The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025
Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads
We're Carolina Cloud - managed data science infrastructure at ~1/3 the cost of AWS.<p>I left my job earlier this year after watching companies get crushed by cloud bills for workloads that didn't need hyperscaler complexity. Some examples from my previous life:
- $1k/month for a basic 16 vCPU VM
- $50k/month for a high-RAM instance
- Over $1k/month for notebook platform start-stop execution<p>We built Carolina Cloud for data scientists and small teams who need serious compute without the sticker shock. Our sweet spot: if you're running VMs, notebooks, or RStudio and not deeply tied to AWS/Azure/GCP service ecosystems, we can save you a lot of money.<p>What we offer:
- Standard Ubuntu VMs
- One-click Marimo notebooks
- One-click RStudio Server and Shiny hosting
- S3-compatible object storage (launching soon)
- Prepay discounts for commitments as short as 2 weeks
- SOC2-certified, HIPAA-compliant datacenter in Charlotte, NC<p>Simple pricing: $0.005/vCPU/hr, $0.005/GiB RAM/hr, and $0.0001/GiB of hot storage/hr on AMD EPYC Turin processors. A 32 vCPU, 128GB RAM instance runs ~$240/month vs $800+ on AWS.<p>We're not trying to replicate every AWS service - if you need Lambda + Secrets Manager + S3 with pre-signed URLs, stick with AWS. But if you're a hedge fund running backtests, a biotech team analyzing genomics data, or a researcher who just needs a beefy VM without surprise egress fees, we're 1/3 the price.<p>Check us out at console.carolinacloud.io - happy to answer questions about our infrastructure, pricing, or why we think there's room for regional clouds built on owned hardware.
Show HN: HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HN
I was looking for some fun project to play around with the latest Gemini models and ended up building this :)<p>Enter your username and get:<p>- Generated roasts and stats based on your HN activity 2025<p>- Your personalized HN front page from 2035 (inspired by a recent Show HN [0])<p>- An xkcd-style comic of your HN persona<p>It uses the latest gemini-3-flash and gemini-3-pro-image (nano banana pro) models, which deliver pretty impressive and funny results.<p>A few examples:<p>- dang: <a href="https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dang" rel="nofollow">https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dang</a><p>- myself: <a href="https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/hubraumhugo" rel="nofollow">https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/hubraumhugo</a><p>Give it a try and share yours :)<p>Happy holidays!<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632</a>
Show HN: HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HN
I was looking for some fun project to play around with the latest Gemini models and ended up building this :)<p>Enter your username and get:<p>- Generated roasts and stats based on your HN activity 2025<p>- Your personalized HN front page from 2035 (inspired by a recent Show HN [0])<p>- An xkcd-style comic of your HN persona<p>It uses the latest gemini-3-flash and gemini-3-pro-image (nano banana pro) models, which deliver pretty impressive and funny results.<p>A few examples:<p>- dang: <a href="https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dang" rel="nofollow">https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dang</a><p>- myself: <a href="https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/hubraumhugo" rel="nofollow">https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/hubraumhugo</a><p>Give it a try and share yours :)<p>Happy holidays!<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632</a>
Show HN: HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HN
I was looking for some fun project to play around with the latest Gemini models and ended up building this :)<p>Enter your username and get:<p>- Generated roasts and stats based on your HN activity 2025<p>- Your personalized HN front page from 2035 (inspired by a recent Show HN [0])<p>- An xkcd-style comic of your HN persona<p>It uses the latest gemini-3-flash and gemini-3-pro-image (nano banana pro) models, which deliver pretty impressive and funny results.<p>A few examples:<p>- dang: <a href="https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dang" rel="nofollow">https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dang</a><p>- myself: <a href="https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/hubraumhugo" rel="nofollow">https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/hubraumhugo</a><p>Give it a try and share yours :)<p>Happy holidays!<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632</a>
Show HN: HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HN
I was looking for some fun project to play around with the latest Gemini models and ended up building this :)<p>Enter your username and get:<p>- Generated roasts and stats based on your HN activity 2025<p>- Your personalized HN front page from 2035 (inspired by a recent Show HN [0])<p>- An xkcd-style comic of your HN persona<p>It uses the latest gemini-3-flash and gemini-3-pro-image (nano banana pro) models, which deliver pretty impressive and funny results.<p>A few examples:<p>- dang: <a href="https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dang" rel="nofollow">https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dang</a><p>- myself: <a href="https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/hubraumhugo" rel="nofollow">https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/hubraumhugo</a><p>Give it a try and share yours :)<p>Happy holidays!<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632</a>
Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files
Hi everyone! My name's Luke and I made the original Jmail here alongside Riley Walz. We had a ton of friends collaborate on building out more of the app suite last night in lieue of DOJ's "Epstein files" release.<p>Please AMA!
Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files
Hi everyone! My name's Luke and I made the original Jmail here alongside Riley Walz. We had a ton of friends collaborate on building out more of the app suite last night in lieue of DOJ's "Epstein files" release.<p>Please AMA!
Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files
Hi everyone! My name's Luke and I made the original Jmail here alongside Riley Walz. We had a ton of friends collaborate on building out more of the app suite last night in lieue of DOJ's "Epstein files" release.<p>Please AMA!
Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files
Hi everyone! My name's Luke and I made the original Jmail here alongside Riley Walz. We had a ton of friends collaborate on building out more of the app suite last night in lieue of DOJ's "Epstein files" release.<p>Please AMA!
Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files
Hi everyone! My name's Luke and I made the original Jmail here alongside Riley Walz. We had a ton of friends collaborate on building out more of the app suite last night in lieue of DOJ's "Epstein files" release.<p>Please AMA!
Show HN: Stepped Actions – distributed workflow orchestration for Rails
Stepped is a Rails engine, extracted out of Envirobly where it powers tasks like application deployment, that involve complex, out-of-the-band tasks like DNS provisioning, retries, waiting for instances to boot, running health checks and all the fun stuff of a highly distributed networked system.
Show HN: Stickerbox, a kid-safe, AI-powered voice to sticker printer
Bob and Arun here, creators of Stickerbox.<p>If AI were built for kids, what would it look like?<p>Asking that question led us to creativity, and more specifically, the power of kids’ imaginations. We wanted to let kids combine the power of their ideas with AI tools but we needed to make sure we did it safely and in the right way.<p>Enter Stickerbox, a voice powered sticker printer. By combining AI image generation with thermal sticker printing, we instantly turn kids' wildest ideas into real stickers they can color, stick, and share.<p>What surprised us most is how the “AI” disappears behind the magic of the device. The moment that consistently amazes kids is when the printer finishes and they are holding their own idea as a real sticker. A ghost on a skateboard, a dragon doing its taxes, their dog as a superhero, anything they can dream of, they can hold in their hand. Their reactions are what pushed us to keep building, even though hardware can be really hard.<p>Along the way the scope of the project grew more than we expected: navigating supply chains, sourcing safe BPA/BPS free thermal paper, passing safety testing for a children’s product, and designing an interface simple enough that a five year old can walk up and just talk to it. We also spent a lot of time thinking about kids’ data and privacy so that parents would feel comfortable having this in their home.<p>Stickerbox is our attempt to make modern AI kid-safe, playful, and tangible. We’d love to hear what you think!<p>P.S. If you’re interested in buying one for yourself or as a gift, use code FREE3PACK to get an extra free pack of paper refills.
Show HN: Stickerbox, a kid-safe, AI-powered voice to sticker printer
Bob and Arun here, creators of Stickerbox.<p>If AI were built for kids, what would it look like?<p>Asking that question led us to creativity, and more specifically, the power of kids’ imaginations. We wanted to let kids combine the power of their ideas with AI tools but we needed to make sure we did it safely and in the right way.<p>Enter Stickerbox, a voice powered sticker printer. By combining AI image generation with thermal sticker printing, we instantly turn kids' wildest ideas into real stickers they can color, stick, and share.<p>What surprised us most is how the “AI” disappears behind the magic of the device. The moment that consistently amazes kids is when the printer finishes and they are holding their own idea as a real sticker. A ghost on a skateboard, a dragon doing its taxes, their dog as a superhero, anything they can dream of, they can hold in their hand. Their reactions are what pushed us to keep building, even though hardware can be really hard.<p>Along the way the scope of the project grew more than we expected: navigating supply chains, sourcing safe BPA/BPS free thermal paper, passing safety testing for a children’s product, and designing an interface simple enough that a five year old can walk up and just talk to it. We also spent a lot of time thinking about kids’ data and privacy so that parents would feel comfortable having this in their home.<p>Stickerbox is our attempt to make modern AI kid-safe, playful, and tangible. We’d love to hear what you think!<p>P.S. If you’re interested in buying one for yourself or as a gift, use code FREE3PACK to get an extra free pack of paper refills.
Show HN: Stickerbox, a kid-safe, AI-powered voice to sticker printer
Bob and Arun here, creators of Stickerbox.<p>If AI were built for kids, what would it look like?<p>Asking that question led us to creativity, and more specifically, the power of kids’ imaginations. We wanted to let kids combine the power of their ideas with AI tools but we needed to make sure we did it safely and in the right way.<p>Enter Stickerbox, a voice powered sticker printer. By combining AI image generation with thermal sticker printing, we instantly turn kids' wildest ideas into real stickers they can color, stick, and share.<p>What surprised us most is how the “AI” disappears behind the magic of the device. The moment that consistently amazes kids is when the printer finishes and they are holding their own idea as a real sticker. A ghost on a skateboard, a dragon doing its taxes, their dog as a superhero, anything they can dream of, they can hold in their hand. Their reactions are what pushed us to keep building, even though hardware can be really hard.<p>Along the way the scope of the project grew more than we expected: navigating supply chains, sourcing safe BPA/BPS free thermal paper, passing safety testing for a children’s product, and designing an interface simple enough that a five year old can walk up and just talk to it. We also spent a lot of time thinking about kids’ data and privacy so that parents would feel comfortable having this in their home.<p>Stickerbox is our attempt to make modern AI kid-safe, playful, and tangible. We’d love to hear what you think!<p>P.S. If you’re interested in buying one for yourself or as a gift, use code FREE3PACK to get an extra free pack of paper refills.
Show HN: I Made Loom for Mobile
An app to make demo vids<p>Of course I have a demo vid: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_fq0TzlsXI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_fq0TzlsXI</a><p>This will be my last post to HN about this. I always like to try a few titles to see if any hit.
Show HN: I Made Loom for Mobile
An app to make demo vids<p>Of course I have a demo vid: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_fq0TzlsXI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_fq0TzlsXI</a><p>This will be my last post to HN about this. I always like to try a few titles to see if any hit.
Show HN: I open-sourced my Go and Next B2B SaaS Starter (deploy anywhere, MIT)
Hi HN, I'm Mohammed, a technical founder who loves shipping and giving back to the community. I'm open-sourcing the full-stack engine that powers my B2B product, apflow.co.<p>What it is: A production B2B starter with a Go backend and Next.js frontend. Both are fully Dockerized with separate containers. No Vercel. No Supabase. Deploy the whole thing on a $6 VPS, or split frontend and backend across different providers. You own the infrastructure.<p>The problem I was solving:<p>Every SaaS starter I evaluated had the same issue: they locked me into someone else's platform. Vercel for hosting. PlanetScale for the database. Serverless functions billing per invocation. Fine for prototypes, but costs become unpredictable at scale and migrating away is painful.<p>I wanted something I could deploy on any Linux box with docker-compose up. Something where I could host the frontend on Cloudflare Pages and the backend on a Hetzner VPS if I wanted. No vendor-specific APIs buried in my code.<p>Why Go for the backend:<p>Go gives me exactly what I need for a SaaS backend:<p>Tiny footprint. The backend idles at ~50MB RAM. On a cheap VPS, that headroom lets me run more services without upgrading.
Concurrency without complexity. Billing webhooks, file uploads, and AI calls run concurrently without callback hell.
Compile-time type safety. Using SQLC, my SQL compiles to type-safe Go. If the query is wrong, it fails at build time, not in production.
Predictable performance. No garbage collection pauses that surprise you under load.
The architecture (Modular Monolith):<p>I didn't want microservices complexity for a small team, but I needed clean separation. I built a Modular Monolith: features like Auth, Billing, and AI are isolated Go modules with explicit interfaces, but they deploy as a single binary.<p>This structure also made AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code) dramatically more effective. Because every module has strict boundaries, the AI knows exactly where new code belongs and doesn't break other modules.<p>Full-stack, not just backend:<p>Backend: Go 1.25 + Gin + SQLC (type-safe SQL, no ORM) + PostgreSQL with pgvector
Frontend: Next.js 16 + React 19 + Tailwind + shadcn/ui
Communication: The frontend consumes a clean REST API. You can swap Next.js for any framework that speaks HTTP.
Infrastructure: Separate Dockerfiles for frontend and backend. Deploy together or apart.
What's pre-built:<p>The boring infrastructure is solved so you can focus on your actual product:<p>Auth + RBAC: Stytch B2B integration with Organizations, Teams, and Roles. Multi-tenant data isolation enforced at the query level.
Billing: Polar.sh as Merchant of Record. Handles subscriptions, invoices, and global tax/VAT. No Stripe webhook edge cases.
AI Pipeline: OpenAI RAG using pgvector. The retrieval service enforces strict context boundaries to minimize hallucinations.
OCR: Mistral integration for document extraction.
File Storage: Cloudflare R2 integration.
Each feature is a separate module. Don't need OCR? Remove it. Want Stripe instead of Polar? The billing interface is abstracted.<p>Real-world proof:<p>This isn't a template I made for GitHub stars. It's the exact code running apflow.co in production. When I added document OCR, I built it as a new module without touching Auth or Billing. The architecture held.<p>How to try it:<p>Clone the repo, read setup.md to check the prerequisite, run ./setup.sh, and you have a working B2B environment locally in minutes.<p>Feedback I want:<p>I'd appreciate feedback from Go developers on the module boundaries and cross-module interfaces. Also curious if anyone has suggestions for the Docker setup in production deployments.<p>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/moasq/production-saas-starter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/moasq/production-saas-starter</a><p>Live: <a href="https://apflow.co" rel="nofollow">https://apflow.co</a>
Show HN: I open-sourced my Go and Next B2B SaaS Starter (deploy anywhere, MIT)
Hi HN, I'm Mohammed, a technical founder who loves shipping and giving back to the community. I'm open-sourcing the full-stack engine that powers my B2B product, apflow.co.<p>What it is: A production B2B starter with a Go backend and Next.js frontend. Both are fully Dockerized with separate containers. No Vercel. No Supabase. Deploy the whole thing on a $6 VPS, or split frontend and backend across different providers. You own the infrastructure.<p>The problem I was solving:<p>Every SaaS starter I evaluated had the same issue: they locked me into someone else's platform. Vercel for hosting. PlanetScale for the database. Serverless functions billing per invocation. Fine for prototypes, but costs become unpredictable at scale and migrating away is painful.<p>I wanted something I could deploy on any Linux box with docker-compose up. Something where I could host the frontend on Cloudflare Pages and the backend on a Hetzner VPS if I wanted. No vendor-specific APIs buried in my code.<p>Why Go for the backend:<p>Go gives me exactly what I need for a SaaS backend:<p>Tiny footprint. The backend idles at ~50MB RAM. On a cheap VPS, that headroom lets me run more services without upgrading.
Concurrency without complexity. Billing webhooks, file uploads, and AI calls run concurrently without callback hell.
Compile-time type safety. Using SQLC, my SQL compiles to type-safe Go. If the query is wrong, it fails at build time, not in production.
Predictable performance. No garbage collection pauses that surprise you under load.
The architecture (Modular Monolith):<p>I didn't want microservices complexity for a small team, but I needed clean separation. I built a Modular Monolith: features like Auth, Billing, and AI are isolated Go modules with explicit interfaces, but they deploy as a single binary.<p>This structure also made AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code) dramatically more effective. Because every module has strict boundaries, the AI knows exactly where new code belongs and doesn't break other modules.<p>Full-stack, not just backend:<p>Backend: Go 1.25 + Gin + SQLC (type-safe SQL, no ORM) + PostgreSQL with pgvector
Frontend: Next.js 16 + React 19 + Tailwind + shadcn/ui
Communication: The frontend consumes a clean REST API. You can swap Next.js for any framework that speaks HTTP.
Infrastructure: Separate Dockerfiles for frontend and backend. Deploy together or apart.
What's pre-built:<p>The boring infrastructure is solved so you can focus on your actual product:<p>Auth + RBAC: Stytch B2B integration with Organizations, Teams, and Roles. Multi-tenant data isolation enforced at the query level.
Billing: Polar.sh as Merchant of Record. Handles subscriptions, invoices, and global tax/VAT. No Stripe webhook edge cases.
AI Pipeline: OpenAI RAG using pgvector. The retrieval service enforces strict context boundaries to minimize hallucinations.
OCR: Mistral integration for document extraction.
File Storage: Cloudflare R2 integration.
Each feature is a separate module. Don't need OCR? Remove it. Want Stripe instead of Polar? The billing interface is abstracted.<p>Real-world proof:<p>This isn't a template I made for GitHub stars. It's the exact code running apflow.co in production. When I added document OCR, I built it as a new module without touching Auth or Billing. The architecture held.<p>How to try it:<p>Clone the repo, read setup.md to check the prerequisite, run ./setup.sh, and you have a working B2B environment locally in minutes.<p>Feedback I want:<p>I'd appreciate feedback from Go developers on the module boundaries and cross-module interfaces. Also curious if anyone has suggestions for the Docker setup in production deployments.<p>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/moasq/production-saas-starter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/moasq/production-saas-starter</a><p>Live: <a href="https://apflow.co" rel="nofollow">https://apflow.co</a>
Show HN: TinyPDF – 3kb pdf library (70x smaller than jsPDF)
I needed to generate invoices in a Node.js app. jsPDF is 229KB. I only needed text, rectangles, lines, and JPEG images.<p><pre><code> So I wrote tinypdf: <400 lines of TypeScript, zero dependencies, 3.3KB minified+gzipped.
What it does:
- Text (Helvetica, colors, alignment)
- Rectangles and lines
- JPEG images
- Multiple pages, custom sizes
What it doesn't do:
- Custom fonts, PNG/SVG, forms, encryption, HTML-to-PDF
That's it. The 95% use case for invoices, receipts, reports, tickets, and labels.
GitHub: https://github.com/Lulzx/tinypdf
npm: npm install tinypdf</code></pre>