poor compared to the originals. I tried some of the clones of Adobe's apps, and they just don't work. I tried wordcraft as of writing this, it does not work and it is even more buggy than my experience with photocraft, changing a text to a headline made it just crash on my M4 MacBook, after making it VERY slow and unresponsive for 3 minutes.

It is extremely far from a working solution for someone who uses these apps for just casual non-professional use. For professional use, I borrow Wolfgang Pauli's "not even wrong" to say it is not even something to think of. People who think this is a possible replacement just don't have a clue about how big a software like Photoshop and MS Word are, and how much they actually provide their users with.

I know that "Hey I open-source'd Adobe and Microsoft" can get people some hype on TikTok and Twitter, and maybe have some media reporting about them for fun, but I am really surprised that people here are passing on these like they are really what they claim to be. Genuinely, if anything can be used as a counterargument for the promised LLMs revolution, it would be software like this.

jrflo•34m ago
I see what you're saying, but we're just getting to the start of it being worthwhile to do something like this. Once these projects have people testing them and proposing changes/improvements (AI driven), I don't think it would be long until they are on par with, if not better than the originals.

The only catch will be if attention coalesces around an individual project instead of hundreds of people vibecoding their own versions.

emmo•32m ago
Like everything in this stupid, hype-driven AI industry, it's always the "easy" 80% that is done; the actually-difficult final 20% is always waved off with vague future promises.
espeed•39m ago
Has anyone compiled a list of best practices for using AI agents to develop large software projects in Rust?

Types help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49806799

Agent memory helps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49948328

Storytold's projects include some best practices: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/AGENTS.md

More?

tamimio•22m ago
Just create a blueprint with specs and architecture decisions, software cycle, with product and research docs, plus other needed docs like legal or such, and always use it to make the code. Don’t use memory because the way it gets called by the model isn’t good, and for any updates make the model update the specs too. That’s what I do and the output not just consistent but also future proof for updates or revisions or audits.
adeptima•17m ago
same. got hundreds of specs started from architecture decisions
adeptima•21m ago
most system design pattern for large projects applicable to rust 1:1

as for skills, did similar research 3 months ago, and couldn’t find anything comprehensive …

except this link https://github.com/leonardomso/rust-skills/tree/master/rules

ended up asking claude for code review 3 time and logging best practices in markdown gives compound effect

as a heavy temporal.io user i was never really bothered with async tokio rust gotchas

https://github.com/temporalio/sdk-rust

python libs written in rust under hood is a good source of rustish domain specific best practices too … if you are ok to see lot of “unsafe” code and clever tricks

wackget•38m ago
All the apps claim to run in the browser via WASM but no links are provided. Are there any live demos of these hosted somewhere?
titzer•38m ago
Why make a clone when you can redo the whole dang UI? Sure we'd like WYSIWYG, but I am absolutely convinced now in my 34th year of computer use that I don't want a GUI with a bunch of toolbars and dropdown menus that is laid out by decades of cruft accumulation.
WillAdams•34m ago
LyX or some sort of Markdown editor with robust templates/stylesheets strikes me as more interesting.

A Word clone would have to offer something which Google Docs doesn't which is also what users want.

titzer•33m ago
A distributed word processor that is not tied to the behemoth's cloud infrastructure and authentication walled garden would be very nice.
cobychapple•36m ago
I see that in addition to the Adobe suite apps last week, they've also now done implementations of excel/spreadsheet (https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft), powerpoint/presentation (https://github.com/storytold/deckcraft), and also AutoCAD/3D modeling (https://github.com/storytold/cadcraft) as well.

What a time to be alive.

maidaman•36m ago
Is it easier to make all these apps from scratch or use AI to supercharge an existing open source alternative?
jrflo•31m ago
While they may be a buggy mess, I think it's really interesting that we're starting to see this unfold in real time. People have been forecasting these kind of changes for the last few years, and it seems like it's actually happening now. Really curious to see where this goes, if everyone has their own custom fork of some common codebase for specific features/needs they have across these base applications.
quasarj•29m ago
The entire Excel implementation is under 50 MiB. The Word one is under 90MiB. Insane. I'm sure the features are incomplete, but both can open the normal Word and Excel files I have laying around. I'm extremely impressed.
ares623•28m ago
Why would people use this rather than existing alternatives with a more established community and maintainers?
pcstl•15m ago
Free.
tombert•12m ago
And they work on Linux. A genius got MS Office working with Wine on Linux in a Nix Flake [1], but that's via a ton of Wine-glue.

These Artcraft apps seem to work on Linux completely fine, at least with the bit I've played with.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401

ares623•8m ago
By alternatives, I mean stuff like LibreOffice and its counterparts.
tombert•5m ago
I can't speak for anyone else, but the reason I did the MS Office on Linux thing was because there is a subset of people who want the proper noun Microsoft Office and will use that as an excuse to not move to Linux. My parents, for example.

I don't really use MS Office for anything but Excel since I don't really do WYSIWYG document editing and even if I did I probably would use LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or something. LibreOffice Calc just kind of sucks as of right now.

jimmygrapes•19m ago
I have seen many claims about clean room implementations. I've seen the numerous refutations of reverse engineering binaries. I want to believe. But the pace is too coincidental imo. I know someone from Storycraft has been defending this in each thread and has acknowledged the lawsuit issue on other projects, but still, I'm hesitantly curious about patent violation considerations. Feel like I'm missing something here.
39m ago
Why not use Darktable?
_aavaa_•37m ago
Performance is bad and UI/UX is laughable.
d3Xt3r•29m ago
Why not use ART (RawTherapee fork)?
_aavaa_•19m ago
See my previous comment.
sbarre•35m ago
As a Lightroom user, I've tried _many_ times to use Darktable, and I've given up every time.

Like so many open source GUI projects, it's clear they have solid technical developers who are building good underlying tech, but they have no one on the project doing any kind of user research or spending time thinking about what good UI/UX looks like.

hootz•33m ago
I do use it sometimes! But I dislike the UX. RawTherapee feels better, but it still feels weird compared to Lightroom. LightCraft is basically a Lightroom clone, so everything feels familiar and standard. The problem is that a bunch of stuff is still missing and/or buggy.
How did those mathematician's data probably wind up in OpenAI's training data? They are willing to rip off Disney (one of the most litigious IP companies on the planet). There's no reason they wouldn't be willing to rip off the MS Word files uploaded by MS devs (and even less reason they won't steal your work too).

I really think the AI companies think there's no turning back on the infringement and they have to infringe in a "too big to fail" manner to the point where they can force an exception for AI not caring about the fallout for IP rights.

sbarre•39m ago
I think the idea here is that all these reverse-engineering projects are _saying_ they're doing clean room implementations for quasi-legal protection.

So they are claiming to follow the legally protected "decompile -> write spec -> new code from spec only" process but they're likely skipping the "write spec" step, and hoping/assuming that it's basically impossible to prove that they're doing so.

lovich•29m ago
So like I said, they are lying.
rosstex•39m ago
I do wonder if some company with money to burn and their backs against the wall will find a sympathetic judge in the argument that precedent be damned, clean-room implementations made with AI cannot be considered clean-room. It's too little too late to stop the rapid advancement of open tech, but that hasn't stopped courts from trying to send a message.
LatticeAnimal•34m ago
If these models will happily recite AGPL 3.0 code as “clean room implementations”, I’m glad that they will also help hobbyists experiment with software. Seems like a fair trade
quasarj•33m ago
Trained on the source code?
hootz•26m ago
It's neural piracy, and I am down for it.
moron4hire•24m ago
People who don't put in effort to build a thing also don't put in effort to test a thing. The effort creates investment.
strange_quark•17m ago
These apps have to be astroturfed, right? Like I get the desire to give Microsoft and Adobe the middle finger and I guess it's somewhat impressive these apps even do anything, but man are they such buggy pieces of trash. Like you said, I downloaded the Word clone and it's broken in so many ways that I can't even describe what the bugs are. In 5 minutes of messing around, I hit so many random and inconsistent failures of basic functionality like styles, image resizing, and table formatting. Plus the UI is atrocious. All the downsides of Windows apps mixed with all the downsides of a weird cross-platform UI framework.