The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: RetroTick – Run classic Windows EXEs in the browser
RetroTick parses PE/NE/MZ binaries, emulates an x86 CPU, and stubs enough Win32/Win16/DOS APIs to run classics like FreeCell, Minesweeper, Solitaire and QBasic, entirely in the browser. Built with Preact + Vite + TypeScript.<p>Demo: <a href="https://retrotick.com" rel="nofollow">https://retrotick.com</a><p>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/lqs/retrotick" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lqs/retrotick</a>
Show HN: RetroTick – Run classic Windows EXEs in the browser
RetroTick parses PE/NE/MZ binaries, emulates an x86 CPU, and stubs enough Win32/Win16/DOS APIs to run classics like FreeCell, Minesweeper, Solitaire and QBasic, entirely in the browser. Built with Preact + Vite + TypeScript.<p>Demo: <a href="https://retrotick.com" rel="nofollow">https://retrotick.com</a><p>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/lqs/retrotick" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lqs/retrotick</a>
Show HN: Linex – A daily challenge: placing pieces on a board that fights back
Hi HN,<p>I wanted to share a web game I’ve been building in HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, and PHP called LINEX.<p>It is primarily designed and optimized to be played in the mobile browser.<p>The idea is simple: you have an 8x8 board where you must place pieces (Tetris-style and some custom shapes) to clear horizontal and vertical lines.<p>Yes, someone might think this has already been done, but let me explain.<p>You choose where to place the piece and how to rotate it. The core interaction consists of "drawing" the piece tap-by-tap on the grid, which provides a very satisfying tactile sense of control and requires a much more thoughtful strategy.<p>To avoid the flat difficulty curve typical of games in this genre, I’ve implemented a couple of twists:<p>1. Progressive difficulty (The board fights back): As you progress and clear lines, permanently blocked cells randomly appear on the board. This forces you to constantly adapt your spatial vision.<p>2. Tools to defend yourself: To counter frustration, you have a very limited number of aids (skip the piece, choose another one, or use a special 1x1 piece). These resources increase slightly as the board fills up with blocked cells, forcing you to decide the exact right moment to use them.<p>The game features a daily challenge driven by a date-based random seed (PRNG). Everyone gets exactly the same sequence of pieces and blockers. Furthermore, the base difficulty scales throughout the week: on Mondays you start with a clean board (0 initial blocked cells, although several will appear as the game progresses), and the difficulty ramps up until Sunday, where you start the game with 3 obstacles already in place.<p>In addition to the global medal leaderboard, you can add other users to your profile to create a private leaderboard and compete head-to-head just with your friends.<p>Time is also an important factor, as in the event of a tie in cleared lines, the player who completed them faster will rank higher on the leaderboard.<p>I would love for you to check it out. I'm especially looking for honest feedback on the difficulty curve, the piece-placement interaction (UI/UX), or the balancing of obstacles/tools, although any other ideas, critiques, or suggestions are welcome.<p><a href="https://www.playlinex.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.playlinex.com/</a><p>Thanks!
Show HN: Linex – A daily challenge: placing pieces on a board that fights back
Hi HN,<p>I wanted to share a web game I’ve been building in HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, and PHP called LINEX.<p>It is primarily designed and optimized to be played in the mobile browser.<p>The idea is simple: you have an 8x8 board where you must place pieces (Tetris-style and some custom shapes) to clear horizontal and vertical lines.<p>Yes, someone might think this has already been done, but let me explain.<p>You choose where to place the piece and how to rotate it. The core interaction consists of "drawing" the piece tap-by-tap on the grid, which provides a very satisfying tactile sense of control and requires a much more thoughtful strategy.<p>To avoid the flat difficulty curve typical of games in this genre, I’ve implemented a couple of twists:<p>1. Progressive difficulty (The board fights back): As you progress and clear lines, permanently blocked cells randomly appear on the board. This forces you to constantly adapt your spatial vision.<p>2. Tools to defend yourself: To counter frustration, you have a very limited number of aids (skip the piece, choose another one, or use a special 1x1 piece). These resources increase slightly as the board fills up with blocked cells, forcing you to decide the exact right moment to use them.<p>The game features a daily challenge driven by a date-based random seed (PRNG). Everyone gets exactly the same sequence of pieces and blockers. Furthermore, the base difficulty scales throughout the week: on Mondays you start with a clean board (0 initial blocked cells, although several will appear as the game progresses), and the difficulty ramps up until Sunday, where you start the game with 3 obstacles already in place.<p>In addition to the global medal leaderboard, you can add other users to your profile to create a private leaderboard and compete head-to-head just with your friends.<p>Time is also an important factor, as in the event of a tie in cleared lines, the player who completed them faster will rank higher on the leaderboard.<p>I would love for you to check it out. I'm especially looking for honest feedback on the difficulty curve, the piece-placement interaction (UI/UX), or the balancing of obstacles/tools, although any other ideas, critiques, or suggestions are welcome.<p><a href="https://www.playlinex.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.playlinex.com/</a><p>Thanks!
Show HN: Linex – A daily challenge: placing pieces on a board that fights back
Hi HN,<p>I wanted to share a web game I’ve been building in HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, and PHP called LINEX.<p>It is primarily designed and optimized to be played in the mobile browser.<p>The idea is simple: you have an 8x8 board where you must place pieces (Tetris-style and some custom shapes) to clear horizontal and vertical lines.<p>Yes, someone might think this has already been done, but let me explain.<p>You choose where to place the piece and how to rotate it. The core interaction consists of "drawing" the piece tap-by-tap on the grid, which provides a very satisfying tactile sense of control and requires a much more thoughtful strategy.<p>To avoid the flat difficulty curve typical of games in this genre, I’ve implemented a couple of twists:<p>1. Progressive difficulty (The board fights back): As you progress and clear lines, permanently blocked cells randomly appear on the board. This forces you to constantly adapt your spatial vision.<p>2. Tools to defend yourself: To counter frustration, you have a very limited number of aids (skip the piece, choose another one, or use a special 1x1 piece). These resources increase slightly as the board fills up with blocked cells, forcing you to decide the exact right moment to use them.<p>The game features a daily challenge driven by a date-based random seed (PRNG). Everyone gets exactly the same sequence of pieces and blockers. Furthermore, the base difficulty scales throughout the week: on Mondays you start with a clean board (0 initial blocked cells, although several will appear as the game progresses), and the difficulty ramps up until Sunday, where you start the game with 3 obstacles already in place.<p>In addition to the global medal leaderboard, you can add other users to your profile to create a private leaderboard and compete head-to-head just with your friends.<p>Time is also an important factor, as in the event of a tie in cleared lines, the player who completed them faster will rank higher on the leaderboard.<p>I would love for you to check it out. I'm especially looking for honest feedback on the difficulty curve, the piece-placement interaction (UI/UX), or the balancing of obstacles/tools, although any other ideas, critiques, or suggestions are welcome.<p><a href="https://www.playlinex.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.playlinex.com/</a><p>Thanks!
Show HN: Agent Swarm – Multi-agent self-learning teams (OSS)
Show HN: Deff – Side-by-side Git diff review in your terminal
deff is an interactive Rust TUI for reviewing git diffs side-by-side with syntax highlighting and added/deleted line tinting. It supports keyboard/mouse navigation, vim-style motions, in-diff search (/, n, N), per-file reviewed toggles, and both upstream-based and explicit --base/--head comparisons. It can also include uncommitted + untracked files (--include-uncommitted) so you can review your working tree before committing.<p>Would love to get some feedback
Show HN: Deff – Side-by-side Git diff review in your terminal
deff is an interactive Rust TUI for reviewing git diffs side-by-side with syntax highlighting and added/deleted line tinting. It supports keyboard/mouse navigation, vim-style motions, in-diff search (/, n, N), per-file reviewed toggles, and both upstream-based and explicit --base/--head comparisons. It can also include uncommitted + untracked files (--include-uncommitted) so you can review your working tree before committing.<p>Would love to get some feedback
Show HN: Django Control Room – All Your Tools Inside the Django Admin
Over the past year I’ve been building a set of operational panels for Django:<p>- Redis inspection
- cache visibility
- Celery task introspection
- URL discovery and testing<p>All of these tools have been built inside the Django admin.<p>Instead of jumping between tools like Flower, redis-cli, Swagger, or external services, I wanted something that sits where I’m already working.<p>I’ve grouped these under a single umbrella: Django Control Room.<p>The idea is pretty simple: the Django admin already gives you authentication, permissions, and a familiar interface. It can also act as an operational layer for your app.<p>Each panel is just a small Django app with a simple interface, so it’s easy to build your own and plug it in.<p>I’m working on more panels (signals, errors, etc.) and also thinking about how far this pattern can go.<p>Curious how others think about this. Does it make sense to consolidate this kind of tooling inside the admin, or do you prefer keeping it separate?
Show HN: Clocksimulator.com – A minimalist, distraction-free analog clock
Hello all!
Build clean, minimalistic analog clock webpage to Cloudflare Pages.<p>This is for (maybe):
- kids to learn
- for second monitor
- old tabled on shelf
- ..<p>Themes and screen wake lock buttons with auto-hide. Goal is to keep it as clean as possible.<p>This possible makes no sense, but for a domain of $10/y this is cheap site for me to keep and see how it lives on.
Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance
Hacker Smacker adds friend/foe functionality to Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every commenter's name. Click to friend or foe a commenter and you'll more easily spot them on future threads. Makes it easy to scroll and spot the commenters you love to read (and hate to read).<p>Main website: <a href="https://hackersmacker.org" rel="nofollow">https://hackersmacker.org</a><p>Chrome/Edge extension: <a href="https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcglejmapenkiabndkcnahfkmbohmhd" rel="nofollow">https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg...</a>
Safari extension: <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725">https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725</a>
Firefox extension: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacker/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacke...</a><p>The interesting part is friend-of-a-friend: if you friend someone who also uses Hacker Smacker, you'll see their friends and foes highlighted too. This lets you quickly scan long comment threads and find the good stuff based on people you trust.<p>I built this to learn how FoaF relationships work with Redis sets, then brought the same technique to NewsBlur's social layer. The backend is CoffeeScript/Node.js/Redis, and the extension works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.<p>Technically I wrote this back in 2011, but never built a proper auth system until now. So I've been using it for 15 years and it's been great. PG once saw it on my laptop (back when he was still moderating HN, in 2012) and remarked that it was neat.<p>Thanks to Mihai Parparita for help with the Chrome extension sandboxing and Greg Brockman for helping design the authentication system.<p>Source is on GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker</a><p>Directly inspired by Slashdot's friend/foe system, which I always wished HN had. Happy to answer questions!
Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance
Hacker Smacker adds friend/foe functionality to Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every commenter's name. Click to friend or foe a commenter and you'll more easily spot them on future threads. Makes it easy to scroll and spot the commenters you love to read (and hate to read).<p>Main website: <a href="https://hackersmacker.org" rel="nofollow">https://hackersmacker.org</a><p>Chrome/Edge extension: <a href="https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcglejmapenkiabndkcnahfkmbohmhd" rel="nofollow">https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg...</a>
Safari extension: <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725">https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725</a>
Firefox extension: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacker/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacke...</a><p>The interesting part is friend-of-a-friend: if you friend someone who also uses Hacker Smacker, you'll see their friends and foes highlighted too. This lets you quickly scan long comment threads and find the good stuff based on people you trust.<p>I built this to learn how FoaF relationships work with Redis sets, then brought the same technique to NewsBlur's social layer. The backend is CoffeeScript/Node.js/Redis, and the extension works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.<p>Technically I wrote this back in 2011, but never built a proper auth system until now. So I've been using it for 15 years and it's been great. PG once saw it on my laptop (back when he was still moderating HN, in 2012) and remarked that it was neat.<p>Thanks to Mihai Parparita for help with the Chrome extension sandboxing and Greg Brockman for helping design the authentication system.<p>Source is on GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker</a><p>Directly inspired by Slashdot's friend/foe system, which I always wished HN had. Happy to answer questions!
Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance
Hacker Smacker adds friend/foe functionality to Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every commenter's name. Click to friend or foe a commenter and you'll more easily spot them on future threads. Makes it easy to scroll and spot the commenters you love to read (and hate to read).<p>Main website: <a href="https://hackersmacker.org" rel="nofollow">https://hackersmacker.org</a><p>Chrome/Edge extension: <a href="https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcglejmapenkiabndkcnahfkmbohmhd" rel="nofollow">https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg...</a>
Safari extension: <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725">https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725</a>
Firefox extension: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacker/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacke...</a><p>The interesting part is friend-of-a-friend: if you friend someone who also uses Hacker Smacker, you'll see their friends and foes highlighted too. This lets you quickly scan long comment threads and find the good stuff based on people you trust.<p>I built this to learn how FoaF relationships work with Redis sets, then brought the same technique to NewsBlur's social layer. The backend is CoffeeScript/Node.js/Redis, and the extension works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.<p>Technically I wrote this back in 2011, but never built a proper auth system until now. So I've been using it for 15 years and it's been great. PG once saw it on my laptop (back when he was still moderating HN, in 2012) and remarked that it was neat.<p>Thanks to Mihai Parparita for help with the Chrome extension sandboxing and Greg Brockman for helping design the authentication system.<p>Source is on GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker</a><p>Directly inspired by Slashdot's friend/foe system, which I always wished HN had. Happy to answer questions!
Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play
I've liked all the projects that put LLMs into game environments. It's been a weird juxtaposition, though: frontier LLMs can one-shot full coding projects, and those same models struggle to get out of Pokémon Red's Mt. Moon.<p>Because of this, I wanted to create a game environment that put this generation of frontier LLMs' top skill, coding, on full display.<p>Ten years ago, a team released a game called Screeps. It was described as an "MMO RTS sandbox for programmers." The Screeps paradigm of writing code and having it executed in a real-time game environment is well suited to LLMs. Drawing on a version of the Screeps open source API, LLM Skirmish pits LLMs head-to-head in a series of 1v1 real-time strategy games.<p>In my testing I found that Claude Opus 4.5 was the most dominant model, but it showed weakness in round 1 as it was overly focused on its in-game economy. Meanwhile, I probably spent a third of all code on sandbox hardening because GPT 5.2 kept trying to cheat by pre-reading its opponent's strategies.<p>If there's interest, I'm planning on doing a round of testing with the latest generation of LLMs (Claude 4.6 Opus, GPT 5.3 Codex, etc.).<p>You can run local matches via CLI. I'm running a hosted match runner with Google Cloud Run that uses isolated-vm. The match playback visualizer is statically served from Cloudflare.<p>I've created a community ladder that you can submit strategies to via CLI, no auth required. I've found that the CLI plus the skill.md that's available has been enough for AI agents to immediately get started.<p>Website: <a href="https://llmskirmish.com" rel="nofollow">https://llmskirmish.com</a><p>API docs: <a href="https://llmskirmish.com/docs" rel="nofollow">https://llmskirmish.com/docs</a><p>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/llmskirmish/skirmish" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/llmskirmish/skirmish</a><p>A video of a match: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnBPaZ1qamM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnBPaZ1qamM</a>
Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play
I've liked all the projects that put LLMs into game environments. It's been a weird juxtaposition, though: frontier LLMs can one-shot full coding projects, and those same models struggle to get out of Pokémon Red's Mt. Moon.<p>Because of this, I wanted to create a game environment that put this generation of frontier LLMs' top skill, coding, on full display.<p>Ten years ago, a team released a game called Screeps. It was described as an "MMO RTS sandbox for programmers." The Screeps paradigm of writing code and having it executed in a real-time game environment is well suited to LLMs. Drawing on a version of the Screeps open source API, LLM Skirmish pits LLMs head-to-head in a series of 1v1 real-time strategy games.<p>In my testing I found that Claude Opus 4.5 was the most dominant model, but it showed weakness in round 1 as it was overly focused on its in-game economy. Meanwhile, I probably spent a third of all code on sandbox hardening because GPT 5.2 kept trying to cheat by pre-reading its opponent's strategies.<p>If there's interest, I'm planning on doing a round of testing with the latest generation of LLMs (Claude 4.6 Opus, GPT 5.3 Codex, etc.).<p>You can run local matches via CLI. I'm running a hosted match runner with Google Cloud Run that uses isolated-vm. The match playback visualizer is statically served from Cloudflare.<p>I've created a community ladder that you can submit strategies to via CLI, no auth required. I've found that the CLI plus the skill.md that's available has been enough for AI agents to immediately get started.<p>Website: <a href="https://llmskirmish.com" rel="nofollow">https://llmskirmish.com</a><p>API docs: <a href="https://llmskirmish.com/docs" rel="nofollow">https://llmskirmish.com/docs</a><p>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/llmskirmish/skirmish" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/llmskirmish/skirmish</a><p>A video of a match: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnBPaZ1qamM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnBPaZ1qamM</a>
Show HN: I ported Tree-sitter to Go
This started as a hard requirement for my TUI-based editor application, it ended up going in a few different directions.<p>A suite of tools that help with semantic code entities: <a href="https://github.com/odvcencio/gts-suite" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/odvcencio/gts-suite</a><p>A next-gen version control system called Got: <a href="https://github.com/odvcencio/got" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/odvcencio/got</a><p>I think this has some pretty big potential! I think there's many classes of application (particularly legacy architecture) that can benefit from these kinds of analysis tooling. My next post will be about composing all these together, an exciting project I call GotHub. Thanks!
Show HN: Terminal Phone – E2EE Walkie Talkie from the Command Line
TerminalPhone is a single, self-contained Bash script that provides anonymous, end-to-end encrypted voice and text communication between two parties over the Tor network. It operates as a walkie-talkie: you record a voice message, and it is compressed, encrypted, and transmitted to the remote party as a single unit. You can also send encrypted text messages during a call. No server infrastructure, no accounts, no phone numbers. Your Tor hidden service .onion address is your identity.
Show HN: Terminal Phone – E2EE Walkie Talkie from the Command Line
TerminalPhone is a single, self-contained Bash script that provides anonymous, end-to-end encrypted voice and text communication between two parties over the Tor network. It operates as a walkie-talkie: you record a voice message, and it is compressed, encrypted, and transmitted to the remote party as a single unit. You can also send encrypted text messages during a call. No server infrastructure, no accounts, no phone numbers. Your Tor hidden service .onion address is your identity.
Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better
My partner, Nick Hodges, and I, David Millington, have been on the Internet for a very long time -- since the Usenet days. We’ve seen it all, and have long been frustrated by bad comments, horrible people, and discouraging discussions. We've also been around places where the discussion is wonderful and productive. How to get more of the latter and less of the former?<p>Current moderation tools just seem to focus on deletion and banning. Wouldn’t it be helpful to encourage productive discussion and <i>teach</i> people how to discuss and argue (in the debate sense) better?<p>A year ago we started building Respectify to help foster healthy communication. Instead of just deleting bad-faith comments, we suggest better, good-faith ways to say what folks are trying to say. We help people avoid: * Logical fallacies (false dichotomy, strawmen, etc.) * Tone issues (how others will read the comment) * Relevance to the actual page/post topic * Low-effort posts * Dog whistles and coded language<p>The commenter gets an explanation of what's wrong and a chance to edit and resubmit. It's moderation + education in one step. We want, too, to automate the entire process so the site owner can focus on content and not worry about moderation at all. And over time, comment by comment, quietly coach better thinking.<p>Our main website has an interactive demo: <a href="https://respectify.ai" rel="nofollow">https://respectify.ai</a>. As the demo shows, the system is completely tunable and adjustable, from "most anything goes" to "You need to be college debate level to get by me".<p>We hope the result is better discussions and a better Internet. Not too much to ask, eh?<p>We love the kind of feedback this group is famous for and hope you will supply some!
Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better
My partner, Nick Hodges, and I, David Millington, have been on the Internet for a very long time -- since the Usenet days. We’ve seen it all, and have long been frustrated by bad comments, horrible people, and discouraging discussions. We've also been around places where the discussion is wonderful and productive. How to get more of the latter and less of the former?<p>Current moderation tools just seem to focus on deletion and banning. Wouldn’t it be helpful to encourage productive discussion and <i>teach</i> people how to discuss and argue (in the debate sense) better?<p>A year ago we started building Respectify to help foster healthy communication. Instead of just deleting bad-faith comments, we suggest better, good-faith ways to say what folks are trying to say. We help people avoid: * Logical fallacies (false dichotomy, strawmen, etc.) * Tone issues (how others will read the comment) * Relevance to the actual page/post topic * Low-effort posts * Dog whistles and coded language<p>The commenter gets an explanation of what's wrong and a chance to edit and resubmit. It's moderation + education in one step. We want, too, to automate the entire process so the site owner can focus on content and not worry about moderation at all. And over time, comment by comment, quietly coach better thinking.<p>Our main website has an interactive demo: <a href="https://respectify.ai" rel="nofollow">https://respectify.ai</a>. As the demo shows, the system is completely tunable and adjustable, from "most anything goes" to "You need to be college debate level to get by me".<p>We hope the result is better discussions and a better Internet. Not too much to ask, eh?<p>We love the kind of feedback this group is famous for and hope you will supply some!