The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: A replayable A2A jury for tracing how agents influence decisions
Show HN: I made alchemical-cosmological PCB badges
Hey guys,<p>A couple weeks ago, I was in Shenzhen, China for a hackathon and on the first day, we all used the one-day PCB fabrication to make PCB badges to wear during the event. I decided to go a little crazy and make some cool 3D alchemical-cosmological badges.<p>It's 3 PCB's stacked on-top of each other that's connected using testpoints on each board. The innerboard has a 10 cent CH32V003 MCU that powers the WS2812B neopixels on the outer rings using the testpoints and shines through using exposed soldermask.<p>If you have any questions about how the design works, feel free to let me know!
Show HN: A tiny LLM running at 21,000 tok/s on a $250 FPGA (Live Demo)
Show HN: Ante, a coding agent in a single binary that runs offline
Show HN: Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots
Hey HN,<p>Henry from Cactus here!<p>We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2.<p>The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges 300-700 on sub-$200 phones such as the Samsung A-Series.<p>On the tool call and mobile device use benchmarks, Needle 2 trades wins with closest small models like LFM2.5 230M and Apple Foundation Model, at 5x to 70x smaller, both at f16 vs Needle 2 at 2bit. Needle is based on Simple Attention Networks from our paper (<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18363" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18363</a>).<p>Edge AI has lately meant Macs and PCs, but that is just 1.5 billion of over 21 billion connected IoT devices in the world today, and in emerging markets most phones ship under $200, no NPU, cheap GPUs. These include budget phones, Raspberry Pis, microcontrollers, wearables, small robots like Reachy Mini, and connected home devices.<p>A conventional transformer of Needle's width and depth spends 164 MFLOPs per token, and even one squeezed down to Needle's parameter count spends 87, Needle spends 70. Even on a high-end phone, an always-on assistant lives inside a power budget; every MFLOP is milliwatt-hours, and Needle spends 7x to 85x fewer of them per token than the smallest performant LLMs. More about the architecture in the link.<p>When we structure intelligence for consumer devices as functions with typed parameters, the only hard part is mapping a messy sentence onto them; which function, with which values. Our research found that when framed that way, the problem needs no world knowledge and no open-ended prose, which is why 45M parameters suffice.<p>Needle 2 expands to structured extraction where the schema can be passed in-place of tools and the model returns structured output. You can use Needle as a text-classification model with an enum field, as a summarization model by providing a schema that extracts key fields, everything but free-range decode.<p>Every product has its own tool vocabulary and fine-tuning needle helps it achieve frontier-level performance on custom tasks, so using the python package (<a href="https://github.com/cactus-compute/needle" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cactus-compute/needle</a>), Needle can be fine-tuned Needle on a Mac/PC in minutes to a few hours, with automated data-generation pipeline, just pass a couple samples.<p>Nonetheless, every response carries a learned confidence score based our Cactus Hybrid technique. If above your threshold, act, below it, escalate to the cloud or bigger model. Combining Needle 2 with a private DeepSeek-v4-Flash deployment works particularly well for enterprise-level tasks at barely any cost, we can help with this setup.<p>We have put a lot of thoughts into Needle 2 but might still be missing quite a lot, please use the playground in the provided link to test Needle and share your thoughts, always appreciated!
Show HN: Voice driven murder mystery, Interview AI suspects with your voice
Hey HN!<p>I'm excited to show off this really fun project I put together. I originally built this project 2-3 years ago, AI was already booming at the time, however voice AI agents were still very early. I loved my proof of concept at the time, but wasn't quite happy with it.<p>I recently had the desire to check out the tech again, and know many of you will be interested.<p>Interviews are speech to speech with OpenAI's gpt-realtime-2.1 over WebRTC. This model is... expensive, and because of that, I have to add some amount of restrictions, conversations are tied to a authenticated Clerk user id. I have also added a 30 minute timer because well, I really don't want to go broke while I sleep tonight.<p>Each suspect has a tool they call when you make a direct accusation. It captures who you accused and a faithful list of the evidence you actually stated.<p>A separate gpt-5-mini judge then decides which of the case's required evidence facts you genuinely presented. Paraphrasing counts, vague suspicion and fishing don't.<p>The rest is Next.js, MongoDB, and Clerk.<p>Let me know whether the suspects hold up under a real interrogation.
Show HN: 35k+ paper psychedelic library that knows LSD from Lumpy Skin Disease
Show HN: Vibez – Open-Source Rust Based Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)
Show HN: Today's cities on a globe of Earth's tectonic past and future
Show HN: Today's cities on a globe of Earth's tectonic past and future
Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
I've been working on a simple multiplayer word game called Alphabet Soup.<p>It's a bit like NYT Spelling Bee, except it's multiplayer and only your best (longest) word counts toward your score. So, instead of trying to find as many words as possible, the game is more about finding one unusually good word.<p>You can play with friends in a private match, or, you can join a public Arena match to play against other players who are online. If no one else is around, you'll be matched with a bot.<p>The game works well with just 2 players, but, also works with bigger groups since the game isn't turn-based.<p>Would love to hear any thoughts or questions :)
Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
I've been working on a simple multiplayer word game called Alphabet Soup.<p>It's a bit like NYT Spelling Bee, except it's multiplayer and only your best (longest) word counts toward your score. So, instead of trying to find as many words as possible, the game is more about finding one unusually good word.<p>You can play with friends in a private match, or, you can join a public Arena match to play against other players who are online. If no one else is around, you'll be matched with a bot.<p>The game works well with just 2 players, but, also works with bigger groups since the game isn't turn-based.<p>Would love to hear any thoughts or questions :)
Show HN: Airy – Free, fast, and simple voice content creation
Show HN: Airy – Free, fast, and simple voice content creation
Show HN: DeepSeek-V4 Latent Reasoning – moving "thinking" into latent space
Show HN: A Project Oberon System version running on RISC-V instead of RISC-5
Show HN: A Project Oberon System version running on RISC-V instead of RISC-5
Show HN: Certo – An open source platform to deliver Open Badges
Certo is open-source infrastructure for issuing, managing, verifying, and exchanging digital credentials.<p>It implements Open Badges 3.0[1] and W3C Verifiable Credentials[2] which are the open standards that make credentials portable, machine-verifiable, and vendor-independent.<p>It is designed to be:<p>- Self-hosted: run it inside your own infrastructure, air-gapped network, or sovereign cloud
- Standards-compliant: credentials it issues work with any OB3/VC-compatible system
- API-first: everything the UI can do, the API can do
- Exportable: your data is always yours, in open formats
- Extensible: a small, stable core with a plugin interface for everything else<p>A demo is available at <a href="https://certo.schroedinger-hat.org/" rel="nofollow">https://certo.schroedinger-hat.org/</a> which we're using for Schrödinger Hat[3] conferences, workshops, partner communities.<p>I'll be around if you have any questions. Feel free to give a feedback on the project.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.imsglobal.org/spec/ob/v3p0" rel="nofollow">https://www.imsglobal.org/spec/ob/v3p0</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/" rel="nofollow">https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/</a>
[3] <a href="https://schroedinger-hat.org/" rel="nofollow">https://schroedinger-hat.org/</a>
Show HN: A free DOCX editor with MCP server for editing
Show HN: Rotating torus in terminal (but with kitty graphics protocol)
Hi HN,<p>I'm taking Computer Graphics @ Stanford this summer and wanted to express some very simple concepts I had in mind. That's why I wrote a rotating torus in C. Going from writing a ray-tracer that works in Blender to pure C with no dependencies feels relaxing. Wanted to try Kitty Graphics Protocol on the way, rendering images in terminal felt cool.<p>Open to comments and suggestions.