The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
Latest posts:
Show HN: Crazierl – An Erlang Operating System
Crazierl is an experimental/hobby operating system based around BEAM.<p>I've linked the browser based demo; I don’t recommend using a phone; it does work, slowly, on the phones I tested, but it’s very awkward to use. You can share a link with a hashtag with your friends and click the consent checkbox, and it (should) link up into dist and I’ve also included a chat application you can start with chat:start(). (quit chat with /quit, or use the shell menu with ctrl-g to switch between shells etc).<p>The browser demo relies on the v86 javascript x86 virtual machine. You can also run Crazierl on a real x86 system, but I’ve had mixed luck on modern systems, it uses some esoteric legacy VGA features and support for that isn’t getting better.<p>Crazierl is fairly limited: 32-bit x86, BIOS boot, only two NIC drivers virtio-net and realtek 8168. But it's got enough to become part of an Erlang dist cluster. It also supports SMP, but it’s crashy with high core counts in qemu; there’s almost certainly several concurrency bugs in the kernel. There's also a lot of excess tcp debug spew (sorry).<p>Source code is available (Apache) <a href="https://github.com/russor/crazierl/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/russor/crazierl/</a>
Show HN: 30u30.fyi – Is your startup founder on Forbes' most fraudulent list?
Show HN: 30u30.fyi – Is your startup founder on Forbes' most fraudulent list?
Show HN: I built an OS that is pure AI
I've been building Pneuma, a desktop computing environment where software doesn't need to exist before you need it. There are no pre-installed applications. You boot to a blank screen with a prompt. You describe what you want: a CPU monitor, a game, a notes app, a data visualizer and a working program materializes in seconds.
Once generated, agents persist. You can reuse them, they can communicate with each other through IPC, and you can share them through a community agent store. The idea isn't that everything is disposable. It's that creation is instant and the barrier to having exactly the tool you need is just describing it.<p>Under the hood: your input goes to an LLM, which generates a self-contained Rust module. That gets compiled to WebAssembly in under a second, then JIT-compiled and executed in a sandboxed Wasmtime instance. Everything is GPU-rendered via wgpu (Vulkan/Metal/DX12). If compilation fails, the error is automatically fed back for correction. ~90% first-attempt success rate.<p>The architecture is a microkernel: agents run in isolated WASM sandboxes with a typed ABI for drawing, input, storage, and networking. An agent crash can't bring down the system. Agents can run side by side, persist to a local store, and be shared or downloaded from the community store.<p>Currently it runs as a desktop app on Linux, macOS, and Windows. The longer-term goal is to run on bare metal and support existing ARM64 binaries alongside generated agents. A full computing environment where AI-generated software and traditional applications coexist.<p>Built entirely in Rust.<p>I built this because I think the traditional software model of find an app, install it, learn it, configure it; is unnecessary friction. If a computer can generate exactly the tool you need in the moment you need it, and then keep it around when it's useful, why maintain a library of pre-built software at all?<p>Free tier available (no credit card). There's a video on the landing page showing it in action.<p>Interested in feedback on the concept, the UX, and whether this is something you'd actually use.
Show HN: PeriodicTableOfElements.org
Show HN: QuickBEAM – run JavaScript as supervised Erlang/OTP processes
QuickBEAM is a JavaScript runtime embedded inside the Erlang/OTP VM.<p>If you’re building a full-stack app, JavaScript tends to leak in anyway — frontend, SSR, or third-party code.<p>QuickBEAM runs that JavaScript inside OTP supervision trees.<p>Each runtime is a process with a `Beam` global that can:
- call Elixir code
- send/receive messages
- spawn and monitor processes
- inspect runtime/system state<p>It also provides browser-style APIs backed by OTP/native primitives (fetch, WebSocket, Worker, BroadcastChannel, localStorage, native DOM, etc.).<p>This makes it usable for:
- SSR
- sandboxed user code
- per-connection state
- backend JS with direct OTP interop<p>Notable bits:<p>- JS runtimes are supervised and restartable
- sandboxing with memory/reduction limits and API control
- native DOM that Erlang can read directly (no string rendering step)
- no JSON boundary between JS and Erlang
- built-in TypeScript, npm support, and native addons<p>QuickBEAM is part of Elixir Volt — a full-stack frontend toolchain built on Erlang/OTP with no Node.js.<p>Still early, feedback welcome.
Show HN: QuickBEAM – run JavaScript as supervised Erlang/OTP processes
QuickBEAM is a JavaScript runtime embedded inside the Erlang/OTP VM.<p>If you’re building a full-stack app, JavaScript tends to leak in anyway — frontend, SSR, or third-party code.<p>QuickBEAM runs that JavaScript inside OTP supervision trees.<p>Each runtime is a process with a `Beam` global that can:
- call Elixir code
- send/receive messages
- spawn and monitor processes
- inspect runtime/system state<p>It also provides browser-style APIs backed by OTP/native primitives (fetch, WebSocket, Worker, BroadcastChannel, localStorage, native DOM, etc.).<p>This makes it usable for:
- SSR
- sandboxed user code
- per-connection state
- backend JS with direct OTP interop<p>Notable bits:<p>- JS runtimes are supervised and restartable
- sandboxing with memory/reduction limits and API control
- native DOM that Erlang can read directly (no string rendering step)
- no JSON boundary between JS and Erlang
- built-in TypeScript, npm support, and native addons<p>QuickBEAM is part of Elixir Volt — a full-stack frontend toolchain built on Erlang/OTP with no Node.js.<p>Still early, feedback welcome.
Show HN: QuickBEAM – run JavaScript as supervised Erlang/OTP processes
QuickBEAM is a JavaScript runtime embedded inside the Erlang/OTP VM.<p>If you’re building a full-stack app, JavaScript tends to leak in anyway — frontend, SSR, or third-party code.<p>QuickBEAM runs that JavaScript inside OTP supervision trees.<p>Each runtime is a process with a `Beam` global that can:
- call Elixir code
- send/receive messages
- spawn and monitor processes
- inspect runtime/system state<p>It also provides browser-style APIs backed by OTP/native primitives (fetch, WebSocket, Worker, BroadcastChannel, localStorage, native DOM, etc.).<p>This makes it usable for:
- SSR
- sandboxed user code
- per-connection state
- backend JS with direct OTP interop<p>Notable bits:<p>- JS runtimes are supervised and restartable
- sandboxing with memory/reduction limits and API control
- native DOM that Erlang can read directly (no string rendering step)
- no JSON boundary between JS and Erlang
- built-in TypeScript, npm support, and native addons<p>QuickBEAM is part of Elixir Volt — a full-stack frontend toolchain built on Erlang/OTP with no Node.js.<p>Still early, feedback welcome.
Show HN: Create a full language server in Go with 3.17 spec support
Show HN: Create a full language server in Go with 3.17 spec support
Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor
BreezePDF lets you edit, sign, merge, compress, redact, OCR, fill forms, extract tables, and use 30+ more PDF tools — all in the browser, no sign-up. Files never leave your computer.<p>I built it because when people search Google for common PDF tasks, many of the tools they find upload documents to a server. I wanted an option that keeps files local instead.<p>I posted an earlier version on HN last spring:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880962">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880962</a><p>At the time it only supported a small set of features. Over the last 10 months I rebuilt large parts of it and expanded it to nearly 40 tools, including several ideas that came from comments in that earlier thread.<p>There is also now a desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, plus a CLI/SDK for developers.
Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor
BreezePDF lets you edit, sign, merge, compress, redact, OCR, fill forms, extract tables, and use 30+ more PDF tools — all in the browser, no sign-up. Files never leave your computer.<p>I built it because when people search Google for common PDF tasks, many of the tools they find upload documents to a server. I wanted an option that keeps files local instead.<p>I posted an earlier version on HN last spring:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880962">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880962</a><p>At the time it only supported a small set of features. Over the last 10 months I rebuilt large parts of it and expanded it to nearly 40 tools, including several ideas that came from comments in that earlier thread.<p>There is also now a desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, plus a CLI/SDK for developers.
Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor
BreezePDF lets you edit, sign, merge, compress, redact, OCR, fill forms, extract tables, and use 30+ more PDF tools — all in the browser, no sign-up. Files never leave your computer.<p>I built it because when people search Google for common PDF tasks, many of the tools they find upload documents to a server. I wanted an option that keeps files local instead.<p>I posted an earlier version on HN last spring:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880962">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880962</a><p>At the time it only supported a small set of features. Over the last 10 months I rebuilt large parts of it and expanded it to nearly 40 tools, including several ideas that came from comments in that earlier thread.<p>There is also now a desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, plus a CLI/SDK for developers.
Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders
Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders
Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders
Show HN: We built a multi-agent research hub. The waitlist is a reverse-CAPTCHA
Hey HN,<p>Automated research is the next big step in AI, with companies like OpenAI aiming to debut a fully automated researcher by 2028 (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/20/1134438/openai-is-throwing-everything-into-building-a-fully-automated-researcher/" rel="nofollow">https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/20/1134438/openai-i...</a>). However, there is a very real possibility that much of this corporate research will remain closed to the general public.<p>To counter this, we spent the last month building Enlidea---a machine-to-machine ecosystem for open research.<p>It's a decentralized research hub where autonomous agents propose hypotheses, stake bounties, execute code, and perform automated peer reviews on each other's work to build consensus.<p>The MVP is almost done, but before launching, we wanted to filter the waitlist for developers who actually know how to orchestrate agents.<p>Because of this, there is no real UI on the landing page. It's an API handshake. Point your LLM agent at the site and see if it can figure out the payload to whitelist your email.
Show HN: Foundry: a Markdown-first CMS written in Go
Hi HN! I've been building a CMS called Foundry, brought together from multiple smaller private projects as well as greenfield code.<p>The short version is: it's a CMS written in Go with a focus on markdown content, a simple hook-based plugin model, themes, archetypes, preview flows, and a clean authoring/developer experience.<p>I started working on it because I wanted something that was more powerful than Hugo for a few of my websites, without having to resort to dangling onto a database.<p>What seems different about it, at least to me, is that I'm trying to keep the system small in concept: local content, explicit behavior, compile-time plugin registration, and an admin/editor layer that is meant to stay close to how the content actually lives on disk. The goal is not to make "yet another website builder", but to make a CMS that is easy to use and quick to onramp onto, but has powerful advanced features and extensibility.<p>Still early, but usable enough that I wanted to put it in front of people here and get feedback. Please don't castigate me on the UI look - I'm not a designer, and the themes are basically clones of each other.<p>Happy to answer technical questions, architecture questions, or hear where this seems useful versus where it does not.
Show HN: Sup AI, a confidence-weighted ensemble (52.15% on Humanity's Last Exam)
Hi HN. I'm Ken, a 20-year-old Stanford CS student. I built Sup AI.<p>I started working on this because no single AI model is right all the time, but their errors don’t strongly correlate. In other words, models often make unique mistakes relative to other models. So I run multiple models in parallel and synthesize the outputs by weighting segments based on confidence. Low entropy in the output token probability distributions correlates with accuracy. High entropy is often where hallucinations begin.<p>My dad Scott (AI Research Scientist at TRI) is my research partner on this. He sends me papers at all hours, we argue about whether they actually apply and what modifications make sense, and then I build and test things. The entropy-weighting approach came out of one of those conversations.<p>In our eval on Humanity's Last Exam, Sup scored 52.15%. The best individual model in the same evaluation run got 44.74%. The relative gap is statistically significant (p < 0.001).<p>Methodology, eval code, data, and raw results:<p>- <a href="https://sup.ai/research/hle-white-paper-jan-9-2026" rel="nofollow">https://sup.ai/research/hle-white-paper-jan-9-2026</a><p>- <a href="https://github.com/supaihq/hle" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/supaihq/hle</a><p>Limitations:<p>- We evaluated 1,369 of the 2,500 HLE questions (details in the above links)<p>- Not all APIs expose token logprobs; we use several methods to estimate confidence when they don't<p>We tried offering free access and it got abused so badly it nearly killed us. Right now the sustainable option is a $5 starter credit with card verification (no auto-charge). If you don't want to sign up, drop a prompt in the comments and I'll run it myself and post the result.<p>Try it at <a href="https://sup.ai" rel="nofollow">https://sup.ai</a>. My dad Scott (@scottmu) is in the thread too. Would love blunt feedback, especially where this really works for you and where it falls short.<p>Here's a short demo video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRcns0rRhsg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRcns0rRhsg</a>
Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
Edit, sign, merge, compress, redact, OCR, fill forms, extract tables, and 30+ more tools — all in the browser, no sign-up. Files never leave your computer. Now with a desktop app (macOS/Windows/Linux) and a CLI/SDK for developers.<p>Last time this was posted it was in it's infancy, and how I've added a bunch more to it