The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: A website that heatmaps your city based on your housing preferences
For the past few months, I've been working on a website that answers two different questions:<p>- Where in my city have the best travel times to all the things and people I care about?<p>- Given a listing, how far is it from all the things and people I care about?<p>Personally this was fueled by my own frustrations when I was apartment hunting in NYC. I was frustrating to have to juggle so many Google Maps tabs when I was evaluating a listing, and it was also annoying to not have full confidence that I was even searching in the right places.<p>I wanted to be close to work, a Trader Joe's, and a major park. Given that public transportation networks can sometimes make close things hard to get to and far things easy to get to, it's not always obvious whether a neighborhood actually even fits my criteria or not!<p>The overarching goal of theretowhere.com is to allow you to make more informed moving decisions while also making things more convenient than they are today.<p><a href="https://ibb.co/pBsX2HjN" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/pBsX2HjN</a><p>It can generate detailed travel time breakdowns for individual listings and addresses, making it easier to determine whether a listing is worth applying for without juggling Google Maps tabs.
This is great for questions like “How far is this apartment from my friends, work and dancing gyms?”<p><a href="https://ibb.co/mVBjwPrJ" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/mVBjwPrJ</a><p>It also has the powerful ability to heatmap a city based on which parts of it are close or not to the people and places you care about.
This is great for questions like “Where in the city would I be reasonably close to work, friends and a woodworking studio?”<p><a href="https://ibb.co/vCynPSRK" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/vCynPSRK</a><p>You can add these heatmaps to sites like Zillow and Streeteasy to make things super convenient (this was very fun to make).<p>The main thing that's on my mind is whether this is useful or not. Like, is this something you would actually use?
I also have other ideas I'd like to eventually intergrate into this (crime heatmaps, noise heatmaps, etc)
Show HN: Heap Explorer
I wrote a little LD_PRELOAD library that makes it easy to inspect and interact with a running program's glibc heap.<p>It's fun to pause processes, free a bunch of their allocations, then resume them. Most of the time, the processes continue as though nothing happened, but sometimes they do interesting things :)
Show HN: ArXivTok
I made this, and it's fully open source so if someone wants to contribute here you have the url: <a href="https://github.com/Miguel07Alm/arxivtok">https://github.com/Miguel07Alm/arxivtok</a>.<p>For this project I was inspired by <a href="https://wikitok.vercel.app" rel="nofollow">https://wikitok.vercel.app</a>.
Show HN: ArXivTok
I made this, and it's fully open source so if someone wants to contribute here you have the url: <a href="https://github.com/Miguel07Alm/arxivtok">https://github.com/Miguel07Alm/arxivtok</a>.<p>For this project I was inspired by <a href="https://wikitok.vercel.app" rel="nofollow">https://wikitok.vercel.app</a>.
Show HN: ArXivTok
I made this, and it's fully open source so if someone wants to contribute here you have the url: <a href="https://github.com/Miguel07Alm/arxivtok">https://github.com/Miguel07Alm/arxivtok</a>.<p>For this project I was inspired by <a href="https://wikitok.vercel.app" rel="nofollow">https://wikitok.vercel.app</a>.
Show HN: Watch fascism unfold in realtime – an AI-powered tracker
Hi HN, Wanted to share a project I made over the weekend - a real-time fascism tracker. The site fetches recent news from trusted sources, filters it for keywords related to fascism and the current US administration, and then sends it to GPT-4o for classification according to the 14 characteristics of fascism described by Dr. Lawrence Britt. With the rapid pace of news in the US, especially post-election, it’s hard to keep up. I built this site so you can quickly see important topics and draw parallels with similar historical events. Would love to hear your thoughts. - Ryan
Show HN: An homage to Tom Dowdy's 1991 screensaver, "Kaos"
So, I was about 11 years old and just got my first Mac, a IIsi, and of course everyone had AfterDark, but there was this other screensaver program called "Dark Side of the Mac". And within it was, I think now, the most beautiful screensaver ever written. It was called Kaos.<p>Kaos would take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds to slowly iterate on a single image, starting with a few colored dots and growing into webs within webs of algorithmic beauty.<p>I'm not sure how Tom Dowdy actually wrote the program. What I've done here is to try to reverse engineer how it might have worked, but to animate it at the same time.<p>Freezing a frame (by clicking) seems to often yield something close to the original. My method is to cycle between 1 and 30 lines, with spaced out pixels, and then iterate the whole buffer to draw fainter and fainter points within a radius from any point that's already lit, while also amplifying the ones that were lit before and shifting their colors slightly at the same time.<p>Anyway, I did this tonight but I've been thinking about it for weeks, so, I hope someone enjoys it. Cheers!
Show HN: An homage to Tom Dowdy's 1991 screensaver, "Kaos"
So, I was about 11 years old and just got my first Mac, a IIsi, and of course everyone had AfterDark, but there was this other screensaver program called "Dark Side of the Mac". And within it was, I think now, the most beautiful screensaver ever written. It was called Kaos.<p>Kaos would take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds to slowly iterate on a single image, starting with a few colored dots and growing into webs within webs of algorithmic beauty.<p>I'm not sure how Tom Dowdy actually wrote the program. What I've done here is to try to reverse engineer how it might have worked, but to animate it at the same time.<p>Freezing a frame (by clicking) seems to often yield something close to the original. My method is to cycle between 1 and 30 lines, with spaced out pixels, and then iterate the whole buffer to draw fainter and fainter points within a radius from any point that's already lit, while also amplifying the ones that were lit before and shifting their colors slightly at the same time.<p>Anyway, I did this tonight but I've been thinking about it for weeks, so, I hope someone enjoys it. Cheers!
Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots
Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots
Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots
Show HN: SQLite disk page explorer
Show HN: SQLite disk page explorer
Show HN: SQLite disk page explorer
Show HN: Polaris, a self-hosted music streaming server in Rust
I'm happy to announce the release of Polaris 0.15.0 . Polaris is a self-hosted music streaming server, to enjoy your music collection from any computer or mobile device. It is free and open-source software, without any kind of premium version.<p>This release is the biggest one since Polaris' humble beginnings 9 years ago. It's technically not a rewrite but there is not much code that was left untouched. The highlights are:<p>- New visual design for the web client (screenshots[1])
- Ability to browse the music collection by artist/album/genre, not only by file
- Support for multi-value fields in song metadata (eg. multiple artists on the same song)
- Revamped search functionality, now supporting per-field queries and boolean operators
- Android client now supports search and playlists (and all the new features from this release)<p>See the changelog[2] for a complete list of improvements.<p>This release is a result of many months of work. I hope all the love and effort I put into it are visible in the end result .<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/agersant/polaris/discussions/227">https://github.com/agersant/polaris/discussions/227</a>
[2]: <a href="https://github.com/agersant/polaris/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md">https://github.com/agersant/polaris/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md</a>
Show HN: Language Learning from YouTube content
Hi!<p>I'm living as an expat in France and I had a hard time following the news. So
I've been working on Fluentsubs that turns YouTube content into a language learning experience.<p>YouTube videos up to 20 minutes can be transcribed and listened to. At the same time I made it easy to lookup certain words and automatically add spaced repetition cards using the given context. This means that you can also rehearse with a real voice and not with AI dubs.<p>This works especially well for the somewhat smaller languages that have a small track on Duolingo, and now are desperately looking for content (Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, etc.)<p>I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback: <a href="https://fluentsubs.com" rel="nofollow">https://fluentsubs.com</a>
Show HN: Apitally – A simple, privacy-focused API monitoring and analytics tool
G’day Hacker News, I’m Simon Gurcke, the sole founder of Apitally (<a href="https://apitally.io" rel="nofollow">https://apitally.io</a>).<p>I’m building a simple API monitoring and analytics tool for Python / Node.js apps. It helps users understand API usage and performance, spot issues early and troubleshoot effectively when something goes wrong.<p>Features include:<p>- <i>Dashboards:</i> Provide insights into API traffic, errors, performance and consumers.<p>- <i>Request logging:</i> Opt-in and highly configurable in terms of what data is logged. Users can drill down from aggregated metrics to individual requests (proven to be super helpful when troubleshooting issues).<p>- <i>Custom alerts:</i> Based on 14 different API metrics with notifications delivered via email, Slack or Microsoft Teams.<p>- <i>Validation error tracking:</i> Captures metrics about which fields failed validation and why. Works for web frameworks with built-in validation (e.g. FastAPI with pydantic), or that integrate with popular third-party validation libraries (e.g. Zod for Hono).<p>- <i>Server error tracking:</i> Captures exception details and stack traces for 500 error responses. An integration with the Sentry SDK also captures event IDs, allowing users to click through to the relevant Sentry issue for more context.<p>I first started developing Apitally to scratch my own itch. While working at a health tech company where I was responsible for API-based software products, I became frustrated with the monitoring tools we had in place - Datadog and the ELK stack. They were too complex for my API-centric use cases, and often a pain to use.<p>As a result, I focused on making Apitally as simple as possible. This involved not just refining the UX of the dashboard, but also optimizing the developer experience with the open-source SDKs:<p>- <a href="https://github.com/apitally/apitally-py">https://github.com/apitally/apitally-py</a> - Python SDK (supports FastAPI, Flask, Django, Litestar, Starlette)<p>- <a href="https://github.com/apitally/apitally-js">https://github.com/apitally/apitally-js</a> - Node.js SDK (supports Express, NestJS, Fastify, Koa, Hono)<p>My other focus was on data privacy, as that is a strict requirement in the healthcare industry. By default, Apitally doesn’t capture any sensitive data - metrics are aggregated on the client side (similar to Prometheus) and sent in the background in regular intervals.<p>The hardest part has been implementing integrations for various web frameworks and supporting a wide range of versions. I learned a lot about the inner workings of web frameworks in the process. Good test coverage and an extensive test matrix were really important to not break people’s production APIs with buggy middleware.<p>Apitally’s backend is built in Python and runs on a small Kubernetes cluster on DigitalOcean. It uses PostgreSQL and ClickHouse to store data and NATS JetStream as a message queue. I chose NATS for being lightweight and its exactly-once processing capabilities. I’m also impressed by ClickHouse’s performance given the low hardware specs of my server (4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM).<p>Apitally is free to use for small hobby projects (with limitations), and I offer two paid tiers for $39 and $119 (USD) per month. The dashboard has a demo mode, allowing people to explore the product without having to set up their own app first.<p>Thank you for reading about my bootstrapped indie product. Please let me know your thoughts and questions in the comments.
Show HN: How good is your color vision? Find out in my new game
Show HN: Matle – A Daily Chess Puzzle Inspired by Wordle
Matle[1], a daily puzzle game that combines chess and Wordle mechanics. You have to guess a hidden checkmate.<p>How it works:
1. You’re given a board with five hidden squares.
2. Guess the pieces in those squares.
3. You must form a checkmate!<p>Hints work like Wordle:
Correct piece & position
Correct piece, wrong position
⬜ Wrong piece<p>[1] <a href="http://www.matle.io/" rel="nofollow">http://www.matle.io/</a>
Show HN: Matle – A Daily Chess Puzzle Inspired by Wordle
Matle[1], a daily puzzle game that combines chess and Wordle mechanics. You have to guess a hidden checkmate.<p>How it works:
1. You’re given a board with five hidden squares.
2. Guess the pieces in those squares.
3. You must form a checkmate!<p>Hints work like Wordle:
Correct piece & position
Correct piece, wrong position
⬜ Wrong piece<p>[1] <a href="http://www.matle.io/" rel="nofollow">http://www.matle.io/</a>