The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: peerd – AI agent harness that runs entirely in your browser
Hey HN. <a href="http://peerd.ai" rel="nofollow">http://peerd.ai</a> is an AI agent harness that lives entirely in your browser as a web extension. You don’t have to install a separate “AI browser”. You don’t have to bolt on or run some external process or manage a clunky mcp integration. It’s just a fully contained web extension, written in no build vanilla JS with minimal non-browser dependencies, using your own provider keys, and Apache 2.<p>This isn’t just a fun hack. While it has largely been a solo side project, I genuinely believe the browser and the web could be the most natural platform for AI agents to operate safely, autonomously, and most importantly without A2A middlemen (more on that in a sec). To demonstrate that point peerd doesn’t just drive browser automation. It spins up isolated sandboxes using tabs and worker instances to support various real workload types. Those include headless JS computational work, visual JS notebooks, personal client side apps, and real Linux VMs on top of wasm with full http networking.<p>The industry discourse over the last several months has been dominated by “which substrate is the best for ai agent sandboxes” with many competing answers focused on different models and use cases. Cloudflare is one of the most prominent examples, positioning its v8 isolate based workers as the best in class solution thanks to faster than container startup times and strong isolation guarantees. The v8 isolate is of course the product of chromium, which runs on billions of browsers around the world for free. The browser as a whole is perhaps the most battle tested sandbox system in the entire software industry. It’s been built on 3 decades of learning from hostile content, hostile code, and hostile users. Native and cloud agents are necessarily rebuilding all or most of this posture from scratch. peerd doesn’t. It leverages everything the browser has to offer and pushes it to its functional limits, while inheriting its security baseline and isolation from the host system.<p>Robust sandboxing isn’t the only thing the browser offers and peerd uses. It comes with extremely powerful and underrated primitives, from webCrypto, webRTC, webAuthn, webGPU, and ~soon WebNN. Direct web access, with your real live sessions, and api calls with fetch present an alternative model to MCP integrations. The agent can write and spawn web apps right there in a tab, no hosted service necessary. Then there’s the A2A piece: peerd already has a rudimentary p2p (peerd-to-peerd?) network in place using webRTC. Today you can connect with peers on the network, add them as contacts, and share signed apps you’ve created. I’m working on extending these apps to be able to leverage the same p2p network to support decentralized web apps (dwapps), as well as facilitate true p2p A2A with no platform or middlemen.<p>Given this is an early part time project, this is an extremely experimental build and in a v0.x preview state. I’ve taken care to attempt to address the lethal trifecta: the main agent loops/sessions never ingest untrusted DOM code or possess low level navigation tools. It delegates those tasks to dedicated web runners with no wider tooling or secrets access that return summarized results. Both the DOM and the summarized results are bracketed as untrusted, meaning two stacked prompt injection escapes are needed. All egress goes through a central module that has a customizable deny list, and only models calls to designated allowed endpoints are possible. See more in the docs, site, and the code itself. Ultimately, use at your own risk.<p>Today anthropic, open router, local ollama, and even an experimental WebGPU instance of Gemma are supported.<p>Honest limitations: Chrome store and AMO are still pending until it can get more eyeballs and live usage. Just loading unpacked from GitHub is the easiest way to go, and as a bonus makes it easy to audit thanks to no build. Linux on wasm depends on the Cheerpx engine, which is not open source and has restrictions for commercial use. That may be a good reason to reassess it compared to alternatives, but it’s also the most performant and looks closest to implementing 64bit support.<p>Poke around, use it, critique it, and have fun.
Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives
Originally we (Andrey, Marcus, Juho) built MonoLisa in 2020 as we realised there's room for a better monospaced typeface for developers. The key insight was to make the glyphs slightly wider to make more room for design to make letters like m feel less cramped.<p>Since then we've released a variable v2 (2022) and now we're happy to expand the typeface with a new family called MonoLisa Text. The reasoning was to cover *other* use cases beyond coding with this proportional font.<p>We hope you give Monolisa a go as there's a free trial to try. We also welcome feedback!
Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives
Originally we (Andrey, Marcus, Juho) built MonoLisa in 2020 as we realised there's room for a better monospaced typeface for developers. The key insight was to make the glyphs slightly wider to make more room for design to make letters like m feel less cramped.<p>Since then we've released a variable v2 (2022) and now we're happy to expand the typeface with a new family called MonoLisa Text. The reasoning was to cover *other* use cases beyond coding with this proportional font.<p>We hope you give Monolisa a go as there's a free trial to try. We also welcome feedback!
Show HN: An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine
Show HN: An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine
Show HN: Nub – A Bun-like all-in-one toolkit for Node.js
Colin here, creator of Nub. I’ve had the general shape of this in mind for years. Nub runs your code with stock `node`, augmented with a `--require` preload hook[0] that adds a transpiler (oxc-powered, packaged as a Node-API add-on), registers a module resolution hook[1], and injects polyfills as needed for APIs like `Worker`, `Temporal`, etc. All purely additive, your code ultimately runs using Node’s actual engine & stdlib implementations.<p>[0] <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module</a><p>[1] <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoptions" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoption...</a>
Show HN: Nub – A Bun-like all-in-one toolkit for Node.js
Colin here, creator of Nub. I’ve had the general shape of this in mind for years. Nub runs your code with stock `node`, augmented with a `--require` preload hook[0] that adds a transpiler (oxc-powered, packaged as a Node-API add-on), registers a module resolution hook[1], and injects polyfills as needed for APIs like `Worker`, `Temporal`, etc. All purely additive, your code ultimately runs using Node’s actual engine & stdlib implementations.<p>[0] <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module</a><p>[1] <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoptions" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoption...</a>
Show HN: Bun-sqlgen – Type-safe raw SQL for Bun, no ORM
Show HN: Bun-sqlgen – Type-safe raw SQL for Bun, no ORM
Show HN: Neural Particle Automata
Neural CAs model self-organizing pattern formation on grids. Now the grid is gone. Each cell is an agentic particle that can move freely in space and change its state.<p>While each particle follows a simple shared rule, many together can grow complex morphologies or form intricate patterns. The resulting particle system as a whole can regenerate from damage and exhibits surprising emergent behavior.<p>Try cutting the lizard and watch it heal itself!
Show HN: Neural Particle Automata
Neural CAs model self-organizing pattern formation on grids. Now the grid is gone. Each cell is an agentic particle that can move freely in space and change its state.<p>While each particle follows a simple shared rule, many together can grow complex morphologies or form intricate patterns. The resulting particle system as a whole can regenerate from damage and exhibits surprising emergent behavior.<p>Try cutting the lizard and watch it heal itself!
Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX
Hi all! TikZ is a widely-used LaTeX package for drawing figures in papers. It uses commands like \draw[->] (0,0) -- (1,2); to draw lines, shapes, text, etc. Academics usually code up their figures by hand, so there is lots of twiddling around with the coordinates and recompiling until things look nice. I guess it’s a bit like SVG, but it’s more code than markup, for example it has loops with \foreach.<p>I built an open-source WYSIWYG TikZ editor (available for web and desktop) that allows you to edit your TikZ source code visually by dragging and resizing elements. It simultaneously shows the source code and the rendered figure, and lets you edit either one while the two views stay in sync. I’m not aware of any other editors that are simultaneously source editors and WYSIWYG (even for editing SVG or HTML), and I’m quite pleased with how well the combination works.<p>The way the app is implemented is by parsing the TikZ code, and at all times keeping track of the exact source location of each object. Thereby, when a user drags an element to a new position, the app can override just the numbers in the coordinate without changing anything else in the code (such as line breaks or indentation).<p>This approach essentially required reimplementing a large fraction of TikZ, which is the kind of task that no human would ever want to do. I think building software that doesn’t exist yet because it would be impossibly tedious to code up is one of the great new possibilities thanks to coding agents, and it’s worth brainstorming for other examples. (This app was built almost entirely by Codex.)<p>Implementing the app came with lots of fun side quests, including building converters from SVG / pptx / ipe to TikZ, re-implementing the LaTeX hyphenation and line-breaking algorithm to support multi-line nodes, and making a color picker that uses the red!20!black color mixing notation used in LaTeX papers.
Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX
Hi all! TikZ is a widely-used LaTeX package for drawing figures in papers. It uses commands like \draw[->] (0,0) -- (1,2); to draw lines, shapes, text, etc. Academics usually code up their figures by hand, so there is lots of twiddling around with the coordinates and recompiling until things look nice. I guess it’s a bit like SVG, but it’s more code than markup, for example it has loops with \foreach.<p>I built an open-source WYSIWYG TikZ editor (available for web and desktop) that allows you to edit your TikZ source code visually by dragging and resizing elements. It simultaneously shows the source code and the rendered figure, and lets you edit either one while the two views stay in sync. I’m not aware of any other editors that are simultaneously source editors and WYSIWYG (even for editing SVG or HTML), and I’m quite pleased with how well the combination works.<p>The way the app is implemented is by parsing the TikZ code, and at all times keeping track of the exact source location of each object. Thereby, when a user drags an element to a new position, the app can override just the numbers in the coordinate without changing anything else in the code (such as line breaks or indentation).<p>This approach essentially required reimplementing a large fraction of TikZ, which is the kind of task that no human would ever want to do. I think building software that doesn’t exist yet because it would be impossibly tedious to code up is one of the great new possibilities thanks to coding agents, and it’s worth brainstorming for other examples. (This app was built almost entirely by Codex.)<p>Implementing the app came with lots of fun side quests, including building converters from SVG / pptx / ipe to TikZ, re-implementing the LaTeX hyphenation and line-breaking algorithm to support multi-line nodes, and making a color picker that uses the red!20!black color mixing notation used in LaTeX papers.
Show HN: I rebuilt the only parts of my IDE I use, in Rust, over a weekend
I don't know Rust.<p>Friday after work I realised that 90% of my IDE time now is just the commit/diff view — and even good IDEs feel heavy for that.<p>So over the weekend I built a dedicated native tool for just that. Kyde is a macOS git commit + diff editor with one goal: be fast, do Git well.<p>I'm curious whether anyone else mostly opens their IDE for git operations these days.<p>It's open source, and there's a signed app in Releases.
Show HN: I rebuilt the only parts of my IDE I use, in Rust, over a weekend
I don't know Rust.<p>Friday after work I realised that 90% of my IDE time now is just the commit/diff view — and even good IDEs feel heavy for that.<p>So over the weekend I built a dedicated native tool for just that. Kyde is a macOS git commit + diff editor with one goal: be fast, do Git well.<p>I'm curious whether anyone else mostly opens their IDE for git operations these days.<p>It's open source, and there's a signed app in Releases.
Show HN: Recall – Local project memory for Claude Code
Show HN: Recall – Local project memory for Claude Code
Show HN: Criterion Closet as a website – pull any of 1,247 films off the shelf
Show HN: Criterion Closet as a website – pull any of 1,247 films off the shelf
Show HN: Got sick of ads, so I made my own logic puzzle site