The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day

from

All Show

from the past*

day week month

with these search terms:

Create follow Go back

Latest posts:

Show HN: Pumpkins.sh – claim, carve, and display a pumpkin to the world

What if....there was a near infinite pumpkin patch where anyone can claim and carve a pumpkin then show-case it to the world?<p>Here are 1 million pumpkins. Pick one. Make it your own.<p>Have a VR headset? Put it on and explore the patch.

Show HN: Entombed in a Raycaster

Show HN: Photoc – Command-line tools for photographers

Show HN: I turned my iPhone and a $20 smart plug into an f-stop timer

I am a film photographer and do some darkroom printing and always wanted one of the proper, advanced f-stop timers, but never really wanted to spend a couple hundred dollars on one. Eventually I figured my phone was already perfectly capable of doing the timing, it just needed a way to switch the enlarger.<p>So I built Darkplug around a cheap smart plug. The app controls the enlarger over the local network and does regular timing, f-stop timing, test strips, has an intuitive dodge/burn workflow, split grade (2 timing channels) and paper development timing.<p>I’ve been using it for a few months in my improvised bathroom darkroom.<p>Fair warning: the app was blindly vibe coded using Codex and Xcode.

Show HN: Parseable, an open observability datalake, handles 100M time-series/min

Show HN: Steve Jobs died 15 years ago today. I built an interactive tribute

Show HN: Minigraf – An embedded, bi-temporal graph database in Rust

A successor project to my previous attempt at building a temporal graph database (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455516">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455516</a>). This one builds on its predecessor's concept, but drops the dependency on another database to provide the storage, transaction and query engines. Minigraf is self-contained, packaged as a library crate, embeds into your application, and supports full bi-temporality.

Show HN: Minigraf – An embedded, bi-temporal graph database in Rust

A successor project to my previous attempt at building a temporal graph database (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455516">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455516</a>). This one builds on its predecessor's concept, but drops the dependency on another database to provide the storage, transaction and query engines. Minigraf is self-contained, packaged as a library crate, embeds into your application, and supports full bi-temporality.

Show HN: Build with Python – a beginner course where your code draws

Hi HN, I built this because I watched my daughter struggle at learning Python. I made something that runs only in the browser with visuals rather than relying on CLI/terminal output. No need to worry about python installation, package versions, venv etc.<p>The lab runs with Pyodide in a web worker, and the program output is a picture by the side of the code block. A user would experiment with the code, and see the immediate changes in the visual output.<p>The course has 13 modules, with the first 6 foundation modules free, module 7-13 with free readings but guide labs for a one-time price of $49.<p>Please give it a try at <a href="https://scimigo.com/en/learn/build-with-python" rel="nofollow">https://scimigo.com/en/learn/build-with-python</a> Send me feedback on the UX and on the exercise design, especially if you teach kids to program.<p>I am also working on a C++ version for beginners (also with browser, no gcc or command lines). stay tuned.

Show HN: Build with Python – a beginner course where your code draws

Hi HN, I built this because I watched my daughter struggle at learning Python. I made something that runs only in the browser with visuals rather than relying on CLI/terminal output. No need to worry about python installation, package versions, venv etc.<p>The lab runs with Pyodide in a web worker, and the program output is a picture by the side of the code block. A user would experiment with the code, and see the immediate changes in the visual output.<p>The course has 13 modules, with the first 6 foundation modules free, module 7-13 with free readings but guide labs for a one-time price of $49.<p>Please give it a try at <a href="https://scimigo.com/en/learn/build-with-python" rel="nofollow">https://scimigo.com/en/learn/build-with-python</a> Send me feedback on the UX and on the exercise design, especially if you teach kids to program.<p>I am also working on a C++ version for beginners (also with browser, no gcc or command lines). stay tuned.

Show HN: Nightwatch – a Mac menu-bar app that tells you when tonight is clear

Here in the north of England clear nights are at a premium, and it's never guaranteed that you'll be able to see anything but cloud. That's why I developed Nightwatch, so that I could be notified when one of those precious few nights where I could see into the heavens was available. Finding out whether tonight was worth setting up meant reading forecast charts every evening, usually to learn that it was not. Nightwatch does that reading for me.<p>It sits in the Mac's menu bar and refreshes the forecast every 30 minutes. An hour before sunset it sends one notification, and only if there is an unbroken run of clear sky in astronomical darkness long enough to image in. Otherwise it says nothing: no news means "clouds".<p>I hope this is useful for other hobbyist stargazers too!<p>When I was a child I wanted desperately to be an astronaut or a dinosaur. I'm now old enough to be the latter and was born in a country where the former was never an option. I've had a fascination with the stars since a a friend of my father gifted me a telescope, and have faded memories of sharing time with my father staring at the stars. My father passed away a few years back and the memory of those nights came back, along with the want to share the same experience with my kids and grandchild.<p>The app uses two forecasts: Apple's WeatherKit is the main source and Open-Meteo is a second opinion. When they disagree, the alert says so instead of averaging them.<p>Thin high cloud counts for half. Stacking many short frames works through a veil of cirrus, so treating it as full cloud threw away usable nights.<p>It works on your own horizon: hills come from terrain data, and you set the houses and trees in each direction, so they are accounted for when it says what is up.<p>It works out, a year ahead, when the Moon will pass in front of a planet, a bright star or the Pleiades as seen from your site.<p>You don't need an account. What leaves the Mac is the coordinates of the place being forecast, sent to the forecast and sky-survey services listed in PRIVACY.md.<p>Limits: Mac only, and the aurora alerts are UK only. The worldwide light-pollution data is new this week. I have checked it against Britain's finer grid and a handful of cities, so I would especially like to hear from people elsewhere whether the darkness it suggests for your site looks right.

Show HN: Nightwatch – a Mac menu-bar app that tells you when tonight is clear

Here in the north of England clear nights are at a premium, and it's never guaranteed that you'll be able to see anything but cloud. That's why I developed Nightwatch, so that I could be notified when one of those precious few nights where I could see into the heavens was available. Finding out whether tonight was worth setting up meant reading forecast charts every evening, usually to learn that it was not. Nightwatch does that reading for me.<p>It sits in the Mac's menu bar and refreshes the forecast every 30 minutes. An hour before sunset it sends one notification, and only if there is an unbroken run of clear sky in astronomical darkness long enough to image in. Otherwise it says nothing: no news means "clouds".<p>I hope this is useful for other hobbyist stargazers too!<p>When I was a child I wanted desperately to be an astronaut or a dinosaur. I'm now old enough to be the latter and was born in a country where the former was never an option. I've had a fascination with the stars since a a friend of my father gifted me a telescope, and have faded memories of sharing time with my father staring at the stars. My father passed away a few years back and the memory of those nights came back, along with the want to share the same experience with my kids and grandchild.<p>The app uses two forecasts: Apple's WeatherKit is the main source and Open-Meteo is a second opinion. When they disagree, the alert says so instead of averaging them.<p>Thin high cloud counts for half. Stacking many short frames works through a veil of cirrus, so treating it as full cloud threw away usable nights.<p>It works on your own horizon: hills come from terrain data, and you set the houses and trees in each direction, so they are accounted for when it says what is up.<p>It works out, a year ahead, when the Moon will pass in front of a planet, a bright star or the Pleiades as seen from your site.<p>You don't need an account. What leaves the Mac is the coordinates of the place being forecast, sent to the forecast and sky-survey services listed in PRIVACY.md.<p>Limits: Mac only, and the aurora alerts are UK only. The worldwide light-pollution data is new this week. I have checked it against Britain's finer grid and a handful of cities, so I would especially like to hear from people elsewhere whether the darkness it suggests for your site looks right.

Show HN: Graphene – Data analysis toolkit for your coding agent

My friend and I have worked at a number of BI companies and thought: Can’t a coding agent do most of this now?<p>Almost. They just need a context/semantic layer to ensure query correctness and some kind of artifact for publishing findings and visualizations.<p>We built an open source project called Graphene that provides these tools:<p>- Semantic layer that’s more token-efficient than YAML, more deterministic than Markdown (eg, composable, callable metric macros), with a query API that’s well in-distribution (SQL). - MDX-like files for dashboards (Markdown with inlined SQL + HTML components for viz with support for CSS and Javascript) - Connects to popular data warehouses or local DuckDB<p>Your coding agent will build really in-depth reports and can ofc leverage any other skills or context that you've made available to it. We dogfood it inside a monorepo with our website, app source code, planning docs, etc so the agent has access to a ton of context. It’s also nice that the agent can add instrumentation, adjust pipelines and transformations, and add dashboards all in one PR.<p>If you want to try it out, just point your coding agent at <a href="https://github.com/graphene-data/graphene/blob/main/docs/setup.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/graphene-data/graphene/blob/main/docs/set...</a> and ask it to set up Graphene.<p>If you don’t have data to play with, you can clone our example project:<p>1. `git clone <<a href="https://github.com/graphene-data/example-flights.git`" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/graphene-data/example-flights.git`</a>> 2. `cd example-flights && npm install`<p>Would love any/all feedback!

Show HN: Thoreau BASIC – What if BASIC hadn't gone out of fashion?

Thoreau BASIC started as a joke. I wanted a BASIC where I could type something ridiculous like:<p><pre><code> DIM A%(12000000000) </code></pre> …and have it actually work. Then I kept adding things. The result is Thoreau BASIC, a free x64 BASIC interpreter inspired by GW-BASIC, running both as a normal Windows program and directly on bare-metal UEFI without an operating system.<p>Version 3.2 has become considerably more ambitious than the little interpreter I originally intended to write. The language still deliberately looks and feels like old Microsoft BASIC. Line numbers, GOTO, GOSUB, PRINT, PSET, LINE, CIRCLE, DRAW, etc. are all there. But underneath that rather innocent-looking surface is now quite a lot of machinery.<p>Some of the current features:<p><pre><code> native x64 JIT compilation, with automatic fallback to the interpreter PARFOR for multithreaded numeric loops SSE2 / AVX2 acceleration where available 64-bit addressing and very large arrays native complex, quaternion and other hypercomplex numbers arbitrary-resolution 24-bit graphics sprites, bitmap operations, polygon filling and mouse input TCP/IP networking on Windows and UEFI an integrated profiler, debugger, tracing and program-analysis tools CREATEEXE to turn a BASIC program into a standalone Windows executable CREATEEFI to turn the same program into a directly bootable UEFI application </code></pre> The sound system has also grown rather out of proportion. Thoreau BASIC can now handle up to 32 live instrument channels plus 64 sound effect channels and 256 voices, with real-time pan and brightness control. NOTE and SOUNDKEY can be used more like playable synthesis primitives rather than just old-school BASIC beeps.<p>3.2 also expands the less glamorous but surprisingly useful parts of the environment. There is better file browsing and selection with GETFILES and SELECTBOX, longer case-preserving paths, recovery/file-flush facilities, and considerably more detailed SYSTEMINFO$ diagnostics. The latter is useful for seeing things such as available CPU capabilities and the execution environment while debugging performance differences between machines.<p>One thing I've spent a lot of time on recently is making the BASIC programs themselves fast enough that they stop feeling like demonstrations of an interpreter. For example, the current Mandelbrot demo is a real-time interactive fractal explorer. Mouse movement pans the fractal, left-click zooms in and right-click zooms out, while the BASIC program continuously redraws and displays the frame rate.<p>There are also 3D and procedural demos, sprite programs, networking examples, hypercomplex fractals and games. An important design constraint throughout the project has been that Windows and UEFI should execute essentially the same BASIC language. A program shouldn't suddenly become a different species just because there is no operating system underneath it.<p>And yes, I am fully aware of the absurdity of combining GOTO 100 with AVX2, multithreading, TCP/IP and quaternion arithmetic. That is increasingly the point. I'm interested in the question: What would BASIC look like if it had never gone out of fashion? Thoreau BASIC 3.2 is my current answer.<p>I'd be especially interested in feedback from people who remember GW-BASIC/QBasic, compiler/interpreter people, and anyone sufficiently unreasonable to enjoy the idea of booting a modern x64 PC directly into a BASIC interpreter/JIT compiler.

Show HN: Thoreau BASIC – What if BASIC hadn't gone out of fashion?

Thoreau BASIC started as a joke. I wanted a BASIC where I could type something ridiculous like:<p><pre><code> DIM A%(12000000000) </code></pre> …and have it actually work. Then I kept adding things. The result is Thoreau BASIC, a free x64 BASIC interpreter inspired by GW-BASIC, running both as a normal Windows program and directly on bare-metal UEFI without an operating system.<p>Version 3.2 has become considerably more ambitious than the little interpreter I originally intended to write. The language still deliberately looks and feels like old Microsoft BASIC. Line numbers, GOTO, GOSUB, PRINT, PSET, LINE, CIRCLE, DRAW, etc. are all there. But underneath that rather innocent-looking surface is now quite a lot of machinery.<p>Some of the current features:<p><pre><code> native x64 JIT compilation, with automatic fallback to the interpreter PARFOR for multithreaded numeric loops SSE2 / AVX2 acceleration where available 64-bit addressing and very large arrays native complex, quaternion and other hypercomplex numbers arbitrary-resolution 24-bit graphics sprites, bitmap operations, polygon filling and mouse input TCP/IP networking on Windows and UEFI an integrated profiler, debugger, tracing and program-analysis tools CREATEEXE to turn a BASIC program into a standalone Windows executable CREATEEFI to turn the same program into a directly bootable UEFI application </code></pre> The sound system has also grown rather out of proportion. Thoreau BASIC can now handle up to 32 live instrument channels plus 64 sound effect channels and 256 voices, with real-time pan and brightness control. NOTE and SOUNDKEY can be used more like playable synthesis primitives rather than just old-school BASIC beeps.<p>3.2 also expands the less glamorous but surprisingly useful parts of the environment. There is better file browsing and selection with GETFILES and SELECTBOX, longer case-preserving paths, recovery/file-flush facilities, and considerably more detailed SYSTEMINFO$ diagnostics. The latter is useful for seeing things such as available CPU capabilities and the execution environment while debugging performance differences between machines.<p>One thing I've spent a lot of time on recently is making the BASIC programs themselves fast enough that they stop feeling like demonstrations of an interpreter. For example, the current Mandelbrot demo is a real-time interactive fractal explorer. Mouse movement pans the fractal, left-click zooms in and right-click zooms out, while the BASIC program continuously redraws and displays the frame rate.<p>There are also 3D and procedural demos, sprite programs, networking examples, hypercomplex fractals and games. An important design constraint throughout the project has been that Windows and UEFI should execute essentially the same BASIC language. A program shouldn't suddenly become a different species just because there is no operating system underneath it.<p>And yes, I am fully aware of the absurdity of combining GOTO 100 with AVX2, multithreading, TCP/IP and quaternion arithmetic. That is increasingly the point. I'm interested in the question: What would BASIC look like if it had never gone out of fashion? Thoreau BASIC 3.2 is my current answer.<p>I'd be especially interested in feedback from people who remember GW-BASIC/QBasic, compiler/interpreter people, and anyone sufficiently unreasonable to enjoy the idea of booting a modern x64 PC directly into a BASIC interpreter/JIT compiler.

Show HN: Glashütte Trash Clock – A 30-minute pendulum clock made from trash

This is a functional 30-minute pendulum clock entirely from discarded materials—cardboard, zip ties, tape, a yardstick, and a paperclip escapement, built in the German Eldorado of precision watchmaking: Glashütte.<p>It also acts as a reference clock for GTC, a new satirical universal time standard.

Show HN: Glashütte Trash Clock – A 30-minute pendulum clock made from trash

This is a functional 30-minute pendulum clock entirely from discarded materials—cardboard, zip ties, tape, a yardstick, and a paperclip escapement, built in the German Eldorado of precision watchmaking: Glashütte.<p>It also acts as a reference clock for GTC, a new satirical universal time standard.

Show HN: Glashütte Trash Clock – A 30-minute pendulum clock made from trash

This is a functional 30-minute pendulum clock entirely from discarded materials—cardboard, zip ties, tape, a yardstick, and a paperclip escapement, built in the German Eldorado of precision watchmaking: Glashütte.<p>It also acts as a reference clock for GTC, a new satirical universal time standard.

Show HN: AI search for every photo and every frame of video on macOS

Show HN: AI search for every photo and every frame of video on macOS