The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)
Show HN: Anos – a hand-written ~100KiB microkernel for x86-64 and RISC-V
I pretty much always have a kernel project going on, and have been that way for decades. Over the past couple of years, that's been Anos, which has gotten further along than any of my previous hobby kernels, supporting IPC, multitasking, SMP (x86-64 only right now) and running on real hardware.<p>LLMs (mostly Claude Code) have been used during development, but I learned early on that it's not _great_ at code at this level, so I've restricted its use to mostly documentation and tests. There's _a little_ AI code in the user space, but I have a strict "no AI code" rule in the kernel itself. I find this helps not only with the quality / functionality of the code, but also with learning - for example, even though I've written multiple kernels in the past, it wasn't until Anos that I _truly_ grokked pagetable management and what was possible with a good VMM interface, and if I'd outsourced that implementation to an LLM I probably wouldn't have learned any of that.<p>In terms of approach, Anos avoids legacy platform features and outdated wiki / tutorial resources, and instead tries to implement as much as possible from manuals and datasheets, and it's definitely worked out well so far. There's no support for legacy platform features or peripherals, with all IO being memory mapped and MSI/MSI-X interrupts (no PIC), for example, which has helped keep the codebase focused and easy to work on. The kernel compiles to about 100KiB on x86-64, with enough features to be able to support multitasking and device drivers in user space.<p>As a hobby project, progress ebbs and flows with pressures of my day job etc, and the main branch has been quiet for the last few months. I have however been working on a USB stack as time allows, and hopefully will soon have at least basic HID support to allow me to take the next step and make Anos interactive.<p>I don't know how useful projects like Anos are any more, given we now live in the age of AI coding, but it's a fun learning experience and helps keep me technically grounded, and I'll carry on with it for as long as those things remain true.
Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read
Show HN: Gemma 4 Multimodal Fine-Tuner for Apple Silicon
About six months ago, I started working on a project to fine-tune Whisper locally on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio with a limited compute budget. I got into it. The problem I had at the time was I had 15,000 hours of audio data in Google Cloud Storage, and there was no way I could fit all the audio onto my local machine, so I built a system to stream data from my GCS to my machine during training.<p>Gemma 3n came out, so I added that. Kinda went nuts, tbh.<p>Then I put it on the shelf.<p>When Gemma 4 came out a few days ago, I dusted it off, cleaned it up, broke out the Gemma part from the Whisper fine-tuning and added support for Gemma 4.<p>I'm presenting it for you here today to play with, fork and improve upon.<p>One thing I have learned so far: It's very easy to OOM when you fine-tune on longer sequences! My local Mac Studio has 64GB RAM, so I run out of memory constantly.<p>Anywho, given how much interest there is in Gemma 4, and frankly, the fact that you can't really do audio fine-tuning with MLX, that's really the reason this exists (in addition to my personal interest). I would have preferred to use MLX and not have had to make this, but here we are. Welcome to my little side quest.<p>And so I made this. I hope you have as much fun using it as I had fun making it.<p>-Matt
Show HN: Is Hormuz open yet?
I built this because I was interested in the data. Didn't fully get it to what I wanted, but thought I'd share it nonetheless. Maybe someone has better data sources they could share!<p>Turns out live ship tracking APIs are expensive so I manually just copied the json from <a href="https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:57.4/centery:26.4/zoom:8" rel="nofollow">https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:57.4/cente...</a> I'll probably have an ai agent do the same thing on some cron interval, if this gets any fanfare.<p>To actually know if the port is open without live ship tracking I found <a href="https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a1730" rel="nofollow">https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a...</a> which was perfect, except it has 4 day lag!<p>I also thought of adding news feed parsing or prediction market data to get a more definitive answer on if it's open right when you load it, but I spent a few hours and am gonna move on for now.
Show HN: An interactive map of Tolkien's Middle-earth
An interactive map of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, with events from across the legendarium plotted as markers.<p>I have been commuting a fair bit between the East and West coast, and thanks to American Airlines' free onboard WiFi, I was able to vibe-code a full interactive map of Middle-earth right from my economy seat at the back of the bus.<p>It's rather amazing how much an LLM knows about Tolkien's work, and it was fun to delve into many of the nooks and crannies of Tolkien's lore.<p>Some features:
- Plot on the map the journey of the main characters in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
- Follow a list of events in the chronological Timeline
- Zoom in on the high-def map and explore many of the off-the-main-plotline places
- Use the 'measure distances' feature to see how far apart things are.<p>I also had a lot of fun learning about tiling to allow for efficient zooming.<p>If you are anything like me, this should provide a fun companion to reading the books or watching the movies (note that on this site, I followed the book narrative, and did not include Peter Jackson's many departures)<p>If you get the chance to check it out, I would love more feedback, and if there is demand, I might do the same for Game of Thrones.
Show HN: Hippo, biologically inspired memory for AI agents
Show HN: Tusk for macOS and Gnome
Show HN: A cartographer's attempt to realistically map Tolkien's world
Show HN: A cartographer's attempt to realistically map Tolkien's world
Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead
Last week SWYX nerd-sniped me into building an Open-source Dropbox.<p>Here is Locker: the ultimate open-source Google Drive/box/Dropbox alternative
- Provider agnostic (S3, R2, vercel blob, local)
- BYOB (Bring your own bucket)
- Virtual file system
- QMD Search plugin
Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead
Last week SWYX nerd-sniped me into building an Open-source Dropbox.<p>Here is Locker: the ultimate open-source Google Drive/box/Dropbox alternative
- Provider agnostic (S3, R2, vercel blob, local)
- BYOB (Bring your own bucket)
- Virtual file system
- QMD Search plugin
Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)
Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)
Show HN: Modo – I built an open-source alternative to Kiro, Cursor, and Windsurf
Show HN: Gemma Gem – AI model embedded in a browser – no API keys, no cloud
Gemma Gem is a Chrome extension that loads Google's Gemma 4 (2B) through WebGPU in an offscreen document and gives it tools to interact with any webpage: read content, take screenshots, click elements, type text, scroll, and run JavaScript.<p>You get a small chat overlay on every page. Ask it about the page and it (usually) figures out which tools to call. It has a thinking mode that shows chain-of-thought reasoning as it works.<p>It's a 2B model in a browser. It works for simple page questions and running JavaScript, but multi-step tool chains are unreliable and it sometimes ignores its tools entirely. The agent loop has zero external dependencies and can be extracted as a standalone library if anyone wants to experiment with it.
Show HN: Gemma Gem – AI model embedded in a browser – no API keys, no cloud
Gemma Gem is a Chrome extension that loads Google's Gemma 4 (2B) through WebGPU in an offscreen document and gives it tools to interact with any webpage: read content, take screenshots, click elements, type text, scroll, and run JavaScript.<p>You get a small chat overlay on every page. Ask it about the page and it (usually) figures out which tools to call. It has a thinking mode that shows chain-of-thought reasoning as it works.<p>It's a 2B model in a browser. It works for simple page questions and running JavaScript, but multi-step tool chains are unreliable and it sometimes ignores its tools entirely. The agent loop has zero external dependencies and can be extracted as a standalone library if anyone wants to experiment with it.
Show HN: GovAuctions lets you browse government auctions at once
I've long been into finding deals on government auction sites (seizures, surplus sales etc.) - right now for example San Diego DHS is selling 26 tons of lead shot, with bidding starting at $1,000 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯<p>It has historically been extremely tedious though: scanning dozens of janky sites which have interminable page loading times; back buttons take you all the way back to the homepage etc.<p>The site I built - GovAuctions - lets you search every government surplus auction at once. You can filter by location, category, and price, save items to a watchlist, and get alerts when new auctions match what you're looking for.<p>Let me know what you think, if you have any suggestions, and if you find any deals in your area!
Show HN: GovAuctions lets you browse government auctions at once
I've long been into finding deals on government auction sites (seizures, surplus sales etc.) - right now for example San Diego DHS is selling 26 tons of lead shot, with bidding starting at $1,000 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯<p>It has historically been extremely tedious though: scanning dozens of janky sites which have interminable page loading times; back buttons take you all the way back to the homepage etc.<p>The site I built - GovAuctions - lets you search every government surplus auction at once. You can filter by location, category, and price, save items to a watchlist, and get alerts when new auctions match what you're looking for.<p>Let me know what you think, if you have any suggestions, and if you find any deals in your area!
Show HN: Real-time AI (audio/video in, voice out) on an M3 Pro with Gemma E2B
Related: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47653752">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47653752</a>