The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: I've Built an Accounting System
It can create invoices and receive payments.<p>Not quite production ready, yet.<p>Only need PostgreSQL installed to try.<p>I will add support to choose SQLite when they add native support for geography types.
Show HN: I made crowdwave – imagine Twitter/Reddit but every post is a voicemail
Hey it's Andrew - author of <a href="https://www.crowdwave.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.crowdwave.com</a> here!<p>- crowdwave works best on your phone - unless you've got your headset and microphone plugged in to your desktop, in which case desktop works great too.<p>Here's the story:<p>So about six months ago I saw this post on HN <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39910119">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39910119</a><p><a href="https://afterthebeep.tel" rel="nofollow">https://afterthebeep.tel</a> is really cool - it's an anonymous voicemail box - you call the provided phone the number and leave a message. Blaine - the guy who runs the site (eventually) listens to and approves your message and writes a headline. It was fun, and I found I kept going back to it and listening to the messages. I left a message once and several weeks later it appeared on the site. Blaine, from comments I read, didn't seem in a hurry to take the site much further, which got me thinking...<p>And I simply could not get one question out of my head - "what would happen if users could just hit record on their phone, instead of having to dial a phone number?".<p>When I get a software idea I get pretty obsessive and that question just kept gnawing at me.<p>So, like the any reasonable programmer would, I stopped working on the project I had been working on for literally YEARS and took a detour. Because that's what you do isn't it - you just drop those multiple years of work and pick up the shiny new thing.<p>I saw that afterthebeep is open source and I loved the UI design - the Windows 3.1 aesthetic really appealed to me - it seems perfect for voicemail, so I grabbed the open source code and started development. I couldn't make much sense of the code - it was using tech I'm not familiar with, so I ditched it all except the layout and the graphics.<p>Fortunately, the project I had been working on for YEARS is basically a Twitter/Reddit clone, so I ripped the UI out of the afterthebeep open source project and did open heart surgery until like some bizarre Frankenstein's monster I had put the afterthebeep open source UI onto my code.<p>And I added in the functionality that I craved so much - a "record" button. Sigh.... relief. It was incredibly satisfying to hit record and see a message appear almost immediately. Nerd craving fulfilled.<p>But my satisfaction did not last long. I REALLY HAD TO fix that problem of getting the posts approved and headlines written. So I made a back end audio processing pipeline and fed the messages into an LLM, which ripped the text from the speech and I then shoved it into OpenAI and asked it to make nice headlines. And it worked beautifully - now you only have to wait 30 seconds to see your message with a nice headline! Ahhhh..... sigh, satisfaction... (it wouldn't be 2024 without an AI twist, would it now?).<p>But hang on! It would be <i>SO much better</i> if there was some sort of category system almost like subreddits - then people could post their messages into areas of interest. So I built the channel system and sat back.... job done.<p>Looking at the calendar, dreading to see..... I've dropped into obsessive coding mode and and I've been down this rabbit hole full time for MONTHS. I'm getting wary - and I'm also getting tired and sick of the effort - when's this going to end?<p>But wait, another idea! How much more cool would it be if you could have your own user account, and follow and like and subscribe! I've just GOT TO make that. AND surely it has to be multi language doesn't it? I mean Germans like talking too don't they? And user profile pics, and channel banner images, and options and settings. And if you don't put in terms and conditions and privacy and a cookie message then won't the Eurpoeans turn up and arrest me? At this stage I'm like a drunken junkie wanting just one more thing, one more thing...... scope ain't just creeping, the scope is up and racing away faster than Usain Bolt.<p>I'm now like nearly five months into this and packing all this functionality into a UI that both make sense and fits onto a tiny phone screen is becoming a huge challenge - a challenge I don't know if I can actually solve - and if I can't make the UI make sense then the whole thing will be unusable. The UI MUST be minimal and yet still reveal to the user pretty much everything within fewer than five pages in total. The UI had to work BEST on a phone. That was a HUGE challenge, and I really didn't know until the end of the project if I could do it at all. But finally the UI seemed to come together and it was a tight squeeze but fit onto the limited screen resolution of even my old iPhone 6s (yes it's my main phone).<p>Then, a few days ago, after many months of grueling grind, there was nothing left on the todo list. crowdwave was done! All the features were done and I'd finally chased down that scope creep.<p>Which brings us to today. Give <a href="https://www.crowdwave.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.crowdwave.com</a> a go on your phone or desktop if you have microphone. It's brand new so there WILL be bugs - hopefully not too severe. Thanks to Blaine at <a href="https://blaines.world/" rel="nofollow">https://blaines.world/</a> for the inspiration!
Show HN: I made crowdwave – imagine Twitter/Reddit but every post is a voicemail
Hey it's Andrew - author of <a href="https://www.crowdwave.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.crowdwave.com</a> here!<p>- crowdwave works best on your phone - unless you've got your headset and microphone plugged in to your desktop, in which case desktop works great too.<p>Here's the story:<p>So about six months ago I saw this post on HN <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39910119">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39910119</a><p><a href="https://afterthebeep.tel" rel="nofollow">https://afterthebeep.tel</a> is really cool - it's an anonymous voicemail box - you call the provided phone the number and leave a message. Blaine - the guy who runs the site (eventually) listens to and approves your message and writes a headline. It was fun, and I found I kept going back to it and listening to the messages. I left a message once and several weeks later it appeared on the site. Blaine, from comments I read, didn't seem in a hurry to take the site much further, which got me thinking...<p>And I simply could not get one question out of my head - "what would happen if users could just hit record on their phone, instead of having to dial a phone number?".<p>When I get a software idea I get pretty obsessive and that question just kept gnawing at me.<p>So, like the any reasonable programmer would, I stopped working on the project I had been working on for literally YEARS and took a detour. Because that's what you do isn't it - you just drop those multiple years of work and pick up the shiny new thing.<p>I saw that afterthebeep is open source and I loved the UI design - the Windows 3.1 aesthetic really appealed to me - it seems perfect for voicemail, so I grabbed the open source code and started development. I couldn't make much sense of the code - it was using tech I'm not familiar with, so I ditched it all except the layout and the graphics.<p>Fortunately, the project I had been working on for YEARS is basically a Twitter/Reddit clone, so I ripped the UI out of the afterthebeep open source project and did open heart surgery until like some bizarre Frankenstein's monster I had put the afterthebeep open source UI onto my code.<p>And I added in the functionality that I craved so much - a "record" button. Sigh.... relief. It was incredibly satisfying to hit record and see a message appear almost immediately. Nerd craving fulfilled.<p>But my satisfaction did not last long. I REALLY HAD TO fix that problem of getting the posts approved and headlines written. So I made a back end audio processing pipeline and fed the messages into an LLM, which ripped the text from the speech and I then shoved it into OpenAI and asked it to make nice headlines. And it worked beautifully - now you only have to wait 30 seconds to see your message with a nice headline! Ahhhh..... sigh, satisfaction... (it wouldn't be 2024 without an AI twist, would it now?).<p>But hang on! It would be <i>SO much better</i> if there was some sort of category system almost like subreddits - then people could post their messages into areas of interest. So I built the channel system and sat back.... job done.<p>Looking at the calendar, dreading to see..... I've dropped into obsessive coding mode and and I've been down this rabbit hole full time for MONTHS. I'm getting wary - and I'm also getting tired and sick of the effort - when's this going to end?<p>But wait, another idea! How much more cool would it be if you could have your own user account, and follow and like and subscribe! I've just GOT TO make that. AND surely it has to be multi language doesn't it? I mean Germans like talking too don't they? And user profile pics, and channel banner images, and options and settings. And if you don't put in terms and conditions and privacy and a cookie message then won't the Eurpoeans turn up and arrest me? At this stage I'm like a drunken junkie wanting just one more thing, one more thing...... scope ain't just creeping, the scope is up and racing away faster than Usain Bolt.<p>I'm now like nearly five months into this and packing all this functionality into a UI that both make sense and fits onto a tiny phone screen is becoming a huge challenge - a challenge I don't know if I can actually solve - and if I can't make the UI make sense then the whole thing will be unusable. The UI MUST be minimal and yet still reveal to the user pretty much everything within fewer than five pages in total. The UI had to work BEST on a phone. That was a HUGE challenge, and I really didn't know until the end of the project if I could do it at all. But finally the UI seemed to come together and it was a tight squeeze but fit onto the limited screen resolution of even my old iPhone 6s (yes it's my main phone).<p>Then, a few days ago, after many months of grueling grind, there was nothing left on the todo list. crowdwave was done! All the features were done and I'd finally chased down that scope creep.<p>Which brings us to today. Give <a href="https://www.crowdwave.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.crowdwave.com</a> a go on your phone or desktop if you have microphone. It's brand new so there WILL be bugs - hopefully not too severe. Thanks to Blaine at <a href="https://blaines.world/" rel="nofollow">https://blaines.world/</a> for the inspiration!
Show HN: Opik, an open source LLM evaluation framework
Hey HN! I'm Caleb, one of the contributors to Opik, a new open source framework for LLM evaluations.<p>Over the last few months, my colleagues and I have been working on a project to solve what we see as the most painful parts of writing evals for an LLM application. For this initial release, we've focused on a few core features that we think are the most essential:<p>- Simplifying the implementation of more complex LLM-based evaluation metrics, like Hallucination and Moderation.<p>- Enabling step-by-step tracking, such that you can test and debug each individual component of your LLM application, even in more complex multi-agent architectures.<p>- Exposing an API for "model unit tests" (built on Pytest), to allow you to run evals as part of your CI/CD pipelines<p>- Providing an easy UI for scoring, annotating, and versioning your logged LLM data, for further evaluation or training.<p>It's often hard to feel like you can trust an LLM application in production, not just because of the stochastic nature of the model, but because of the opaqueness of the application itself. Our belief is that with better tooling for evaluations, we can meaningfully improve this situation, and unlock a new wave of LLM applications.<p>You can run Opik locally, or with a free API key via our cloud platform. You can use it with any model server or hosted model, but we currently have a built-in integration with the OpenAI Python library, which means it automatically works not just with OpenAI models, but with any model served via a compatible model server (ollama, vLLM, etc). Opik also currently has out-of-the-box integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Ragas, and a few other popular tools.<p>This is our initial release of Opik, so if you have any feedback or questions, I'd love to hear them!
Show HN: Opik, an open source LLM evaluation framework
Hey HN! I'm Caleb, one of the contributors to Opik, a new open source framework for LLM evaluations.<p>Over the last few months, my colleagues and I have been working on a project to solve what we see as the most painful parts of writing evals for an LLM application. For this initial release, we've focused on a few core features that we think are the most essential:<p>- Simplifying the implementation of more complex LLM-based evaluation metrics, like Hallucination and Moderation.<p>- Enabling step-by-step tracking, such that you can test and debug each individual component of your LLM application, even in more complex multi-agent architectures.<p>- Exposing an API for "model unit tests" (built on Pytest), to allow you to run evals as part of your CI/CD pipelines<p>- Providing an easy UI for scoring, annotating, and versioning your logged LLM data, for further evaluation or training.<p>It's often hard to feel like you can trust an LLM application in production, not just because of the stochastic nature of the model, but because of the opaqueness of the application itself. Our belief is that with better tooling for evaluations, we can meaningfully improve this situation, and unlock a new wave of LLM applications.<p>You can run Opik locally, or with a free API key via our cloud platform. You can use it with any model server or hosted model, but we currently have a built-in integration with the OpenAI Python library, which means it automatically works not just with OpenAI models, but with any model served via a compatible model server (ollama, vLLM, etc). Opik also currently has out-of-the-box integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Ragas, and a few other popular tools.<p>This is our initial release of Opik, so if you have any feedback or questions, I'd love to hear them!
Show HN: Franzelio – Draw lines, make music, share your instrument
Show HN: Franzelio – Draw lines, make music, share your instrument
Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations
Last year we launched a project called Psychic that did moderately well on hacker news, but was a commercial failure. We were able to find customers, but none with compelling and overlapping use cases. Everyone who was interested was too early to be a real customer.<p>This was our launch: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36032081">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36032081</a><p>We recently decided to revive and rebrand the project after seeing a sudden spike in interest from people who wanted to connect LLMs to data - but specifically through browsers. It's also a problem we've experienced firsthand, having built scraping features into Psychic and previously working on bot detection at Robinhood.<p>If you haven’t built a web scraper or browser automation before, you might assume it’s very straightforward. People have been building scrapers for as long as the internet has existed, so there must be many tools for the job.<p>The truth is that web scraping strategies need to constantly adapt as web standard change, and as companies that don’t want to be scraped adopt new technologies to try and block it. The old standards never completely go away, so the longer the internet exists, the more edge cases you’ll need to account for. This adds up to a LOT of infrastructure that needs to be set up and a lot of schlep developers have to go through to get up and running.<p>Scraping is no easier today than it was 10 years ago - the problems are just different.<p>Finic is an open source platform for building and deploying browser agents. Browser agents are bots deployed to the cloud that mimic the behaviour of humans, like web scrapers or remote process automation (RPA) jobs. Simple examples include scripts that scrape static websites like the SEC's EDGAR database. More complex use cases include integrating with legacy applications that don’t have public APIs, where the best way to automate data entry is to just manipulate HTML selectors (EHRs for example).<p>Our goal is to make Finic the easiest way to deploy a Playwright-based browser automation. With this launch, you can already do so in just 4 steps. Check out our docs for more info: <a href="https://docs.finic.io/quickstart" rel="nofollow">https://docs.finic.io/quickstart</a>
Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations
Last year we launched a project called Psychic that did moderately well on hacker news, but was a commercial failure. We were able to find customers, but none with compelling and overlapping use cases. Everyone who was interested was too early to be a real customer.<p>This was our launch: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36032081">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36032081</a><p>We recently decided to revive and rebrand the project after seeing a sudden spike in interest from people who wanted to connect LLMs to data - but specifically through browsers. It's also a problem we've experienced firsthand, having built scraping features into Psychic and previously working on bot detection at Robinhood.<p>If you haven’t built a web scraper or browser automation before, you might assume it’s very straightforward. People have been building scrapers for as long as the internet has existed, so there must be many tools for the job.<p>The truth is that web scraping strategies need to constantly adapt as web standard change, and as companies that don’t want to be scraped adopt new technologies to try and block it. The old standards never completely go away, so the longer the internet exists, the more edge cases you’ll need to account for. This adds up to a LOT of infrastructure that needs to be set up and a lot of schlep developers have to go through to get up and running.<p>Scraping is no easier today than it was 10 years ago - the problems are just different.<p>Finic is an open source platform for building and deploying browser agents. Browser agents are bots deployed to the cloud that mimic the behaviour of humans, like web scrapers or remote process automation (RPA) jobs. Simple examples include scripts that scrape static websites like the SEC's EDGAR database. More complex use cases include integrating with legacy applications that don’t have public APIs, where the best way to automate data entry is to just manipulate HTML selectors (EHRs for example).<p>Our goal is to make Finic the easiest way to deploy a Playwright-based browser automation. With this launch, you can already do so in just 4 steps. Check out our docs for more info: <a href="https://docs.finic.io/quickstart" rel="nofollow">https://docs.finic.io/quickstart</a>
Show HN: Electrico – Electron Without Node and Chrome
Show HN: Electrico – Electron Without Node and Chrome
Show HN: Electrico – Electron Without Node and Chrome
Show HN: Open Scanner, an open-source document scanning app for iPhone
Show HN: Open Scanner, an open-source document scanning app for iPhone
Show HN: Open Scanner, an open-source document scanning app for iPhone
Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative
Hey HN, I'm Andrew, one of the creators of Void. I made this open source version of Cursor where you can get all of Cursor's core features but in a fully-customizable IDE (ctrl+k, ctrl+L). We love Cursor but there are so many other features we want to build, like allowing AI to edit multiple files at once, or giving AI better understanding of your file system. Void is the open-source, fully customizable tool we've been wanting.<p>The hard part: we're building Void as a fork of vscode. The repo has great documentation for extensions, but going deeper gets pretty involved. All of the code is OOP-based, and they mount DOM nodes the old-school way (which is what React was supposed to solve..). So adding new UI features isn't exactly trivial. Microsoft also made its extension marketplace closed-source so we (and Cursor) have to hack our way through it. One thing we're excited about is refactoring and creating docs so that it's much easier for anyone to contribute.<p>The other benefit of open source is we don't need to hide how our prompts are built, so we can transfer the private API logic that Cursor has right onto your local machine. This lets you host a model on-prem and have your data stay completely private. It also means you can go directly to LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic) instead of going through us as a middleman.<p>There's still a lot to build, and full disclosure, we are very early stage. But we're super excited about building and have a working prototype that we're quickly adding features to.<p>Let us know if there's anything you want to see in a Cursor-style editor. Or feel free to shoot us a pull request. Cheers!
Show HN: TensorZero – open-source data and learning flywheel for LLMs
Hi HN!<p>We're Gabriel & Viraj, and we're excited to open source TensorZero.<p>To be a little cheeky, TensorZero is an open-source platform that helps LLM applications graduate from API wrappers into defensible AI products.<p>1. Integrate our model gateway<p>2. Send metrics or feedback<p>3. Unlock compounding improvements in quality, cost, and latency<p>It enables a data & learning flywheel for LLMs by unifying:<p>• Inference: one API for all LLMs, with <1ms P99 overhead<p>• Observability: inference & feedback → your database<p>• Optimization: better prompts, models, inference strategies<p>• Experimentation: built-in A/B testing, routing, fallbacks<p>Our goal is to help engineers build, manage, and optimize the next generation of LLM applications: AI systems that learn from real-world experience.<p>In addition to a Quick Start (5min) [1] and a Tutorial (30min) [2], we've also published a series of complete runnable examples illustrating TensorZero's data & learning flywheel.<p>• Writing Haikus to Satisfy a Judge with Hidden Preferences [3] – my personal favorite<p>• Fine-Tuning TensorZero JSON Functions for Named Entity Recognition (CoNLL++) [4]<p>• Automated Prompt Engineering for Math Reasoning (GSM8K) with a Custom Recipe (DSPy) [5]<p>___<p>[1] <a href="https://www.tensorzero.com/docs/gateway/quickstart" rel="nofollow">https://www.tensorzero.com/docs/gateway/quickstart</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.tensorzero.com/docs/gateway/tutorial" rel="nofollow">https://www.tensorzero.com/docs/gateway/tutorial</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/tensorzero/tensorzero/tree/main/examples/haiku-hidden-preferences">https://github.com/tensorzero/tensorzero/tree/main/examples/...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://github.com/tensorzero/tensorzero/tree/main/examples/ner-fine-tuning-json-functions">https://github.com/tensorzero/tensorzero/tree/main/examples/...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://github.com/tensorzero/tensorzero/tree/main/examples/gsm8k-custom-recipe-dspy">https://github.com/tensorzero/tensorzero/tree/main/examples/...</a><p>We hope you find TensorZero useful! Feedback and questions are very welcome. If you're interested in using it at work, we'd be happy to set up a Slack channel with your team (free).
Show HN: Xnapper Studio – Web tool for creating attention-grabbing screenshots
Xnapper Studio aims to make it fast and easy to create eye-catching images and mockups, especially for people sharing images their product images on on social media and blogs.<p>Compared to our macOS app, we've doubled down on making the screenshots look better by adding device mockups (i.e. iPhone, Macbook, Safari, etc.), more social media dimensions, and image positioning.<p>Currently we're working on adding an option to share the image with a link (cloud storage and share).<p>Would love to get your feedback on our beta!
Show HN: Universal Logger for Node, Deno, Bun, Browser
Hey everyone,
I had posted about my project <a href="https://adzejs.com" rel="nofollow">https://adzejs.com</a> a couple of years ago and it was met with a lot of interest, so I'm writing about the major v2 update that's just been released to see if anyone is interested.<p>What makes Adze interesting compared to other logging libraries like pino, bunyan, winston, etc?<p>Adze is universal. This means that Adze will "just work" in all of your environments. This is especially handy when working with SSR projects like sveltekit, nuxt, next, etc. You can also use Adze with Bun or Deno without any special adaptations or considerations.<p>Adze 2.x is also smaller (13.29kb minified and brotlied) and faster than the original. Benchmarks put it at generating 100,000 logs in ~700ms.<p>Version 2 also offers a cleaner API than version 1 as it no longer uses factories and instead uses static class methods.<p><pre><code> import adze from 'adze';
// Generating a log
adze.timestamp.ns('foo').log('A log with a timestamp and namespace.');
// Making a child logger
const logger = adze.timestamp.ns('foo').seal();
logger.log('A log with a timestamp and namespace.');
</code></pre>
Adze 2.x comes with support for four different types of log formats out-of-the-box. These formats include:
- a human-readable pretty format - a machine-readable JSON format that is compatible with the Bunyan CLI - a format for common logs - and a format for simple stdout logging<p>Adze 2.x also offers better extensibility support. You can now create custom formatters and custom middleware for modifying log behavior or transporting them to another source (like a file, etc). Log listeners are also still supported.<p>Changing formats is easy.<p><pre><code> import adze, { setup } from 'adze';
setup({
format: 'json', // <- Change with an env var
});
adze.withEmoji.success('This is a pretty log!');
</code></pre>
Adze 2.x also includes a handy new template literal logging feature for times where you are repeating logs frequently with slightly different messages (like error messages in a catch). Adze offers a new sealTag terminator that will seal your configuration into a template literal tag function to further simplify your logging.
Example<p><pre><code> import adze from 'adze';
// Let's create a reusable ERR tag with emoji's, timestamps, and the "my-module" namespace.
const ERR = adze.withEmoji.timestamp.ns('my-module').sealTag();
try {
// do something that could fail...
} catch (e) {
ERR`Printing my error as an error log! ${e}`;
}</code></pre>
There is much, much more to Adze than what I can present in this post, but please check it out at <a href="https://adzejs.com" rel="nofollow">https://adzejs.com</a> and let me know what you think! Try it out!
Also, please give it a star to bookmark it at <a href="https://github.com/adzejs/adze">https://github.com/adzejs/adze</a> if you might use it in the future!<p>I appreciate any feedback as well. This has been a huge labor of love for me and I hope it benefits you all as well.<p>Thank you!
Show HN: JAQT – JavaScript Queries and Transformations
Hi all,<p>I've made a javascript library to simplify searching/sorting/filtering in arrays of objects. Its inspired by both GraphQL and SQL, but implemented using javascript Proxies. Instead of creating a new language, its all just javascript.<p>I've made it as part of an experimental database, which uses javascript as the query engine. The normal javascript map/reduce/sort functions are quite difficult to master for junior developers. JAQT is easier to explain, and can still be used in combination with any existing array functions.<p>Please let me know what you think of the API and its ease of use!