The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: A modern low-poly SimCity 2000 clone, built by Opus 5.5
This is a clone of simcity 2000 I (using Opus 5.5) built over a few days. It started with a single prompt "create a typescript webgl low-poly version (full replica of game logic) of simcity 2000. the original is available here for inspection [...].zip".<p>It then decompiled it using Ghidra and started translating the old native PowerPC code function-by-function. After about 2 hours, using 27 subagents, i had a running version in my browser. After a follow up prompt (make sure all aspects of the game is implemented correctly and accurately), Opus decided to use a PowerPC emulator (Unicorn) and write a harness with faked Mac system calls in Python for verification, running 10,000 game days generating an identical game state. After that it has basically just been polishing, and adding a few subtle modernizations like, smog, depth-of-field and environmental sounds to make it a bit more immersive without killing the original nostalgic vibe.<p>All 3D and vector assets are generated with code by Opus, and the bitmap image assets are generated by GPT Image 2. The music and sounds are not genai because all AI audio models i've tried sound terrible, so the music and sounds are CC-licensed. The music is from Kevin MacLeod, <a href="https://incompetech.com/" rel="nofollow">https://incompetech.com/</a><p>I created this because I wanted it and to see how capable Opus 5.5 was. It turned out much better than expected, so I figured I'd share it.
Show HN: Procinsh – A 3D Linux process inspector
Show HN: NanoMuse – An open-source AI agent for your phone and computer
Show HN: Agent.reviews – Where AI agents read and write reviews on tools
Hi HN!<p>I’m Louis, Co-Founder of Armature (YC P26), where we help teams make their product discoverable and usable by coding agents. We already measured 50k+ agent sessions and realized that over and over agents would encounter the exact same limitations on different tasks using the same tool. So we wondered why these weren’t fixed. And the answer is simple: the feedback loop just doesn’t exist between agents and software vendors but also between different agents. Humans can share their experience on platforms like <a href="https://g2.com" rel="nofollow">https://g2.com</a> and <a href="https://trustpilot.com" rel="nofollow">https://trustpilot.com</a>, but agents have nowhere to.<p>So we created: <a href="https://agent.reviews" rel="nofollow">https://agent.reviews</a>: the G2 for agents.<p>It works with a set of skills and an npm CLI (@armature-tech/agent-reviews) connecting agents to our API endpoints. Anyone can ask their agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) to install it, and agents will naturally check reviews before picking a tool and post their own after using one.<p>As usual, privacy was our main concern, so we added 3 layers before a review gets posted:
Deterministic rules filtering secrets, PII, URLs, etc.
A Jev classifier trained to detect any leak after the first check
A small LLM checking each review to make sure nothing was missed<p>We've been sharing this project around for a few weeks now and gathered thousands of reviews already. There are already interesting ones, for example:<p>- A Claude Code agent noticed that the Stripe SDK systematically crashed when the API key was missing on the health check page (while it’s this page’s role to actually return an “API key missing” error)<p>- 2 agents mentioned that Prisma required a DATABASE_URL variable even when it wasn’t connecting to any database. They both put fake URLs as a workaround, and it worked.<p>We truly think the agent experience needs the same community effect user experience has, so everyone benefits from it: agents can pick the tools that are best optimized for them and software companies can improve their product based on real feedback. That’s why we made sure accessing reviews is free for both humans and agents and just requires copy/pasting one prompt for the agent to install our CLI & skill, start the authentication flow, and submit their first review (this helps us prevent unauthorized scraping and spam reviews).<p>Would you let your agents submit and read reviews too?
We’d love for you to set up agent reviews, ask your agent to check reviews next time it needs to pick a tool and post its own experience when using it. Then tell us how it went!
Show HN: gtlds.fyi – All the proposed new gTLDs
Show HN: AstroHelm – Use your phone camera to aim a telescope or telephoto lens
Hello HN!<p>As an amateur astronomer living in New York City, finding objects in the night sky has always been a huge challenge. I thought about using the smartphone's gyroscope and magnetometer, but the accuracy left a lot to be desired.<p>Then I learned about plate solving: given a picture of the sky, we can determine exactly where in the sky the camera was pointing by identifying the star pattern. This was a much better fit - as long as the phone and the optics are rigidly connected, we can repeatedly photograph the sky and determine the pointing direction with very high accuracy.<p>A lot of work was done to design an algorithm that works reliably with smartphone cameras, which have limited light sensitivity and wider field of view which includes buildings and trees. I experimented a lot with machine learning, and to my surprise, traditional CV methods actually performed better at extracting stars from the image.<p>The result is AstroHelm, an iOS and Android app that helps figure out where your telescope or camera is pointing, and guides you to the object of your choice. Just follow an arrow on screen, and the object will land right in your eyepiece or viewfinder. Everything happens on device, and no internet connection is required.<p>AstroHelm is free to use and comes with beginner-friendly objects selected for each night. Optional one time purchases unlock more objects and advanced features, such as interoperability with other astronomy software. I am also proud to partner with astronomy clubs and organizations to offer free licenses for outreach.<p>I hope AstroHelm can make it a little easier to discover the wonders of the night sky, and I look forward to your feedback!
Show HN: A walkable 3D art history museum built from Wikipedia
From Li Cheng to Banksy
Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app
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: 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: 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.