Hacker News

Show HN: SnipFast – Extract Highlighted Text from Physical Books

Hacker News - Fri, 04/25/2025 - 8:22am

Hi HN,

I built SnipFast - a tool that helps you extract important text from an image of a page. If you’ve ever highlighted sections in a physical book and wanted to save or organize them digitally, SnipFast can help.

This came from my own frustration. I like to note down ideas when reading, but doing that from physical books was time-consuming. I looked for a tool to solve this, didn’t find one, so I built it.

SnipFast lets you:

- Automatically detect and extract highlighted text from a page photo (works with most highlighter pens and languages)

- Click on sentences in the image to manually pick exactly what you want to copy

It’s aimed at readers, students, researchers - basically anyone who annotates physical books and wants to keep those notes digitally.

Under the hood, it uses a custom ML model trained on highlight detection. The app runs on a Kotlin backend with a Postgres database. You can try it for free. Signup is required, but it’s minimal. I offer some credits upfront so people can test it out. After that, there’s a small payment required. The goal is mainly to prevent abuse and to validate whether this is a tool people find valuable enough to pay for.

The UI still needs work, and I’m mainly looking for feedback at this stage. I’d love to hear: does this solve a real problem for you? Was anything confusing? What would make it more useful?

link: https://snipfa.st

Thanks, Tom

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43792829

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: Aigr.id – Decentralized Internet of Intelligence

Hacker News - Fri, 04/25/2025 - 8:17am

Hey HN,

I'm Narasimha Prasanna, co-founder of AIGr.id. We're excited to introduce AIGr.id, a decentralized, community-driven global AI network designed as public infrastructure—think of it as the Internet of Intelligence.

Instead of large, closed, monolithic AI systems, AIGr.id interconnects smaller, independent AI clusters through AIOS, a decentralized AI operating system that's 100% open-source.

Today’s AI landscape is:

- Centralized: Resource-heavy systems demand vast funding, compute, and talent—excluding much of the world.

- Controlled: Dominated by a few powerful actors incentivized to prioritize profit over public good.

- Limited Participation: Production and distribution of AI is limited to a small group of people or organizations, which leads to unequal benefits.

- Fragmented: Siloed AI systems with no open protocols for AI coordination.

We believe it's time to re-imagine AI as collective intelligence—as a shared commons that is decentralized, collaborative, composable, inclusive, and guided by values beyond profit. We’re not trying to build “the one true model”—we’re trying to make it easier for people to build, remix, run, and govern their own AI systems, together. We want a world where AGI doesn’t have to be monolithic—where different models, agents, and collectives can evolve side by side, coordinate, and even argue if they need to. Plural, by design.

We believe the future of AI is along the lines of: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Artificial-intel... .

AIGrid enables use cases like these.

Why AIGr.id?

- Global Commons: Built and governed collectively by communities, not corporations.

- Composable AI Blocks: Deploy shared and reusable AI modules like LLMs or vision models.

- Decentralized Control: Supports both controller and coordinator mechanism for resource allocation and task execution - without central control.

- Resource Efficiency: Smart scheduling and GPU sharing to maximize resources.

- Policy-Driven: Governed transparently through Python-based policies.

- Distributed Workflow: Utilize Directed Acyclic Graphs (vDAGs) to manage complex distributed AI workflows.

- Extensible: Easily integrates external tools, frameworks, and models.

Current Status:

Beta phase—Testnet launching first week of May 2025. Actively seeking feedback and contributions from developers, engineers, designers, and governance researchers.

Explore more:

- Source code: https://github.com/OpenCyberspace/AIGr.id/tree/main

- Website: https://aigr.id

- Documentation: https://docs.aigr.id

- Vision Paper: https://resources.aigr.id

We'd love your feedback and ideas - let's build a Sovereign and Networked AI future together!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43792789

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: An interactive demo of QR codes' error correction

Hacker News - Fri, 04/25/2025 - 8:15am

Hi HN! This is a hobby project of mine that recently landed me my first interview and helped me get my first internship offers.

Draw on a QR code, and the health bars will accurately display how close the QR code is to being unscannable. How few errors does it take to break a QR code? How many errors can a QR code handle? Counters at the bottom track your record minimum and maximum damage. (Can you figure out how to break a QR code with 0.0% damage to the actual data region?)

Also, click on the magnifying glass button to toggle between "draw mode" and "inspect mode". I encourage you to use your phone's camera to scan the code as you draw and undo/redo to verify that the code really does break when the app says it does.

I wrote the underlying decoder in C++, and it's compiled to WebAssembly for the website.

I hope you find it interesting.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43792774

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

The Quickchat AI MCP Server

Hacker News - Fri, 04/25/2025 - 8:05am
Categories: Hacker News

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