The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
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.
Show HN: I made a heatmap diff viewer for code reviews
0github.com is a pull request viewer that color-codes every diff line/token by how much human attention it probably needs. Unlike PR-review bots, we try to flag not just by "is it a bug?" but by "is it worth a second look?" (examples: hard-coded secret, weird crypto mode, gnarly logic, ugly code).<p>To try it, replace github.com with 0github.com in any pull-request URL. Under the hood, we split the PR into individual files, and for each file, we ask an LLM to annotate each line with a data structure that we parse into a colored heatmap.<p>Examples:<p><a href="https://0github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/pull/666" rel="nofollow">https://0github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/pull/666</a><p><a href="https://0github.com/stack-auth/stack-auth/pull/988" rel="nofollow">https://0github.com/stack-auth/stack-auth/pull/988</a><p><a href="https://0github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/pull/12995" rel="nofollow">https://0github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/pull/12995</a><p><a href="https://0github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2548" rel="nofollow">https://0github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2548</a><p>Notice how all the example links have a 0 prepended before github.com. This navigates you to our custom diff viewer where we handle the same URL path parameters as github.com. Darker yellows indicate that an area might require more investigation. Hover on the highlights to see the LLM's explanation. There's also a slider on the top left to adjust the "should review" threshold.<p>Repo (MIT license): <a href="https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux</a>
Show HN: I made a heatmap diff viewer for code reviews
0github.com is a pull request viewer that color-codes every diff line/token by how much human attention it probably needs. Unlike PR-review bots, we try to flag not just by "is it a bug?" but by "is it worth a second look?" (examples: hard-coded secret, weird crypto mode, gnarly logic, ugly code).<p>To try it, replace github.com with 0github.com in any pull-request URL. Under the hood, we split the PR into individual files, and for each file, we ask an LLM to annotate each line with a data structure that we parse into a colored heatmap.<p>Examples:<p><a href="https://0github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/pull/666" rel="nofollow">https://0github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/pull/666</a><p><a href="https://0github.com/stack-auth/stack-auth/pull/988" rel="nofollow">https://0github.com/stack-auth/stack-auth/pull/988</a><p><a href="https://0github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/pull/12995" rel="nofollow">https://0github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/pull/12995</a><p><a href="https://0github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2548" rel="nofollow">https://0github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2548</a><p>Notice how all the example links have a 0 prepended before github.com. This navigates you to our custom diff viewer where we handle the same URL path parameters as github.com. Darker yellows indicate that an area might require more investigation. Hover on the highlights to see the LLM's explanation. There's also a slider on the top left to adjust the "should review" threshold.<p>Repo (MIT license): <a href="https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux</a>
Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest
Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest
Show HN: Learn German with Games
I just started learning German, and it has been a frustrating experience, to say the least. There are so many seemingly arbitrary rules that make pattern recognition very difficult. Therefore, I have been looking for ways to make memorization a bit easier and fun. So, I came up with a bunch of games to make learning German a bit more engaging. Hope you find it useful as well!
Show HN: Learn German with Games
I just started learning German, and it has been a frustrating experience, to say the least. There are so many seemingly arbitrary rules that make pattern recognition very difficult. Therefore, I have been looking for ways to make memorization a bit easier and fun. So, I came up with a bunch of games to make learning German a bit more engaging. Hope you find it useful as well!
Show HN: Bash Screensavers
A github project to collect a bunch of bash-based screensavers/visualizations.
Show HN: Bash Screensavers
A github project to collect a bunch of bash-based screensavers/visualizations.
Show HN: Write Go code in JavaScript files
I built a Vite plugin that lets you write Go code directly in .js files using a "use
golang" directive. It compiles to WebAssembly automatically.
Show HN: Write Go code in JavaScript files
I built a Vite plugin that lets you write Go code directly in .js files using a "use
golang" directive. It compiles to WebAssembly automatically.
Show HN: JSON Query
I'm working on a tool that will probably involve querying JSON documents and I'm asking myself how to expose that functionality to my users.<p>I like the power of `jq` and the fact that LLMs are proficient at it, but I find it right out impossible to come up with the right `jq` incantations myself. Has anyone here been in a similar situation? Which tool / language did you end up exposing to your users?
Show HN: JSON Query
I'm working on a tool that will probably involve querying JSON documents and I'm asking myself how to expose that functionality to my users.<p>I like the power of `jq` and the fact that LLMs are proficient at it, but I find it right out impossible to come up with the right `jq` incantations myself. Has anyone here been in a similar situation? Which tool / language did you end up exposing to your users?
Show HN: MyraOS – My 32-bit operating system in C and ASM (Hack Club project)
Hi HN, I’m Dvir, a young developer. Last year, I got rejected after a job interview because I lacked some CPU knowledge. After that, I decided to deepen my understanding in the low level world and learn how things work under the hood. I decided to try and create an OS in C and ASM as a way to broaden my knowledge in this area.<p>This took me on the most interesting ride, where I’ve learned about OS theory and low level programming on a whole new level. I’ve spent hours upon hours, blood and tears, reading different OS theory blogs, learning low level concepts, debugging, testing and working on this project.<p>I started by reading University books and online blogs, while also watching videos.
Some sources that helped me out were OSDev Wiki (<a href="https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page</a>), OSTEP (<a href="https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP" rel="nofollow">https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP</a>), open-source repositories like MellOS and LemonOS (more advanced), DoomGeneric, and some friends that have built an OS before.<p>This part was the longest, but also the easiest. I felt like I understood the theory, but still could not connect it into actual code. Sitting down and starting to code was difficult, but I knew that was the next step I needed to take!
I began by working on the bootloader, which is optional since you can use a pre-made one (I switched to GRUB later), but implementing it was mainly for learning purposes and to warm up on ASM. These were my steps after that:<p><pre><code> 1) I started implementing the VGA driver, which gave me the ability to display text.
2) Interrupts - IDT, ISR, IRQ, which signal to the CPU that a certain event occurred and needs handling (such as faults, hardware connected device actions, etc).
3) Keyboard driver, which enables me to display the same text I type on my keyboard.
4) PMM (Physical memory management)
5) Paging and virtual memory management
6) RTC driver - clock addition (which was, in my opinion, optional)
7) PIT driver - Ticks every certain amount of time, and also
8) FS (File System) and physical HDD drivers - for the HDD I chose PATA (HDD communication protocol) for simplicity (SATA is a newer but harder option as well).
For the FS I chose EXT2 (The Second Extended FileSystem), which is a foundational linux FS structure introduced in 1993. This FS structure is not the simplest,
but is very popular in hobby-OS, it is very supported, easy to set up and upgrade to newer EXT versions, it has a lot of materials online, compared to other
options. This was probably the longest and largest feature I had worked on.
9) Syscall support.
10) Libc implementation.
11) Processing and scheduling for multiprocessing.
12) Here I also made a shell to test it all.
</code></pre>
At this point, I had a working shell, but later decided to go further and add a GUI! I was working on the FS (stage 8), when I heard about Hack Club’s Summer of Making (SoM). This was my first time practicing in HackClub, and I want to express my gratitude and share my enjoyment of participating in it.<p>At first I just wanted to declare the OS as finished after completing the FS, and a bit of other drivers, but because of SoM my perspective was changed completely. Because of the competition, I started to think that I needed to ship a complete OS, with processing, GUI and the bare minimum ability to run Doom. I wanted to show the community in SoM how everything works.<p>Then I worked on it for another 2 months, after finishing the shell, just because of SoM!, totalling my project to almost 7 months of work. At this time I added full GUI support, with dirty rectangles and double buffering, I made a GUI mouse driver, and even made a full Doom port! things I would've never even thought about without participating in SoM.<p>This is my SoM project: <a href="https://summer.hackclub.com/projects/5191" rel="nofollow">https://summer.hackclub.com/projects/5191</a>.<p>Every project has challenges, especially in such a low level project. I had to do a lot of debugging while working on this, and it is no easy task. I highly recommend using GDB which helped me debug so many of my problems, especially memory ones.<p>The first major challenge I encountered was during the coding of processes - I realized that a lot of my paging code was completely wrong, poorly tested, and had to be reworked. During this time I was already in the competition and it was difficult keeping up with devlogs and new features while fixing old problems in a code I wrote a few months ago.<p>Some more major problems occurred when trying to run Doom, and unlike the last problem, this was a disaster. I had random PFs and memory problems, one run could work while the next one wouldn’t, and the worst part is that it was only on the Doom, and not on processes I created myself. These issues took a lot of time to figure out. I began to question the Doom code itself, and even thought about giving up on the whole project.<p>After a lot of time spent debugging, I fixed the issues. It was a combination of scheduling issues, Libc issues and the Qemu not having enough (wrongfully assuming 128MB for the whole OS was enough).<p>Finally, I worked throughout all the difficulties, and shipped the project! In the end, the experience working on this project was amazing. I learned a lot, grew and improved as a developer, and I thank SoM for helping to increase my motivation and make the project memorable and unique like I never imagined it would be.<p>The repo is at <a href="https://github.com/dvir-biton/MyraOS" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dvir-biton/MyraOS</a>. I’d love to discuss any aspect of this with you all in the comments!
Show HN: MyraOS – My 32-bit operating system in C and ASM (Hack Club project)
Hi HN, I’m Dvir, a young developer. Last year, I got rejected after a job interview because I lacked some CPU knowledge. After that, I decided to deepen my understanding in the low level world and learn how things work under the hood. I decided to try and create an OS in C and ASM as a way to broaden my knowledge in this area.<p>This took me on the most interesting ride, where I’ve learned about OS theory and low level programming on a whole new level. I’ve spent hours upon hours, blood and tears, reading different OS theory blogs, learning low level concepts, debugging, testing and working on this project.<p>I started by reading University books and online blogs, while also watching videos.
Some sources that helped me out were OSDev Wiki (<a href="https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page</a>), OSTEP (<a href="https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP" rel="nofollow">https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP</a>), open-source repositories like MellOS and LemonOS (more advanced), DoomGeneric, and some friends that have built an OS before.<p>This part was the longest, but also the easiest. I felt like I understood the theory, but still could not connect it into actual code. Sitting down and starting to code was difficult, but I knew that was the next step I needed to take!
I began by working on the bootloader, which is optional since you can use a pre-made one (I switched to GRUB later), but implementing it was mainly for learning purposes and to warm up on ASM. These were my steps after that:<p><pre><code> 1) I started implementing the VGA driver, which gave me the ability to display text.
2) Interrupts - IDT, ISR, IRQ, which signal to the CPU that a certain event occurred and needs handling (such as faults, hardware connected device actions, etc).
3) Keyboard driver, which enables me to display the same text I type on my keyboard.
4) PMM (Physical memory management)
5) Paging and virtual memory management
6) RTC driver - clock addition (which was, in my opinion, optional)
7) PIT driver - Ticks every certain amount of time, and also
8) FS (File System) and physical HDD drivers - for the HDD I chose PATA (HDD communication protocol) for simplicity (SATA is a newer but harder option as well).
For the FS I chose EXT2 (The Second Extended FileSystem), which is a foundational linux FS structure introduced in 1993. This FS structure is not the simplest,
but is very popular in hobby-OS, it is very supported, easy to set up and upgrade to newer EXT versions, it has a lot of materials online, compared to other
options. This was probably the longest and largest feature I had worked on.
9) Syscall support.
10) Libc implementation.
11) Processing and scheduling for multiprocessing.
12) Here I also made a shell to test it all.
</code></pre>
At this point, I had a working shell, but later decided to go further and add a GUI! I was working on the FS (stage 8), when I heard about Hack Club’s Summer of Making (SoM). This was my first time practicing in HackClub, and I want to express my gratitude and share my enjoyment of participating in it.<p>At first I just wanted to declare the OS as finished after completing the FS, and a bit of other drivers, but because of SoM my perspective was changed completely. Because of the competition, I started to think that I needed to ship a complete OS, with processing, GUI and the bare minimum ability to run Doom. I wanted to show the community in SoM how everything works.<p>Then I worked on it for another 2 months, after finishing the shell, just because of SoM!, totalling my project to almost 7 months of work. At this time I added full GUI support, with dirty rectangles and double buffering, I made a GUI mouse driver, and even made a full Doom port! things I would've never even thought about without participating in SoM.<p>This is my SoM project: <a href="https://summer.hackclub.com/projects/5191" rel="nofollow">https://summer.hackclub.com/projects/5191</a>.<p>Every project has challenges, especially in such a low level project. I had to do a lot of debugging while working on this, and it is no easy task. I highly recommend using GDB which helped me debug so many of my problems, especially memory ones.<p>The first major challenge I encountered was during the coding of processes - I realized that a lot of my paging code was completely wrong, poorly tested, and had to be reworked. During this time I was already in the competition and it was difficult keeping up with devlogs and new features while fixing old problems in a code I wrote a few months ago.<p>Some more major problems occurred when trying to run Doom, and unlike the last problem, this was a disaster. I had random PFs and memory problems, one run could work while the next one wouldn’t, and the worst part is that it was only on the Doom, and not on processes I created myself. These issues took a lot of time to figure out. I began to question the Doom code itself, and even thought about giving up on the whole project.<p>After a lot of time spent debugging, I fixed the issues. It was a combination of scheduling issues, Libc issues and the Qemu not having enough (wrongfully assuming 128MB for the whole OS was enough).<p>Finally, I worked throughout all the difficulties, and shipped the project! In the end, the experience working on this project was amazing. I learned a lot, grew and improved as a developer, and I thank SoM for helping to increase my motivation and make the project memorable and unique like I never imagined it would be.<p>The repo is at <a href="https://github.com/dvir-biton/MyraOS" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dvir-biton/MyraOS</a>. I’d love to discuss any aspect of this with you all in the comments!
Show HN: MyraOS – My 32-bit operating system in C and ASM (Hack Club project)
Hi HN, I’m Dvir, a young developer. Last year, I got rejected after a job interview because I lacked some CPU knowledge. After that, I decided to deepen my understanding in the low level world and learn how things work under the hood. I decided to try and create an OS in C and ASM as a way to broaden my knowledge in this area.<p>This took me on the most interesting ride, where I’ve learned about OS theory and low level programming on a whole new level. I’ve spent hours upon hours, blood and tears, reading different OS theory blogs, learning low level concepts, debugging, testing and working on this project.<p>I started by reading University books and online blogs, while also watching videos.
Some sources that helped me out were OSDev Wiki (<a href="https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page</a>), OSTEP (<a href="https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP" rel="nofollow">https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP</a>), open-source repositories like MellOS and LemonOS (more advanced), DoomGeneric, and some friends that have built an OS before.<p>This part was the longest, but also the easiest. I felt like I understood the theory, but still could not connect it into actual code. Sitting down and starting to code was difficult, but I knew that was the next step I needed to take!
I began by working on the bootloader, which is optional since you can use a pre-made one (I switched to GRUB later), but implementing it was mainly for learning purposes and to warm up on ASM. These were my steps after that:<p><pre><code> 1) I started implementing the VGA driver, which gave me the ability to display text.
2) Interrupts - IDT, ISR, IRQ, which signal to the CPU that a certain event occurred and needs handling (such as faults, hardware connected device actions, etc).
3) Keyboard driver, which enables me to display the same text I type on my keyboard.
4) PMM (Physical memory management)
5) Paging and virtual memory management
6) RTC driver - clock addition (which was, in my opinion, optional)
7) PIT driver - Ticks every certain amount of time, and also
8) FS (File System) and physical HDD drivers - for the HDD I chose PATA (HDD communication protocol) for simplicity (SATA is a newer but harder option as well).
For the FS I chose EXT2 (The Second Extended FileSystem), which is a foundational linux FS structure introduced in 1993. This FS structure is not the simplest,
but is very popular in hobby-OS, it is very supported, easy to set up and upgrade to newer EXT versions, it has a lot of materials online, compared to other
options. This was probably the longest and largest feature I had worked on.
9) Syscall support.
10) Libc implementation.
11) Processing and scheduling for multiprocessing.
12) Here I also made a shell to test it all.
</code></pre>
At this point, I had a working shell, but later decided to go further and add a GUI! I was working on the FS (stage 8), when I heard about Hack Club’s Summer of Making (SoM). This was my first time practicing in HackClub, and I want to express my gratitude and share my enjoyment of participating in it.<p>At first I just wanted to declare the OS as finished after completing the FS, and a bit of other drivers, but because of SoM my perspective was changed completely. Because of the competition, I started to think that I needed to ship a complete OS, with processing, GUI and the bare minimum ability to run Doom. I wanted to show the community in SoM how everything works.<p>Then I worked on it for another 2 months, after finishing the shell, just because of SoM!, totalling my project to almost 7 months of work. At this time I added full GUI support, with dirty rectangles and double buffering, I made a GUI mouse driver, and even made a full Doom port! things I would've never even thought about without participating in SoM.<p>This is my SoM project: <a href="https://summer.hackclub.com/projects/5191" rel="nofollow">https://summer.hackclub.com/projects/5191</a>.<p>Every project has challenges, especially in such a low level project. I had to do a lot of debugging while working on this, and it is no easy task. I highly recommend using GDB which helped me debug so many of my problems, especially memory ones.<p>The first major challenge I encountered was during the coding of processes - I realized that a lot of my paging code was completely wrong, poorly tested, and had to be reworked. During this time I was already in the competition and it was difficult keeping up with devlogs and new features while fixing old problems in a code I wrote a few months ago.<p>Some more major problems occurred when trying to run Doom, and unlike the last problem, this was a disaster. I had random PFs and memory problems, one run could work while the next one wouldn’t, and the worst part is that it was only on the Doom, and not on processes I created myself. These issues took a lot of time to figure out. I began to question the Doom code itself, and even thought about giving up on the whole project.<p>After a lot of time spent debugging, I fixed the issues. It was a combination of scheduling issues, Libc issues and the Qemu not having enough (wrongfully assuming 128MB for the whole OS was enough).<p>Finally, I worked throughout all the difficulties, and shipped the project! In the end, the experience working on this project was amazing. I learned a lot, grew and improved as a developer, and I thank SoM for helping to increase my motivation and make the project memorable and unique like I never imagined it would be.<p>The repo is at <a href="https://github.com/dvir-biton/MyraOS" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dvir-biton/MyraOS</a>. I’d love to discuss any aspect of this with you all in the comments!
Show HN: Diagram as code tool with draggable customizations
In the past I've used declarative diagram generation tools like Mermaid.js a lot for quickly drawing up things but for presentations or deliverables I find that I have to then move the generated diagrams over to a tool like Lucidchart which allows full control of the organization and customization.<p>Therefore I am now working on this to combine the benefits of both into just one tool which can do both functions.<p>The project is certainly in the early stages but if you find yourself making architecture diagrams I'd love to hear your thoughts on the idea or even a Github issue for a feature request!<p>One of the workflows I'm targeting is when an AI generates the first draft of the diagram (all the LLMs know .mmd syntax) and then the user can then customize it to their liking which I think can drastically speed up making complex diagrams!
Show HN: Diagram as code tool with draggable customizations
In the past I've used declarative diagram generation tools like Mermaid.js a lot for quickly drawing up things but for presentations or deliverables I find that I have to then move the generated diagrams over to a tool like Lucidchart which allows full control of the organization and customization.<p>Therefore I am now working on this to combine the benefits of both into just one tool which can do both functions.<p>The project is certainly in the early stages but if you find yourself making architecture diagrams I'd love to hear your thoughts on the idea or even a Github issue for a feature request!<p>One of the workflows I'm targeting is when an AI generates the first draft of the diagram (all the LLMs know .mmd syntax) and then the user can then customize it to their liking which I think can drastically speed up making complex diagrams!