The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
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Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
I made a better DOM morphing algorithm
At least I think it’s better, but also I could also be missing something obvious.
Show HN: Unflip – a puzzle game about XOR patterns of squares
Show HN: Tiny Diffusion – A character-level text diffusion model from scratch
This is a character-level language diffusion model for text generation.<p>The model is a modified version of Nanochat's GPT implementation and is trained on Tiny Shakespeare!<p>It is only 10.7 million parameters, so you can try it out locally.
Show HN: Epstein Files Organized and Searchable
Hey all,<p>Throwaway in case this is assumed to be politcally motivated.<p>I spent some time organizing the Eptstein files to make transparency a little clearer. I need to tighten the data for organizations and people a bit more, but hopeful this is helpful in research in the interim.
Show HN: DBOS Java – Postgres-Backed Durable Workflows
Hi HN - I’m Peter, here with Harry (devhawk), and we’re building DBOS Java, an open-source Java library for durable workflows, backed by Postgres.<p><a href="https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-java" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-java</a><p>Essentially, DBOS helps you write long-lived, reliable code that can survive failures, restarts, and crashes without losing state or duplicating work. As your workflows run, it checkpoints each step they take in a Postgres database. When a process stops (fails, restarts, or crashes), your program can recover from those checkpoints to restore its exact state and continue from where it left off, as if nothing happened.<p>In practice, this makes it easier to build reliable systems for use cases like AI agents, payments, data synchronization, or anything that takes hours, days, or weeks to complete. Rather than bolting on ad-hoc retry logic and database checkpoints, durable workflows give you one consistent model for ensuring your programs can recover from any failure from exactly where they left off.<p>This library contains all you need to add durable workflows to your program: there's no separate service or orchestrator or any external dependencies except Postgres. Because it's just a library, you can incrementally add it to your projects, and it works out of the box with frameworks like Spring. And because it's built on Postgres, it natively supports all the tooling you're familiar with (backups, GUIs, CLI tools) and works with any Postgres provider.<p>If you want to try it out, check out the quickstart:<p><a href="https://docs.dbos.dev/quickstart?language=java" rel="nofollow">https://docs.dbos.dev/quickstart?language=java</a><p>We'd love to hear what you think! We’ll be in the comments for the rest of the day to answer any questions.
Kratos - Cloud native Auth0 open-source alternative (self-hosted)
Show HN: Gametje – A casual online gaming platform
Hi all, I’ve been working on this project for a while but haven't shared it properly on Hacker News.<p>It is a casual gaming platform focused on simple multiplayer games that can be played in person with a central screen (like a TV) or remotely via video chat. You can also play on your smart Android based TVs via the app: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gametje">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gametje</a> (it was just released recently so could be buggy). It is also available directly in Discord: <a href="https://discord.com/discovery/applications/1215323000866607125" rel="nofollow">https://discord.com/discovery/applications/12153230008666071...</a> as an embedded activity.<p>It is playable in 9 languages and doesn’t require any downloads. Most games revolve around creativity in some shape or form. They can be played by just about anyone whether or not you consider yourself a “gamer”. If you can text, you can play these games.<p>Why did I create it?<p>Some of you may see the resemblance to Jackbox games. I have been a huge fan of them for 10+ years and enjoyed playing their games a lot. However, I found their support for other languages a bit lacking. While living in the Netherlands, I have encountered quite a few non-native English speakers and wanted to help them have a similar experience. Jackbox also has some fragmentation issues between app stores. I own their games on PC and PS4 but I can’t share a “license” between them. They also come out with a pack every year with 5 games. You never know if the game(s) will be fun, or if you should try to buy a previous pack with the one killer party game in it.<p>I designed Gametje with these issues in mind. It is playable in multiple languages with more being added regularly (feel free to request one). You can play it from any device with a web browser. There is no need to install it via Steam or a game console. All games are available in one place with no “packs” to buy.<p>What’s up with the name?<p>I have been living in the Netherlands for some years and part of my original motivation stems from wanting to give my friends here a game to play in their native language. It's way easier to be witty/funny in your mother tongue after all! Because of that, I wanted to incorporate something Dutch into the site's name. The suffix ‘-tje’ is one of the diminutive endings in Dutch and is meant to soften a word or make it "smaller". Game + tje = Gametje, or a little game. I have been informed by native Dutch speakers that it should have been ‘Gamepje’ to be "correct" but I liked the way Gametje sounded better.<p>Where can I try it?<p>Go here: <a href="https://gametje.com/" rel="nofollow">https://gametje.com/</a><p>You can test it out as a guest without signing up in order to get a feel for the games. Clicking into each game gives a short explanation and a small example of the gameplay. When creating a game room, you can choose to host via a central screen, host and play from a single device (like a phone) or cast the main screen to a Chromecast. There is also an Android TV app available that was just recently released: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gametje">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gametje</a><p>After creating a game room, you can join from another browser window or device. You can also add AI players if you want to try it out on your own, although it is a lot more fun with real people. I also created a discord channel: <a href="https://discord.gg/7jrftHuHp9" rel="nofollow">https://discord.gg/7jrftHuHp9</a> where you can find other users to play with. If you sign up for an account, you can opt-in as an alpha tester and see the new games as they are developed. It’ll also keep track of all your previous games and make sure not to duplicate content. You can review previous games as well and relish in your past victories.<p>What am I looking for?<p>I am interested in feedback about the whole concept and also the gameplay. Is it fun? What could be improved? Interested in helping out? Let me know!<p>Happy to share the more technical details as well for those that are interested. You can also read a bit about the platform and games in my blog:<p><a href="https://blog.gametje.com/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.gametje.com/</a><p>Thanks!
Show HN: What Is Hacker News Working On?
I tagged all comments from "What Are You Working On?" (like <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45561428">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45561428</a>) posts and built a simple SvelteKit website, hope it's helpful to find people with similar projects. I'm also thinking of adding some analysis of project types over time to see changes in tech
Show HN: What Is Hacker News Working On?
I tagged all comments from "What Are You Working On?" (like <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45561428">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45561428</a>) posts and built a simple SvelteKit website, hope it's helpful to find people with similar projects. I'm also thinking of adding some analysis of project types over time to see changes in tech
Show HN: I built a self-hosted error tracker in Rails
This project is inspired by 37signals’ ONCE idea. I replicated the whole process and have already sold a few copies (the testimonials are real).
Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
I designed a relative piano-roll-based music notation. I used 12 colored arranged in a specific way to make visible the main effects and oppositions of Western tonal harmony. The tonic is always white, so a manual annotation/interpretation is required for each MIDI file.<p>All chords are flags of three to four colors. Minor mode is darker, major mode is lighter. Colors are arranged in thirds.<p>I sorted the pieces from simple complex harmony. I also wrote a bit of text to explain what you may see. There's also a corpus of structures: hyperlinks of tags that allow you to find similar patterns throughout my corpus of 3000+ popular pieces.<p>My method makes chord progressions memorizable and instantly visible in the scores. No preparation of Roman numeral analysis / chord symbols analysis is required. After a bit of training the chords will stare right in your eyes.<p>It's not synesthesia, it's a missing script for tonal music which makes harmonically identical things look the same (or similar).<p>I've also recorded lectures on my method in Russian (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzQrZe3EemP5pVPYMwBJGtiejiN3qtCce" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzQrZe3EemP5pVPYMwBJG...</a>). I'm sorry I haven't yet found time to re-record in English.<p>I've also sketched a friendlier intro: <a href="https://vpavlenko.github.io/d/" rel="nofollow">https://vpavlenko.github.io/d/</a><p>Sorry, but this thing won't make any sense if you're color-blind.<p>It's open-source: <a href="https://github.com/vpavlenko/rawl" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vpavlenko/rawl</a><p>Earlier context: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165596">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165596</a><p>(Back then colors were less logical, and there was no corpus of 3000+ piece annotated yet)
Show HN: qqqa – A fast, stateless LLM-powered assistant for your shell
I built qqqa as an open-source project, because I was tired of bouncing between shell, ChatGPT / the browser for rather simple commands. It comes with two binaries: qq and qa.<p>qq means "quick question" - it is read-only, perfect for the commands I always forget.<p>qa means "quick agent" - it is qq's sibling that can run things, but only after showing its plan and getting an approval by the user.<p>It is built entirely around the Unix philosophy of focused tools, stateless by default - pretty much the opposite of what most coding agent are focusing on.<p>Personally I've had the best experience using Groq + gpt-oss-20b, as it feels almost instant (up to 1k tokens/s according to Groq) - but any OpenAI-compatible API will do.<p>Curious if the HN crowd finds it useful - and of course, AMA.
Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
Hi everyone,<p>For the past couple months I've been working on a website with two main features:<p>- <a href="https://book.sv" rel="nofollow">https://book.sv</a> - put in a list of books and get recommendations on what to read next from a model trained on over a billion reviews<p>- <a href="https://book.sv/intersect" rel="nofollow">https://book.sv/intersect</a> - put in a list of books and find the users on Goodreads who have read them all (if you don't want to be included in these results, you can opt-out here: <a href="https://book.sv/remove-my-data" rel="nofollow">https://book.sv/remove-my-data</a>)<p>Technical info available here: <a href="https://book.sv/how-it-works" rel="nofollow">https://book.sv/how-it-works</a><p>Note 1: If you only provide one or two books, the model doesn't have a lot to work with and may include a handful of somewhat unrelated popular books in the results. If you want recommendations based on just one book, click the "Similar" button next to the book after adding it to the input book list on the recommendations page.<p>Note 2: This is uncommon, but if you get an unexpected non-English titled book in the results, it is probably not a mistake and it very likely has an English edition. The "canonical" edition of a book I use for display is whatever one is the most popular, which is usually the English version, but this is not the case for all books, especially those by famous French or Russian authors.
Show HN: I built a local-first daily planner for iOS
Show HN: A CSS-Only Terrain Generator
Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
I spent a few hours last weekend testing whether AI can replace code by executing directly. Built a contact manager where every HTTP request goes to an LLM with three tools: database (SQLite), webResponse (HTML/JSON/JS), and updateMemory (feedback). No routes, no controllers, no business logic. The AI designs schemas on first request, generates UIs from paths alone, and evolves based on natural language feedback. It works—forms submit, data persists, APIs return JSON—but it's catastrophically slow (30-60s per request), absurdly expensive ($0.05/request), and has zero UI consistency between requests. The capability exists; performance is the problem. When inference gets 10x faster, maybe the question shifts from "how do we generate better code?" to "why generate code at all?"
Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
I spent a few hours last weekend testing whether AI can replace code by executing directly. Built a contact manager where every HTTP request goes to an LLM with three tools: database (SQLite), webResponse (HTML/JSON/JS), and updateMemory (feedback). No routes, no controllers, no business logic. The AI designs schemas on first request, generates UIs from paths alone, and evolves based on natural language feedback. It works—forms submit, data persists, APIs return JSON—but it's catastrophically slow (30-60s per request), absurdly expensive ($0.05/request), and has zero UI consistency between requests. The capability exists; performance is the problem. When inference gets 10x faster, maybe the question shifts from "how do we generate better code?" to "why generate code at all?"
Show HN: Strange Attractors
I went down the rabbit hole on a side project and ended up building this: Strange Attractors(<a href="https://blog.shashanktomar.com/posts/strange-attractors" rel="nofollow">https://blog.shashanktomar.com/posts/strange-attractors</a>). It’s built with three.js.<p>Working on it reminded me of the little "maths for fun" exercises I used to do while learning programming in early days. Just trying things out, getting fascinated and geeky, and being surprised by the results. I spent way too much time on this, but it was extreme fun.<p>My favorite part: someone pointed me to the Simone Attractor on Threads. It is a 2D attractor and I asked GPT to extrapolate it to 3D, not sure if it’s mathematically correct, but it’s the coolest by far. I have left all the params configurable, so give it a try. I called it Simone (Maybe).<p>If you like math-art experiments, check it out. Would love feedback, especially from folks who know more about the math side.
Show HN: Strange Attractors
I went down the rabbit hole on a side project and ended up building this: Strange Attractors(<a href="https://blog.shashanktomar.com/posts/strange-attractors" rel="nofollow">https://blog.shashanktomar.com/posts/strange-attractors</a>). It’s built with three.js.<p>Working on it reminded me of the little "maths for fun" exercises I used to do while learning programming in early days. Just trying things out, getting fascinated and geeky, and being surprised by the results. I spent way too much time on this, but it was extreme fun.<p>My favorite part: someone pointed me to the Simone Attractor on Threads. It is a 2D attractor and I asked GPT to extrapolate it to 3D, not sure if it’s mathematically correct, but it’s the coolest by far. I have left all the params configurable, so give it a try. I called it Simone (Maybe).<p>If you like math-art experiments, check it out. Would love feedback, especially from folks who know more about the math side.