Hacker News Reader

boriskourton Penpot: The Open-Source Figma

Penpot has been invaluable! A very nice system and team. 'On prem' Figma has a lot of unique possibilities.

I like the idea of being more physical, I wonder how it will work in practice. But would love to visit and see.

  Great products don’t happen in isolation. They are shaped by the people who use them. That’s what this space is for: a place where Kagi users and our team members can share feedback, ideas, and a cup of coffee in person. Kagi Hub is an extension of our mission to humanize the web, creating an offline space where people who care about a better internet can meet.

boriskourton WorldGen – Text to Immersive 3D Worlds

The paper is quite good [0] there are some interesting details on tackling individual meshes.

(couldn't cleanup the link at all sorry)

[0]: https://scontent-lhr6-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.2365-6/586830145_...

boriskourton Arduino Terms of Service and Privacy Policy update: setting the record straight

  By the mid 2000s open-source hardware again became a hub of activity due to the emergence of several major open-source hardware projects and companies, such as OpenCores, RepRap (3D printing), Arduino, Adafruit, SparkFun, and Open Source Ecology. In 2007, Perens reactivated the openhardware.org website, but it is currently (February 2025) inactive. [0]

I think they should have worded this better, but what they are known for, more specifically, is pushing open source hardware forward and sticking with it on principle even though it caused many business challenges.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware

boriskourton Multimodal Diffusion Language Models for Thinking-Aware Editing and Generation

Interesting approach and a very readable paper.

> We provide two varients of MMaDA-Parallel with different tokenizers. MMaDA-Parallel-A is trained with tokenizer Amused-VQ, and MMaDA-Parallel-M is trained with tokenizer Magvitv2.

tyfeld/MMaDA-Parallel-A: https://huggingface.co/tyfeld/MMaDA-Parallel-A/tree/main

tyfeld/MMaDA-Parallel-M: https://huggingface.co/tyfeld/MMaDA-Parallel-M/tree/main

boriskourton Even Realities Smart Glasses: G2

These offer a wide-ish profile of prescription lens options within the three lens types they support. It is definitely not the full gamut though.

boriskourton Even Realities Smart Glasses: G2

I wonder how they handle the whole notification stack with iOS. Did anyone try the first one? A lot of non-apple wearables have issues with that.

boriskourton Blender 5.0

The SDF geometry nodes open up a wild amount of new options. That and node closures solve so many difficult problems, especially in complex scattering. If you haven't checked them out, here is a bit on them and volume grids: https://code.blender.org/2025/10/volume-grids-in-geometry-no...

boriskourton Mysterious drones have been spotted at airports across Europe

Not a bad overview of the situation! Worth it for some of the questions about what is actually efficient and not just technically effective. Especially at this scale.

> "The aggressor", he concludes, "will observe, adjust, repeat – until they get through".

Reminds me a lot of digital sec.

boriskourton Norway's Wealth Tax Unchains a Capital Exodus

As others have pointed out this is an advertisement for this service, with a lot of unsubstantiated claims.

boriskourton Steam Frame

And like the Steam Deck it will never be available in my region :) So much for globalization!

boriskourton You will own nothing and be (un)happy

This popular phrase may have even more impact as "You will own nothing and things will own you."

boriskourton Blender 5.1

They will release the public facing changelog very soon! It’s more visual and highlights all the big changes.

boriskourton Blender 5.1

https://developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/5.0/

5.0 is about to drop, maybe you wanted to share that?

boriskourton OpenMW 0.50.0 Released – open-source Morrowind reimplementation

The Lua integration has grown massively over the last couple of years. Can really get up to some very cool stuff now. Its been fun to see how it contributes to a lot of the dehardcoding in the C++ codebase too.

boriskourton RSF forces in Sudan's civil war are preparing for mass genocide

They do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Support_Forces

boriskourton RSF forces in Sudan's civil war are preparing for mass genocide

The UN has been in the region for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Mission_in_Suda...

And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Mission_in_Sout...

But the scale of the conflict is beyond all comprehension. And capacity to make a difference outside of proxy funding by state actors is minimal.

boriskourton RSF forces in Sudan's civil war are preparing for mass genocide

The Sudan conflict affects us all. It’s an unbelievable tragedy.

The flip flopping list of allies and opponents is a tangible primer on the last couple of years in geopolitics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Support_Forces

boriskourton The Hidden Engineering of Niagara Falls

Grady is also on Nebula, its a very nice place to watch these if you like the video format. There are a few engineering creators on there that make really high quality work.

boriskourton Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach

This is the essential point, and why it’s always a bit frustrating seeing ‘is anyone surprised’ take come up so often here. It lowers the quality of the possible discussion by trivialising it.

boriskourton David Lynch LA House

He was not a poor man, he was not a wealthy man. This project did take 40 years. Which is a great deal of his career and income, there is another nice comment from Jen about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/davidlynch/comments/1nhcgej/comment...

boriskourton David Lynch LA House

Jennifer Lynch is very active on Reddit and explained why it’s selling for anyone interested. [0]

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/davidlynch/comments/1nhb6q9/comment...

boriskourton Raspberry Pi Synthesizers – How the Pi is transforming synths

Max MSP has RNBO [0] which provides a Pi image, and a quick deploy path for patches. I've used it for a few art installations, and the versions from this year have been super nice. Basically, you can design and test audio on your regular dev machine and quickly deploy to the PI. You don't need to mess with any Linux audio nonsense.

People also use this to make unique pedals.

[0]: https://rnbo.cycling74.com/

boriskourton YouTube is a mysterious monopoly

Let me find some Blender and Unreal Engine tutorials on this Netflix site, thanks for directing me to this indieweb marvel! :)

(maybe a tear-down of my washer is there too!)

boriskourton Making Minecraft Spherical

I wonder if this is also how Eskil Steenberg's 'Love' worked. [0]

It had a spherical 'block' world as well.

[0]: https://www.quelsolaar.com/love/

boriskourton Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2025)

Me and another artist are having our fourth live performance of “We Wade Awake” [0] We’ve iterating on it each time, and the latest had a fully dynamic and procedural world generation using Unreal PCG. All input comes from two midi controllers, and we’ve built out a 25 minute experience of a fever dream trip through a surreal Bayou. Some videos and sound in the link.

Been fun to push Nanite and Lumen to the limit!

[0]: https://boris.kourtoukov.com/we-wade-awake-live-visual-perfo...

boriskourton Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

Have been building a design tool for Spatial Computing [0] Me and my co-founder struggled for over a decade working in XR and wanted to simplify the design process for us and everyone else. We've been focused on reducing steps between design iterations by as much as humanly possible. So the tool works live, multi-user, in real-time and immediately across all compatible devices.

Here's a recent example of whats possible from one of our users [1], and a recent project I made for fun that you can try on your iOS [2] or Meta Quest [3] device.

[0]: https://ordinary.space

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matt-rice-sennep_mixedreality...

[2]: https://app.ordinary.space/#/share/b2d3d7

[3]: https://app.ordinary.space/#/share/96b9cf

boriskourton Show HN: An homage to Tom Dowdy's 1991 screensaver, "Kaos"

It reminds me of a Cloud chamber used to study ionizing radiation. Here is a timestamped video of one I saw recently: https://youtu.be/PVpP9gcnIcE?t=325

boriskourton Show HN: Making AR experiences is still painful – had to make my own editor

Thanks! Love what you do! Excited to see all the cool stuff that people will make in AR over the next year :)

boriskourton Show HN: Making AR experiences is still painful – had to make my own editor

Yes we did! That team is doing some super cool stuff! Early on we laser focused on the more traditional UX / Interaction Design workflow by helping with state management and opening up more complex interactions. So it is not just about the content, but how the user experience flows across many different moments in a product.

We've also focused on a no code solution, to give designers the tools to prototype AR without having the overhead of learning programming.