The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: JavaScript web apps with WASM layout and GPU rendering in 280 KB
Over the past year, I have been working to find a better way to write cross-platform apps.<p>The problems I am trying to solve:<p>- Native frameworks only work on a subset of platforms, so a different implementation of the UI needs to be written per target.
- They are updated at the same pace as the platform itself, which forces the developer to split the user base to be able to use new features, or wait a long time for bugs to get fixed.
- They also force developers to use specific high-level languages, so they are not a good fit for apps with high performance requirements, like creative apps or games.
- Cross-platform frameworks that rely on bundling a browser engine solve the problem of code reuse, but they inherit the limitations of HTML/CSS.
- Those that take control over layout and rendering are not efficient and lightweight enough to be used on the web, and require the use of compiled languages.<p>Ideally, we would be able to bundle the UI framework directly with the application. This would allow developers to use new features and fix issues in the UI framework immediately. It would also allow ideas for improvements to compete in a natural way, rather than being decided by a committee.<p>Uniform is my idea for how we can solve these problems. This is the structure:<p>- A layout and rendering engine written in C, compiled to WASM on the web and native code on all other platforms
- A JavaScript API where each function call gets forwarded directly into the core, for best performance and efficiency
- A native runtime (<2 MB) that makes it possible to run the same JavaScript code on macOS and iOS (more platforms to come). The runtime can also generate packaged apps to upload to app stores. The packaging steps are also described in JS.<p>Uniform supports very fast iteration cycles via hot-reload on all platforms. Even on iOS, the JS source code of an app can be changed while the app is running. Changes are visible on the next display refresh. No connection to a computer or the internet is required. Apps can be written from scratch on a phone, with native performance.<p>The readme in the linked repository includes many examples and a detailed explanation of the core ideas. It is handwritten without any use of AI.<p>And here is a live demo:
<a href="https://raffk.com/hn-demo/" rel="nofollow">https://raffk.com/hn-demo/</a><p>It should work in any browser that supports WebGPU. (To get 120 Hz support in Safari, the “Prefer Page Rendering Updates near 60fps” feature flag needs to be disabled.)
Show HN: Someone Was Here – Find out who used your Mac while you were away
Many thanks to my ex for inspiring my new MacOS app, Someone Was Here.<p>It takes a photo of whoever uses your Mac while you're away, whether you left it unlocked or they know your password, and sends their photo to your iPhone if the face isn't yours.<p>I built Someone Was Here as a menu bar app making use of Apple Vision and a local face recognition run via Core ML. It all runs locally on your Mac with no tracking or ads.<p>Real-time remote alerts are available via one-time $4.99 lifetime purchase via the free companion iPhone/iPad app, Pushover, ntfy, Telegram or a webhook.
Show HN: MeowDisplay Is iPhone Mirroring, but in Reverse
Hey HN and Cats, thank you for checking this out!<p>Github:
<a href="https://github.com/raiseCatError/meowdisplay" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/raiseCatError/meowdisplay</a><p>EDIT 2: I should've mentioned that MeowDisplay started as a fork of OpenDisplay: <a href="https://github.com/peetzweg/opendisplay" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/peetzweg/opendisplay</a>
which provided the foundational screen capture, virtual display, encoding and iPhone/iPad receivers. I've since taken it in a more phone-first direction, with work on the interaction, streaming and security layers. I've credited OpenDisplay and its developer Philip in the README under "Built on OpenDisplay".<p>MeowDisplay is my take on the control your Mac from your phone scene. Available on iPhones, iPads and Macs, with Android rn in closed testing.<p>The website has interactive illustrative demos if you'd like to see the app demonstrated.<p>I think MeowDisplay does a few things differently, some of which I prefer and you might too.<p>Such as Window view: allowing multiple tabs in split-screen type panes. Traditional Mirror/Extend views exist as alternatives.
Floating windows: coming in the 2.1 release.<p>Touch input approaches: Direct Touch(Classic or Natural), experimental Smart Touch, and Trackpad mode alongside Apple Pencil support. Doesn't sacrifice display space for a trackpad, use all of the phone's screen with your preferred mode.<p>Stage Peek: shows a scrollable and searchable list of your Mac's windows on your phone along with an app drawer when you hold and pull on the left edge of your screen.<p>It's free and open source so you can try it and see if it's for you without having to commit to it or anything.<p>EDIT: I've used MeowDisplay during development whilst I was travelling between cities, left my acbook at home clamshell, powered, external display attached, and used it for small tasks remotely, it was pretty reliable even on a 5G network on a moving bus.<p>Meow,
Jai
Show HN: DBDelve – Open-Source DB Client Made with Rust and GPUI
Hi HN, I’m Shayan and a few months ago I started building a DB Client DBDelve with a focus on performance and just making something that feels good to use (in the spirit of Zed, Ghostty, and other tools that just feel pleasant to use).<p>For my workflow I’ve always looked for performance, especially since some time ago I had a really outdated machine and any kind of bloat was really noticeable, I remember using DBeaver and it just crashing on me multiple times, I also had to use postGIS which just made it worse. I migrated all my essential dev tools to use the ones with performance in mind (Zed, Ghostty etc) but the only thing that was missing was DB Client. The main choices everyone has are DBeaver which is a memory hog and an overkill for most of the tasks imo. The other options like Datagrid, Beekeeper, TablePlus are either electron based so bloated and memory hogs or paid and closed-source.<p>DBDelve 0.3.6 against DBeaver 25.3.1 on the same Postgres table, median of 5 runs each (2026-10-11, M1 Pro, 32 GB). Times are from the action to the rows rendered.<p><pre><code> DBDelve DBeaver
Launch 1.1 s 5.2 s
Idle memory 133 MB 606 MB
1,000-row query 0.21 s 1.96 s
1M rows, time 56 s 208 s
1M rows, memory [1] 4.9 GB 17 GB
</code></pre>
[1] The whole 1M-row, 100-column table pulled into memory on purpose, with the row limit off. Not a normal use case; DBeaver's heap limit had to be raised manually for the benchmark.<p>Scrolling perf with 1 million rows loaded with 100 columns each: <a href="https://youtu.be/V2MOhJYFqIE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/V2MOhJYFqIE</a><p>It has most of the features most devs would need for 90% of their workflow plus some more I thought would be a nice touch:
Readonly, read-write and Full Access modes
Glass themes (If you’re into them, I am)
Keyboard focused with every keybinding customizable
Organization of connections into projects<p>Me and some other folks have been daily driving it for more than a month now and most good feedback comes on it having a really simple UI to navigate, very stable for its age and the performance of course. I’m also sharing here because those people tell me this has potential to grow so I’m trying my hand at distributing it.<p>Just want to give a huge shoutout here to the Zed team for GPUI, it's a breeze to work with if you just get through them not updating the crate officially on crates.io but the community has found the solutions for it, you just have to dig deep for it. It performs extremely well and just the HTML-like structure of it, makes it easy to understand for someone from a web dev background and agents are very good at writing it too. GPUI component also solves a lot of problems with having a good component library we can use. I think for anyone starting a GPUI project now, GPUI-kit makes a lot of sense, it just bundles GPUI, GPUI-component together and has some optimizations adding retained mode which is experimental but could provide a lot of benefit, so think all things considered it should be the default way.<p>The major optimization I did was just lowering the memory overhead by using packed rows which reduced the memory usage by 40% on large datasets (8.1GB to 4.9GB on a 4GB table loaded in app), everything else came bundled in with Rust and GPUI mostly or they just made it very easy.<p>Limitations:
It's not signed and notarized, identity verification from apple's side has been a nightmare but it should be signed soon.
Don’t expect feature parity with more mature clients for now, the general direction of this right now is the zed way of adding features in but after making sure the core workflows are done with a high quality.<p>Do give it a try, you can import your connections from dbeaver and tableplus.<p><a href="https://github.com/ShayanAbbas1/dbdelve" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ShayanAbbas1/dbdelve</a>
Show HN: Flide: Make Jev-like decision models up to 9.5x faster
Decision models need their own inference engine.<p>So we developed Flide, a high-performance and exact inference engine for Jev-like decision models.<p>Flide achieves up to a 9.5x speedup over vLLM and SGLang.<p>It now supports 30+ popular local Jev-like decision models.<p>Start to make your decision immediately:<p>pip install flide
Show HN: Every satellite that passed over any place this week, and its photos
hey HN, i built this because i wanted to know what had actually photographed my street.<p>type in any place and it finds every satellite that passed over it in the last 7 days (SGP4 on the CelesTrak catalog, runs in your browser in about half a second), then pulls the real Sentinel-2 / Landsat / NASA images from those passes.<p>some fun bits:
- the pass search can't skip a pass. checked it against a brute force on poles, the antimeridian and tiny swaths: 0 missed
- all ~17k objects in orbit are drawn on the GPU, solving Kepler's equation every frame
- Sentinel-2 timestamps are often 5-10 min off from when the sat actually crosses your spot, which was a fun one to figure out<p>it only says "watched" if a real image exists, and it doesn't store your location.<p>code: <a href="https://github.com/dev-Armaan/satellites" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dev-Armaan/satellites</a><p>would love feedback, especially on what data sources to add
Show HN: Maple – Sub-2-BPW Moe Pruning to Run Gemma 4 26B at 45 TPS on a 6GB GPU
A field guide to CAPTCHA types and how they break
Show HN: Where Were We
A little web game I made as an anniversary present for my wife.<p>Upload vacation photos and make them into a game.<p>WWW uses EXIF to determine where and when the photo was taken. This is then turned into a game you can send to anyone.
Show HN: Where Were We
A little web game I made as an anniversary present for my wife.<p>Upload vacation photos and make them into a game.<p>WWW uses EXIF to determine where and when the photo was taken. This is then turned into a game you can send to anyone.
Show HN: Vegetable Gardening for Engineers
Show HN: Vegetable Gardening for Engineers
Show HN: An offline desktop companion to help maintain a healthy blink rhythm
Profession like software engineer, mechanical / graphics designer takes a lot of strain on your eyes, observing minute details for hours and hours on screen can significantly reduce the blink rate which you might not even notice until it gets irreversibly painful, leaving you with dry eyes. I am already a victim of it, working 20 years as a research engineer in computer vision, zooming into pixel level details to hand craft algorithms. Now the doctors says its only regular use of lubricating drops can keep your eyes safe.<p>Now with AI and available fantastic libraries it's possible to play safe so that your body does not pay the price of your profession. EyesRhythm is build to help you keep the blink rhythm healthy by giving small audio / visual indication to maintain healthy blink rhythm not just by monitoring healthy blink rate but also keeping a watch on how rhythmic they are.<p>EyeRhythm also has a visual log for the neck movement. It is also capable to automatically track the face using multiple webcams that you might have on your working desk to get the best view of your eyes for accurate blink detection.<p>Most importantly it works completely local no internet required.
Show HN: An offline desktop companion to help maintain a healthy blink rhythm
Profession like software engineer, mechanical / graphics designer takes a lot of strain on your eyes, observing minute details for hours and hours on screen can significantly reduce the blink rate which you might not even notice until it gets irreversibly painful, leaving you with dry eyes. I am already a victim of it, working 20 years as a research engineer in computer vision, zooming into pixel level details to hand craft algorithms. Now the doctors says its only regular use of lubricating drops can keep your eyes safe.<p>Now with AI and available fantastic libraries it's possible to play safe so that your body does not pay the price of your profession. EyesRhythm is build to help you keep the blink rhythm healthy by giving small audio / visual indication to maintain healthy blink rhythm not just by monitoring healthy blink rate but also keeping a watch on how rhythmic they are.<p>EyeRhythm also has a visual log for the neck movement. It is also capable to automatically track the face using multiple webcams that you might have on your working desk to get the best view of your eyes for accurate blink detection.<p>Most importantly it works completely local no internet required.
Show HN: Did prediction markets do any predicting this midterms?
I've heard so much about how prediction markets are the guiding light in this dark world. But when put head to head against polls or Nate Silver's FLIPR model, they are really a wash. Especially looking at flipped or close-by-polls races, there is no alpha compared to a traditional poll-based model. Was this obvious to everyone else too? Can we treat them like the entertainment they are and tax them for the terrible ads?
Show HN: Spindle – a full-featured, type-safe web framework for OCaml 5
Spindle is a multicore-by-design, eio-native web framework for modern OCaml.<p>Its central idea is to provide an expressive, type-driven API and derive the rest: codecs, request validation, OpenAPI spec and frontend schemas (Zod and Melange). This keeps contracts in sync between server and client without maintaining separate definitions.<p>The framework includes an RFC-strict HTTP server, composable dependencies, WebSockets, SSE and high-level primitives for building MCP servers. It also provides production-ready essentials like distributed tracing, OT-compatible metrics, logging and other features you would expect. Speed was never the goal but the benchmarks show it running x2 faster than NestJS and x5 faster than FastAPI on a single core.<p>Give it a try.<p>Documentation: <a href="https://hyphatech.github.io/spindle/" rel="nofollow">https://hyphatech.github.io/spindle/</a>
Show HN: Spindle – a full-featured, type-safe web framework for OCaml 5
Spindle is a multicore-by-design, eio-native web framework for modern OCaml.<p>Its central idea is to provide an expressive, type-driven API and derive the rest: codecs, request validation, OpenAPI spec and frontend schemas (Zod and Melange). This keeps contracts in sync between server and client without maintaining separate definitions.<p>The framework includes an RFC-strict HTTP server, composable dependencies, WebSockets, SSE and high-level primitives for building MCP servers. It also provides production-ready essentials like distributed tracing, OT-compatible metrics, logging and other features you would expect. Speed was never the goal but the benchmarks show it running x2 faster than NestJS and x5 faster than FastAPI on a single core.<p>Give it a try.<p>Documentation: <a href="https://hyphatech.github.io/spindle/" rel="nofollow">https://hyphatech.github.io/spindle/</a>
Show HN: We compressed a 31B video+audio diffusion model to 14B, 6 steps, INT8
Show HN: We compressed a 31B video+audio diffusion model to 14B, 6 steps, INT8
Show HN: We compressed a 31B video+audio diffusion model to 14B, 6 steps, INT8