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Top stories from https://news.ycombinator.com (with 100+ score) Contribute to the development here: https://github.com/phil-r/hackernewsbot Also check https://t.me/designer_news Contacts: @philr
Show HN: eInk optimized manga with Kindle Comic Converter (+Kobo/ReMarkable) (Score: 151+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u69n
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u69n
Kindle Comic Converter optimizes comics and manga for eink readers like Kindle, Kobo, ReMarkable, and more. Pages display in fullscreen without margins, with proper fixed layout support. Its main feature is various optional image processing steps to look good on eink screens, which have different requirements than normal LCD screens. It also does filesize optimization by downscaling to your specific device's screen resolution, which can improve performance on underpowered ereaders. Supported input formats include folders/CBZ/CBR/PDF of JPG/PNG files and more. Supported output formats include MOBI/AZW3, EPUB, KEPUB, and CBZ.
Hey everyone! I'm the current maintainer of KCC since 2023, thanks for using it! I’ve been reading manga on Kindle ever since I got the big 9.7” Kindle DX from 2010 using mangle, and upgraded to the even bigger 10.2” Kindle Scribe 2022 using KCC.
The biggest contributions I've made to KCC are:
- added modern macOS support and removed homebrew requirement
- ported code to run on native Apple silicon M1 chip and later for a 2x speed boost (qt5->qt6)
- free open source windows codesign with SignPath - fixed Kindle Scribe support
- and tons of other various features and bug fixes and developer friendly changes
- created a legacy Windows 7 build with 300+ downloads…
The biggest community PRs were:
- huge 2x speed boosts due to various CPU/IO optimizations
- Kobo/Remarkable support
Enjoy using KCC and let me know if you have any questions!
Brush (Bo(u)rn(e) RUsty SHell) a POSIX and Bash-Compatible Shell in Rust (Score: 150+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u3q2
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u3q2
Show HN: Bracket – selfhosted tournament system (❄️ Score: 150+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6tXhs
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6tXhs
Over the last two years, I developed a tournament system called Bracket.
Most (if not all) tournament systems available online are paid and ask tons of money (a typical minimum subscription costs 50 euros per month, and go up to 500 euros per month or so), which is not feasible for many small sport clubs/individuals. So I developed my own system and put it publicly on GitHub. AFAIK this is the only open source tournament system available that has a significant amount of features.
I made this tournament system for my badminton club and hosted six paid tournaments successfully.
It features flexible setups, where a tournament can have multiple stages and each stage can have multiple "items" (round robin, single elimination or swiss).
Backend is written in async Python with FastAPI and frontend in Next.js with the great Mantine library.
I would appreciate some feedback!
GitHub: https://github.com/evroon/bracket
Demo: https://www.bracketapp.nl/demo
Docs: https://docs.bracketapp.nl
Waiting for Postgres 18: Accelerating Disk Reads with Asynchronous I/O (🔥 Score: 154+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u62B
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u62B
Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor (Score: 158+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u4PW
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u4PW
CLion Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use (🔥 Score: 156+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u5rb
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u5rb
Unity’s Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC (🔥 Score: 158+ in 1 hour)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u5ts
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u5ts
Jury orders NSO to pay $167M for hacking WhatsApp users (Score: 154+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u4hZ
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u4hZ
EPA Plans to Shut Down the Energy Star Program (Score: 150+ in 6 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u4jw
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u4jw
Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools (Score: 153+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u3JB
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u3JB
Show HN: Sheet Music in Smart Glasses (Score: 152+ in 12 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/c/6u2MC
Hi everyone, my name is Kevin Lin, and this is a Show HN for my sheet music smart glasses project. My video was on the front page on Friday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43876243, but dang said we should do a Show HN as well, so here goes!
I’ve wanted to put sheet music into smart glasses for a long time, but the perfect opportunity to execute came in mid-February, when Mentra (YC W25) tweeted about a smart glasses hackathon they were hosting - winners would get to take home a pair. I went, had a blast making a bunch of music-related apps with my teammate, and we won, so I got to take them home, refine the project, and make a pretty cool video about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j36u2i7PKKE).
The glasses are Even Realities G1s. They look normal, but they have two microphones, a screen in each lens, and can be even made with a prescription. Every person I’ve met who tried them on was surprised at how good the display is, and the video recordings of them unfortunately don’t do them justice.
The software runs on AugmentOS, which is Mentra’s smart glasses operating system that works on various 3rd-party smart glasses, including the G1s. All I had to do to make an app was write and run a typescript file using the AugmentOS SDK. This gives you the voice transcription and raw audio as input, and text or bitmaps available as output to the screens, everything else is completely abstracted away. Your glasses communicate with an AugmentOS app, and then the app communicates with your typescript service.
The only hard part was creating a Python script to turn sheet music (MusicXML format) into small, optimized bitmaps to display on the screens. To start, the existing landscape of music-related Python libraries is pretty poorly documented and I ran into multiple never-before-seen error messages. Downscaling to the small size of the glasses screens also meant that stems and staff lines were disappearing, so I thought to use morphological dilation to emphasize those without making the notes unintelligible. The final pipeline was MusicXML -> music21 library to render chunks of bars to png -> dilate with opencv- > downscale -> convert to bitmap with Pillow -> optimize bitmaps with imagemagick. This is far from the best code I’ve ever written, but the LLMs attempt at this whole task was abysmal and my years of Python experience really got to shine here. The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinlinxc/AugmentedChords.
Putting it together, my typescript service serves these bitmaps locally when requested. I put together a UI where I can navigate menus and sheet music with voice commands (e.g. show catalog, next, select, start, exit, pause) and then I connected foot pedals to my laptop. Because of bitmap sending latency (~3s right now, but future glasses will do better), using foot pedals to turn the bars while playing wasn’t viable, so I instead had one of my pedals toggle autoscrolling, and the other two pedals sped up/temporarily paused the scrolling.
After lots of adjustments, I was able to play a full song using just the glasses! It took many takes and there was definitely lots of room for improvement. For example: - Bitmap sending is pretty slow, which is why using the foot pedals to turn bars wasn’t viable. - The resolution is pretty small, I would love to put more bars in at once so I can flip less frequently. - Since foot pedals aren’t portable, it would be cool to have a mode where the audio dictates when the sheet music changes. I tried implementing that with FFT but it was often wrong and more effort is needed. Head tilt controls would be cool too, because full manual control is a hard requirement for practicing.
All of these pain points are being targeted by Mentra and other companies competing in the space, and so I’m super excited to see the next generation! Also, feel free to ask me anything!
FTC bans hidden fees for live events and short-term rentals, effective May 12 (🔥 Score: 158+ in 1 hour)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u4bk
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u4bk
TeleMessage, used by Trump officials, can access plaintext chat logs (🔥 Score: 151+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u3Fe
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u3Fe
Pixels in Islamic Art: Square Kufic Calligraphy (2020) (Score: 150+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6tYvd
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6tYvd
Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database (🔥 Score: 153+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/c/6u2UK
Hey HN! We’re Will and Jeff from Exa (https://exa.ai). We recently launched Exa Websets, an embeddings-powered search engine designed to return exactly what you’re asking for. You can get precise results for complex queries like “all startups working on open-source developer tools based in SF, founded 2021-2025”.
Demo here - https://youtu.be/Unt8hJmCxd4
We started working on Exa because we were frustrated that while LLM state-of-the-art is advancing every week, Google has gotten worse over time. The Internet used to feel like a magical information portal, but it doesn’t feel that way anymore when you’re constantly being pushed towards SEO-optimized clickbait.
Websets is a step in the opposite direction. For every search, we perform dozens of embedding searches over Exa’s vector database of the web to find good search candidates, then we run agentic workflows on each result to verify they match exactly what you asked for.
Websets results are good for two reasons. First, we train custom embedding models for our main search algorithm, instead of typical keyword matching search algorithms. Our embeddings models are trained specifically to return exactly the type of entity you ask for. In practice, that means if you search “startups working in nanotech”, keyword-based search engines return listicles about nanotech startups, because these listicles match the keywords in the query. In contrast, our embedding models return actual startup homepages, because these startup homepages match the meaning of the query.
The second is that LLMs provide the last-mile intelligence needed to verify every result. Each result and piece of data is backed with supporting references that we used to validate that the result is actually a match for your search criteria. That’s why Websets can take minutes or even hours to run, depending on your query and how many results you ask for. For valuable search queries, we think this is worth it.
Also notably, Websets are tables, not lists. You can add “enrichment” columns to find more information about each result, like “# of employees” or “does author have blog?”, and the cells asynchronously load in. This table format hopefully makes the web feel more like a database.
A few examples of searches that work with Websets:
- “Math blogs created by teachers from outside the US”: https://websets.exa.ai/cma1oz9xf007sis0ipzxgbamn
- "research paper about ways to avoid the O(n^2) attention problem in transformers, where one of the first author's first name starts with "A","B", "S", or "T", and it was written between 2018 and 2022”: https://websets.exa.ai/cm7dpml8c001ylnymum4sp11h
- “US based healthcare companies, with over 100 employees and a technical founder": https://websets.exa.ai/cm6lc0dlk004ilecmzej76qx2
- “all software engineers in the Bay Area, with experience in startups, who know Rust and have published technical content before”: https://youtu.be/knjrlm1aibQ
You can try it at https://websets.exa.ai/ and API docs are at https://docs.exa.ai/websets. We’d love to hear your feedback!
Ty: A fast Python type checker and language server, written in Rust (🔥 Score: 157+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u6CE
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u6CE
My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer (Score: 152+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u5gM
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u5gM
The DEA is now abandoning body cameras (Score: 150+ in 19 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u4a2
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u4a2
So Much Blood (Score: 153+ in 6 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u589
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u589
DoorDash to acquire Deliveroo (Score: 151+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6tZtN
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6tZtN
Old Timey Code and Old Timey Mono Fonts (❄️ Score: 151+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6tTLk
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6tTLk
Bloat is still software's biggest vulnerability (2024) (Score: 150+ in 11 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u4at
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u4at
FTC rule on unfair or deceptive fees to take effect on May 12 (Score: 150+ in 22 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6tZPi
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6tZPi
FAQ: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/rule-unfair-...
VVVVVV Source Code (Score: 154+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u49j
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u49j
iOS Kindle app now has a ‘get book’ button after changes to App Store rules (Score: 151+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u3K2
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u3K2
India launches attack on 9 sites in Pakistan and Pakistani Jammu and Kashmir (Score: 150+ in 6 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u3JY
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u3JY
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/world/asia/india-pakistan-attacks.html (https://archive.ph/Bph7S)
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/06/asia/india-pakistan-kashmir-conflict-hnk-intl
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/live-blog/2025-05-06/india-strikes-pakistan-after-kashmir-attack (https://archive.ph/eypzA)
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cwyneele13qt
Why does Switzerland have so many bunkers? (❄️ Score: 150+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6tTwu
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6tTwu
New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms (Score: 150+ in 11 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6tZZh
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6tZZh
Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English (Score: 150+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u2rd
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u2rd
Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust (by showing me C++) (🔥 Score: 153+ in 1 hour)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6u3ee
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6u3ee