The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
Latest posts:
Show HN: Katakate – Dozens of VMs per node for safe code exec
I've built this to make it easy to host your own infra for lightweight VMs at large scale.<p>Intended for exec of AI-generated code, for CICD runners, or for off-chain AI DApps. Mainly to avoid Docker-in-Docker dangers and mess.<p>Super easy to use with CLI / Python SDK, friendly to AI engs who usually don't like to mess with VM orchestration and networking too much.<p>Defense-in-depth philosophy.<p>Would love to get feedback (and contributors: clear & exciting roadmap!), thx
Show HN: I'm making a detective game built on Wikipedia
Hi HN!
Worked on this side project for a while and wanted to share it. It's free to play.
Show HN: I'm making a detective game built on Wikipedia
Hi HN!
Worked on this side project for a while and wanted to share it. It's free to play.
Show HN: Web-directive.js – A directive pattern for native HTML
A library to implement directive pattern for native HTML without any framework, which is inspired by Vue.js.
Show HN: Browser-based PDF form fields detection (YOLO-based)
Hey HN!<p>Last week, Joe Barrow released CommonForms [1], a set of open models for automatically detecting form fields in PDFs.<p>He trained two models, FFDNet-S and FFDNet-L, on a dataset of 55k documents. You can read more about his approach in the arXiv paper [2].<p>As someone who's been searching for reliable models to auto-detect form fields (one of the last hard problems in PDF form filling), I was seriously impressed by the quality of these models. I wanted to give them the attention and distribution they deserve, so I created a fully browser-based implementation that handles both detection and field addition.<p>My implementation relies on his models and onnx runtime web + some post-processing. I plan on publishing a small browser library to encapsulate it in the coming days to make it easier to deploy anywhere (currently you'd have to fork / copy my code)<p>Happy to answer any questions about the browser-based implementation!<p>Questions about the models themselves should be directed to Joe, who I believe is also on HN [3]<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/jbarrow/commonforms" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jbarrow/commonforms</a>
[2] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16506" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16506</a>
[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jbarrow">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jbarrow</a>
Show HN: I got tired of managing dev environments, so I built ServBay
Hey HN,<p>For years, my local development setup has been a fragile mess of tools that never quite played nicely together. On my mac, it was a constant battle with Homebrew services starting (or not starting) on boot, conflicting PHP and Node versions managed by `asdf` or `nvm`, and a collection of `docker-compose.yml` files that I'd copy-paste and tweak for every single project. The cognitive load was just too high.<p>Setting up SSL was another chore involving `mkcert`. Sharing a quick demo with a colleague meant firing up ngrok. And if I wanted to run two projects that needed different versions of PostgreSQL? Good luck. I’d have to stop one service to start another.<p>I missed the simplicity of the MAMP/XAMPP era, but I needed something that could handle the diverse stack of a modern developer – not just PHP and MySQL, but Python, Go, Rust, Node.js, and various databases.<p>That’s why I (along with my small team) built ServBay. It's our attempt to bring back simplicity and speed to local development without sacrificing power. It's a native app for macOS and Windows, not a wrapper around Docker or VMs.<p>Here's what it does:<p>One-Click Stacks: You can install and run multiple, isolated versions of languages like Python, Node.js, Go, Java, Rust, Ruby, and .NET. No more path conflicts or environment variable hell.<p>Databases, Plural: This was a huge one for me. You can run multiple instances of MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, and MongoDB simultaneously. Project A can use Postgres 14 while Project B uses Postgres 16, both running at the same time on different ports.<p>Automatic SSL: Any host you create gets a valid SSL certificate out of the box. No more browser privacy warnings for `<i>.test` or `</i>.localhost` domains.<p>Built-in Tunneling: If you need to demo a feature or test a webhook, there's a one-click button to expose your local site to the internet via a secure tunnel.<p>One-Click Local AI: This is something we're really excited about. We've added a feature to easily download and run models like Llama 3 or Stable Diffusion locally through a simple UI, so you can experiment without worrying about API keys or costs.<p>Everything Else: It also handles one-click backups, has a clean, non-intrusive UI, and is designed to be as lightweight as possible.<p>I know what many of you are thinking: "Why not just use Docker?"<p>And that's a fair question. We use Docker for production and complex, multi-service architectures. But for quickly spinning up a single-service app, testing a new framework, or just general day-to-day development, the overhead of `Dockerfile`s, `docker-compose.yml`, slow file sync on macOS, and resource consumption often feels like overkill. ServBay is for those moments where you just want to get to the code.<p>The project is still young, and we have a long roadmap ahead. I'm here all day to answer any questions, listen to your (brutally honest) feedback, and hear about what your own development workflows look like.<p>You can check it out here: <a href="https://www.servbay.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.servbay.com</a><p>Thanks for reading.
Show HN: Open-Source Voice AI Badge Powered by ESP32+WebRTC
hi!<p>video[0]<p>The idea is you could carry around this hardware and ask it any questions about the conference. Who is speaking, what are they speaking about etc... it connects via WebRTC to a LLM and you get a bunch of info.<p>This is a workshop/demo project I did for a conference. When I was talking to the organizers I mentioned that I enjoy doing hardware + WebRTC projects. They thought that was cool and so we ran with it.<p>I have been doing these ESP32 + voice ai projects for a bit now. Started with an embedded sdk for livekit[1] that jul 2024 and been noodling with it since then. This code then found its way into pipecat/livekit etc...<p>So I hope it inspires you to go build with hardware and webrtc. It's a REALLY fun space right now. Lots of different cheap microcontrollers and even more cool projects.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPuNpaL9ig8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPuNpaL9ig8</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/Sean-Der/embedded-sdk" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Sean-Der/embedded-sdk</a>
Show HN: EloqDoc: MongoDB-compatible doc DB with object storage as first citizen
We're excited to share EloqDoc, a new open source document database built on top of Data Substrate. EloqDoc is designed around the principle of treating object storage (like S3) as a first-class citizen for durability and cost efficiency. If you love the flexibility of MongoDB's document model but are struggling with scaling, cost, and consistency due to its coupled architecture, EloqDoc is for you. It’s built to solve MongoDB's inherent infrastructure challenges while remaining fully compatible with existing MongoDB clients and drivers.<p>Key Features:<p>1. Object Storage as First Citizen: Uses object storage for primary durability, leveraging local NVMe caching to achieve both lower cost and higher performance than using block-level storage (e.g. EBS).<p>2. Decoupled Compute & Storage: Scale your compute/QPS independently of your storage capacity, or vice-versa, without data movement.<p>3. True ACID Transactions: Delivers full ACID compliance with especially fast distributed transactions—consistency without compromise.<p>4. Native Distribution & Multi-Writer: It's a natively distributed database, eliminating complex manual sharding routers (like mongos) and supporting true Multi-Writer scalability.<p>Check it out:
<a href="https://www.github.com/eloqdata/eloqdoc" rel="nofollow">https://www.github.com/eloqdata/eloqdoc</a><p>We welcome any feedback, critique, or questions on the EloqDoc!
Show HN: EloqDoc: MongoDB-compatible doc DB with object storage as first citizen
We're excited to share EloqDoc, a new open source document database built on top of Data Substrate. EloqDoc is designed around the principle of treating object storage (like S3) as a first-class citizen for durability and cost efficiency. If you love the flexibility of MongoDB's document model but are struggling with scaling, cost, and consistency due to its coupled architecture, EloqDoc is for you. It’s built to solve MongoDB's inherent infrastructure challenges while remaining fully compatible with existing MongoDB clients and drivers.<p>Key Features:<p>1. Object Storage as First Citizen: Uses object storage for primary durability, leveraging local NVMe caching to achieve both lower cost and higher performance than using block-level storage (e.g. EBS).<p>2. Decoupled Compute & Storage: Scale your compute/QPS independently of your storage capacity, or vice-versa, without data movement.<p>3. True ACID Transactions: Delivers full ACID compliance with especially fast distributed transactions—consistency without compromise.<p>4. Native Distribution & Multi-Writer: It's a natively distributed database, eliminating complex manual sharding routers (like mongos) and supporting true Multi-Writer scalability.<p>Check it out:
<a href="https://www.github.com/eloqdata/eloqdoc" rel="nofollow">https://www.github.com/eloqdata/eloqdoc</a><p>We welcome any feedback, critique, or questions on the EloqDoc!
Show HN: I created a cross-platform GUI for the JJ VCS (Git compatible)
Personally, I think the JJ VCS (<a href="https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj</a>) hit a point some time in this past year where I find it hard to find a great reason to continue using git. Over the years I've cobbled together aliases and bash functions to try to improve my git workflow, but after using jj, which works with ~any git repo and integrates great with Github repos, all of the workflow issues I ran into with git are not only solved, but improved in ways I couldn't manage with simple scripts.<p>One example is the op log, which lets you go to any point in your repo's time and provides simple undo and redo commands when you want to back out of a merge, didn't mean to rebase, etc.<p>Because I have a pretty strong conviction that JJ is at this point a cleaner and more powerful version of git, my hopes are that it continues to grow. With that, it seemed a proper full-featured GUI was missing for the VCS. There's some plugins that add some integration into VS Code, and there's one in the works to get Intellij support working, but many of the constructs JJ provides in my opinion necessitate a grounds-up build of a GUI around how JJ works.<p>Right now, [name-redacted] is an MVP in an open beta. I did my best to support all of the core functionality one would need, though there's many nice-to-haves that I am going to add, like native merge support, native splitting, etc. Most of this will be based on feedback from the Beta.<p>I'm really grateful for the great community JJ has built, alongside the HN community itself in the countless VCS-based posts I've read over the years, and am hoping for lots of input here during Beta under real usage - the goal is to be a full-featured desktop GUI for the VCS, similar to many of the great products that are out there for git.
Show HN: I created a cross-platform GUI for the JJ VCS (Git compatible)
Personally, I think the JJ VCS (<a href="https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj</a>) hit a point some time in this past year where I find it hard to find a great reason to continue using git. Over the years I've cobbled together aliases and bash functions to try to improve my git workflow, but after using jj, which works with ~any git repo and integrates great with Github repos, all of the workflow issues I ran into with git are not only solved, but improved in ways I couldn't manage with simple scripts.<p>One example is the op log, which lets you go to any point in your repo's time and provides simple undo and redo commands when you want to back out of a merge, didn't mean to rebase, etc.<p>Because I have a pretty strong conviction that JJ is at this point a cleaner and more powerful version of git, my hopes are that it continues to grow. With that, it seemed a proper full-featured GUI was missing for the VCS. There's some plugins that add some integration into VS Code, and there's one in the works to get Intellij support working, but many of the constructs JJ provides in my opinion necessitate a grounds-up build of a GUI around how JJ works.<p>Right now, [name-redacted] is an MVP in an open beta. I did my best to support all of the core functionality one would need, though there's many nice-to-haves that I am going to add, like native merge support, native splitting, etc. Most of this will be based on feedback from the Beta.<p>I'm really grateful for the great community JJ has built, alongside the HN community itself in the countless VCS-based posts I've read over the years, and am hoping for lots of input here during Beta under real usage - the goal is to be a full-featured desktop GUI for the VCS, similar to many of the great products that are out there for git.
Show HN: I created a cross-platform GUI for the JJ VCS (Git compatible)
Personally, I think the JJ VCS (<a href="https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj</a>) hit a point some time in this past year where I find it hard to find a great reason to continue using git. Over the years I've cobbled together aliases and bash functions to try to improve my git workflow, but after using jj, which works with ~any git repo and integrates great with Github repos, all of the workflow issues I ran into with git are not only solved, but improved in ways I couldn't manage with simple scripts.<p>One example is the op log, which lets you go to any point in your repo's time and provides simple undo and redo commands when you want to back out of a merge, didn't mean to rebase, etc.<p>Because I have a pretty strong conviction that JJ is at this point a cleaner and more powerful version of git, my hopes are that it continues to grow. With that, it seemed a proper full-featured GUI was missing for the VCS. There's some plugins that add some integration into VS Code, and there's one in the works to get Intellij support working, but many of the constructs JJ provides in my opinion necessitate a grounds-up build of a GUI around how JJ works.<p>Right now, [name-redacted] is an MVP in an open beta. I did my best to support all of the core functionality one would need, though there's many nice-to-haves that I am going to add, like native merge support, native splitting, etc. Most of this will be based on feedback from the Beta.<p>I'm really grateful for the great community JJ has built, alongside the HN community itself in the countless VCS-based posts I've read over the years, and am hoping for lots of input here during Beta under real usage - the goal is to be a full-featured desktop GUI for the VCS, similar to many of the great products that are out there for git.
Show HN: Playwright Skill for Claude Code – Less context than playwright-MCP
I got tired of playwright-mcp eating through Claude's 200K token limit, so I built this using the new Claude Skills system. Built it with Claude Code itself.<p>Instead of sending accessibility tree snapshots on every action, Claude just writes Playwright code and runs it. You get back screenshots and console output. That's it.<p>314 lines of instructions vs a persistent MCP server. Full API docs only load if Claude needs them.<p>Same browser automation, way less overhead. Works as a Claude Code plugin or manual install.<p>Token limit issue: <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp/issues/889" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp/issues/889</a><p>Claude Skills docs: <a href="https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills" rel="nofollow">https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills</a>
Show HN: Playwright Skill for Claude Code – Less context than playwright-MCP
I got tired of playwright-mcp eating through Claude's 200K token limit, so I built this using the new Claude Skills system. Built it with Claude Code itself.<p>Instead of sending accessibility tree snapshots on every action, Claude just writes Playwright code and runs it. You get back screenshots and console output. That's it.<p>314 lines of instructions vs a persistent MCP server. Full API docs only load if Claude needs them.<p>Same browser automation, way less overhead. Works as a Claude Code plugin or manual install.<p>Token limit issue: <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp/issues/889" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp/issues/889</a><p>Claude Skills docs: <a href="https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills" rel="nofollow">https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills</a>
Show HN: Playwright Skill for Claude Code – Less context than playwright-MCP
I got tired of playwright-mcp eating through Claude's 200K token limit, so I built this using the new Claude Skills system. Built it with Claude Code itself.<p>Instead of sending accessibility tree snapshots on every action, Claude just writes Playwright code and runs it. You get back screenshots and console output. That's it.<p>314 lines of instructions vs a persistent MCP server. Full API docs only load if Claude needs them.<p>Same browser automation, way less overhead. Works as a Claude Code plugin or manual install.<p>Token limit issue: <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp/issues/889" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp/issues/889</a><p>Claude Skills docs: <a href="https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills" rel="nofollow">https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills</a>
Show HN: Notepad.exe – macOS editor for Swift and Python (now Linux runtime)
I recently released version 1.4 of Notepad.exe, my editor built for macOS. The goal of the app is to let you prototype ideas in Swift or Python with minimal setup - write code, hit Run, skip project scaffolding.<p>This release adds support for a Linux runtime/subsystem, so you can write on macOS and execute snippets in a Linux environment.<p>I’d love to hear any feedback or answer any questions: would a tool like this fit your workflow? What friction remains?
Show HN: Pyversity – Fast Result Diversification for Retrieval and RAG
Hey HN! I’ve recently open-sourced Pyversity, a lightweight library for diversifying retrieval results. Most retrieval systems optimize only for relevance, which can lead to top-k results that look almost identical. Pyversity efficiently re-ranks results to balance relevance and diversity, surfacing items that remain relevant but are less redundant. This helps with improving retrieval, recommendation, and RAG pipelines without adding latency or complexity.<p>Main features:<p>- Unified API: one function (diversify) supporting several well-known strategies: MMR, MSD, DPP, and COVER (with more to come)<p>- Lightweight: the only dependency is NumPy, keeping the package small and easy to install<p>- Fast: efficient implementations for all supported strategies; diversify results in milliseconds<p>Re-ranking with cross-encoders is very popular right now, but also very expensive. From my experience, you can usually improve retrieval results with simpler and faster methods, such as the ones implemented in this package. This helps retrieval, recommendation, and RAG systems present richer, more informative results by ensuring each new item adds new information.<p>Code and docs: github.com/pringled/pyversity<p>Let me know if you have any feedback, or suggestions for other diversification strategies to support!
Show HN: Pyversity – Fast Result Diversification for Retrieval and RAG
Hey HN! I’ve recently open-sourced Pyversity, a lightweight library for diversifying retrieval results. Most retrieval systems optimize only for relevance, which can lead to top-k results that look almost identical. Pyversity efficiently re-ranks results to balance relevance and diversity, surfacing items that remain relevant but are less redundant. This helps with improving retrieval, recommendation, and RAG pipelines without adding latency or complexity.<p>Main features:<p>- Unified API: one function (diversify) supporting several well-known strategies: MMR, MSD, DPP, and COVER (with more to come)<p>- Lightweight: the only dependency is NumPy, keeping the package small and easy to install<p>- Fast: efficient implementations for all supported strategies; diversify results in milliseconds<p>Re-ranking with cross-encoders is very popular right now, but also very expensive. From my experience, you can usually improve retrieval results with simpler and faster methods, such as the ones implemented in this package. This helps retrieval, recommendation, and RAG systems present richer, more informative results by ensuring each new item adds new information.<p>Code and docs: github.com/pringled/pyversity<p>Let me know if you have any feedback, or suggestions for other diversification strategies to support!
Show HN: Pyversity – Fast Result Diversification for Retrieval and RAG
Hey HN! I’ve recently open-sourced Pyversity, a lightweight library for diversifying retrieval results. Most retrieval systems optimize only for relevance, which can lead to top-k results that look almost identical. Pyversity efficiently re-ranks results to balance relevance and diversity, surfacing items that remain relevant but are less redundant. This helps with improving retrieval, recommendation, and RAG pipelines without adding latency or complexity.<p>Main features:<p>- Unified API: one function (diversify) supporting several well-known strategies: MMR, MSD, DPP, and COVER (with more to come)<p>- Lightweight: the only dependency is NumPy, keeping the package small and easy to install<p>- Fast: efficient implementations for all supported strategies; diversify results in milliseconds<p>Re-ranking with cross-encoders is very popular right now, but also very expensive. From my experience, you can usually improve retrieval results with simpler and faster methods, such as the ones implemented in this package. This helps retrieval, recommendation, and RAG systems present richer, more informative results by ensuring each new item adds new information.<p>Code and docs: github.com/pringled/pyversity<p>Let me know if you have any feedback, or suggestions for other diversification strategies to support!
Show HN: A better Hacker News front end
I forked pajecawav's better-hn repo, which turned out to be an excellent foundation to build on. While the original implementation was clean and functional, it didn't quite capture the essence of Hackernews. More importantly, it was missing some features I considered essential for a truly viable alternative.<p>After tinkering with it for a while, I think I've nailed it—at least for my own use case. If it works well for me, chances are others might find it useful too. So I figured, why not share it?<p>Pretty straightforward: no ads, no tracking, no monetization schemes and no intention to do so. Just a simple deployment on Vercel's free tier, which costs me exactly nothing. I'm not expecting millions of users (let's be realistic), but we'll see how it scales if people actually start using it.<p>Any feedback is welcome, or just use it.