The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
Latest posts:
Show HN: After a decade of reversing, I got co-op working in DOS Wing Commander
Show HN: Kairos – Open-source risk and fraud decisioning platform
Hey HN, Ayan here from Finic. We’re launching Kairos, an open source alternative to Sift, Sardine, and other real-time fraud decisioning platforms. Kairos addresses two of the biggest problems facing traditional decisioning tools: a lack of labeled data to train on and dealing with fraudsters that are constantly changing their tactics.<p>1. Traditional fraud solutions use ML models such as XGBoost to detect fraud, but these models are dependent on quality labeled data which many businesses do not have. We address this by using “System One” decision models in additional to traditional models such as XGBoost and logistic regression. This allows you to incorporate plain language questions such as “Is this a throwaway email” into your decisioning, bypassing the need for large amounts of labeled data. This also allows you to capture aspects of fraud that are more unstructured, which is something that XGBoost models struggle with.<p>2. Fraud teams are facing off with live players that are constantly changing their behavior to bypass the detection logic they have in place. You can train a detection model or define a ruleset once, but it will become obsolete in a matter of weeks as fraudsters figure out what your detection logic is. This means that you need a team regularly training models and updating rules based on new fraud patterns. Typically this takes a large data science/ML team. Kairos addresses this by introducing an MCP server, so that your agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc.) can define a decision workflow, train models on your data, and pick the variant that performs best.<p>You can self-host Kairos with Docker or use the hosted version at <a href="https://kairos.finic.ai">https://kairos.finic.ai</a>
Show HN: I built a tool that prices a pre-built PC part by part
I've missed out on an awesome computer that I could use for a project because figuring out value took too long. Users paste a listing and receive a value grade, dated component estimates and a shareable report. AI reads the listing but my custom built price engine determines the grade (updated every day). Self financed and working now. Looking for feedback re: scoring, interface, and if its helpful. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpft--x3WlI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpft--x3WlI</a>
Show HN: Uncracked City, detective game where you question LLM suspects that lie
To give you some context on the project. I'm a solo founder and I use AI heavily in my work. The idea came from wanting players to discover cities. Each city has its own history, so every case is set in a real city with real public places. The crime and the people are on other hand invented. The part that I care most is the playable aspect of the game, a model plays the detective and must solve the case before it goes live.<p>As of today: it's free on Android, the iOS version is still waiting to be reviewed by Apple. It's available in six popular languages, but adding more languages is just a matter of time and demand.My long term vision if it takes off: weekly cases, private parties like a team-building escape game, an MCP so a game master can build their own scenario from ChatGPT or Claude, and maybe tourism offices since players travel the world.
Show HN: HackerChurn – which SaaS tools HN wants to cancel
Show HN: HackerChurn – which SaaS tools HN wants to cancel
Show HN: I built a little browser game to practice Vim commands
I made hjkl to help myself remember Vim commands. It’s a little browser game you can play when you want to unwind and get a bit of Vim practice in.<p>There are still a lot of commands I want to add, but I hope someone finds it useful in the meantime :)
Show HN: HackerTV – HN's most-recommended Youtube videos as 24/7 TV channels
I saw HackerTube (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319510">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319510</a>) a few days ago, the YouTube videos HN keeps
recommending, pulled from 19 years of comments. It made me want to flip
through them instead of picking, so I built a TV for it. I have Algo fatigue.<p>Each topic area is a channel (DEVTV, SOLDER, RETRO, ORBIT, ...), plus HN Prime
(the top 400), a music channel, and Late Night on ch 99, which only broadcasts
11pm-5am your local time and shows color bars otherwise.<p>Similar to HackerTube it was built with Claude Code in a few hours.<p>All credit for the data goes to HackerTube. Happy to hear channel ideas.
Show HN: HackerTV – HN's most-recommended Youtube videos as 24/7 TV channels
I saw HackerTube (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319510">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319510</a>) a few days ago, the YouTube videos HN keeps
recommending, pulled from 19 years of comments. It made me want to flip
through them instead of picking, so I built a TV for it. I have Algo fatigue.<p>Each topic area is a channel (DEVTV, SOLDER, RETRO, ORBIT, ...), plus HN Prime
(the top 400), a music channel, and Late Night on ch 99, which only broadcasts
11pm-5am your local time and shows color bars otherwise.<p>Similar to HackerTube it was built with Claude Code in a few hours.<p>All credit for the data goes to HackerTube. Happy to hear channel ideas.
Show HN: Hacker Times, a New York Times-inspired version of Hacker News
I thought it would be fun to browse HN as if it were a newspaper. The site updates once an hour. Enjoy!
Show HN: Hacker Times, a New York Times-inspired version of Hacker News
I thought it would be fun to browse HN as if it were a newspaper. The site updates once an hour. Enjoy!
Show HN: HackerHack – HackerBooks but for Posts Posted on HN
No AI used for this btw.
Show HN: Warsaw in voxels – An interactive 3D map of the city centre
Explore central Warsaw in voxels - slightly inspired by Minecraft, and MagicaVoxel.
You can change the date, time of day and weather, explore the city, or click on a pedestrian to control them (here a bit of inspiration from Dungeon Keeper).<p>Works best on desktop, but I tried to make it usable on mobile too. The initial load can take a while. It's based on several open datasets, including:<p>- OpenStreetMap (<a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=6/52.02/19.14" rel="nofollow">https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=6/52.02/19.14</a>) - buildings, streets, sidewalks, tram tracks, etc<p>- GUGiK / Geoportal (<a href="https://www.geoportal.gov.pl/" rel="nofollow">https://www.geoportal.gov.pl/</a>) - LiDAR for building heights and trees, aerial imagery for colours<p>- Warsaw's city tree database (<a href="https://mapa.um.warszawa.pl/" rel="nofollow">https://mapa.um.warszawa.pl/</a>) - individual tree species, used for seasonal foliage<p>Open-source (<a href="https://github.com/stared/warsaw-vibe-voxel" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/stared/warsaw-vibe-voxel</a>), so feel invited to (re)use it as you wish!
Show HN: Warsaw in voxels – An interactive 3D map of the city centre
Explore central Warsaw in voxels - slightly inspired by Minecraft, and MagicaVoxel.
You can change the date, time of day and weather, explore the city, or click on a pedestrian to control them (here a bit of inspiration from Dungeon Keeper).<p>Works best on desktop, but I tried to make it usable on mobile too. The initial load can take a while. It's based on several open datasets, including:<p>- OpenStreetMap (<a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=6/52.02/19.14" rel="nofollow">https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=6/52.02/19.14</a>) - buildings, streets, sidewalks, tram tracks, etc<p>- GUGiK / Geoportal (<a href="https://www.geoportal.gov.pl/" rel="nofollow">https://www.geoportal.gov.pl/</a>) - LiDAR for building heights and trees, aerial imagery for colours<p>- Warsaw's city tree database (<a href="https://mapa.um.warszawa.pl/" rel="nofollow">https://mapa.um.warszawa.pl/</a>) - individual tree species, used for seasonal foliage<p>Open-source (<a href="https://github.com/stared/warsaw-vibe-voxel" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/stared/warsaw-vibe-voxel</a>), so feel invited to (re)use it as you wish!
Show HN: I've updated my Linux System Call website and API
I first released those in back in 2020 and now I finally added more architectures, Kernel selector, syscall descriptions and a few other niceties. It should work a bit better on mobile devices too but I am no CSS expert.<p>The API is at <a href="https://api.syscall.sh" rel="nofollow">https://api.syscall.sh</a>
Show HN: I've updated my Linux System Call website and API
I first released those in back in 2020 and now I finally added more architectures, Kernel selector, syscall descriptions and a few other niceties. It should work a bit better on mobile devices too but I am no CSS expert.<p>The API is at <a href="https://api.syscall.sh" rel="nofollow">https://api.syscall.sh</a>
Show HN: I've updated my Linux System Call website and API
I first released those in back in 2020 and now I finally added more architectures, Kernel selector, syscall descriptions and a few other niceties. It should work a bit better on mobile devices too but I am no CSS expert.<p>The API is at <a href="https://api.syscall.sh" rel="nofollow">https://api.syscall.sh</a>
Show HN: Wikihack – HackerTube, but for Wikipedia articles mentioned on HN
After seeing Karpathy's Hackertube and Hackerbooks, I just had to make Wikihack.<p>I scraped all mentions of wikipedia on hackernews and ranked them, and turn them into a scrollable feed to make it a bit more easy to digest / interact with. You can see where people submitted the articles and where people mentioned it in comments.<p>The top shows the most frequently linked articles.<p>Random is random but slightly weighted towards the more frequently linked articles (a little bit like Wikipedia actually).<p>Rising is ranked towards the past 12 months.<p>The entire site is served only through the frontend -- I'll add more features if people enjoy this!
Show HN: Subvocal – Talk to your computer without making noise
Hi HN, we're Aarush and Arnav from The Subvocal Company (YC F26) (<a href="https://subvocal.company/">https://subvocal.company/</a>). We’re building smart glasses that let you talk to your computer without talking out loud. You can mouth words silently and discreetly and the glasses decode them to text at the speed of speech.<p>Here's a video of Dave from YC trying it out: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QdX1eObVYI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QdX1eObVYI</a><p>(Edit: you don't actually have to move your lips or even open your mouth for this to work! Since the RF can see inside your mouth the system can be fine tuned on "internal speech". This isn't the automatic tongue movements that occur when "thinking" words to yourself, but more like mouthing with your lips closed. It's a bit weird to do, but with practice, we have been able to get it down pretty well.)<p>Arnav and I were studying CS at Georgia Tech at the beginning of the year, with no experience in silent speech or sensing. We were both AI-native builders and power users of Wispr Flow. What bugged us was not being able to use these tools in the library (or an office) or in public. At Stanford’s TreeHacks in February, we decided to build the most technically ridiculous thing we could think of. We’d read about AlterEgo, a silent speech system out of MIT’s Media Lab, and wanted to recreate it in 36 hours. We built a crude prototype, sticking EMG electrodes onto my face:<p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mwhv5HZMz3UTevdrgwS5O7g2jWV0K9r2/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mwhv5HZMz3UTevdrgwS5O7g2jWV...</a><p>We got it to kind of work at a letter level in a very janky way. It wasn’t good enough to win the hackathon, but convinced us to go all in. The first time I typed a sentence without anyone noticing, I felt the magic of the technology.<p>We quickly realized EMG (reading muscle electrical signals) wouldn’t work:<p>- Signal changes due to sweat<p>- Electrical interference<p>- Placement variability<p>- Most importantly, no one wants to stick electrodes onto their face!!<p>So we switched to RF and built the glasses you see now. They emit radio waves, similar to Bluetooth, that pass through your face. As they cross the tongue, lips and soft palate, they’re modulated by silent mouthing. We train foundation models on this data to decode these perturbations to text.<p>Despite prior academic research, getting this to work was a huge engineering challenge. First we built an extremely low noise RF sensing stack. Then we had to place antennas so their fields overlapped maximally with the articulators. Our first attempt on glasses failed completely, so we reverted to old habits and taped antennas on our face:<p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ks0dS0eZiTV9EqSFsyB_w5BBjpcBAfX-/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ks0dS0eZiTV9EqSFsyB_w5BBjpc...</a><p>Since taping antennas consistently in the same spot and angle was hard, we created this weird but effective head rig to hold them in place:<p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rhzNFpdDzr7oHk0isFY70dkoV4CAF1pT/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rhzNFpdDzr7oHk0isFY70dkoV4C...</a><p>This worked, but obviously wasn’t a product yet. So we worked deep in simulations to design glasses that could hold the antennas.<p>That evolved into our design now, with antennas embedded within the frames. Once we established there was a signal, the next hurdle was cross-user generalization. Everyone’s facial anatomy, and hence RF signal patterns, are vastly different. We tried algorithmic workarounds but realized the only lever was to massively scale pretraining data.<p>So that’s what we did. We set up booths in our office and paid people to read prompts wearing our glasses, to pretrain our models on. This produced a beautiful scaling curve, with errors falling quickly as we scaled our dataset and cross-user performance becoming genuinely compelling (as you see in the video above; Dave only had a short 20-sentence calibration).<p>We always heard about building things from first principles but never understood it before this. We tried tackling it top down but completely failed. Only when we broke each component (the antenna, electronics, ML) down to its fundamentals to understand and optimize it did we get it to work really well.<p>Over the next few months we’re continuing R&D to turn our prototype glasses into the slick product on our website and ship in Q1 2027. We’re also scaling up our dataset to improve performance on edge cases.<p>For anyone who loves voice dictation but hates using it around people, we’ve opened preorders for our first batch of 500 units, with a $200 discount off the final price. Allocation is running out quickly, so get yours at <a href="https://subvocal.co/preorder" rel="nofollow">https://subvocal.co/preorder</a>!
Show HN: Subvocal – Talk to your computer without making noise
Hi HN, we're Aarush and Arnav from The Subvocal Company (YC F26) (<a href="https://subvocal.company/">https://subvocal.company/</a>). We’re building smart glasses that let you talk to your computer without talking out loud. You can mouth words silently and discreetly and the glasses decode them to text at the speed of speech.<p>Here's a video of Dave from YC trying it out: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QdX1eObVYI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QdX1eObVYI</a><p>(Edit: you don't actually have to move your lips or even open your mouth for this to work! Since the RF can see inside your mouth the system can be fine tuned on "internal speech". This isn't the automatic tongue movements that occur when "thinking" words to yourself, but more like mouthing with your lips closed. It's a bit weird to do, but with practice, we have been able to get it down pretty well.)<p>Arnav and I were studying CS at Georgia Tech at the beginning of the year, with no experience in silent speech or sensing. We were both AI-native builders and power users of Wispr Flow. What bugged us was not being able to use these tools in the library (or an office) or in public. At Stanford’s TreeHacks in February, we decided to build the most technically ridiculous thing we could think of. We’d read about AlterEgo, a silent speech system out of MIT’s Media Lab, and wanted to recreate it in 36 hours. We built a crude prototype, sticking EMG electrodes onto my face:<p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mwhv5HZMz3UTevdrgwS5O7g2jWV0K9r2/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mwhv5HZMz3UTevdrgwS5O7g2jWV...</a><p>We got it to kind of work at a letter level in a very janky way. It wasn’t good enough to win the hackathon, but convinced us to go all in. The first time I typed a sentence without anyone noticing, I felt the magic of the technology.<p>We quickly realized EMG (reading muscle electrical signals) wouldn’t work:<p>- Signal changes due to sweat<p>- Electrical interference<p>- Placement variability<p>- Most importantly, no one wants to stick electrodes onto their face!!<p>So we switched to RF and built the glasses you see now. They emit radio waves, similar to Bluetooth, that pass through your face. As they cross the tongue, lips and soft palate, they’re modulated by silent mouthing. We train foundation models on this data to decode these perturbations to text.<p>Despite prior academic research, getting this to work was a huge engineering challenge. First we built an extremely low noise RF sensing stack. Then we had to place antennas so their fields overlapped maximally with the articulators. Our first attempt on glasses failed completely, so we reverted to old habits and taped antennas on our face:<p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ks0dS0eZiTV9EqSFsyB_w5BBjpcBAfX-/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ks0dS0eZiTV9EqSFsyB_w5BBjpc...</a><p>Since taping antennas consistently in the same spot and angle was hard, we created this weird but effective head rig to hold them in place:<p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rhzNFpdDzr7oHk0isFY70dkoV4CAF1pT/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rhzNFpdDzr7oHk0isFY70dkoV4C...</a><p>This worked, but obviously wasn’t a product yet. So we worked deep in simulations to design glasses that could hold the antennas.<p>That evolved into our design now, with antennas embedded within the frames. Once we established there was a signal, the next hurdle was cross-user generalization. Everyone’s facial anatomy, and hence RF signal patterns, are vastly different. We tried algorithmic workarounds but realized the only lever was to massively scale pretraining data.<p>So that’s what we did. We set up booths in our office and paid people to read prompts wearing our glasses, to pretrain our models on. This produced a beautiful scaling curve, with errors falling quickly as we scaled our dataset and cross-user performance becoming genuinely compelling (as you see in the video above; Dave only had a short 20-sentence calibration).<p>We always heard about building things from first principles but never understood it before this. We tried tackling it top down but completely failed. Only when we broke each component (the antenna, electronics, ML) down to its fundamentals to understand and optimize it did we get it to work really well.<p>Over the next few months we’re continuing R&D to turn our prototype glasses into the slick product on our website and ship in Q1 2027. We’re also scaling up our dataset to improve performance on edge cases.<p>For anyone who loves voice dictation but hates using it around people, we’ve opened preorders for our first batch of 500 units, with a $200 discount off the final price. Allocation is running out quickly, so get yours at <a href="https://subvocal.co/preorder" rel="nofollow">https://subvocal.co/preorder</a>!