The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: Voiden – an offline, Git-native API tool built around Markdown
Hi HN,<p>We have open-sourced Voiden.<p>Most API tools are built like platforms. They are heavy because they optimize for accounts, sync, and abstraction - not for simple, local API work.<p>Voiden treats API tooling as files.<p>It’s an offline-first, Git-native API tool built on Markdown, where specs, tests, and docs live together as executable Markdown in your repo. Git is the source of truth.<p>No cloud. No syncing. No accounts. No telemetry.Just Markdown, Git, hotkeys, and your damn specs.<p>Voiden is extensible via plugins (including gRPC and WSS).<p>Repo: <a href="https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden</a><p>Download Voiden here : <a href="https://voiden.md/download" rel="nofollow">https://voiden.md/download</a><p>We'd love feedback from folks tired of overcomplicated and bloated API tooling !
Show HN: ÆTHRA – Writing Music as Code
Hi HN<p>I’m building ÆTHRA — a programming language designed specifically for composing music and emotional soundscapes.<p>Instead of focusing on general-purpose programming, ÆTHRA is a pure DSL where code directly represents musical intent: tempo, mood, chords, progression, dynamics, and instruments.<p>The goal is to make music composition feel closer to writing a story or emotion, rather than manipulating low-level audio APIs.<p>Key ideas:
- Text-based music composition
- Chords and progressions as first-class concepts
- Time, tempo, and structure handled by the language
- Designed for ambient, cinematic, emotional, and minimal music
- Interpreter written in C# (.NET)<p>Example ÆTHRA code (simplified):<p>tempo 60
instrument guitar<p>chord Am for 4
chord F for 4
chord C for 4
chord G for 4<p>This generates a slow, melancholic progression suitable for ambient or cinematic scenes.<p>ÆTHRA currently:
- Generates WAV audio
- Supports notes, chords, tempo, duration, velocity
- Uses a simple interpreter (no external DAWs or MIDI tools)
- Is intentionally minimal and readable<p>What it is NOT:
- Not a DAW replacement
- Not MIDI-focused<p>Why I made it:
I wanted a language where music is the primary output — not an afterthought. Something between code, emotion, and sound design.<p>The project is open-source and early-stage (v0.8). I’m mainly looking for:
- Feedback on the language design
- Ideas for musical features worth adding
- Thoughts from people into PL design, audio, or generative art<p>Repo: <<a href="https://github.com/TanmayCzax/AETHRA" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/TanmayCzax/AETHRA</a>><p>Thanks for reading — happy to answer questions or discuss ideas.
Show HN: Zuckerman – minimalist personal AI agent that self-edits its own code
Hi HN,<p>I'm building Zuckerman: a personal AI agent that starts ultra-minimal and can improve itself in real time by editing its own files (code + configuration). Agents can also share useful discoveries and improvements with each other.<p>Repo: <a href="https://github.com/zuckermanai/zuckerman" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zuckermanai/zuckerman</a><p>The motivation is to build something dead-simple and approachable, in contrast to projects like OpenClaw, which is extremely powerful but has grown complex: heavier setup, a large codebase, skill ecosystems, and ongoing security discussions.<p>Zuckerman flips that:<p>1. Starts with almost nothing (core essentials only).<p>2. Behavior/tools/prompts live in plain text files.<p>3. The agent can rewrite its own configuration and code.<p>4. Changes hot-reload instantly (save -> reload).<p>5. Agents can share improvements with others.<p>6. Multi-channel support (Discord/Slack/Telegram/web/voice, etc).<p>Security note: self-edit access is obviously high-risk by design, but basic controls are built in (policy sandboxing, auth, secret management).<p>Tech stack: TypeScript, Electron desktop app + WebSocket gateway, pnpm + Vite/Turbo.<p>Quickstart is literally:<p><pre><code> pnpm install && pnpm run dev
</code></pre>
It's very early/WIP, but the self-editing loop already works in basic scenarios and is surprisingly addictive to play with.<p>Would love feedback from folks who have built agent systems or thought about safe self-modification.
Show HN: NanoClaw – “Clawdbot” in 500 lines of TS with Apple container isolation
I’ve been running Clawdbot for the last couple weeks and have genuinely found it useful but running it scares the crap out of me.<p>OpenClaw has 52+ modules and runs agents with near-unlimited permissions in a single Node process. NanoClaw is ~500 lines of core code, agents run in actual Apple containers with filesystem isolation. Each chat gets its own sandboxed context.<p>This is not a swiss army knife. It’s built to match my exact needs. Fork it and make it yours.
Show HN: Minimal – Open-Source Community driven Hardened Container Images
I would like to share Minimal - Its a open source collection of hardened container images build using Apko, Melange and Wolfi packages. The images are build daily, checked for updates and resolved as soon as fix is available in upstream source and Wolfi package. It utilizes the power of available open source solutions and contains commercially available images for free. Minimal demonstrates that it is possible to build and maintain hardened container images by ourselves.
Minimal will add more images support, and goal is to be community driven to add images as required and fully customizable.
Show HN: Minimal – Open-Source Community driven Hardened Container Images
I would like to share Minimal - Its a open source collection of hardened container images build using Apko, Melange and Wolfi packages. The images are build daily, checked for updates and resolved as soon as fix is available in upstream source and Wolfi package. It utilizes the power of available open source solutions and contains commercially available images for free. Minimal demonstrates that it is possible to build and maintain hardened container images by ourselves.
Minimal will add more images support, and goal is to be community driven to add images as required and fully customizable.
Show HN: Phage Explorer
I got really interested in biology and genetics a few months ago, just for fun.<p>This was largely inspired by the work of Sydney Brenner, which became the basis of my brennerbot.org project.<p>In particular, I became very fascinated by phages, which are viruses that attack bacteria. They're the closest thing to the "fundamental particles" of biology: the minimal units of genetic code that do something useful that allows them to reproduce and spread.<p>They also have some incredible properties, like having a structure that somehow encodes an icosahedron.<p>I always wondered how the DNA of these things translated into geometry in the physical world. That mapping between the "digital" realm of ACGT, which in turn maps onto the 20 amino acids in groups of 3, and the world of 3D, analog shapes, still seems magical and mysterious to me.<p>I wanted to dig deeper into the subject, but not by reading a boring textbook. I wanted to get a sense for these phages in a tangible way. What are the different major types of phages? How do they compare to each other in terms of the length and structure of their genetic code? The physical structure they assume?<p>I decided to make a program to explore all this stuff in an interactive way.<p>And so I'm very pleased to present you with my open-source Phage Explorer:<p>phage-explorer.org<p>I probably went a bit overboard, because what I ended up with has taken a sickening number of tokens to generate, and resulted in ~150k lines of Typescript and Rust/Wasm.<p>It implements 23 analysis algorithms, over 40 visualizations, and has the complete genetic data and 3D structure of 24 different classes of phage.<p>It actually took a lot of engineering to make this work well in a browser; it's a surprising amount of data (this becomes obvious when you look at some of the 3D structure models).<p>It works fairly well on mobile, but if you want to get the full experience, I highly recommend opening it on a desktop browser in high resolution.<p>As far as I know, it's the most complete informational / educational software about phages available anywhere. Now, I am the first to admit that I'm NOT an expert, or even that knowledgeable, about, well, ANY of this stuff.<p>So if you’re a biology expert, please take a look and let me know what you think of what I've made! And if I've gotten anything wrong, please let me know in the GitHub Issues and I'll fix it:<p><a href="https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/phage_explorer" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/phage_explorer</a>
Show HN: Phage Explorer
I got really interested in biology and genetics a few months ago, just for fun.<p>This was largely inspired by the work of Sydney Brenner, which became the basis of my brennerbot.org project.<p>In particular, I became very fascinated by phages, which are viruses that attack bacteria. They're the closest thing to the "fundamental particles" of biology: the minimal units of genetic code that do something useful that allows them to reproduce and spread.<p>They also have some incredible properties, like having a structure that somehow encodes an icosahedron.<p>I always wondered how the DNA of these things translated into geometry in the physical world. That mapping between the "digital" realm of ACGT, which in turn maps onto the 20 amino acids in groups of 3, and the world of 3D, analog shapes, still seems magical and mysterious to me.<p>I wanted to dig deeper into the subject, but not by reading a boring textbook. I wanted to get a sense for these phages in a tangible way. What are the different major types of phages? How do they compare to each other in terms of the length and structure of their genetic code? The physical structure they assume?<p>I decided to make a program to explore all this stuff in an interactive way.<p>And so I'm very pleased to present you with my open-source Phage Explorer:<p>phage-explorer.org<p>I probably went a bit overboard, because what I ended up with has taken a sickening number of tokens to generate, and resulted in ~150k lines of Typescript and Rust/Wasm.<p>It implements 23 analysis algorithms, over 40 visualizations, and has the complete genetic data and 3D structure of 24 different classes of phage.<p>It actually took a lot of engineering to make this work well in a browser; it's a surprising amount of data (this becomes obvious when you look at some of the 3D structure models).<p>It works fairly well on mobile, but if you want to get the full experience, I highly recommend opening it on a desktop browser in high resolution.<p>As far as I know, it's the most complete informational / educational software about phages available anywhere. Now, I am the first to admit that I'm NOT an expert, or even that knowledgeable, about, well, ANY of this stuff.<p>So if you’re a biology expert, please take a look and let me know what you think of what I've made! And if I've gotten anything wrong, please let me know in the GitHub Issues and I'll fix it:<p><a href="https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/phage_explorer" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/phage_explorer</a>
Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out
Hey everyone!<p>Just made this over the past few days.<p>Moltbots can sign up and interact via CLI, no direct human interactions.<p>Just for fun to see what they all talk about :)
Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out
Hey everyone!<p>Just made this over the past few days.<p>Moltbots can sign up and interact via CLI, no direct human interactions.<p>Just for fun to see what they all talk about :)
Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
Built this because tones are killing my spoken Mandarin and I can't reliably hear my own mistakes.<p>It's a 9M Conformer-CTC model trained on ~300h (AISHELL + Primewords), quantized to INT8 (11 MB), runs 100% in-browser via ONNX Runtime Web.<p>Grades per-syllable pronunciation + tones with Viterbi forced alignment.<p>Try it here: <a href="https://simedw.com/projects/ear/" rel="nofollow">https://simedw.com/projects/ear/</a>
Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
Built this because tones are killing my spoken Mandarin and I can't reliably hear my own mistakes.<p>It's a 9M Conformer-CTC model trained on ~300h (AISHELL + Primewords), quantized to INT8 (11 MB), runs 100% in-browser via ONNX Runtime Web.<p>Grades per-syllable pronunciation + tones with Viterbi forced alignment.<p>Try it here: <a href="https://simedw.com/projects/ear/" rel="nofollow">https://simedw.com/projects/ear/</a>
Show HN: Mystral Native – Run JavaScript games natively with WebGPU (no browser)
Hi HN, I've been building Mystral Native — a lightweight native runtime that lets you write games in JavaScript/TypeScript using standard Web APIs (WebGPU, Canvas 2D, Web Audio, fetch) and run them as standalone desktop apps. Think "Electron for games" but without Chromium. Or a JS runtime like Node, Deno, or Bun but optimized for WebGPU (and bundling a window / event system using SDL3).<p>Why: I originally started by starting a new game engine in WebGPU, and I loved the iteration loop of writing Typescript & instantly seeing the changes in the browser with hot reloading. After getting something working and shipping a demo, I realized that shipping a whole browser doesn't really work if I also want the same codebase to work on mobile. Sure, I could use a webview, but that's not always a good or consistent experience for users - there are nuances with Safari on iOS supporting WebGPU, but not the same features that Chrome does on desktop. What I really wanted was a WebGPU runtime that is consistent & works on any platform. I was inspired by deno's --unsafe-webgpu flag, but I realized that deno probably wouldn't be a good fit long term because it doesn't support iOS or Android & doesn't bundle a window / event system (they have "bring your own window", but that means writing a lot of custom code for events, dealing with windowing, not to mention more specific things like implementing a WebAudio shim, etc.). So that got me down the path of building a native runtime specifically for games & that's Mystral Native.<p>So now with Mystral Native, I can have the same developer experience (write JS, use shaders in WGSL, call requestAnimationFrame) but get a real native binary I can ship to players on any platform without requiring a webview or a browser. No 200MB Chromium runtime, no CEF overhead, just the game code and a ~25MB runtime.<p>What it does:
- Full WebGPU via Dawn (Chrome's implementation) or wgpu-native (Rust)
- Native window & events via SDL3
- Canvas 2D support (Skia), Web Audio (SDL3), fetch (file/http/https)
- V8 for JS (same engine as Chrome/Node), also supports QuickJS and JSC
- ES modules, TypeScript via SWC
- Compile to single binary (think "pkg"): `mystral compile game.js --include assets -o my-game`
- macOS .app bundles with code signing, Linux/Windows standalone executables
- Embedding API for iOS and Android (JSC/QuickJS + wgpu-native)<p>It's early alpha — the core rendering path works well & I've tested on Mac, Linux (Ubuntu 24.04), and Windows 11, and some custom builds for iOS & Android to validate that they can work, but there's plenty to improve. Would love to get some feedback and see where it can go!<p>MIT licensed.<p>Repo: <a href="https://github.com/mystralengine/mystralnative" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mystralengine/mystralnative</a><p>Docs: <a href="https://mystralengine.github.io/mystralnative/" rel="nofollow">https://mystralengine.github.io/mystralnative/</a>
Show HN: Cicada – A scripting language that integrates with C
I wrote a lightweight scripting language that runs together with C. Specifically, it's a C library, you run it through a C function call, and it can callback your own C functions. Compiles to ~250 kB. No dependencies beyond the C standard library.<p>Key language features:
* Uses aliases not pointers, so it's memory-safe
* Arrays are N-dimensional and resizable
* Runs scripts or its own 'shell'
* Error trapping
* Methods, inheritance, etc.
* Customizable syntax
Show HN: Cicada – A scripting language that integrates with C
I wrote a lightweight scripting language that runs together with C. Specifically, it's a C library, you run it through a C function call, and it can callback your own C functions. Compiles to ~250 kB. No dependencies beyond the C standard library.<p>Key language features:
* Uses aliases not pointers, so it's memory-safe
* Arrays are N-dimensional and resizable
* Runs scripts or its own 'shell'
* Error trapping
* Methods, inheritance, etc.
* Customizable syntax
Show HN: I built an AI conversation partner to practice speaking languages
Hi,<p>I built TalkBits because most language apps focus on vocabulary or exercises, but not actual conversation. The hard part of learning a language is speaking naturally under pressure.<p>TalkBits lets you have real-time spoken conversations with an AI that acts like a native speaker. You can choose different scenarios (travel, daily life, work, etc.), speak naturally, and the AI responds with natural speech back.<p>The goal is to make it feel like talking to a real person rather than doing lessons.<p>Techwise, it uses realtime speech input, transcription, LLM responses, and tts streaming to keep latency low so the conversation feels fluid.<p>I’m specially interested in feedback about:
– Does it feel natural?
– Where does the conversation break immersion?
– What would make you use this regularly?<p>Happy to answer technical questions too.<p>Thanks
Show HN: I built an AI conversation partner to practice speaking languages
Hi,<p>I built TalkBits because most language apps focus on vocabulary or exercises, but not actual conversation. The hard part of learning a language is speaking naturally under pressure.<p>TalkBits lets you have real-time spoken conversations with an AI that acts like a native speaker. You can choose different scenarios (travel, daily life, work, etc.), speak naturally, and the AI responds with natural speech back.<p>The goal is to make it feel like talking to a real person rather than doing lessons.<p>Techwise, it uses realtime speech input, transcription, LLM responses, and tts streaming to keep latency low so the conversation feels fluid.<p>I’m specially interested in feedback about:
– Does it feel natural?
– Where does the conversation break immersion?
– What would make you use this regularly?<p>Happy to answer technical questions too.<p>Thanks
Show HN: Amla Sandbox – WASM bash shell sandbox for AI agents
WASM sandbox for running LLM-generated code safely.<p>Agents get a bash-like shell and can only call tools you provide, with constraints you define.
No Docker, no subprocess, no SaaS — just pip install amla-sandbox
Show HN: Amla Sandbox – WASM bash shell sandbox for AI agents
WASM sandbox for running LLM-generated code safely.<p>Agents get a bash-like shell and can only call tools you provide, with constraints you define.
No Docker, no subprocess, no SaaS — just pip install amla-sandbox
Show HN: Amla Sandbox – WASM bash shell sandbox for AI agents
WASM sandbox for running LLM-generated code safely.<p>Agents get a bash-like shell and can only call tools you provide, with constraints you define.
No Docker, no subprocess, no SaaS — just pip install amla-sandbox