The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: Startup sci-fi novel that took me 5 years to write
It started after reading Stephen King's "On Writing" where he likened the art of writing as the unearthing of an archeological site after you stumbled upon a unique bone of a story. His advice was to choose a domain you are deeply intimate with. For me, I've been a struggling startup founder for 15 years—enough material to inspire a novel.<p>A 1,000-word writing exercise turned into a complete 125k-word manuscript over the course of a year.<p>In year 1, I learned the sheer joy of unencumbered creative flow and authentic expression. A similar flow I used to get from coding (and more recently vibe coding). What made it effortless was a mindset that I was writing for the sake of it, not with the intention of publishing.<p>After a year of keeping it close to my chest, I decided to show it to a few close friends. They liked some of it, destroyed some of it. Some ultimately encouraged me to publish it.<p>In year 2, I learned about the chasm between writing for myself and writing for an audience. Nerdy stuff I thought were clever completely flew over my readers' heads. So I studied a dozen textbooks on literature, prose, poetry, voice, grammar, and completely rewrote the manuscript twice over, this time with the audience in mind. There is a lot more finesse to writing than I originally appreciated.<p>In year 3, I felt ready to pitch literary agents. The reason wasn't to make a career out of writing, but to learn from professionals. After 100 personalized pitches and 0 offers of representation, I learned that pitching agents was much harder than pitching VCs. Especially for a niche novel like mine; fellow startup founders was too small of a TAM.<p>In year 4, I engaged with a professional author/editor (Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse), who gave me essays worth of incredible developmental feedback. Lots of nuanced feedback I couldn't get from textbooks. Per his advice, I started back at chapter 1 and refactored the whole manuscript. I distilled it down to the best 88k words.<p>The tinkering never stops; when do you know it's done? I realized that I kept on tinkering because it was more comfortable than overcoming the fear of launching. Today, on 06/08/26, almost 5 years after that Stephen King writing exercise, I'm ready to say “ship it.”<p>Blockchained is a near-future startup sci-fi thriller that chronicles a struggling startup founder who meets a mysterious investor in Hong Kong. Little does he know that the too-good-to-be-true investor works for the Chinese government.<p>Blockchained was written for the fellow startup founders, engineers, and near-future sci-fi enthusiasts. In other words, HN community, you are my target audience<p>Sample chapters available at <a href="https://www.blockchainednovel.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.blockchainednovel.com/</a> — eBook and paperback available today. Hardcover edition coming soon.<p>I suppose we live in an era where it must be qualified that Blockchained was 99.9% lovingly handcrafted. No AI was used to write this novel aside from research, spellcheck, grammar, and the occasional phrasing checks.
Show HN: Learn from 30 historical figures, open source, nonprofit, self-hosted
Hello HN, I am the founder of Agora Cosmica.<p>This started about three years ago. On a walk I asked a chatbot to interpret the cave dream from Cormac McCarthy's book "The Road" as C.G. Jung. It gave me a perspective I had not thought of. But for my own dreams the policies of the big providers felt wrong for so personal conversations, as zero data retention is not available. So I started building.<p>The project evolved to a German nonprofit and we published the code (AGPL-3.0) last month. The content is still copyright, but will be opened to CC-BY 4.0 in the next 6 to 12 months.<p>Agora Cosmica is a library to learn from 30 historical figures. Each one has 12 narrated stories about their teachings / life wisdom, speech to speech conversation. Four learning modes and a council where you can gather the figures to discuss or reflect on a topic. Each figure is an AI Echo, an interpretation grounded in primary works, historical context, with a factcheck per figure to show what's verified versus recreated.
On privacy: The speech is self hosted on Hetzner GPU servers, Qwen3-TTS for German, Kokoro TTS for English, Faster-Whisper for transcription. 30 free messages per day (EU-hosted for GDPR), BYOK, or you can run it in a full local self-hosted mode.<p>No conversation is stored, no tracking cookies, no profiling, no signup.<p>The app is slow on purpose. Cosmic, no dopamine rush.<p>The mission is to be a doorway, a first step, an introduction to get people interested and outgrow the app to move to primary texts and human teachers.<p>Live at: <a href="https://agoracosmica.org" rel="nofollow">https://agoracosmica.org</a>
Show HN: Mach – A compiled systems language looking for contributions
Hi HN,<p>I'm the creator of Mach (<a href="https://github.com/octalide/mach" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/octalide/mach</a> or <a href="https://machlang.org" rel="nofollow">https://machlang.org</a>). Two days ago, we finally achieved full self hosting. I wanted to make a post here to show off the language since this is a big milestone for us.<p>## TL;DR about the language for those curious:<p>- There are no external dependencies anywhere in the pipeline. This includes LLVM, libc bindings, or anything of the sort (save for the historical bootstrap compiler, which requires any C compiler and has been phased out completely).<p>- Mach is extremely opinionated and very anti-magic. WYSIWYG is a core principal for the language. There are no hidden behaviors, implicit type conversions, or "automatic features". Simplicity and stripping away ambiguity are core principals that this language upholds.<p>- Performance currently lags behind C by about a factor of only 4x at the time of writing, almost entirely due to the lack of deep compiler optimizations like autovectorization, which have not been fully implemented yet. Eventually, Mach will be at least on par with C.<p>## Why did I build this?<p>I love low level systems languages like C, Zig, Go, and (sometimes) Rust, but I wanted something that actively discourages "cleverness" in favor of long-term maintainability and overall clarity. Mach is highly opinionated and explicitly demands verbosity in ways that other languages are afraid to. Computers aren't magic, and code you write should not pretend they are.
This project initially started out as a learning opportunity for myself, but grew into a fully featured language as time went on. There is still a lot I have to learn, however, and I'm excited to be able to do so as this project continues to grow into the future.<p>## Why do I (the reader) care?<p>If you like C, you'll probably like Mach. Mach takes heavy inspiration from the "vibe" of writing C, but improves on much of the syntax, lacks quite a few footguns, "unhides" a lot of internal mechanisms, and has a FAR better dependency management system.<p>If you want to play around with a language that is fully capable of replacing C, and especially if you would like to contribute to its development, then PLEASE stop by and mess around.<p>## Where should I go to check it out?<p>The github repository has a link to our discord if you'd like to chat with myself or our few other regular users.
My personal account has all of the tooling that exists as well as a few example repos if you feel inclined to try it out.<p>## Will this project by dead in X months?<p>I've been working on this in the background for over 2 years now. This is a long term project that I plan to maintain into the indefinite future, with or without a userbase.
If you like the language at all, I highly encourage you to get involved in its development because it WILL be sticking around in some capacity forever.<p>I know this was a bit "rambly", but let me just say that it's been a great joy to work on this project and I would love any and ALL opinions and contributions, ESPECIALLY if you hate the language or find a problem that needs fixing.
Let me know what you guys think!
Show HN: Command Center, the AI coding env for people who care about quality
Hi HN! We’re Jimmy and Ray. Jimmy is a Thiel Fellow with a Ph. D. from MIT who has worked on programming tools for 15 years; Ray became VP of Sales at a $2B company when he was 19 and has built side-businesses vibe-coding.<p>Last year, we set to answer the question “If AI can write code 100x faster, then why aren’t you shipping 100x faster?” What we learned shocked us — even fairly nontechnical people and solo founders told us they were spending more than half of their development time reading the AI-written code. And much of the rest of the time was spent either de-slop-ping it, or wishing they had done so.<p>As luck turns out, our last two products were a tool that quickly onboards people to large codebases ( <a href="https://x.com/0xjimmyk/status/1873357324229984677" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/0xjimmyk/status/1873357324229984677</a> ) and trainings that taught deep concepts of code quality to CEOs, YC founders, and engineers at top companies ( mirdin.com ), so we were extremely well-positioned to solve these problems.<p>Command Center is an agentic coding environment focused on quality. With a few keypresses, you can start building 3 features at once and soon have 3 diffs ready, each consisting of 2000 changed lines across 50 files….<p>This is normally the point where you think “Crap, what now?”<p>With Command Center, at this point you simply click “Refactor,” and watch the vibed slop turn into readable robustness. Then you click “Generate Walkthrough,” and then suddenly, to read a 2000 line diff, instead of scrolling up and down trying to make sense of it, you just press the right arrow key 200 times. See something you don’t like? Click on line 37, type “Do this and all other network fetches in the background Cmd+Enter,” and you have a few more agents getting your code into final shape. Click or type “Commit,” “Push,” “Create PR” — you just shipped a high quality, non-slop feature<p>We’re striving to be the best at every step of the pipeline, but can just try Command Center in pieces wherever you feel your current workflow is weakest. We have users who do all their coding in Zed or the Codex app, and then jump over to Command Center for a walkthrough when it finishes running. There’s even a skill that will pop open a Command Center walkthrough from the environment of your choice. Or you can just keep Command Center running while you do your work elsewhere, and if your AI deletes anything, you have Command Center’s snapshots to the rescue.<p>We launched quietly last year and have been refining since. The quality and usability have kept going up, and Command Center is now ready for a lot more attention.<p>Since our quiet launch, we’ve seen at least a dozen other agentic coding environments appear….approximately all of which have the same feature set focused on the part which is already easy (generating the first version of the code) and with at best a shoddy answer to the hard part (everything that comes after). Command Center’s focus is making the hard parts easy.<p>Here’s what our users have to say:<p>“[The refactorings] give your LLM taste. I’ve never seen an LLM write code this good before.” — Doug Slater, Staff Engineer, Climavision<p>“With Command Center walkthroughs, I can get through a 400-line diff in less than half the time.” — Prateek Kumar, Platfor Engineer, Sumo Logic<p>This product is not for everyone. If you’re someone who preaches “the prompt is the source, the code is the compiler output,” then you probably won’t enjoy Command Center.<p>But if you want to uphold traditional engineering discipline while also shipping 20 PRs a day, then this is the environment for you.
Show HN: Gravity – interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein
Just for fun and self education, I've built this over a weekend to teach myself why orbits exist, not just show planets going around. Something that was never clearly explain to me in school.
It opens with a guided tour that builds the idea up step by step: two bodies and the equal/opposite force, inertia (the Sun is removed and Earth just drifts straight), then "an orbit is falling and continuously missing," cosmic velocities with a little rocket, Voyager 1 & 2's real gravity assists (the clock runs the actual 1977–1989 dates so the planets orbit into their grand-tour alignment and the slingshots line up), and it ends on Einstein — gravity as curved spacetime, the classic rubber-sheet well.
What's real: every body uses its real radius/mass and J2000 orbital elements; positions come from solving Kepler's equation each frame. You can toggle to an N-body mode (symplectic leapfrog) that shows live energy drift (~1e-6%) so you can see the integrator is honest. The only thing faked is scale — at true scale you can't see anything — so there's a toggle between true scale and a log-remapped "visual" scale, with physics always running in real AU.
Tech: TypeScript + Three.js + Vite, fully client-side, no backend, works offline (surface textures are generated procedurally from value-noise; only Earth uses a real image). Source: <a href="https://github.com/qunabu/Gravity" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/qunabu/Gravity</a><p>Happy to answer questions — and feedback on the physics or the explanations is very welcome. This project might be totally inaccurate in terms of real physics, this is how i do understand this on my own - i'm happy to confront this with reality
Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
Hello HN,<p>I've been working on a simple OS for tinkering and running bare metal apps on vintage PCs.<p>Since I couldn't quite decide whether to target pure 16-bit, or slightly more capable 32-bit machines, I ended up with two separate versions:<p>- GentleOS/32 (<a href="https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32</a>) works on i386+, requires 4MB of RAM and VGA display supporting 640x480x16 mode or any 256-color VESA mode.<p>- GentleOS/16 (<a href="https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos</a>) works on 80186+, requires less than 192KB of RAM and a CGA display supporting 320x200x4 mode.<p>You can find more details in the repos.
Show HN: NoSuggest – Watch YouTube without the recommendation algorithm
NoSuggest is a quiet act of resistance against YouTube algorithms always trying to pull you into a loop of unlimited videos in turn into unlimited screen time. With unending side cards of videos, auto-play, what's next suggestions, YouTube shorts and notifications, users will be doom scrolling for many hours in a day.<p>I faced the same problem. Acknowledging that, not all content in YouTube is bad. There are educational videos, genuine news contents without political bias which is very hard to find outside YouTube and many other good relaxing, entertainment stuff.<p>NoSuggest lets you only follow the YouTube channels you like and removes all types of recommendation YouTube has. So you don't waste time on watching things which you never wanted to watch anyways.<p>UI is very simple. You add your favourite channels in "Channels" tab and latest 5 videos per channel excluding shorts would appear in "Feed" tab. "Search" tab is to search for specific videos to watch and "Saved" tab is to bookmark any video you want to watch later. Intention of NoSuggest is to provide whatever is necessary to extract whats good from YouTube all inside NoSuggest and leave out bad parts.<p>NoSuggest works in any devices. Install it as an app (PWA) in android and iPhone, or simply open in browser in laptops. No sign-in, no account creation or no card details. NoSuggest won't even ask your name. Total privacy for the users.<p>Parents can add the channels and save some educational videos and lock it with the pin for kids mode. Kids won't be able access unwanted additive contents inside NoSuggest.<p>Completely free, no string attached. Source available in Github through NoSuggest website.<p>I would love genuine feedback. Thank you very much for your attention on this matter.
Show HN: NoSuggest – Watch YouTube without the recommendation algorithm
NoSuggest is a quiet act of resistance against YouTube algorithms always trying to pull you into a loop of unlimited videos in turn into unlimited screen time. With unending side cards of videos, auto-play, what's next suggestions, YouTube shorts and notifications, users will be doom scrolling for many hours in a day.<p>I faced the same problem. Acknowledging that, not all content in YouTube is bad. There are educational videos, genuine news contents without political bias which is very hard to find outside YouTube and many other good relaxing, entertainment stuff.<p>NoSuggest lets you only follow the YouTube channels you like and removes all types of recommendation YouTube has. So you don't waste time on watching things which you never wanted to watch anyways.<p>UI is very simple. You add your favourite channels in "Channels" tab and latest 5 videos per channel excluding shorts would appear in "Feed" tab. "Search" tab is to search for specific videos to watch and "Saved" tab is to bookmark any video you want to watch later. Intention of NoSuggest is to provide whatever is necessary to extract whats good from YouTube all inside NoSuggest and leave out bad parts.<p>NoSuggest works in any devices. Install it as an app (PWA) in android and iPhone, or simply open in browser in laptops. No sign-in, no account creation or no card details. NoSuggest won't even ask your name. Total privacy for the users.<p>Parents can add the channels and save some educational videos and lock it with the pin for kids mode. Kids won't be able access unwanted additive contents inside NoSuggest.<p>Completely free, no string attached. Source available in Github through NoSuggest website.<p>I would love genuine feedback. Thank you very much for your attention on this matter.
Show HN: Gitdot – a better GitHub. Open-source, written in Rust
What works now: user signups, org creations, private/public repos, and importing GitHub repositories (both as read-only mirrors and full migrations). So basically, you can create, push and pull to a repo, but we don't have many features quite yet (issues, PRs, CI).<p>What is a bit unique is: 1) we built it in Rust and 2) the website is a little odd. Its design is inspired by CLIs (e.g., fzf, broot, vim) instead of web apps, and as such, lacks some affordances that you might typically expect in favor of keyboard-driven instant navigations (we have the very ambitious goal of an FCP of 100ms). In case you're curious, here's how we we built it: <a href="https://gitdot.io/designs">https://gitdot.io/designs</a><p>We recognize that we're making some bold claims here and are also well aware that we have much to learn. Building software is still hard, and that's a fact we seem to relearn everyday.<p>But we wanted to share what we built so far nonetheless.<p>Cheers, thank y'all for reading, and till the next
—paul & mikkel.
Show HN: Gitdot – a better GitHub. Open-source, written in Rust
What works now: user signups, org creations, private/public repos, and importing GitHub repositories (both as read-only mirrors and full migrations). So basically, you can create, push and pull to a repo, but we don't have many features quite yet (issues, PRs, CI).<p>What is a bit unique is: 1) we built it in Rust and 2) the website is a little odd. Its design is inspired by CLIs (e.g., fzf, broot, vim) instead of web apps, and as such, lacks some affordances that you might typically expect in favor of keyboard-driven instant navigations (we have the very ambitious goal of an FCP of 100ms). In case you're curious, here's how we we built it: <a href="https://gitdot.io/designs">https://gitdot.io/designs</a><p>We recognize that we're making some bold claims here and are also well aware that we have much to learn. Building software is still hard, and that's a fact we seem to relearn everyday.<p>But we wanted to share what we built so far nonetheless.<p>Cheers, thank y'all for reading, and till the next
—paul & mikkel.
Show HN: Performative-UI – A react component library of design tropes
hope you enjoy
Show HN: Performative-UI – A react component library of design tropes
hope you enjoy
Show HN: Free animated icon library for Vue
Hi everyone!<p>Tim here, maintainer of the lucide-motion-vue library. I build this as a way to use nice animated icons in my webapps. We were already on lucide, and found animate-ui animated icons as a great collection, unfortunately React only or made to be used with shadcn.<p>So I ported the library to Vue, and combined it with another library (lucide-animated.com). As both libraries dont share the same animations and/or icons, this creates the largest animated icons library for vue that can be used from one source.<p>Additionally, I've made several quality of live changes to make it easier to use the icons:
- drop-in replacement for lucide icons, or use a seperate namespace if you want
- several animation variants
- easy to be used standalone or in buttons
- several animation triggers
- comprehensive overview, playground and docs page, comes with llms.txt to be used by agents<p>Finally, the repo also contains a "forge". With this, you can<p>a) take any icon from the lucide library, or have ai suggest some
b) autogenerate animations for these icons
c) add them to the library with one click<p>We'll use the forge over time to hopefully create animated variants for all of lucides icons, if these icons are useful to be animated.<p>Looking forward to hear your feedback
Cheers!
Show HN: Free animated icon library for Vue
Hi everyone!<p>Tim here, maintainer of the lucide-motion-vue library. I build this as a way to use nice animated icons in my webapps. We were already on lucide, and found animate-ui animated icons as a great collection, unfortunately React only or made to be used with shadcn.<p>So I ported the library to Vue, and combined it with another library (lucide-animated.com). As both libraries dont share the same animations and/or icons, this creates the largest animated icons library for vue that can be used from one source.<p>Additionally, I've made several quality of live changes to make it easier to use the icons:
- drop-in replacement for lucide icons, or use a seperate namespace if you want
- several animation variants
- easy to be used standalone or in buttons
- several animation triggers
- comprehensive overview, playground and docs page, comes with llms.txt to be used by agents<p>Finally, the repo also contains a "forge". With this, you can<p>a) take any icon from the lucide library, or have ai suggest some
b) autogenerate animations for these icons
c) add them to the library with one click<p>We'll use the forge over time to hopefully create animated variants for all of lucides icons, if these icons are useful to be animated.<p>Looking forward to hear your feedback
Cheers!
Show HN: Oproxy – inspect and modify network traffic from the browser
Show HN: Oproxy – inspect and modify network traffic from the browser
Show HN: Kyushu – A self-hostable WASM sandbox for JavaScript workers
Show HN: Kyushu – A self-hostable WASM sandbox for JavaScript workers
Show HN: I Derived a Pancake
After 25 years of making other people's pancake recipes - always yearning for more tang, more fluff, and more predictability - I decided to derive the pancake recipe from the chemistry.<p>You mark checkboxes for what you have on hand (ricotta, sour cream, kefir, buttermilk, yogurt, cottage cheese, lemon, cream of tartar, etc.) and it computes the best recipe based on targets for acid, fat, salt, sugar, and CO2.<p>My particular favorite are the yeast-raised lemon ricotta kefir pancakes - the best I've ever had.<p>The math is done in a small pure-ESM library: ingredient composition to component masses and acid moles, a stoichiometry layer, and a bisection solver for the target deficits.<p>I'm not a chemist, so if something is off, tell me and I will fix it!
Show HN: I Derived a Pancake
After 25 years of making other people's pancake recipes - always yearning for more tang, more fluff, and more predictability - I decided to derive the pancake recipe from the chemistry.<p>You mark checkboxes for what you have on hand (ricotta, sour cream, kefir, buttermilk, yogurt, cottage cheese, lemon, cream of tartar, etc.) and it computes the best recipe based on targets for acid, fat, salt, sugar, and CO2.<p>My particular favorite are the yeast-raised lemon ricotta kefir pancakes - the best I've ever had.<p>The math is done in a small pure-ESM library: ingredient composition to component masses and acid moles, a stoichiometry layer, and a bisection solver for the target deficits.<p>I'm not a chemist, so if something is off, tell me and I will fix it!