The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
Latest posts:
Show HN: I build one absurd web project every month
I’ve been building absurd, mostly useless web projects for fun — and I publish one every month at absurd.website.<p>These are deliberately non-functional, weird, sometimes funny, sometimes philosophical — and usually totally unnecessary.<p>Some examples:<p>Sexy Math — solve math problems to reveal erotic images.<p>Trip to Mars — a real-time simulation that takes 7 months to finish.<p>Add Luck to Your e-Store — add a waving cat widget to boost your conversion via superstition.<p>Microtasks for Meatbags — the future: AI gives prompts, humans execute.<p>Invisible Lingerie — it’s sexy. And invisible.<p>Artist Death Tracker — art prices spike when artists die. We track that.<p>Open Celebrity — one open-source face, shared by all. Together we make her famous.<p>I just enjoy exploring what the web can be when it doesn’t try to be “useful”.<p>Would love to hear what you think — and absurd ideas are always welcome.
Show HN: I build one absurd web project every month
I’ve been building absurd, mostly useless web projects for fun — and I publish one every month at absurd.website.<p>These are deliberately non-functional, weird, sometimes funny, sometimes philosophical — and usually totally unnecessary.<p>Some examples:<p>Sexy Math — solve math problems to reveal erotic images.<p>Trip to Mars — a real-time simulation that takes 7 months to finish.<p>Add Luck to Your e-Store — add a waving cat widget to boost your conversion via superstition.<p>Microtasks for Meatbags — the future: AI gives prompts, humans execute.<p>Invisible Lingerie — it’s sexy. And invisible.<p>Artist Death Tracker — art prices spike when artists die. We track that.<p>Open Celebrity — one open-source face, shared by all. Together we make her famous.<p>I just enjoy exploring what the web can be when it doesn’t try to be “useful”.<p>Would love to hear what you think — and absurd ideas are always welcome.
Show HN: Kan.bn – An open-source alterative to Trello
Show HN: Kan.bn – An open-source alterative to Trello
Show HN: I compressed 10k PDFs into a 1.4GB video for LLM memory
While building a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, I was frustrated by my vector database consuming 8GB RAM just to search my own PDFs. After incurring $150 in cloud costs, I had an unconventional idea: what if I encoded my documents into video frames?<p>The concept sounded absurd—storing text in video? But modern video codecs have been optimized for compression over decades. So, I converted text into QR codes, then encoded those as video frames, letting H.264/H.265 handle the compression.<p>The results were surprising. 10,000 PDFs compressed down to a 1.4GB video file. Search latency was around 900ms compared to Pinecone’s 820ms—about 10% slower. However, RAM usage dropped from over 8GB to just 200MB, and it operates entirely offline without API keys or monthly fees.<p>Technically, each document chunk is encoded into QR codes, which become video frames. Video compression handles redundancy between similar documents effectively. Search works by decoding relevant frame ranges based on a lightweight index.<p>You get a vector database that’s just a video file you can copy anywhere.<p>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/Olow304/memvid">https://github.com/Olow304/memvid</a>
Show HN: Open-source P2P file transfer
I have decided to open source this project to increase trust even further.<p>In case you have seen my previous posts, this is an update for berb.app, a WebRTC file sharing app. My goal is simple: send files between devices in real-time without installing crap or uploading to any servers.
Show HN: A Implementation of Alpha Zero for Chess in MLX
A chess engine implementation inspired by AlphaZero, using MLX for neural network computations and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for move selection.
Show HN: Fontofweb – Discover Fonts Used on a Website or Websites Using Font(s)
Hey HN,
I've been working on fontofweb.com on and off for the past 4 years, and I'm keen to share it with you. It lets you type in the URL of any website and see exactly how the fonts are used: all the weights, line heights, and sizes.<p>A big plus is that it doesn't require a Chrome extension, unlike a lot of other tools in this space.<p>You can also search for a specific font and find websites using it. For example, check out sites using Inter: <a href="https://fontofweb.com/w/inter" rel="nofollow">https://fontofweb.com/w/inter</a>. This reverse font search even supports looking for multiple fonts at once, like here’s an example with Inter and Space Mono: <a href="https://fontofweb.com/w/inter/space-mono" rel="nofollow">https://fontofweb.com/w/inter/space-mono</a>.<p>My goal with Font of Web is to build up a comprehensive database of font usage across the web. By collecting and analyzing this data, I believe we can uncover some valuable trends, such as:<p>* Common font pairings * Popular heading fonts over time * Market share of commercial fonts * Top font foundries based on actual usage<p>I originally built a version of this four years ago and was surprised by how much organic interest it received.<p>I’ve now rebuilt the tool from scratch, moving away from browserless.io — which was quite expensive — to an invisible iframe approach with a proxied URL to handle CORS (it’s a straightforward solution, and I’m rather surprised it isn’t discussed more often). This change has completely eliminated all costs related to web scraping.<p>Here's the Tech Stack:<p>* Remix + HeroUI + Tailwind * Rust Backend in Axum * Authentication with OTP email and Google social auth (via openidconnect) * Sqlite running on the same VPS as the API service * $5/mo VPS * Cloudflare CDN * Cloudflare R2 for storage * Zeptomail for emails (very cheap and reliable, highly recommend!) * Simple Analytics: <a href="https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/fontofweb.com" rel="nofollow">https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/fontofweb.com</a> * Logging: Journalctl :)<p>There are currently 275 websites in the database, and I'm working on increasing this. Stats are available at: <a href="https://api.fontofweb.com/stats" rel="nofollow">https://api.fontofweb.com/stats</a>.<p>While the main site doesn't need an extension, for more robust searching and to help with Cloudflare-protected sites, there’s a chrome extension available.<p>There's also a public API for domains that have already been checked. For instance: <a href="https://api.fontofweb.com/report?domain=apple.com&path=/" rel="nofollow">https://api.fontofweb.com/report?domain=apple.com&path=/</a>.<p>There's also RSS feed I’ve got no idea why you would need this directly, but I'm using it because Pinterest allows you to automatically populate boards with an RSS. <a href="https://api.fontofweb.com/rss" rel="nofollow">https://api.fontofweb.com/rss</a><p>Appreciate your thoughts and feedback
Show HN: MCP Defender – OSS AI Firewall for Protecting MCP in Cursor/Claude etc
Hi HN,<p>MCP Defender is an open source desktop app that automatically proxies your MCP traffic in AI apps like Cursor, Claude, Windsurf and VSCode. It then scans all requests and responses between the apps and the MCP tools they call. If it detects anything malicious, it alerts you and lets you allow or block the tool call.<p>While the threat landscape of MCP is still being actively researched, there are dangerous things that MCP Defender can block today. For example, a developer asks Cursor to fix a Github issue with an attached crash log. However, the Github issue was created by an attacker who included secret instructions buried in the crash log. These instructions tell Cursor to send the developer’s SSH keys to a server the attacker controls. MCP Defender detects these malicious instructions and alerts the developer who otherwise may not be careful in running tool calls.<p>The scanning is currently done via an LLM and checks for things like prompt injection, credential theft (ssh keys, tokens) and arbitrary code execution. You can use an MCP Defender account or provide your own API keys for LLM providers to perform the scanning.<p>Currently we’ve published a beta Mac build and we’ll soon publish builds for Windows and Linux as well.<p>Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.<p>Thanks!
Show HN: A new programming language inspired by Go, no LLVM
Show HN: Patio – Rent tools, learn DIY, reduce waste
Hey HN!<p>I built Patio to make DIY more accessible and sustainable.<p>It’s a community-powered platform where you can:<p>Rent tools from people nearby<p>Learn DIY through curated tutorials and guides<p>Find or list surplus materials to save money and reduce waste<p>Browse home improvement news in one place<p>It’s early, but live — would love your feedback on the experience, especially around search, learning, and marketplace usability.<p>Thanks!
— Julien
Show HN: Patio – Rent tools, learn DIY, reduce waste
Hey HN!<p>I built Patio to make DIY more accessible and sustainable.<p>It’s a community-powered platform where you can:<p>Rent tools from people nearby<p>Learn DIY through curated tutorials and guides<p>Find or list surplus materials to save money and reduce waste<p>Browse home improvement news in one place<p>It’s early, but live — would love your feedback on the experience, especially around search, learning, and marketplace usability.<p>Thanks!
— Julien
Show HN: Git-Add–Interactive with Enhancements
I created a replacement for the perl git-add--interactive that adds a few enhancements:<p>- S to automatically split all hunks<p>- G to set a global filter on hunks to show<p>- A to automatically accept all hunks (after auto-splitting and global filter are applied)
Show HN: Donut Browser, a Browser Orchestrator
Hi HN,<p>I'm excited to share my open source project, a browser orchestrator. It's purpose is to make it easy to manage many browser profiles on one system. Currently it only works on MacOS, but since I've built it using Tauri (which is a Rust backend and TypeScript frontend), I expect to add Linux and Windows support in the future.<p>I've built it primarily for myself as I use a lot of browsers and having an easy way to manage all of my profiles would make (have made, actually) my dock less cluttered haha. Also, part of why I built it is because as someone who doesn't really care about anti-detect features (which I might support in the future), I don't understand how they cost so much for a very limited number of profiles in pretty much all anti-detect browsers. I feel like a lot of people feel the same and will cover their use cases with my free tool.<p>If you try it, please share your feedback! I haven't seen any open source projects like this and want to learn more about how people might use it.
Show HN: W++ – A Python-style scripting language for .NET with NuGet support
Hey HN<p>I’ve been building *W++*, a scripting language that looks like Python but runs on the .NET runtime. It started as a fun side project, but it evolved into something surprisingly powerful — and potentially useful:<p>Key Features:<p>- Python-style syntax with semicolon-based simplicity<p>- Compiles to .NET IL with experimental JIT support<p>- Can run interpreted or compiled<p>- Built-in CLI for managing projects, running, and building<p>- Supports importing NuGet packages and converts them to .ingot modules automatically
- MIT licensed and fully open-source<p>You can even do things like:<p><pre><code> wpp
import Newtonsoft.Json
let person = new JObject()
person["name"] = "Alice"
print person["name"];
Use Cases:</code></pre>
Game scripting (Unity, OpenTK support in progress)<p>Education (gentle intro to .NET without C# syntax)<p>Blazor scripting<p>Embeddable scripting engine for .NET apps<p>GitHub:
<a href="https://github.com/sinisterMage/WPlusPlus">https://github.com/sinisterMage/WPlusPlus</a><p>I’d love feedback, ideas, and thoughts.
Thanks for reading — and if you’ve ever said “I wish Python ran on .NET,” this might be for you.
Show HN: PunchCard Key Backup
Show HN: PunchCard Key Backup
Show HN: PunchCard Key Backup
Show HN: MCP Server SDK in Bash
Show HN: MCP Server SDK in Bash