The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: Write SaaS apps where users control where their data is stored
Hello HN,<p>I would like to share with you linkedrecords.com - an open source backend as a service I'm working on since some time now. You can think of it as an firebase/convex alternative with an interesting twist.<p>In 2018 I needed to write large software requirements/architecture documents in Google Docs. While I was annoyed by the limitations of Google Docs back then (no captions on figures, no automatic heading numbering, slow when docs are bigger,...) I was still fascinated by the real time collaboration features of it. So I've started a quest to understand how it works and I begun to implement an alternative to Google Docs.<p>I was convinced that this kind of real time collaboration is the future so I've given it much thought how I could make this as generic as possible so I could use it in all future tools I would build.<p>In the same time I was playing around with firebase (surprisingly you can not build a google docs alternative with firebase that easy as their real time collaboration does not provide merging text but rather just JSON). And back then I was also convinced that backend as a service is the right way to go. I was thinking that one of the most important reason we were still writing custom backend code is because of authorization.<p>I also was faced with another problem when trying to make the backend as generic as possible: relations between entities are also domain specific. E.g. A Documents can have many comments.<p>Luckily I was intrigued by another concept back in 2018 it was called web 3.0. Back in 2018 this had nothing to do with crypto. It was used as a term to refer to the semantic web and the resource description framework as one of its standards. There are also some RDF implementations which I could have reused but they are all XML and mostly Java based. I needed something light. Instead of implementing my own RDF product I took the idea of the RDF triplestore and came up with my own interpretation of it.<p>Using concepts like: triplestores and schema-on-read, I came up with a system that does not has any business logic in its backend and while working on my Google Docs alternative I felt in love with it as I've discovered some properties I did not anticipated from the get go:<p>- Dealing with global state in react is very easy. It feels like you use an SQL client in your browser and all queries are reactive and always up to date. When writing a query you do not have to think about authorization it's all backed in.
- Because the backend is 100% free of domain specific code you can point your single page app to any linkedrecords deployment.
- You never have to write backend code
- Its quite efficient when using AI agents<p>The best way to experience it, is to follow this little tutorial: <a href="https://linkedrecords.com/getting-started/" rel="nofollow">https://linkedrecords.com/getting-started/</a><p>It takes a while to get a hang of it so you have to have an open mind.<p>I would love to read your feedback on this.
Show HN: Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice
Here is a tool I built initially for myself to help with my German and Greek language studies. It started as a hack for creating Anki cards from native language audio. It extracts the words, finds their base forms (lemmas) and groups the examples by the lemma. At some point I realised that I have a transcription with word level timestamps that opens a lot of other opportunities. So I added a mode to click the first and last word in the transcript and it starts looping with the right gap and repeat count.<p>Another feature I use a lot is selecting an audio fragment, sending a predefined prompt to an AI to "explain grammar" or "explain nuances of meaning" and I still experimenting with prompts.<p>And because shadowing is so easy I also use it as a player to improve my English pronunciation. (I am not a native English speaker.)<p>I made a quick video showing the workflow for creating Anki cards and shadowing: <a href="https://youtu.be/TaR58uuDBvU?si=o5aGLAi2S-BZ7Zy9" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/TaR58uuDBvU?si=o5aGLAi2S-BZ7Zy9</a><p>The app supports 15 input languages (Japanese and Chinese are the latest experimental additions), and more than 30 output languages.<p>I would really appreciate it if you could try it <a href="https://lingochunk.com/try" rel="nofollow">https://lingochunk.com/try</a>. I know there are other tools with similar functionality but I created something that fits my workflow and it is fun to build.<p>Also I struggled to find public domain audio for the try page. I'd be grateful if anyone could point me to public domain sources (I used LibriVox, Wikimedia and FSI courses), or if you're a creator, let me feature some of your own recordings with credits and links.
Show HN: MiniPCs.zip – Charting the Pareto frontier of Mini PCs
The overall idea is to chart out the thousands of Mini PCs by benchmark and reveal the Pareto Front so you can get the most Compute per Dollar. Definitely a labor of love as I have a number of Mini PCs for my "homelab" (TrueNAS, piHole, Plex, basic stuff). It uses Gemini to extract specs from listings (since they're not often strongly categorized).<p>Quick blog post here: <a href="https://luke.zip/posts/pareto-pcs/" rel="nofollow">https://luke.zip/posts/pareto-pcs/</a>
Show HN: Bible as RAG Database
Made this in a free evening. Index an permissive license translation of the Bible (WEB) into a RAG database to allow returning passages of similar semantic meaning. Lots of fun. For example, "more money more problems" returns Ecclesiastes 5:9-13 which, I'll just say, is spot on..<p>"Moreover the profit of the earth is for all. The king profits from the field. He who loves silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he who loves abundance, with increase. This also is vanity. When goods increase, those who eat them are increased; and what advantage is there to its owner, except to feast on them with his eyes? The sleep of a laboring man is sweet, whether he eats little or much; but the abundance of the rich will not allow him to sleep. There is a grievous evil which I have seen under the sun: wealth kept by its owner to his harm."<p>Anyway - thought it was fun enough to share. It's slow and I vibe coded it so I haven't sorted out how to make it not take 15 seconds to vector search against the full 4GB index.
Show HN: Chess-Inspired Roguelike
Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion
Hi HN, Nick here. We’re launching OpenKnowledge (<a href="https://openknowledge.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://openknowledge.ai/</a>), a “what you see is what you get” markdown editor that has direct integrations with Claude, Codex, and other agents. Available as MacOS app or Web UI+CLI. Fully free/local and OSS.<p>We built this because we wanted a Notion-like experience for writing and sharing markdown files across our team. Obsidian is the best alternative we tried, but found it doesn’t have a true WYSWIG UI and it didn’t integrate well with Claude/Codex outside of community plugins.<p>So we built OpenKnowledge. It takes shape as:<p>1. A MacOS app with a file navigator, the WYSIWYG editor, and link explorer.<p>2. Integrations with the Claude, Codex, and Cursor desktop apps. The agents can open an OpenKnowledge editor within their embedded web browsers for a side-by-side experience.<p>3. Built-in mcps, skills, and RAG for LLM-wiki and “AI Second Brain” scenarios + spec writing<p>4. An embedded terminal and CLI for TUI-first users<p>OSS stack includes: Tiptap/prosemirror, CodeMirror, yjs (CRDT), Electron (MacOS app), Orama, remark/rehype/micromark/mdast, @pierre/trees<p>On the architecture side, the interesting eng. challenges included:<p>1. A pipeline to convert ProseMirror to markdown in a bidirectional lossless way. ProseMirror uses ASTs, which are not designed to have byte-fidelity.<p>2. A dual-observer CRDT to keep the ProseMirror and markdown state in-sync.<p>The CRDT + git also power a collaborative experience that shows what Agents are doing in the markdown, have undo/redo, and version history. The “Share” and cloud-sync functionality are geared for team collaboration. They feel “no-code” but leverage git/GitHub under the hood, which also means data stays fully private.<p>In that spirit, we made OpenKnowledge open source for anybody who’s curious or who’d like to contribute.<p>We’re actively thinking about plugins/extensibility and what’s next. If you have suggestions or feedback, would love to hear it.
Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments
Show HN: Shumai – open-source Frame.io alternative for creative work
Shumai is an open source platform for uploading creative files, managing projects, collecting precise feedback, sharing work, and collaborating with AI agents, all in one simple creative-first workspace.<p>I’ve always liked the product design of Frame.io, and I wanted to build an alternative that feels just as polished, while being open source and easy to self host.<p>You can deploy Shumai with docker compose in just a few minutes. It can also be installed from npm, though you'll need to provide your own PostgreSQL instance with the pgvector extension installed.<p>For larger deployments, Shumai supports distributed processing via Temporal, allowing resource intensive tasks such as transcoding to be scaled independently.<p>It's still early in development, feel free to try and share any feedback.<p>Demo: <a href="https://staging.shumai.one" rel="nofollow">https://staging.shumai.one</a>
Show HN: Pure Effect – Reproduce production bugs on your laptop without a DB
Hi HN,<p>I think it's safe to say that the majority of developers don't give a second thought to writing code with I/O tangled in business logic. It's all too common to see code like: const user = findUser(email); if (!user) await saveUser(user);<p>Now, you may ask: what's the big deal? When we write code like this, two things happen:<p>1. It gets harder to debug production bugs. Unless you have the exact same database and remote API services to connect to, you may fail to reproduce the bug.<p>2. You have to use mocks and fakes in your tests, or use test containers, which only help somewhat, and they are slow!<p>To solve these issues, I built Pure Effect, a tiny TypeScript/JavaScript effect library. The core idea is simple: if a function performs I/O, it isn't pure. But if it returns a description of the I/O it wants to perform, it is. So instead of await findUser(email), you return a Command object that says, "I would like to call this function, and when it finishes, here's what to do next." Your business logic becomes a pure function. Same input, same output, every time. The database never gets touched until the interpreter (runEffect) runs.<p>When I first started the library, I didn't expect just how far that one idea would stretch. Once your pipelines are just data, a lot of wonderful things become possible:<p>- No need for mocking libraries. You walk the tree in tests and assert on its structure: assert.equal(flow.cmd.name, 'cmdFindUser'). Nothing is executed.<p>- Wrap any effect with Retry(effect, { attempts: 3, delay: 200, backoff: 2 }). The configuration is plain data, so you can assert on it in tests.<p>- Every command's input and output flows through the interpreter, so you get a full execution trace for free. You can write a simple timeTravel() function that replays it locally without touching any I/O. Perfect for debugging complex production bugs.<p>- An onBeforeCommand hook sits between your business logic and the interpreter. Since it sees every intended side effect before it fires, it can be used to enforce runtime guardrails. You can quarantine destructive calls before they happen for example.<p>- You can review AI-generated code before it runs. Since Pure Effect pipelines are plain data, you can inspect what the generated code intends to do before it touches anything.<p>There are just six primitives: Success, Failure, Command, Ask, Retry, and Parallel, plus effectPipe and runEffect. Zero dependencies. Under 1 KB minified and gzipped.<p>How it compares to Effect-TS<p>Effect-TS is the full-featured option in this space and has a large ecosystem. Pure Effect offers a different tradeoff. It covers the 80% case: testable pipelines, dependency injection, retry, and OpenTelemetry hooks, all in under 1 KB with zero dependencies and no new vocabulary to learn. Effect-TS is a framework you build around. Pure Effect, on the other hand, is a pattern you drop into existing code.<p>I've been using Pure Effect in production since December. It's at v0.8.0, not 1.0 yet, but stable enough that I wanted to put it out there and hear what people think.<p>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/aycangulez/pure-effect" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/aycangulez/pure-effect</a><p>I wrote five posts that document how Pure Effect evolved. They are tagged at <a href="https://lackofimagination.org/tags/effect/" rel="nofollow">https://lackofimagination.org/tags/effect/</a> if you want the longer story.
Show HN: Treedocs: Documentation that automatically checks for staleness
Show HN: peerd – AI agent harness that runs entirely in your browser
Hey HN. <a href="http://peerd.ai" rel="nofollow">http://peerd.ai</a> is an AI agent harness that lives entirely in your browser as a web extension. You don’t have to install a separate “AI browser”. You don’t have to bolt on or run some external process or manage a clunky mcp integration. It’s just a fully contained web extension, written in no build vanilla JS with minimal non-browser dependencies, using your own provider keys, and Apache 2.<p>This isn’t just a fun hack. While it has largely been a solo side project, I genuinely believe the browser and the web could be the most natural platform for AI agents to operate safely, autonomously, and most importantly without A2A middlemen (more on that in a sec). To demonstrate that point peerd doesn’t just drive browser automation. It spins up isolated sandboxes using tabs and worker instances to support various real workload types. Those include headless JS computational work, visual JS notebooks, personal client side apps, and real Linux VMs on top of wasm with full http networking.<p>The industry discourse over the last several months has been dominated by “which substrate is the best for ai agent sandboxes” with many competing answers focused on different models and use cases. Cloudflare is one of the most prominent examples, positioning its v8 isolate based workers as the best in class solution thanks to faster than container startup times and strong isolation guarantees. The v8 isolate is of course the product of chromium, which runs on billions of browsers around the world for free. The browser as a whole is perhaps the most battle tested sandbox system in the entire software industry. It’s been built on 3 decades of learning from hostile content, hostile code, and hostile users. Native and cloud agents are necessarily rebuilding all or most of this posture from scratch. peerd doesn’t. It leverages everything the browser has to offer and pushes it to its functional limits, while inheriting its security baseline and isolation from the host system.<p>Robust sandboxing isn’t the only thing the browser offers and peerd uses. It comes with extremely powerful and underrated primitives, from webCrypto, webRTC, webAuthn, webGPU, and ~soon WebNN. Direct web access, with your real live sessions, and api calls with fetch present an alternative model to MCP integrations. The agent can write and spawn web apps right there in a tab, no hosted service necessary. Then there’s the A2A piece: peerd already has a rudimentary p2p (peerd-to-peerd?) network in place using webRTC. Today you can connect with peers on the network, add them as contacts, and share signed apps you’ve created. I’m working on extending these apps to be able to leverage the same p2p network to support decentralized web apps (dwapps), as well as facilitate true p2p A2A with no platform or middlemen.<p>Given this is an early part time project, this is an extremely experimental build and in a v0.x preview state. I’ve taken care to attempt to address the lethal trifecta: the main agent loops/sessions never ingest untrusted DOM code or possess low level navigation tools. It delegates those tasks to dedicated web runners with no wider tooling or secrets access that return summarized results. Both the DOM and the summarized results are bracketed as untrusted, meaning two stacked prompt injection escapes are needed. All egress goes through a central module that has a customizable deny list, and only models calls to designated allowed endpoints are possible. See more in the docs, site, and the code itself. Ultimately, use at your own risk.<p>Today anthropic, open router, local ollama, and even an experimental WebGPU instance of Gemma are supported.<p>Honest limitations: Chrome store and AMO are still pending until it can get more eyeballs and live usage. Just loading unpacked from GitHub is the easiest way to go, and as a bonus makes it easy to audit thanks to no build. Linux on wasm depends on the Cheerpx engine, which is not open source and has restrictions for commercial use. That may be a good reason to reassess it compared to alternatives, but it’s also the most performant and looks closest to implementing 64bit support.<p>Poke around, use it, critique it, and have fun.
Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives
Originally we (Andrey, Marcus, Juho) built MonoLisa in 2020 as we realised there's room for a better monospaced typeface for developers. The key insight was to make the glyphs slightly wider to make more room for design to make letters like m feel less cramped.<p>Since then we've released a variable v2 (2022) and now we're happy to expand the typeface with a new family called MonoLisa Text. The reasoning was to cover *other* use cases beyond coding with this proportional font.<p>We hope you give Monolisa a go as there's a free trial to try. We also welcome feedback!
Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives
Originally we (Andrey, Marcus, Juho) built MonoLisa in 2020 as we realised there's room for a better monospaced typeface for developers. The key insight was to make the glyphs slightly wider to make more room for design to make letters like m feel less cramped.<p>Since then we've released a variable v2 (2022) and now we're happy to expand the typeface with a new family called MonoLisa Text. The reasoning was to cover *other* use cases beyond coding with this proportional font.<p>We hope you give Monolisa a go as there's a free trial to try. We also welcome feedback!
Show HN: An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine
Show HN: An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine
Show HN: Nub – A Bun-like all-in-one toolkit for Node.js
Colin here, creator of Nub. I’ve had the general shape of this in mind for years. Nub runs your code with stock `node`, augmented with a `--require` preload hook[0] that adds a transpiler (oxc-powered, packaged as a Node-API add-on), registers a module resolution hook[1], and injects polyfills as needed for APIs like `Worker`, `Temporal`, etc. All purely additive, your code ultimately runs using Node’s actual engine & stdlib implementations.<p>[0] <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module</a><p>[1] <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoptions" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoption...</a>
Show HN: Nub – A Bun-like all-in-one toolkit for Node.js
Colin here, creator of Nub. I’ve had the general shape of this in mind for years. Nub runs your code with stock `node`, augmented with a `--require` preload hook[0] that adds a transpiler (oxc-powered, packaged as a Node-API add-on), registers a module resolution hook[1], and injects polyfills as needed for APIs like `Worker`, `Temporal`, etc. All purely additive, your code ultimately runs using Node’s actual engine & stdlib implementations.<p>[0] <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module</a><p>[1] <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoptions" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoption...</a>
Show HN: Bun-sqlgen – Type-safe raw SQL for Bun, no ORM
Show HN: Bun-sqlgen – Type-safe raw SQL for Bun, no ORM
Show HN: Neural Particle Automata
Neural CAs model self-organizing pattern formation on grids. Now the grid is gone. Each cell is an agentic particle that can move freely in space and change its state.<p>While each particle follows a simple shared rule, many together can grow complex morphologies or form intricate patterns. The resulting particle system as a whole can regenerate from damage and exhibits surprising emergent behavior.<p>Try cutting the lizard and watch it heal itself!