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Show HN: Stop playing my matchstick puzzles, start building your own in seconds

Show HN: Large Scale Article Extract of Newspapers 1730s-1960s

Hello HN, over the past 7 months I've spent nearly 3,000 hours on building SNEWPAPERS, the first historical newpaper archive with full-text extractions, nearly perfect OCR, a vast categorization taxonomy and of course with semantic and agentic search capabilities.<p>Problem: I wanted to search through newspaper archives, but when I tried every service only lets you search for keywords and dates, and gives you back raw images of the papers, and too many of them with no context. A sea of noise.<p>Solution: I taught machines how to read the newspapers and so far I've extracted the content from > 600k pages (about 5TB) from the Chronicling America collection. Problems I had to deal with were an infinite variety of layouts, font sizes, image scan qualities, resolutions, aspect ratios, navigating around the images on the page. I also had to figure out how to get OCR to be nearly perfect so people wouldn't hate reading the extracts. I stitched together a multi-model pipeline (layout tech, ocr tech, llm, vllm) with heuristics to go from layout -> segmentation -> classification. I put it all in OpenSearch / Postgres and made it semantically searchable and also put an agentic search tool on top that knows how to use the API really well and helps you write queries to find what you're looking for. Happy to discuss AWS architecture and scaling as well, that was tough!<p>If you have five minutes and you just want to jump in and have your own personalized experience, what I would suggest is:<p>Before searching for anything, go to the Sleuth page Ask it about anything from 1736 to 1963, maybe 1 or 2 follow up questions Then go to the search page so you can see the queries it wrote for you (bottom left "saved queries") and uncover more info on whatever it is you're interested in<p>If you think it's cool and you want to learn more, then there's about 10 minutes of video guides on the various capabilities in "Guide" on the nav bar<p>Some other people have also taken a crack at this, notably:<p><a href="https://dell-research-harvard.github.io/resources/americanstories" rel="nofollow">https://dell-research-harvard.github.io/resources/americanst...</a> (very good attempt) <a href="https://labs.loc.gov/work/experiments/newspaper-navigator/" rel="nofollow">https://labs.loc.gov/work/experiments/newspaper-navigator/</a> (focused on images)

Show HN: Mljar Studio – local AI data analyst that saves analysis as notebooks

Hi HN,<p>I’ve been working on mljar-supervised (open-source AutoML for tabular data) for a few years. Recently I built a desktop app around it called MLJAR Studio.<p>The idea is simple: you talk to your data in natural language, the AI generates Python code, executes it locally, and the whole conversation becomes a reproducible notebook (*.ipynb file). So instead of just chatting with data, you end up with something you can inspect, modify, and rerun.<p>What MLJAR Studio does:<p>- Sets up a local Python environment automatically, runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux<p>- Installs missing packages during the conversation<p>- Built-in AutoML for tabular data (classification, regression, multiclass)<p>- Works with standard Python libraries (pandas, matplotlib, etc.)<p>- Works with any data file: CSV, Excel, Stata, Parquet ...<p>- Connects to PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Snowflake, Databricks, and Supabase.<p>For AI: use Ollama locally (zero data egress), bring your own OpenAI key, or use MLJAR AI add-on.<p>I built this because I wanted something between Jupyter Notebook (flexible but manual) and AI tools that generate code but don’t preserve the workflow. Most tools I tried either hide too much or don’t give reproducible results and are cloud based<p>Demos:<p>- 60-second demo: <a href="https://youtu.be/BjxpZYRiY4c" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/BjxpZYRiY4c</a><p>- Full 3-minute analysis: <a href="https://youtu.be/1DHMMxaNJxI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/1DHMMxaNJxI</a><p>Pricing is $199 one-time, with a 7-day trial.<p>Curious if this is useful for others doing real data work, or if I’m solving my own problem here.<p>Happy to answer questions.

Show HN: Filling PDF forms with AI using client-side tool calling

Hey HN!<p>I built SimplePDF Copilot: an AI assistant that can interact with the PDF editor. It fills fields, answers questions, focuses on a specific field, adds fields, deletes pages, and so on.<p>It's built on top of SimplePDF that I started 7 years ago, pioneering privacy-respecting client-side pdf editing, now used monthly by 200k+ people.<p>As for the privacy model: the PDF itself never leaves the browser. Parsing, rendering, and field detection all run client-side.<p>The text the model needs (and your messages) goes to whatever LLM you point at. By default that's our demo proxy (DeepSeek V4 Flash, rate-capped), but you can BYOK and point it at any cloud provider, or go fully local (I've been testing with LM Studio).<p>Unlike the existing "Chat with PDF" tools that only retrieve the text/OCR layer, Copilot can act on the PDF: filling fields, adding fields (detected client-side using CommonForms by Joe Barrow [1], jbarrow on HN with some post-processing heuristics I added on top), focusing on fields, deleting pages, and so on.<p>I built this because SimplePDF is mostly used by healthcare customers where document privacy is paramount, and I wanted an AI experience that didn't require shipping PII to a third party. Stack is pretty standard:<p>- Tanstack Start<p>- AI SDK from Vercel<p>- Tailwind (I personally prefer CSS modules, I'm old-school but the goal since I open source it, I figured that Tailwind would be a better fit)<p>The more interesting part is the client-side tool calling: events are passed back and forth via iframe postMessage.<p>If you're not familiar with "tool calling" and "client-side tool calling", a quick primer:<p>Tool calling is what LLMs use to take actions. When Claude runs grep or ls, or hits an MCP server, those are tool calls.<p>Client-side tool calling means the intent to call a tool comes from the LLM, but the execution happens in the browser.<p>That matters for: speed, you can't go faster than client-to-client operations and also gives you the ability to limit the data you expose to the LLM. For the demo I do feed the content of the document to the LLM, but that connection could be severed as simply as removing the tool that exposes the content data.<p>The demo is fully open source, available on Github [2] and the demo is the same as the link of this post [3]<p>What's not open source is SimplePDF itself (loaded as the iframe).<p>I could talk on and on about this, let me know if you have any questions, anything goes!<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/jbarrow/commonforms" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jbarrow/commonforms</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/SimplePDF/simplepdf-embed/tree/main/copilot" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SimplePDF/simplepdf-embed/tree/main/copil...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://copilot.simplepdf.com/?share=a7d00ad073c75a75d493228e6ff7b11eb3f2d945b6175913e87898ec96ca8076&form=w9&lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://copilot.simplepdf.com/?share=a7d00ad073c75a75d493228...</a>

Show HN: Piruetas – A self-hosted diary app I built for my girlfriend

I searched for a simple, self-hosted journal app for my girlfriend and everything I found was either too complex, too feature-heavy, too feature-less for what I needed or required trusting a cloud service.<p>So I built Piruetas (it means pirouettes in Spanish - she chose the name btw).<p>It's a day-per-page diary with rich text editing, drag-and-drop image uploads, auto-save, public share links, and a clean mobile UI. It can be set up for Personal or Multi-user usage via docker compose deployment.<p>She seems to like it so I decided to give back to the community and make it available for everyone (after some QA)<p>Live demo: <a href="https://piruet.app" rel="nofollow">https://piruet.app</a> (login: demo / piruetas — data resets every 30 min!) GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/patillacode/piruetas" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/patillacode/piruetas</a>

Show HN: Ableton Live MCP

Show HN: DAC – open-source dashboard as code tool for agents and humans

Hi all, this is Burak.<p>When agents became a reality one of the first things I wanted to do was to automate building dashboards. The first, and the most obvious, wall that I ran into was that a lot of the tools were just driven by UI. This meant that without the agents handling browser UIs and whatnot, it wasn't possible to have the agents do that. In addition, it would be impossible to review any of the changes the agent would make.<p>The first instinct there is to get your agent to build a React app for the dashboard. This works beautifully for the happy path, but I quickly ran into other issues there: - every dashboard turns out to be different - have to implement a backend to centralize the query execution - there is no centralized mechanism to control the rules and standards around visualizations - there is no way to get a semantic layer working with the dashboards easily<p>In the end, agents ended up reinventing the wheel for every new dashboard, even under the same project. Building a standardized, local project for these turned out to be building a BI tool from scratch.<p>After trying these out, I asked myself: what if the dashboards were built for agents as the primary user?<p>A product like that would need to have a couple of features: - First of all, everything needs to be driven by version-controllable text. YAML is fine. - Changes to the dashboards should be easy to review and understand by humans. - Agents are great at writing code, it'd be great if this were driven by code to have dynamic stuff: JSX would be great. - Static analysis being a first-class citizen: validate dashboards before deploying. Agents can check their work too. - A standardized way of deploying these based on a couple of files in a folder: operationally very simple. - Built-in semantic layer to standardize metrics.<p>That's what I ended up building: dac (Dashboard-As-Code) is an open-source tool and a spec to define dashboards, well, as code. It contains an implementation in Go that can be deployed as a single binary anywhere. The dashboards are defined in YAML and JSX, YAML for static stuff, JSX for dynamic dashboards. You can run queries at load time to define conditional charts, generate tabs on the fly per customer, or list charts for each A/B test you are running.<p>I built it in Go because I do love Go, and I think it is the greatest language at the moment to work with AI agents.<p>dac runs as a single binary, you can get started with a `dac init` command and it'll automatically create some sample dashboards for you based on duckdb. It supports 10+ SQL backends, with more to come. It supports validation, custom themes and whatnot.<p>You can see it here: <a href="https://github.com/bruin-data/dac" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bruin-data/dac</a><p>I would love to hear what can be improved here, please let me know your thoughts.

Show HN: Pollen – distributed WASM runtime, no control plane, single binary

Show HN: Apple's SHARP running in the browser via ONNX runtime web

Hi HN, author here. SHARP is Apple's recent single-image 3D Gaussian splatting model (<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10685" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10685</a>). Their reference code is PyTorch + a pretty heavy pipeline; I wanted to see if it could run in a browser with no server hop, so I exported the predictor to ONNX and ran it via onnxruntime-web with the WebGPU EP.<p>What works: drop in an image, get a .ply you can download or preview live, all on your machine — your image never leaves the tab. The model is large (~2.4 GB sidecar) so first load is slow on a cold cache, but inference itself is a few seconds on a recent Mac.<p>Caveats: SHARP's released weights are research-use only (Apple's model license, not the code's). I host the exported ONNX on R2 so thedemo "just works", but you can also export your own from the upstream Apple repo and upload locally.<p>Happy to talk about it in the comments :)

Show HN: State of the Art of Coding Models, According to Hacker News Commenters

Hello HN,<p>I was away from my computer for two weeks, and after coming back and reading the latest discussions on HN about coding assistants (models, harnesses), I felt very out of the loop. My normal process would have been to keep reading and figure out the latest and greatest from people's comments, but I wanted to try and automate this process.<p>Basically the goal is to get a quick overview over which coding models are popular on HN. A next iteration could also scan for harnesses that people use, or info on self-hosting or hardware setups.<p>I wrote a short intro on the page about the pipeline that collects and analyzes the data, but feel free to ask for more details or check the Google Sheet for more info.<p><a href="https://hnup.date/hn-sota" rel="nofollow">https://hnup.date/hn-sota</a>

Show HN: Destiny – Claude Code's fortune Teller skill

Destiny is the Claude Code's plugin that gives you a real fortune reading.<p>Type /destiny to see today's destiny!<p>It uses the actual classical East Asian astrology system. You enter your birthday once, then /destiny gives you today's reading anytime.<p>Two layers, kept honest:<p>1. The numbers (your eight-character birth chart, today's day pillar, the hexagram for the moment, five-element relationships) are computed by a Python script. Same person + same day = identical output. You can verify against any traditional calendar source.<p>2. The prose (today's stars, character sketch, life arc, advice) is written by Claude, applying centuries-old reading conventions to that fixed data. Not LLM-hallucinated horoscope.<p>If you have fun with it, a star would mean a lot.

Show HN: Site Mogging

Hi HN,<p>I've been playing around with Cloudflare's Browser Run and Workers AI to create this funny "website vs website"-website.<p>Google's Gemma 4b model is actually quite good at vision.

Show HN: AI CAD Harness

Hi HN, I'm Zach, one of the co-founders of Adam (<a href="https://adam.new">https://adam.new</a>).<p>We've been on HN twice before with text-to-CAD/3D experiments [1][2]. The honest takeaway from those threads: prompt-to-3D model web apps are fun, but serious mechanical engineers don't want a black box that spits out an STL. They want help inside the CAD tool they already use, with full visibility and control over the feature tree.<p>So we built that. Adam is now a harness that integrates directly with your CAD. It reads your parts, understands the existing feature tree, and edits it for you agentically. We are now live in beta on Onshape and Fusion! [3]:<p>Install link Autodesk Fusion: <a href="https://fusion.adam.new/install">https://fusion.adam.new/install</a><p>Install link PTC Onshape: <a href="https://cad.onshape.com/appstore/apps/Design & Documentation/690a8dc864e816c112aa66a0" rel="nofollow">https://cad.onshape.com/appstore/apps/Design & Documenta...</a><p>Things people are using it for today: - "Merge redundant features and clean up my tree" - "Rename every feature so the tree is actually readable" - "Round all internal edges with a 2mm fillet" - “Parametrize my model” - Along with of course, using Adam to generate CAD end-to-end!<p>A few things we care about that aren't obvious from the listing:<p>1. From the start we have always believed in CAD as code as the right abstraction. Our harness leverages Onshape's FeatureScript and Python in Fusion heavily.<p>2. We run an internal CAD benchmark across frontier models. There has been a massive jump in the spatial reasoning capabilities of recent models, particularly GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7 [4] [5]<p>3. We open-sourced our earlier text-to-CAD work [6]<p>A note on the Anthropic Autodesk connector that shipped a couple days ago [7]: We think it's great for the space and validates the direction.<p>Where Adam is different: - Model-agnostic. We pick whichever frontier model is winning on each task type from our own internal bench, instead of being tied to one lab. - We live natively in your CAD apps and are actively building integrations across all programs<p>What would you want an in-CAD agent to do that nothing does today?<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182206">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182206</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45140921">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45140921</a><p>[3] <a href="https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2050264512230719980?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2050264512230719980?s=20</a><p>[4] <a href="https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2044859329329893376?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2044859329329893376?s=20</a><p>[5] <a href="https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2047795078912172122?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2047795078912172122?s=20</a><p>[6] <a href="https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM</a><p>[7] <a href="https://x.com/claudeai/status/2049143440508616863?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/claudeai/status/2049143440508616863?s=20</a>

Show HN: Perfect Bluetooth MIDI for Windows

Hi HN, I'm Erwin. I built a small free open-source utility that bridges Bluetooth LE MIDI keyboards into the new Windows MIDI Services stack so any DAW or Web MIDI app can use them as if they were wired.<p>I bought a Roland FP-90X piano partly because it had Bluetooth MIDI. On my Windows 11 PC, pairing succeeded, but my DAW couldn't see the keyboard, and notes I sent from the PC never made the piano sing. After a regrettable number of evenings, I'd separated this into three independent bugs stacked on top of each other.<p>The first one is the famous one: Windows only natively exposes BLE-MIDI through the WinRT API, which almost no DAW polls. So even when pairing succeeds, MIDI apps still don't see the device. The usual workaround is MIDIberry + loopMIDI, but I couldn't get that combination to work reliably in my case, and I wanted a single-app solution. The new Windows MIDI Services stack ships with a feature called loopback endpoints: anything written to one comes out the other, and any winmm/WinRT/WMS app sees them as normal MIDI ports. So the app does WinRT BLE-MIDI in, WMS loopback out. That solved direction one, piano to PC.<p>Direction two, PC to piano, still didn't work. NoteOn writes were getting ATT-acked, but the piano stayed silent. I tried both write modes (some BLE-MIDI firmware silently drops one or the other), poked the proprietary ISSC characteristic. Every variant ATT-acked, every variant produced silence. So the bytes were reaching the piano. Something above the GATT layer was discarding them.<p>After ruling out pairing, encryption, write-mode, and proprietary characteristics, the only obvious lever left was the MIDI channel itself. The FP-90X has a panel setting called Transmit Channel, default 1. Yet it turns out the FP-90X actually receives on channel 4 (and it can't be changed). Notes I sent on channel 1 were being GATT-acked and silently dropped at the synth engine because they weren't on the channel the engine was listening to. Zero feedback at any layer. The fix had to live up at the application layer, so I added a Detect button that plays N test notes ascending on each channel from 1 to 16: you count the notes you actually hear, and that number is the receive channel. Saved per BLE MAC, about 75 seconds, done forever per piano.<p>Tech stack: .NET 10, Avalonia for the UI (the BLE/MIDI side is Windows-only but the UI layer is portable), Microsoft.Windows.Devices.Midi2 packages for WMS, Windows.Devices.Midi (WinRT) directly for BLE rather than relying on Korg's older WinMM driver. MIT, single self-contained ~21 MB exe, no installer, no telemetry, no account.<p>I built it for myself and use it with my FP-90X to play through a few apps and Web MIDI sites. Pete from the Microsoft Windows MIDI Services team commented positively on the BLE integration when I shared it on r/synthesizers (<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/1szvuiq/comment/oj5ew9b/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/1szvuiq/comme...</a>).<p>Site (with screenshots): <a href="https://mayerwin.github.io/Perfect-Bluetooth-MIDI-For-Windows/" rel="nofollow">https://mayerwin.github.io/Perfect-Bluetooth-MIDI-For-Window...</a><p>Source: <a href="https://github.com/mayerwin/Perfect-Bluetooth-MIDI-For-Windows" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mayerwin/Perfect-Bluetooth-MIDI-For-Windo...</a><p>Long-form technical writeup with the full debugging story: <a href="https://dev.to/mayerwin/why-your-bluetooth-midi-keyboard-silently-drops-notes-on-windows-2i84" rel="nofollow">https://dev.to/mayerwin/why-your-bluetooth-midi-keyboard-sil...</a><p>Personally tested with my FP-90X only. The BLE side is generic, so other keyboards (WIDI Master, CME, Yamaha MD-BT01, Korg microKey Air, ROLI Seaboard, etc.) should work, but I haven't confirmed individually. Device test reports, issues, and PRs very welcome.

Show HN: Winpodx – run Windows apps on Linux as native windows

Show HN: GhostBox – Borrow a disposable little machine from the Global Free Tier

I built this because I was always creating machines on GH actions to test builds on different OS, and I wanted a tight CLI that could do it. I always saw Actions as this great resources and ephemeral machines you could do dev work in just were a natural way for me to work, so this grew out of that workflow.<p>I didn't expect it to blow up, so it wasn't 100% finished when I posted it. But it should stabilize pretty quickly.<p>Happy to know what you think and talk about it.

Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

USB-C cables can be a mess. One cable charges at 5W, another does 100W and Thunderbolt 4, and they look identical in the drawer.<p>WhatCable sits in your menu bar and reads the cable data your Mac already has access to. Plug in a cable and it tells you in plain English what it can actually do: charging wattage, data speed, display support, Thunderbolt, etc.<p>Built in Swift/SwiftUI. Open source, free, no tracking.<p>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable</a>

Show HN: TRiP – a complete transformer engine in C built from scratch just by me

Show HN: I wrote a DOOM clone in my own programming language

Show HN: My retired dad and I made a daily, somewhat difficult, quiz

My dad makes the questions, I made the site.<p>I think the genre and the level of difficulty is suited for HN. Hope you enjoy.<p>(I promise no AI-generated questions, they are all hand made!).