The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
Latest posts:
Show HN: Enroll, a tool to reverse-engineer servers into Ansible config mgmt
Happy new year folks!<p>This tool was born out of a situation where I had 'inherited' a bunch of servers that were not under any form of config management. Oh, the horror...<p>Enroll 'harvests' system information such as what packages are installed, what services are running, what files have 'differed' from their out-of-the-box defaults, and what other custom snowflake data might exist.<p>The harvest state data can be kept as its own sort of SBOM, but also can be converted in a mere second or two into fully-functional Ansible roles/playbooks/inventory.<p>It can be run remotely over SSH or locally on the machine. Debian and Redhat-like systems are supported.<p>There is also a 'diff' mode to detect drift over time. (Years ago I used Puppet instead of Ansible and miss the agent/server model where it would check in and re-align to the expected state, in case people were being silly and side-stepping the config management altogether). For now, diff mode doesn't 'enforce' but is just capable of notification (webhook, email, stdout) if changes occur.<p>Since making the tool, I've found that it's even useful for systems where you <i>already</i> have in Ansible, in that it can detect stuff you forgot to put into Ansible in the first place. I'm now starting to use it as a 'DR strategy' of sorts: still favoring my normal Ansible roles day-to-day (they are more bespoke and easier to read), but running enroll with '--dangerous --sops' in the background periodically as a 'dragnet' catch-all, just in case I ever need it.<p>Bonus: it also can use my other tool JinjaTurtle, which converts native config files into Jinja2 templates / Ansible vars. That one too was born out of frustration, converting a massive TOML file into Ansible :)<p>Anyway, hope it's useful to someone other than me! The website has some demos and more documentation. Have fun every(any)-one.
Show HN: Tasker – An open-source desktop agent for browser and OS automation
Hi HN<p>I recently got married, promptly had a bit of a meltdown, and decided to lock myself
in a room and build for a while.<p>At the same time, I was trying to outbound sell for my startup and kept running into
the same problem: I wanted an automation tool that could actually use my computer
like a person. Click through UIs, copy/paste between apps, handle messy workflows —
not just APIs and webhooks.<p>I couldn’t find anything that felt:
- consumer-friendly (non-technical)
- local-first
- flexible enough for real-world, UI-driven tasks<p>So I challenged myself to see how far I could get building an open-source,
desktop automation app powered by AI. That’s Tasker.<p>I’ve been using it daily for ~2–3 weeks for sales workflows, and my father has been
using it to help generate estimates for his HVAC business. It’s still early (still needs to expand to general OS), but it’s
already replaced a lot of manual work for us in browser.<p>One thing that’s become very clear: a cloud/deployable version that can run on cron
or be triggered via HTTP would unlock a lot of use cases. I’m not totally sure where
this goes next, but I wanted to share it early and get feedback.<p>Would love thoughts on:
- What workflows you’d actually trust something like this with
- Desktop vs cloud tradeoffs
- Where this breaks down in practice
- Whether this feels useful or just scary<p>Repo and docs are linked on the site.
Show HN: Tasker – An open-source desktop agent for browser and OS automation
Hi HN<p>I recently got married, promptly had a bit of a meltdown, and decided to lock myself
in a room and build for a while.<p>At the same time, I was trying to outbound sell for my startup and kept running into
the same problem: I wanted an automation tool that could actually use my computer
like a person. Click through UIs, copy/paste between apps, handle messy workflows —
not just APIs and webhooks.<p>I couldn’t find anything that felt:
- consumer-friendly (non-technical)
- local-first
- flexible enough for real-world, UI-driven tasks<p>So I challenged myself to see how far I could get building an open-source,
desktop automation app powered by AI. That’s Tasker.<p>I’ve been using it daily for ~2–3 weeks for sales workflows, and my father has been
using it to help generate estimates for his HVAC business. It’s still early (still needs to expand to general OS), but it’s
already replaced a lot of manual work for us in browser.<p>One thing that’s become very clear: a cloud/deployable version that can run on cron
or be triggered via HTTP would unlock a lot of use cases. I’m not totally sure where
this goes next, but I wanted to share it early and get feedback.<p>Would love thoughts on:
- What workflows you’d actually trust something like this with
- Desktop vs cloud tradeoffs
- Where this breaks down in practice
- Whether this feels useful or just scary<p>Repo and docs are linked on the site.
Show HN: I created a tool to design and create foamcore inserts for boardgames
As a holiday project to test out spec first development using Codex CLI, I ended up creating <a href="https://boxinsertdesigner.com/" rel="nofollow">https://boxinsertdesigner.com/</a><p>It lets you design a box insert in 2D and spits out a cutting list.<p>I'm looking for feedback, bugs, feature ideas etc and figured this would be a good place to find it :)
Show HN: I created a tool to design and create foamcore inserts for boardgames
As a holiday project to test out spec first development using Codex CLI, I ended up creating <a href="https://boxinsertdesigner.com/" rel="nofollow">https://boxinsertdesigner.com/</a><p>It lets you design a box insert in 2D and spits out a cutting list.<p>I'm looking for feedback, bugs, feature ideas etc and figured this would be a good place to find it :)
Show HN: Wario Synth – Turn any song into Game Boy version
Search any song, get a Gameboy version.<p>Emulates Nintendo's Sharp LR35902 sound hardware: 2 pulse waves for melody/harmony, 1 wave channel for bass, 1 noise for percussion.<p>Finds MIDI sources, parses tracks, maps to GB roles, resynthesizes with Web Audio. Everything runs client-side.<p>Site: <a href="https://www.wario.style" rel="nofollow">https://www.wario.style</a><p>Open source: <a href="https://github.com/b1rdmania/motif" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/b1rdmania/motif</a><p>Hobby project, non commercial, so please don't sue me.
Show HN: Wario Synth – Turn any song into Game Boy version
Search any song, get a Gameboy version.<p>Emulates Nintendo's Sharp LR35902 sound hardware: 2 pulse waves for melody/harmony, 1 wave channel for bass, 1 noise for percussion.<p>Finds MIDI sources, parses tracks, maps to GB roles, resynthesizes with Web Audio. Everything runs client-side.<p>Site: <a href="https://www.wario.style" rel="nofollow">https://www.wario.style</a><p>Open source: <a href="https://github.com/b1rdmania/motif" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/b1rdmania/motif</a><p>Hobby project, non commercial, so please don't sue me.
Show HN: Wario Synth – Turn any song into Game Boy version
Search any song, get a Gameboy version.<p>Emulates Nintendo's Sharp LR35902 sound hardware: 2 pulse waves for melody/harmony, 1 wave channel for bass, 1 noise for percussion.<p>Finds MIDI sources, parses tracks, maps to GB roles, resynthesizes with Web Audio. Everything runs client-side.<p>Site: <a href="https://www.wario.style" rel="nofollow">https://www.wario.style</a><p>Open source: <a href="https://github.com/b1rdmania/motif" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/b1rdmania/motif</a><p>Hobby project, non commercial, so please don't sue me.
Show HN: BusterMQ, Thread-per-core NATS server in Zig with io_uring
Show HN: BusterMQ, Thread-per-core NATS server in Zig with io_uring
Show HN: OpenWorkers – Self-hosted Cloudflare workers in Rust
I've been working on this for some time now, starting with vm2, then deno-core for 2 years, and recently rewrote it on rusty_v8 with Claude's help.<p>OpenWorkers lets you run untrusted JS in V8 isolates on your own infrastructure. Same DX as Cloudflare Workers, no vendor lock-in.<p>What works today: fetch, KV, Postgres bindings, S3/R2, cron scheduling, crypto.subtle.<p>Self-hosting is a single docker-compose file + Postgres.<p>Would love feedback on the architecture and what feature you'd want next.
Show HN: OpenWorkers – Self-hosted Cloudflare workers in Rust
I've been working on this for some time now, starting with vm2, then deno-core for 2 years, and recently rewrote it on rusty_v8 with Claude's help.<p>OpenWorkers lets you run untrusted JS in V8 isolates on your own infrastructure. Same DX as Cloudflare Workers, no vendor lock-in.<p>What works today: fetch, KV, Postgres bindings, S3/R2, cron scheduling, crypto.subtle.<p>Self-hosting is a single docker-compose file + Postgres.<p>Would love feedback on the architecture and what feature you'd want next.
Show HN: OpenWorkers – Self-hosted Cloudflare workers in Rust
I've been working on this for some time now, starting with vm2, then deno-core for 2 years, and recently rewrote it on rusty_v8 with Claude's help.<p>OpenWorkers lets you run untrusted JS in V8 isolates on your own infrastructure. Same DX as Cloudflare Workers, no vendor lock-in.<p>What works today: fetch, KV, Postgres bindings, S3/R2, cron scheduling, crypto.subtle.<p>Self-hosting is a single docker-compose file + Postgres.<p>Would love feedback on the architecture and what feature you'd want next.
Show HN: LoongArch Userspace Emulator
<a href="https://fwsgonzo.medium.com/notes-on-libloong-loongarch-64-bit-emulation-515ea6610cad" rel="nofollow">https://fwsgonzo.medium.com/notes-on-libloong-loongarch-64-b...</a>
Show HN: LoongArch Userspace Emulator
<a href="https://fwsgonzo.medium.com/notes-on-libloong-loongarch-64-bit-emulation-515ea6610cad" rel="nofollow">https://fwsgonzo.medium.com/notes-on-libloong-loongarch-64-b...</a>
Show HN: Frockly – A visual editor for understanding complex Excel formulas
I built a visual editor that represents Excel formulas as blocks,
making it easier to inspect, refactor, and reason about complex formulas structurally.
Frockly is not an Excel replacement.
It focuses on understanding and refactoring formulas before bringing them back to Excel.
Demo: <a href="https://ryuu12358.github.io/Frockly/" rel="nofollow">https://ryuu12358.github.io/Frockly/</a>
GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/ryuu12358/Frockly" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ryuu12358/Frockly</a>
Write-up: <a href="https://note.com/ryuu12358/n/naa65d9d5facd" rel="nofollow">https://note.com/ryuu12358/n/naa65d9d5facd</a> （Japanese）
Show HN: Frockly – A visual editor for understanding complex Excel formulas
I built a visual editor that represents Excel formulas as blocks,
making it easier to inspect, refactor, and reason about complex formulas structurally.
Frockly is not an Excel replacement.
It focuses on understanding and refactoring formulas before bringing them back to Excel.
Demo: <a href="https://ryuu12358.github.io/Frockly/" rel="nofollow">https://ryuu12358.github.io/Frockly/</a>
GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/ryuu12358/Frockly" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ryuu12358/Frockly</a>
Write-up: <a href="https://note.com/ryuu12358/n/naa65d9d5facd" rel="nofollow">https://note.com/ryuu12358/n/naa65d9d5facd</a> （Japanese）
Show HN: I built a universal clipboard that syncs realtime on multiple devices
I’m Gopal, the guy behind QuickClip.<p>I built this out of pure frustration. Copying items between my phone and laptop was very painful. Sending notes and links on WhatsApp. Saving random drafts I’d forget about. It was total waste of time.<p>So I made QuickClip for myself first. A dead simple way to move text, links and images between devices instantly. No setup drama. No thinking. Fully encrypted<p>I use it every day. Shipping it publicly now to see if anyone else has the same problem.<p>Would honestly love to hear, how you move stuff between devices today, what’s broken or slow and what would make this actually useful for you<p>Happy to answer anything and take suggestions. Thanks for checking it out.
Show HN: Use Claude Code to Query 600 GB Indexes over Hacker News, ArXiv, etc.
Paste in my prompt to Claude Code with an embedded API key for accessing my public readonly SQL+vector database, and you have a state-of-the-art research tool over Hacker News, arXiv, LessWrong, and dozens of other high-quality public commons sites. Claude whips up the monster SQL queries that safely run on my machine, to answer your most nuanced questions.<p>There's also an Alerts functionality, where you can just ask Claude to submit a SQL query as an alert, and you'll be emailed when the ultra nuanced criteria is met (and the output changes). Like I want to know when somebody posts about "estrogen" in a psychoactive context, or enough biology metaphors when talking about building infrastructure.<p>Currently have embedded:
posts: 1.4M / 4.6M
comments: 15.6M / 38M
That's with Voyage-3.5-lite. And you can do amazing compositional vector search, like search @FTX_crisis - (@guilt_tone - @guilt_topic) to find writing that was about the FTX crisis and distinctly without guilty tones, but that can mention "guilt".<p>I can embed everything and all the other sources for cheap, I just literally don't have the money.
Show HN: Use Claude Code to Query 600 GB Indexes over Hacker News, ArXiv, etc.
Paste in my prompt to Claude Code with an embedded API key for accessing my public readonly SQL+vector database, and you have a state-of-the-art research tool over Hacker News, arXiv, LessWrong, and dozens of other high-quality public commons sites. Claude whips up the monster SQL queries that safely run on my machine, to answer your most nuanced questions.<p>There's also an Alerts functionality, where you can just ask Claude to submit a SQL query as an alert, and you'll be emailed when the ultra nuanced criteria is met (and the output changes). Like I want to know when somebody posts about "estrogen" in a psychoactive context, or enough biology metaphors when talking about building infrastructure.<p>Currently have embedded:
posts: 1.4M / 4.6M
comments: 15.6M / 38M
That's with Voyage-3.5-lite. And you can do amazing compositional vector search, like search @FTX_crisis - (@guilt_tone - @guilt_topic) to find writing that was about the FTX crisis and distinctly without guilty tones, but that can mention "guilt".<p>I can embed everything and all the other sources for cheap, I just literally don't have the money.