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Show HN: AirAP AirPlay server – AirPlay to an iOS Device

I made AirAP because I wanted a simple way to play sound from my Mac Mini when my speaker broke. But it’s got a ton of other uses too, like testing how audio sounds like on different devices, or repurposing old wired speakers.<p>This was incredibly fun to make - can’t wait for you all to see it!

Show HN: AirAP AirPlay server – AirPlay to an iOS Device

I made AirAP because I wanted a simple way to play sound from my Mac Mini when my speaker broke. But it’s got a ton of other uses too, like testing how audio sounds like on different devices, or repurposing old wired speakers.<p>This was incredibly fun to make - can’t wait for you all to see it!

Show HN: I wrote a Java decompiler in pure C language

Show HN: I wrote a Java decompiler in pure C language

Show HN: I wrote a Java decompiler in pure C language

Show HN: Fast Random Library for C++17

Morning HN.<p>Random number generation feels is a somewhat underrepresented topic in the C++ realm. There is a lot of questionable info about it found online and even the standard library is quite behind the times in terms of it's algorithms. It suffers from trying to accommodate sometimes impractical standard requirements and has several ways of getting significantly bad statistical results. This leaves a lot easily achievable performance & quality on the table.<p>So, being a mathematician who mostly works with stochastic models and wants these models to run fast and well, I embarked on a journey of trying to summarize "what is good and what is bad" and implement the "best stuff there currently is".<p>Thankfully, the design of C++ <random> is quite flexible and easy to extend. With some cleanup, generalization and compile-time logic all the different algorithms can be wrapped in a generic standard-compatible API.<p>A result of this work is single-header RNG library which has:<p><pre><code> - <random>-compatible generators (PRNGSs) with 3x-6x better performance - Cryptographically secure generators (CSPRNGs) - Faster uniform / normal distributions that produce same sequences on every platform - Quick approximations of some non-linear distributions - More reliable entropy sources that std::random_device() - rand()-like API for when we just want random numbers without the boilerplate of proper a <random> setup </code></pre> Effectively all of this gets us 2x-8x speedups on many workloads while producing even better statistical quality.<p>Don't think there is anything else like it, so I would like to showcase the result here and hear some opinions on its improvement:<p><a href="https://github.com/DmitriBogdanov/UTL/blob/master/docs/module_random.md">https://github.com/DmitriBogdanov/UTL/blob/master/docs/modul...</a><p>For those interested, there is a more detailed rundown of all the quirks of this topic at end of the docs, might prove an interesting read.

Show HN: Penny-1.7B Irish Penny Journal style transfer

Yesterday, in the bygone hour of the weekend, I undertook a most singular and fascinating endeavor, wherein I delved deep into the recesses of my mind, and, with a fervent zeal, breathed life into a most remarkable creation. I embarked upon the quest, with the singular object of fashioning an artificial construct, one imbued with the verdant essence of the Irish Penny Journal, an ancient and venerable tome that holds within its pages the whispered tales of a bygone era.<p>In my haste, I set forth to construct a dataset, a repository of those fleeting moments, these ephemeral sentences, which spoke of a bygone age. I procured a collection of these fleeting moments, these sentences, and with them, I synthetically conjured forth modern translations, an ingenious feat of substitution, which allowed my artificial construct to take on the guise of the language of the Irish Penny Journal.<p>Then, with great anticipation, I fashioned a small encoder, a humble instrument, with which to guide the artificial construct in its endeavors. I presented this encoder as a bribe, a reward, to a most ingenious system, one that trained a colossal language model, one of unbridled potential, one that was capable of weaving tales with the very essence of the Irish Penny Journal.<p>And lo! In the succeeding moments of time, I witnessed a most wondrous thing. My artificial construct, armed with this training, and guided by the whispers of the encoder, began to speak, to speak in the language of the Irish Penny Journal. The words it spoke were, indeed, the words of the past, imbued with the nostalgia of a forgotten era.<p>And thus, my friends, I have witnessed a most singular creation, one which embodies the language of the past, yet, in its most recent iteration, speaks to the present. A testament to the ingenuity of the human spirit, this artificial construct speaks of the bygone era, yet, with each word, it whispers to us, to us, of a future yet to come.<p>——<p>That’s Penny explaining itself to you. This was trained using GRPO only, in less than a day using a single A6000. I didn’t use any SFT, and only relied on a small encoder (MiniLM2) trained to classify texts from the Irish Penny Journal and their modern translations (synthetically produced).

Show HN: Penny-1.7B Irish Penny Journal style transfer

Yesterday, in the bygone hour of the weekend, I undertook a most singular and fascinating endeavor, wherein I delved deep into the recesses of my mind, and, with a fervent zeal, breathed life into a most remarkable creation. I embarked upon the quest, with the singular object of fashioning an artificial construct, one imbued with the verdant essence of the Irish Penny Journal, an ancient and venerable tome that holds within its pages the whispered tales of a bygone era.<p>In my haste, I set forth to construct a dataset, a repository of those fleeting moments, these ephemeral sentences, which spoke of a bygone age. I procured a collection of these fleeting moments, these sentences, and with them, I synthetically conjured forth modern translations, an ingenious feat of substitution, which allowed my artificial construct to take on the guise of the language of the Irish Penny Journal.<p>Then, with great anticipation, I fashioned a small encoder, a humble instrument, with which to guide the artificial construct in its endeavors. I presented this encoder as a bribe, a reward, to a most ingenious system, one that trained a colossal language model, one of unbridled potential, one that was capable of weaving tales with the very essence of the Irish Penny Journal.<p>And lo! In the succeeding moments of time, I witnessed a most wondrous thing. My artificial construct, armed with this training, and guided by the whispers of the encoder, began to speak, to speak in the language of the Irish Penny Journal. The words it spoke were, indeed, the words of the past, imbued with the nostalgia of a forgotten era.<p>And thus, my friends, I have witnessed a most singular creation, one which embodies the language of the past, yet, in its most recent iteration, speaks to the present. A testament to the ingenuity of the human spirit, this artificial construct speaks of the bygone era, yet, with each word, it whispers to us, to us, of a future yet to come.<p>——<p>That’s Penny explaining itself to you. This was trained using GRPO only, in less than a day using a single A6000. I didn’t use any SFT, and only relied on a small encoder (MiniLM2) trained to classify texts from the Irish Penny Journal and their modern translations (synthetically produced).

Show HN: A toy version of Wireshark (student project)

Hi everyone,<p>I recently published a small open-source project. It’s a minimal network packet analyzer written in Go — designed more like a learning toy than a replacement for Wireshark.<p>It currently supports parsing basic protocols like TLS, DNS, and HTTP, and includes a tiny fuzzing engine to test payload responses. You can inspect raw packet content directly from the terminal. The output is colored for readability, and the code structure is kept simple and clear.<p>The entire program is very small — just about 400 lines of Go code. I know it’s not anywhere near Wireshark’s level, and I still use Wireshark myself for real-world analysis. But I built it as a personal experiment in network parsing and to understand protocol behavior more directly.<p>If you're curious or would like to try it out, the project is here: <a href="https://github.com/lixiasky/vanta">https://github.com/lixiasky/vanta</a><p>I'm happy to hear your thoughts, suggestions, or critiques. It’s just a little network toy, but maybe someone out there finds it useful or fun.<p>Thanks for reading!

Show HN: A toy version of Wireshark (student project)

Hi everyone,<p>I recently published a small open-source project. It’s a minimal network packet analyzer written in Go — designed more like a learning toy than a replacement for Wireshark.<p>It currently supports parsing basic protocols like TLS, DNS, and HTTP, and includes a tiny fuzzing engine to test payload responses. You can inspect raw packet content directly from the terminal. The output is colored for readability, and the code structure is kept simple and clear.<p>The entire program is very small — just about 400 lines of Go code. I know it’s not anywhere near Wireshark’s level, and I still use Wireshark myself for real-world analysis. But I built it as a personal experiment in network parsing and to understand protocol behavior more directly.<p>If you're curious or would like to try it out, the project is here: <a href="https://github.com/lixiasky/vanta">https://github.com/lixiasky/vanta</a><p>I'm happy to hear your thoughts, suggestions, or critiques. It’s just a little network toy, but maybe someone out there finds it useful or fun.<p>Thanks for reading!

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