The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: Voice Age Verification
I miss the old web. As a kid I could type in "a/s/l" in AOL messenger and chat with someone my own age, without worrying about the dangers that lurk on the web today.<p>After seeing what happened to Omegle, a question stuck: is there a simple way to do age verification that both keeps people safe and doesn't contribute to a surveillance state?<p>After a year of hard work, that question resulted in AGEWARDEN. Each part of the service puts people first. No tracking, nothing stored (it's more difficult these days to NOT collect data :smh:).<p>Please give it a try if you have a moment <a href="https://agewarden.ai/demo" rel="nofollow">https://agewarden.ai/demo</a>. Feedback is very much welcomed.<p>GG
Show HN: VoiceDraw – Talk system design out loud, the diagrams draw themselves
I was frustated by having to draw system design diagrams by hand when discussing it with my team mates or in an interview. So I thought "Wouldn't it be great if someone draws it for me, while I think out loud?".<p>That is when I came up with VoiceDraw. You can just think out loud or discuss your system architecture with a friend/interviewer, the diagrams are automatically drawn along with your reasoning, open questions and tradeoffs beautifully written on to the side.<p>Demo Video: <a href="https://youtu.be/36PgHKSuccE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/36PgHKSuccE</a>
Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis
I know, it's kind of weird. What is a veterinarian doing creating an analysis tool for lawn problems?<p>Frankly, the idea was born of my own lawn care struggles. Endless lawn care company fees without any actual improvement. Googling problems and finding generic solutions without regional considerations. One time I overseeded my grass not realizing I had to actually put soil down too.<p>One day, I decided to run lawn pictures through AI and found some pretty helpful information. So I decided with my clinical background (the idea of treating the cause, not just the symptoms), as well as tech savvy, I would create an AI tool where homeowners can upload pictures of their lawn, enter their ZIP code, and get a diagnosis tailored to their location with actionable next steps in just 15 seconds.<p>Completely free. The platform is monetized with affiliate sales (if a user elects to purchase through one of our Amazon or other links) and by selling exclusive rights to individual ZIP codes to lawn care companies seeking warm leads. Users can pursue their own DIY plan, purchase a lawn care subscription service, or contact a local lawn care system.<p>I'd love if you'd test it out, toy with it, try to break it, and give me your feedback. Any feature requests would be super helpful.<p>Thanks! Excited to hear your thoughts.<p>Andrew
Show HN: Garden of Flowers – an archive of pictorial typography before ASCII art
Hey all, I made this. The archive started with my 2015 BA thesis on Amiga ASCII art when I was curious about the history of ASCII art but found very little on text art that came before it. The historical precursors are often attributed to typewriter art and shaped/visual poetry, but I think letterpress is overlooked. So, I got slightly obsessed and started a personal database of pictures built entirely from metal type, ornaments, and rule, some going back to the 1600s. After eight years, I've managed to find ~2500 images. My friend Adel Faure built the website so it's now browseable by anyone!<p>I would like to note that most images are from public digital collections (Internet Archive, national libraries, etc.) and displayed without permission (for educational purposes). I've tried to source every image, but check the original source and its license before reusing anything. I'd be happy to take down or correct anything.<p>It's also incomplete and surely has errors and misattributions. Corrections to anything are very welcome.<p>If anyone has leads on works I haven't catalogued, I'd love to hear them! The practice and pictures are scattered across languages and keywords (type picture, typosignet, typotectur, Bildsatz, stigmatypie, stunt typography...), so things hide in odd corners of archives. If you've seen something like this, please point me at it.<p>There's also a longer essay on how it began:
<a href="https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?essay" rel="nofollow">https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?essay</a>
Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
Hi HN! Excited to launch machine0, a CLI that makes it easy to create, provision and snapshot persistent NixOS (& Ubuntu) VMs.<p>You can think of machine0 as a modern VPS provider. VMs stay on unless switched-off (with 99.99% uptime), they have static IPs and HTTPS endpoints, 1-60 vCPU, up to 240GB RAM and optionally GPUs. The CLI provides commands to manage lifecycle, snapshots and also provision the VMs using Nix flakes or Ansible playbooks. VMs are priced by the minute of usage.<p>What makes machine0 unique is that it has first class support for NixOS! In a nutshell, NixOS lets you define your entire OS as code (think Terraform but for your Linux). A flake declares your system state (packages, services, firewall rules, users...) and pins all dependencies via a lockfile. Given the same flake.nix and flake.lock, `nixos-rebuild switch` always produces the exact same system.<p>The NixOS ecosystem is mature, and flakes are expressive: at the system level you can define packages, what's in /etc, firewall rules, users & groups etc. At the user level, you can define your shell, aliases, tmux and vim config. Having your entire environment defined as code makes it easy to audit what's installed and how things are set up. You can rollback by reverting the last commit. And agents can write the code for you and test it against disposable machine0 VMs.<p>If you'd like to dive right in, these commands will get you started:<p><pre><code> npm install -g @machine0/cli
machine0 new my-vm --image nixos-25-11 # create a new nixos VM
machine0 provision my-vm ./flake#my-profile # provision it using a nix flake
machine0 ssh my-vm # ssh in
machine0 stop my-vm # stop the VM
machine0 images new my-vm my-snapshot # create a snapshot
machine0 new my-clone --image my-snapshot # create a new VM from the snapshot
</code></pre>
- Demo of installation + NixOS provisioning via Claude Code: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT8N0_e3Vfg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT8N0_e3Vfg</a><p>- Documentation: <a href="https://docs.machine0.io/introduction/overview">https://docs.machine0.io/introduction/overview</a><p>- machine0 NixOS flakes: <a href="https://github.com/fdmtl/machine0-nixos" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fdmtl/machine0-nixos</a><p>If you're in the habit of using VMs, or want to know what the NixOS fuss is about, would love for you to give machine0 a try!
Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
Hi HN! Excited to launch machine0, a CLI that makes it easy to create, provision and snapshot persistent NixOS (& Ubuntu) VMs.<p>You can think of machine0 as a modern VPS provider. VMs stay on unless switched-off (with 99.99% uptime), they have static IPs and HTTPS endpoints, 1-60 vCPU, up to 240GB RAM and optionally GPUs. The CLI provides commands to manage lifecycle, snapshots and also provision the VMs using Nix flakes or Ansible playbooks. VMs are priced by the minute of usage.<p>What makes machine0 unique is that it has first class support for NixOS! In a nutshell, NixOS lets you define your entire OS as code (think Terraform but for your Linux). A flake declares your system state (packages, services, firewall rules, users...) and pins all dependencies via a lockfile. Given the same flake.nix and flake.lock, `nixos-rebuild switch` always produces the exact same system.<p>The NixOS ecosystem is mature, and flakes are expressive: at the system level you can define packages, what's in /etc, firewall rules, users & groups etc. At the user level, you can define your shell, aliases, tmux and vim config. Having your entire environment defined as code makes it easy to audit what's installed and how things are set up. You can rollback by reverting the last commit. And agents can write the code for you and test it against disposable machine0 VMs.<p>If you'd like to dive right in, these commands will get you started:<p><pre><code> npm install -g @machine0/cli
machine0 new my-vm --image nixos-25-11 # create a new nixos VM
machine0 provision my-vm ./flake#my-profile # provision it using a nix flake
machine0 ssh my-vm # ssh in
machine0 stop my-vm # stop the VM
machine0 images new my-vm my-snapshot # create a snapshot
machine0 new my-clone --image my-snapshot # create a new VM from the snapshot
</code></pre>
- Demo of installation + NixOS provisioning via Claude Code: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT8N0_e3Vfg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT8N0_e3Vfg</a><p>- Documentation: <a href="https://docs.machine0.io/introduction/overview">https://docs.machine0.io/introduction/overview</a><p>- machine0 NixOS flakes: <a href="https://github.com/fdmtl/machine0-nixos" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fdmtl/machine0-nixos</a><p>If you're in the habit of using VMs, or want to know what the NixOS fuss is about, would love for you to give machine0 a try!
Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding
Hi HN, I'm Djoumé. I've been a developer for over 20 years, and like a lot of you I've been coding almost exclusively through an agent in the past few months.<p>It's been amazing to vibe code prototypes in any stack, but when it comes to building something reliable/scalable, I couldn't effectively guide the agent unless I knew the technology. And the scariest part is that I'm seeing a lot of my technical skills decreasing due to AI coding.<p>Reflecting on my journey, I also worry about how the new "AI native" generation of software developer is going to acquire technical depth.<p>So I built fata.dev: short daily spaced-repetition sessions for programming skills (Rust, CSS, React, Python, TypeScript, Architecture).<p>You can try it in the browser with no signup: <a href="https://fata.app/courses" rel="nofollow">https://fata.app/courses</a><p>It's an offline-first mobile app built with Capacitor, RxDB and Firebase. The first courses were painfully written by hand, but most content is now AI-generated. It takes about 3000 LLM calls to generate a course, and every code samples goes through compilation, linting, unit testing, AI and a final manual review.<p>Would very much appreciate any feedback on the product & website, what works and what could be better. Thanks!
Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding
Hi HN, I'm Djoumé. I've been a developer for over 20 years, and like a lot of you I've been coding almost exclusively through an agent in the past few months.<p>It's been amazing to vibe code prototypes in any stack, but when it comes to building something reliable/scalable, I couldn't effectively guide the agent unless I knew the technology. And the scariest part is that I'm seeing a lot of my technical skills decreasing due to AI coding.<p>Reflecting on my journey, I also worry about how the new "AI native" generation of software developer is going to acquire technical depth.<p>So I built fata.dev: short daily spaced-repetition sessions for programming skills (Rust, CSS, React, Python, TypeScript, Architecture).<p>You can try it in the browser with no signup: <a href="https://fata.app/courses" rel="nofollow">https://fata.app/courses</a><p>It's an offline-first mobile app built with Capacitor, RxDB and Firebase. The first courses were painfully written by hand, but most content is now AI-generated. It takes about 3000 LLM calls to generate a course, and every code samples goes through compilation, linting, unit testing, AI and a final manual review.<p>Would very much appreciate any feedback on the product & website, what works and what could be better. Thanks!
Show HN: Discover Wikipedia articles popular on Hacker News
Show HN: I wrote a C++ ray tracer from scratch without AI
Show HN: I wrote a C++ ray tracer from scratch without AI
Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
Show HN: Dual YOLOv8n UAV Detection on RK3588S at 42 FPS Using NPU
Show HN: 3D print Z reinforcement via injected loops
Commodity FDM print strength is limited by poor Z-axis layer bonding. Parts crack along Z under stress. MAGMA tries to fix this in software that works on any FDM 3D printer.<p>It's a fork of OrcaSlicer with a new infill type that creates paired U-shaped vertical channels inside the print, plus G-code that injects molten plastic into those channels to bridge Z layer interfaces with continuous plastic.<p>Big caveat: I have a junky Ender 3 and haven't gotten a clean physical print yet. Don't expect this to work out of the box! After months of tinkering, I'm releasing the software so the 3DP community can experiment with nozzles, multi-material, weird hardware, and other print parameters I can't. There's around 40 MAGMA-specific settings to fiddle with, plus some general quality-of-life features (e.g. printing thin infill sections as solid, and a "dual infill shell" feature that applies MAGMA only to the outer shell to save print time).<p>THIS CODE IS ALPHA. Around 50 prints old. The injection G-code is novel. Some printer firmware won't like extruding without movement. In extreme cases it could damage your printer or start a fire. DON'T WALK AWAY WHILE PRINTING.<p>Why MAGMA? "Lava tubes" is a misnomer. Molten rock is magma underground, lava only after it surfaces. The injected tubes are buried inside the print, so "magma tubes" is the correct term.
Show HN: 3D print Z reinforcement via injected loops
Commodity FDM print strength is limited by poor Z-axis layer bonding. Parts crack along Z under stress. MAGMA tries to fix this in software that works on any FDM 3D printer.<p>It's a fork of OrcaSlicer with a new infill type that creates paired U-shaped vertical channels inside the print, plus G-code that injects molten plastic into those channels to bridge Z layer interfaces with continuous plastic.<p>Big caveat: I have a junky Ender 3 and haven't gotten a clean physical print yet. Don't expect this to work out of the box! After months of tinkering, I'm releasing the software so the 3DP community can experiment with nozzles, multi-material, weird hardware, and other print parameters I can't. There's around 40 MAGMA-specific settings to fiddle with, plus some general quality-of-life features (e.g. printing thin infill sections as solid, and a "dual infill shell" feature that applies MAGMA only to the outer shell to save print time).<p>THIS CODE IS ALPHA. Around 50 prints old. The injection G-code is novel. Some printer firmware won't like extruding without movement. In extreme cases it could damage your printer or start a fire. DON'T WALK AWAY WHILE PRINTING.<p>Why MAGMA? "Lava tubes" is a misnomer. Molten rock is magma underground, lava only after it surfaces. The injected tubes are buried inside the print, so "magma tubes" is the correct term.
Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call
I'm the developer of Trace, a non-intrusive, shortcut-driven Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on-device. I know, another meeting transcription app. Please bear with me though, I'm confident that this is at least a little novel.<p>I primarily built Trace for myself. I'd been using MacWhisper, but there was enough fiddling before each call that I'd forget to start it and walk out of an hour-long meeting with nothing written down. So the things I cared about most were that it's quick to activate and stays out of the way. You activate Trace by pressing a global shortcut (configurable), which reveals a small bar at the bottom of your screen (there's also a keystroke and/or option to hide it entirely if you'd rather not see it at all).<p>As I was building it I wanted to bake in a couple of workflows I'd wished for in other transcription apps.<p>1. Mid-meeting you can press another global shortcut to mark a "key moment" and type a note. The note shows up in the resulting transcript inline at that timestamp. I wanted to add this because I kept catching myself thinking "wait, that bit matters" in meetings and reaching to jot it down in a separate app like Obsidian, which I then needed to add context to, which took me out of the meeting. I use it all the time. If I paste the transcript into an LLM afterwards (which I find myself doing more and more these days) the important moments are flagged so it doesn't gloss over them. This is more noticeable in longer meetings with lots of topics.
2. With another keyboard shortcut you can summon a rough live recap (subtitles, basically) to quickly recap what's just been said.<p>Trace uses standard macOS microphone and system recording APIs to capture both sides of the conversation as two separate tracks and then runs the system side through on-device diarization to identify speakers. Right now we only label them as "Speaker 1", "Speaker 2", etc but there are plans for speaker labelling in the future. You can also show a "live recap" as the call is happening to review what someone just said.<p>All transcription models run on your machine. To be clear though, Trace doesn't do any of the summarising itself, it just produces a markdown transcript, so if you want summaries then you need to pass the output to an AI.<p>The app is sandboxed and your audio/transcripts are never uploaded anywhere - they just exist as audio files and markdown on disk. The only network call Trace is required to make is on the first run to download the speech and speaker models (around 500MB) from Hugging Face, and after that it can be used fully offline. If enabled, a Google Calendar integration can auto-name sessions but that needs a network connection.<p>The app is £9.99 on the macOS App Store. I've been using it every day for months now and I'm super happy with how it's improved my workflow. Feedback very welcome.
Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call
I'm the developer of Trace, a non-intrusive, shortcut-driven Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on-device. I know, another meeting transcription app. Please bear with me though, I'm confident that this is at least a little novel.<p>I primarily built Trace for myself. I'd been using MacWhisper, but there was enough fiddling before each call that I'd forget to start it and walk out of an hour-long meeting with nothing written down. So the things I cared about most were that it's quick to activate and stays out of the way. You activate Trace by pressing a global shortcut (configurable), which reveals a small bar at the bottom of your screen (there's also a keystroke and/or option to hide it entirely if you'd rather not see it at all).<p>As I was building it I wanted to bake in a couple of workflows I'd wished for in other transcription apps.<p>1. Mid-meeting you can press another global shortcut to mark a "key moment" and type a note. The note shows up in the resulting transcript inline at that timestamp. I wanted to add this because I kept catching myself thinking "wait, that bit matters" in meetings and reaching to jot it down in a separate app like Obsidian, which I then needed to add context to, which took me out of the meeting. I use it all the time. If I paste the transcript into an LLM afterwards (which I find myself doing more and more these days) the important moments are flagged so it doesn't gloss over them. This is more noticeable in longer meetings with lots of topics.
2. With another keyboard shortcut you can summon a rough live recap (subtitles, basically) to quickly recap what's just been said.<p>Trace uses standard macOS microphone and system recording APIs to capture both sides of the conversation as two separate tracks and then runs the system side through on-device diarization to identify speakers. Right now we only label them as "Speaker 1", "Speaker 2", etc but there are plans for speaker labelling in the future. You can also show a "live recap" as the call is happening to review what someone just said.<p>All transcription models run on your machine. To be clear though, Trace doesn't do any of the summarising itself, it just produces a markdown transcript, so if you want summaries then you need to pass the output to an AI.<p>The app is sandboxed and your audio/transcripts are never uploaded anywhere - they just exist as audio files and markdown on disk. The only network call Trace is required to make is on the first run to download the speech and speaker models (around 500MB) from Hugging Face, and after that it can be used fully offline. If enabled, a Google Calendar integration can auto-name sessions but that needs a network connection.<p>The app is £9.99 on the macOS App Store. I've been using it every day for months now and I'm super happy with how it's improved my workflow. Feedback very welcome.
Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call
I'm the developer of Trace, a non-intrusive, shortcut-driven Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on-device. I know, another meeting transcription app. Please bear with me though, I'm confident that this is at least a little novel.<p>I primarily built Trace for myself. I'd been using MacWhisper, but there was enough fiddling before each call that I'd forget to start it and walk out of an hour-long meeting with nothing written down. So the things I cared about most were that it's quick to activate and stays out of the way. You activate Trace by pressing a global shortcut (configurable), which reveals a small bar at the bottom of your screen (there's also a keystroke and/or option to hide it entirely if you'd rather not see it at all).<p>As I was building it I wanted to bake in a couple of workflows I'd wished for in other transcription apps.<p>1. Mid-meeting you can press another global shortcut to mark a "key moment" and type a note. The note shows up in the resulting transcript inline at that timestamp. I wanted to add this because I kept catching myself thinking "wait, that bit matters" in meetings and reaching to jot it down in a separate app like Obsidian, which I then needed to add context to, which took me out of the meeting. I use it all the time. If I paste the transcript into an LLM afterwards (which I find myself doing more and more these days) the important moments are flagged so it doesn't gloss over them. This is more noticeable in longer meetings with lots of topics.
2. With another keyboard shortcut you can summon a rough live recap (subtitles, basically) to quickly recap what's just been said.<p>Trace uses standard macOS microphone and system recording APIs to capture both sides of the conversation as two separate tracks and then runs the system side through on-device diarization to identify speakers. Right now we only label them as "Speaker 1", "Speaker 2", etc but there are plans for speaker labelling in the future. You can also show a "live recap" as the call is happening to review what someone just said.<p>All transcription models run on your machine. To be clear though, Trace doesn't do any of the summarising itself, it just produces a markdown transcript, so if you want summaries then you need to pass the output to an AI.<p>The app is sandboxed and your audio/transcripts are never uploaded anywhere - they just exist as audio files and markdown on disk. The only network call Trace is required to make is on the first run to download the speech and speaker models (around 500MB) from Hugging Face, and after that it can be used fully offline. If enabled, a Google Calendar integration can auto-name sessions but that needs a network connection.<p>The app is £9.99 on the macOS App Store. I've been using it every day for months now and I'm super happy with how it's improved my workflow. Feedback very welcome.
Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing