The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: Minecraft Villager Sounds for Terminal Errors
Show HN: Freeing GPUs stuck by runaway jobs
Show HN: Zenode – an AI-powered electronic component search engine
TL;DR - My cofounder Collin and I built an AI version of Digi-Key to help PCB designers find and use parts, except with a way bigger catalog, modern refinement tools, and an AI that can actually read the damn datasheets for you.<p>*The problem*<p>Modern circuit board design is filled with absurdly tedious tasks, where one small mistake can brick a project and cost thousands. The worst (in our opinion) is reading datasheets, which eats up to 25% of the first part of any project:
1. First, you slog through catalogs to find viable parts, using search tools that are still stuck in the dark ages. There are ~80M unique components in today’s supply chain, yet the tools we have to look through them are just digitized versions of the same paper catalogs our grandparents got in the mail.<p>2. During the design, you spend a ton of time flipping between different 10-100-page PDFs for every component in every subcircuit, hoping like hell you don’t miss some tiny spec in a footnote somewhere that kills your design.<p>3. And god help you when the requirements inevitably change and now you have to figure out what subsystems are affected!<p>*What we built*<p>Zenode is an AI-powered electronics search engine that actually helps engineers find and understand components. Our core features:
1. Largest and Deepest Part Catalog → We have merged dozens of existing part catalogs and documents from major distributors and manufacturers<p>2. Discovery Search → natural language queries to quickly find categories, set filters, and rank results<p>3. Modern Parametric Filters → rebuilt from scratch to move off the string values pervasive in industry and build numeric ranges that actually work.<p>4. Interactive Documents → AI constrained to a single part’s datasheet/manuals. Ask a question, get the answer with a highlighted source for quick reference.<p>5. Deep Dive → search across dozens of parts simultaneously (“what’s the lowest-power accelerometer available?”) instead of slogging one by one.<p>*What we learned*<p>1. By far the hardest part of the last 2 years has been wrangling 3 TB of messy, inconsistent data into something usable. We had to teach the AI how to handle hand-drawn figures, normalize different unit variables and names that mean the same thing, and navigate conflicting information present between different datasheet versions of the same part. It’s been a nightmare<p>2. We originally built custom PDF parsers and AI extractors, which were best in class for ~3 months until generalized AI passed them. So we stopped reinventing wheels and doubled down on data quality instead.<p>3. The killer feature wasn’t the AI searching a single part, but what we heard repeatedly from users is that they want the AI to read across multiple parts, hence why we’ve launched deep dive!<p>*Where it’s strong*<p>- Speed: rips through a 1,000-page microcontroller datasheet in seconds.<p>- Breadth: 40M+ part sources unified into one catalog, and more than just datasheets, application notes, errata, etc.<p>- Comparisons: Deep Dive lets you ask across multiple parts, not just one at a time.<p>*Where it’s not*<p>- Pricing/availability: currently outdated (for now we expect folks to check existing aggregators like Octopart).<p>- Accuracy: good enough to match my mediocre skills; not yet at Collin's level, but we're starting tuning and this will improve rapidly!<p>*Try it*<p>It’s live today (zenode.ai). Sign up for a free account and If you put “Hacker News” in during signup in the “where did you hear about us” field, we’ll give you 1,000 bonus credits (once we finish building that, so sometime this week ).<p>*Feedback we’d love*<p>1. Should Deep Dive results auto-become filters you can refine further?<p>2. Do you want the ability to mark preferred parts / exclude others?<p>3. Is “Deep Dive on a BOM” (alt discovery + manufacturability checks on a list of known components from different categories) the killer feature?
Show HN: Zenode – an AI-powered electronic component search engine
TL;DR - My cofounder Collin and I built an AI version of Digi-Key to help PCB designers find and use parts, except with a way bigger catalog, modern refinement tools, and an AI that can actually read the damn datasheets for you.<p>*The problem*<p>Modern circuit board design is filled with absurdly tedious tasks, where one small mistake can brick a project and cost thousands. The worst (in our opinion) is reading datasheets, which eats up to 25% of the first part of any project:
1. First, you slog through catalogs to find viable parts, using search tools that are still stuck in the dark ages. There are ~80M unique components in today’s supply chain, yet the tools we have to look through them are just digitized versions of the same paper catalogs our grandparents got in the mail.<p>2. During the design, you spend a ton of time flipping between different 10-100-page PDFs for every component in every subcircuit, hoping like hell you don’t miss some tiny spec in a footnote somewhere that kills your design.<p>3. And god help you when the requirements inevitably change and now you have to figure out what subsystems are affected!<p>*What we built*<p>Zenode is an AI-powered electronics search engine that actually helps engineers find and understand components. Our core features:
1. Largest and Deepest Part Catalog → We have merged dozens of existing part catalogs and documents from major distributors and manufacturers<p>2. Discovery Search → natural language queries to quickly find categories, set filters, and rank results<p>3. Modern Parametric Filters → rebuilt from scratch to move off the string values pervasive in industry and build numeric ranges that actually work.<p>4. Interactive Documents → AI constrained to a single part’s datasheet/manuals. Ask a question, get the answer with a highlighted source for quick reference.<p>5. Deep Dive → search across dozens of parts simultaneously (“what’s the lowest-power accelerometer available?”) instead of slogging one by one.<p>*What we learned*<p>1. By far the hardest part of the last 2 years has been wrangling 3 TB of messy, inconsistent data into something usable. We had to teach the AI how to handle hand-drawn figures, normalize different unit variables and names that mean the same thing, and navigate conflicting information present between different datasheet versions of the same part. It’s been a nightmare<p>2. We originally built custom PDF parsers and AI extractors, which were best in class for ~3 months until generalized AI passed them. So we stopped reinventing wheels and doubled down on data quality instead.<p>3. The killer feature wasn’t the AI searching a single part, but what we heard repeatedly from users is that they want the AI to read across multiple parts, hence why we’ve launched deep dive!<p>*Where it’s strong*<p>- Speed: rips through a 1,000-page microcontroller datasheet in seconds.<p>- Breadth: 40M+ part sources unified into one catalog, and more than just datasheets, application notes, errata, etc.<p>- Comparisons: Deep Dive lets you ask across multiple parts, not just one at a time.<p>*Where it’s not*<p>- Pricing/availability: currently outdated (for now we expect folks to check existing aggregators like Octopart).<p>- Accuracy: good enough to match my mediocre skills; not yet at Collin's level, but we're starting tuning and this will improve rapidly!<p>*Try it*<p>It’s live today (zenode.ai). Sign up for a free account and If you put “Hacker News” in during signup in the “where did you hear about us” field, we’ll give you 1,000 bonus credits (once we finish building that, so sometime this week ).<p>*Feedback we’d love*<p>1. Should Deep Dive results auto-become filters you can refine further?<p>2. Do you want the ability to mark preferred parts / exclude others?<p>3. Is “Deep Dive on a BOM” (alt discovery + manufacturability checks on a list of known components from different categories) the killer feature?
Show HN: Python Audio Transcription: Convert Speech to Text Locally
Show HN: Python Audio Transcription: Convert Speech to Text Locally
Show HN: Python Audio Transcription: Convert Speech to Text Locally
Show HN: Python Audio Transcription: Convert Speech to Text Locally
Show HN: Python Audio Transcription: Convert Speech to Text Locally
Show HN: Software Freelancers Contract Template
I started working as a freelancer [in Finland] a year ago and was surprised to learn that no decent contract template was available for direct assignments. There were some free contract templates available for intermediated assignments, but not for direct assignments. The "golden standard" of contract templates in Finland is an extremely heavy-handed and expensive template that costs ~500€ PER YEAR to use. Personally at the time I decided to just do a DIY contract for my first freelancing project.<p>Over time, as I got more engaged in the Finnish freelancing community, I realized that many people struggled with the same issue. After discussing this in our freelancing co-op Ohjelmistofriikit, we decided to invest both time and money into solving this problem. We decided right from the start that we were gonna open source everything and give it out for free.<p>We first developed a traditional document template in collaboration with a law firm. After that we developed a web generator that makes it easy to fill out the template. The user flow of the generator is designed to eliminate boilerplate-type work (such as hiding sections instead of showing "skip this section if condition X does not apply to you") and also to reduce mistakes users might make when editing a traditional document template (such as copypasting something incorrectly).<p>Although the legalese is designed for the Finnish jurisdiction, the contract template can be useful as an example for similar work in other jurisdictions.<p>Go ahead and draft a contract right there in your browser!
Show HN: Software Freelancers Contract Template
I started working as a freelancer [in Finland] a year ago and was surprised to learn that no decent contract template was available for direct assignments. There were some free contract templates available for intermediated assignments, but not for direct assignments. The "golden standard" of contract templates in Finland is an extremely heavy-handed and expensive template that costs ~500€ PER YEAR to use. Personally at the time I decided to just do a DIY contract for my first freelancing project.<p>Over time, as I got more engaged in the Finnish freelancing community, I realized that many people struggled with the same issue. After discussing this in our freelancing co-op Ohjelmistofriikit, we decided to invest both time and money into solving this problem. We decided right from the start that we were gonna open source everything and give it out for free.<p>We first developed a traditional document template in collaboration with a law firm. After that we developed a web generator that makes it easy to fill out the template. The user flow of the generator is designed to eliminate boilerplate-type work (such as hiding sections instead of showing "skip this section if condition X does not apply to you") and also to reduce mistakes users might make when editing a traditional document template (such as copypasting something incorrectly).<p>Although the legalese is designed for the Finnish jurisdiction, the contract template can be useful as an example for similar work in other jurisdictions.<p>Go ahead and draft a contract right there in your browser!
Show HN: Software Freelancers Contract Template
I started working as a freelancer [in Finland] a year ago and was surprised to learn that no decent contract template was available for direct assignments. There were some free contract templates available for intermediated assignments, but not for direct assignments. The "golden standard" of contract templates in Finland is an extremely heavy-handed and expensive template that costs ~500€ PER YEAR to use. Personally at the time I decided to just do a DIY contract for my first freelancing project.<p>Over time, as I got more engaged in the Finnish freelancing community, I realized that many people struggled with the same issue. After discussing this in our freelancing co-op Ohjelmistofriikit, we decided to invest both time and money into solving this problem. We decided right from the start that we were gonna open source everything and give it out for free.<p>We first developed a traditional document template in collaboration with a law firm. After that we developed a web generator that makes it easy to fill out the template. The user flow of the generator is designed to eliminate boilerplate-type work (such as hiding sections instead of showing "skip this section if condition X does not apply to you") and also to reduce mistakes users might make when editing a traditional document template (such as copypasting something incorrectly).<p>Although the legalese is designed for the Finnish jurisdiction, the contract template can be useful as an example for similar work in other jurisdictions.<p>Go ahead and draft a contract right there in your browser!
Show HN: Software Freelancers Contract Template
I started working as a freelancer [in Finland] a year ago and was surprised to learn that no decent contract template was available for direct assignments. There were some free contract templates available for intermediated assignments, but not for direct assignments. The "golden standard" of contract templates in Finland is an extremely heavy-handed and expensive template that costs ~500€ PER YEAR to use. Personally at the time I decided to just do a DIY contract for my first freelancing project.<p>Over time, as I got more engaged in the Finnish freelancing community, I realized that many people struggled with the same issue. After discussing this in our freelancing co-op Ohjelmistofriikit, we decided to invest both time and money into solving this problem. We decided right from the start that we were gonna open source everything and give it out for free.<p>We first developed a traditional document template in collaboration with a law firm. After that we developed a web generator that makes it easy to fill out the template. The user flow of the generator is designed to eliminate boilerplate-type work (such as hiding sections instead of showing "skip this section if condition X does not apply to you") and also to reduce mistakes users might make when editing a traditional document template (such as copypasting something incorrectly).<p>Although the legalese is designed for the Finnish jurisdiction, the contract template can be useful as an example for similar work in other jurisdictions.<p>Go ahead and draft a contract right there in your browser!
Show HN: Tips to stay safe from NPM supply chain attacks
Hi everyone, given the recent increase of attacks on the NPM supply chain, I've put together a list of tips and tricks to help developers stay secure on this specific topic: <a href="https://github.com/bodadotsh/npm-security-best-practices" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bodadotsh/npm-security-best-practices</a><p>I'd love for you to check it out, and contribute your own insights and best practices to make this a comprehensive resource for the community.<p>Cheers!
Show HN: Tips to stay safe from NPM supply chain attacks
Hi everyone, given the recent increase of attacks on the NPM supply chain, I've put together a list of tips and tricks to help developers stay secure on this specific topic: <a href="https://github.com/bodadotsh/npm-security-best-practices" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bodadotsh/npm-security-best-practices</a><p>I'd love for you to check it out, and contribute your own insights and best practices to make this a comprehensive resource for the community.<p>Cheers!
Show HN: Tips to stay safe from NPM supply chain attacks
Hi everyone, given the recent increase of attacks on the NPM supply chain, I've put together a list of tips and tricks to help developers stay secure on this specific topic: <a href="https://github.com/bodadotsh/npm-security-best-practices" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bodadotsh/npm-security-best-practices</a><p>I'd love for you to check it out, and contribute your own insights and best practices to make this a comprehensive resource for the community.<p>Cheers!
Show HN: I wrote an OS in 1000 lines of Zig
Show HN: I wrote an OS in 1000 lines of Zig
Show HN: Math2Tex – Convert handwritten math and complex notes to LaTeX text
Hi HN,<p>I’m the creator of Math2Tex. I was a PhD student, I spend a huge amount of my time working with LaTeX, especially when dealing with lecture notes, academic papers, and homework. I built *Math2Tex*, a lightweight tool that converts handwritten or printed academic content — especially math formulas — into LaTeX or text<p>The Problem:<p>I've always found it incredibly tedious to manually type out mathematical formulas, especially complex, multi-line equations from my handwritten notes or from a textbook. It's slow, boring, and I always make syntax errors. I tried some existing tools, but they often struggled with my handwriting or couldn't handle mixed content (text and formulas together).<p>The Solution:<p>So, I built Math2Tex to solve my own problem. It’s a straightforward, single-page web app: you upload an image (a photo of your notebook, a screenshot of a PDF, etc.), and it converts the academic content into clean LaTeX code or plain text. You get a real-time preview and can copy the result with one click. My goal was to make the workflow as fast as possible: Snap. Convert. Done.<p>You can try it here: [<a href="https://math2tex.com" rel="nofollow">https://math2tex.com</a>](<a href="https://math2tex.com/" rel="nofollow">https://math2tex.com/</a>)<p>How is it different from general AI tools like GPT, Claude, etc?<p>This is a fair question. While large models can handle this, they are often slow for such a specific task. I wanted something faster and more specialized. Math2Tex uses a lightweight model fine-tuned specifically for academic content recognition.<p>In short, think of it as a specialized scalpel versus a Swiss Army knife. For this particular job, it's generally 3-5x faster and, in my experience, more reliable for complex notations.<p>Tech Stack:<p>The core OCR engine is a custom-trained model based on a transformer architecture, fine-tuned on a large dataset of both printed and handwritten academic material. It's all deployed on Vercel.<p>*It's free to use.* This is still an early version, and I'm sure there are plenty of bugs and areas for improvement. The recognition might not be perfect, especially with very messy handwriting or some obscure symbols.<p>I would be incredibly grateful for your feedback. Whether you’re a student, researcher, or someone who’s fought with LaTeX input. Feedback on both the tool and the approach would be really helpful.<p>Thanks!
Show HN: Math2Tex – Convert handwritten math and complex notes to LaTeX text
Hi HN,<p>I’m the creator of Math2Tex. I was a PhD student, I spend a huge amount of my time working with LaTeX, especially when dealing with lecture notes, academic papers, and homework. I built *Math2Tex*, a lightweight tool that converts handwritten or printed academic content — especially math formulas — into LaTeX or text<p>The Problem:<p>I've always found it incredibly tedious to manually type out mathematical formulas, especially complex, multi-line equations from my handwritten notes or from a textbook. It's slow, boring, and I always make syntax errors. I tried some existing tools, but they often struggled with my handwriting or couldn't handle mixed content (text and formulas together).<p>The Solution:<p>So, I built Math2Tex to solve my own problem. It’s a straightforward, single-page web app: you upload an image (a photo of your notebook, a screenshot of a PDF, etc.), and it converts the academic content into clean LaTeX code or plain text. You get a real-time preview and can copy the result with one click. My goal was to make the workflow as fast as possible: Snap. Convert. Done.<p>You can try it here: [<a href="https://math2tex.com" rel="nofollow">https://math2tex.com</a>](<a href="https://math2tex.com/" rel="nofollow">https://math2tex.com/</a>)<p>How is it different from general AI tools like GPT, Claude, etc?<p>This is a fair question. While large models can handle this, they are often slow for such a specific task. I wanted something faster and more specialized. Math2Tex uses a lightweight model fine-tuned specifically for academic content recognition.<p>In short, think of it as a specialized scalpel versus a Swiss Army knife. For this particular job, it's generally 3-5x faster and, in my experience, more reliable for complex notations.<p>Tech Stack:<p>The core OCR engine is a custom-trained model based on a transformer architecture, fine-tuned on a large dataset of both printed and handwritten academic material. It's all deployed on Vercel.<p>*It's free to use.* This is still an early version, and I'm sure there are plenty of bugs and areas for improvement. The recognition might not be perfect, especially with very messy handwriting or some obscure symbols.<p>I would be incredibly grateful for your feedback. Whether you’re a student, researcher, or someone who’s fought with LaTeX input. Feedback on both the tool and the approach would be really helpful.<p>Thanks!