The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: My iOS app to practice sight reading (10 years in the App Store)
Hello HN, this has been my personal project for quite some time now. It has been a slowly evolving project over the years and its core function is for users to expose themselves to progressively more difficult lessons of music notes.<p>NOTE: It is free and there are no ads. There is an in app purchase but most of the app doesn't require it.
Show HN: LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one
LinkedIn feels more like Facebook every day — noisy feeds, fake engagement, and everyone shouting into the void.<p>Thats why I used to built a personal microsite on Squarespace and uploaded a video resume to YouTube to stand out - it helped me land interviews and get into Big Tech.<p>But I always wondered: why isn’t there a platform designed to help you stand out like that?<p>So I built OpenSpot: a public, curated platform where you can showcase who you are — with video, audio, and proof of your work. No endless feeds. No humblebrags. Just real people open to new opportunities.<p>We’ve already onboarded a few companies, so recruiters can reach out to you directly. But you can also connect with other standout folks and supercharge your network.<p>Just upload your resume and we´ll automatically generate your profile in under 1 minute.<p>It’s early, but feels like something people actually need.
Would love your thoughts.
Show HN: I built website for sharing Drum Patterns
Originally started as a project to restore patterns from now defunct website 808.pixll.de just for myself, but eventually i decided to share it with others. I've seen this website mentioned a couple of times on HN:)<p>Currently it only supports Roland TR-808, but there will be more.
Show HN: Learn where countries are on the world map with Spaced Repetition
Hi HN,<p>I made a web game to practice country locations a while ago and HN liked it, so I thought I'd post my updated version as well.<p>As for how the game works and feels, I'd really recommend you checking it out for yourself, it's free, no signup, no ads.<p>The tech stack is Vue + ts + Tailwind/Daisy for the looks. The learning algorithm is a slight modification of the ts version of FSRS.<p>If you have anything to add, it's open source as well (<a href="https://github.com/koljapluemer/learn-worldmap" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/koljapluemer/learn-worldmap</a>), although not well documented yet.<p>In the end it's just a little sideproject, but I hope you enjoy it — any feedback welcome :)
Show HN: I made a live multiplayer Minesweeper game
Hi everyone! For several months now I've been stuck on the idea of a Minesweeper game that isn't just single player.
This is what I came up with:<p>• Live games allowing several people to play at the same time<p>• Scoring system rewarding correct moves<p>• Grid size, mines count, and players count set to make games as balanced as possible
Show HN: "Git who" – A new CLI tool for industrial-scale Git blaming
I've always wanted a better way to explore the authorship data embedded in a Git commit log. I'm having fun building a CLI tool to do this.<p>It's a bit like the "Contributors" tab on Github that shows you how many commits each contributor has made but much faster and with many more options.<p>If you get a chance to try it out, please let me know. I'd love to hear feedback and suggestions. Thank you!
Show HN: I made a tool to port tweets to Bluesky mantaining their original date
Bluesky allows to backdate their posts with their API, so I made this tool to copy your twitter (X) profile to Bluesky keeping the backdated dates of your tweets, showing as if they were posted back then
Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript
3 months ago I wanted to draw an ASCII diagram to include in some documentation at work. I found the few tools online to be insufficient, and was suprised there wasn't a more complete tool to get the job done.<p>Since, I've built Cascii from scratch in vanilla Javascript (I'm not an FE dev, it might be obvious...).<p>I hope it works alright. Please check out the live version at <a href="https://cascii.app" rel="nofollow">https://cascii.app</a>, report problems, make diagrams to improve your code's documentation. Hope you enjoy using it.
Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp
Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp
Show HN: Nash, I made a standalone note with single HTML file
Hello HN,
I hope it will posted as well.
I made a note in single html file.
This does not require a separate membership or installation of the software, and if you download and modify an empty file, you can modify and read it at any time, regardless of online or offline.
It can be shared through messengers such as Telegram, so it is also suitable to share contents with long articles and images.
It is also possible to host and blog because it is static html file content.
Show HN: Nash, I made a standalone note with single HTML file
Hello HN,
I hope it will posted as well.
I made a note in single html file.
This does not require a separate membership or installation of the software, and if you download and modify an empty file, you can modify and read it at any time, regardless of online or offline.
It can be shared through messengers such as Telegram, so it is also suitable to share contents with long articles and images.
It is also possible to host and blog because it is static html file content.
Show HN: Bubbles, a vanilla JavaScript web game
Hey everybody, you might remember my older game, Lander! It made a big splash on Hacker News about 2 years ago. I'm still enjoying writing games with no dependencies. I've been working on Bubbles for about 6 months and would love to see your scores.<p>If you like it, you can build your own levels with my builder tool: <a href="https://ehmorris.com/bubbles/builder/" rel="nofollow">https://ehmorris.com/bubbles/builder/</a> and share the levels here or via Github.
Show HN: XPipe, a shell connection hub for SSH, Docker, K8s, VMs, and more
Hey HN, I built XPipe as I always wanted to have an easy file system and terminal access to all of my remote systems, including containers, virtual machines, clusters, and more that you normally can't connect to with existing solutions out of the box.<p>XPipe is a new type of connection hub that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop. It can make your life easier when working with any kind of servers by eliminating all the commonly tedious tasks that come up when interacting with remote systems, either from the terminal or from a graphical interface. XPipe comes with integrations for SSH, docker and other containers, various hypervisors like Proxmox, Kubernetes clusters, tools like Teleport and Tailscale, and more without requiring any setup on your remote systems. You can link your favourite text/code editors, terminals, password managers, shells, command-line tools, and more with it, allowing you to keep using your own favourite tools when working with XPipe.<p>The entire implementation of how it communicates with remote systems is completely different from most other solutions out there. What happens in the background can essentially be explained this way: It launches a local shell process like cmd or bash and executes a command that opens a remote shell connection such as ssh user@host in that shell process. All communication is then done through the stdin/stdout/stderr of that shell process. From there, it detects what kind of server and environment, such as shell type, os, user, etc. you have logged into and adjusts how it talks to the remote system. By then using, for example, file system related commands such as ls, rm, touch, etc. and its equivalents, it can realize a functional file manager that can connect to essentially every system.<p>It is essentially the same idea as emacs TRAMP mode if you have ever used that. With the difference being that it works on all kinds of systems and is also not constrained to a certain editor/tool environment. VSCode also uses a similar approach for some of the remote development tools with SSH, but that one is more limited in scope and is a little bit sluggish to use. And it's also bound to the VSCode platform. The goal of XPipe's implementation is to not be limited by a certain environment or specific set of tools.<p>The development took a while as this new approach requires a completely new implementation in many areas, but I am confident that it's ready now. I appreciate any kind of feedback from you to guide me in the right development direction from here.<p>Enjoy!
Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed
Hi HN! I love imagining the past, so I made Time Portal, a game where you are dropped into a historical event and see AI video footage from that moment. You have to guess where you are in time and on the map. It’s like GeoGuessr (and heavily inspired by it!) but for historical events.<p>The videos are all created with AI. It’s a pipeline of Flux (images), Kling (video), and mmaudio (audio). The videos aren’t always historically accurate to the last detail. They might incorporate elements of folklore or have details from popular beliefs about the way things looked rather than the latest academic research on how they looked.<p>I’m thinking a lot about how to make the game more interactive. One thing that makes Geoguessr so fun for me is that you can move infinitely and always find more details to help you pinpoint the location. I want Time Portal to have a similar quality. I have a few ideas to try soon that will hopefully make the game more interactive and infinite.
Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
Hi HN! I’m Cole Ashman, founder of Pila Energy. I’ve spent my career working on home energy systems—first as an engineer on Tesla’s Powerwall, where I focused on the Backup Gateway, Solar Inverter, and metering systems. More recently, I led Product at SPAN, where we built the Smart Electrical Panel and integrated with most major home solar, EV, and battery systems.<p>Pila (<a href="https://pila.energy/" rel="nofollow">https://pila.energy/</a>) is a home battery that plugs into a standard wall outlet, provides smart backup power, energy shifting, and grid services. It’s more than a power bank—it’s a distributed energy system that can scale across multiple rooms, entire buildings, and work together in real time as a coordinated system. We built Pila to be local first with an open API to allow developers to build use cases on top of our hardware (Home Assistant, etc).<p>Big batteries like Tesla Powerwall and Enphase are great if you own a home and can afford a $10K+ electrical project, but they require permanent installation, electricians, and panel upgrades—which makes them inaccessible for renters, apartments, and cost-conscious homeowners. Over 50% of the cost of installing a Powerwall isn’t even the battery itself—it’s soft costs: labor, permitting, etc. We wanted to create an entry point for more people to access energy security at home.<p>How does it work?<p>Plug Pila into any 120V wall outlet, and power passes through to connected devices and appliances. The inverter, LFP battery, BMS, grid disconnection, controller, and wireless connectivity are all built in. (details at <a href="https://pila.energy/tech-specs" rel="nofollow">https://pila.energy/tech-specs</a>)<p>When an outage happens, the onboard inverter detects the power loss within 20ms and automatically disconnects from the grid (islanding). Whether you’re home or away, backup kicks in instantly. A built-in cellular radio ensures you get a notification even if your home WiFi is out. Pila is 1.6kWh. That will backup a standard fridge for over a day.<p>One key challenge we faced with a distributed architecture was coordination between batteries, for things like solar-following and managing real-time draw from your utility connection. Unlike large garage systems, where you can run a wired CAN bus, our batteries are spread across the home. We’re solving this with a sub-GHz wireless mesh network—self-healing, coordinator-less, and designed to make setup and expansion as simple as plugging in another unit.<p>Long-term, we’d love to open up this protocol to provide a more reliable communication layer for energy products in noisy built environments—reducing reliance on consumer Wi-Fi.<p>We want to deliver the value you’d expect from a whole-home battery like Powerwall, in a plug-in format. That means going beyond a basic lead acid UPS with real home energy management, useful insights about power use, power larger loads like sump pumps, and even deliver grid services.<p>Most portable batteries are missing the functionality that makes a home battery useful: no bidirectional power, no integration with solar or smart home systems, and no ability to manage home energy dynamically. They tend to be boxy, ruggedized, meant to be moved around, not seamlessly integrated into your living space. On top of that, many use e-mobility battery chemistries, which are great for delivering high power on demand but wear out faster when cycled daily for home energy use.<p>As a renter myself, I started Pila because these awesome energy products aren’t accessible enough. And frankly, generators are loud, expensive, and a pain to deal with. Even many Powerwall owners I’ve talked to say they really care about keeping the fridge, WiFi, and a sump pump running—so why does energy resilience have to be so complicated and expensive?<p>As the grid struggles to keep up with demand, we believe modular, renter-friendly batteries can make home energy resilience more accessible.<p>What's been your experience with home batteries?
What recent power outages have you had, and how were you affected?
Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories
I'm Jack, and I'm excited to share a project that has channeled my Factorio addiction recently: the Factorio Learning Environment (FLE).<p>FLE is an open-source framework for developing and evaluating LLM agents in Factorio. It provides a controlled environment where AI models can attempt complex automation, resource management, and optimisation tasks in a grounded world with meaningful constraints.<p>A critical advantage of Factorio as a benchmark is its unbounded nature. Unlike many evals that are quickly saturated by newer models, Factorio's geometric complexity scaling means it won't be "solved" in the next 6 months (or possibly even years). This allows us to meaningfully compare models by the order-of-magnitude of resources they can produce - creating a benchmark with longevity.<p>The project began 18 months ago after years of playing Factorio, recognising its potential as an AI research testbed. A few months ago, our team (myself, Akbir, and Mart) came together to create a benchmark that tests agent capabilities in spatial reasoning and long-term planning.<p>Two technical innovations drove this project forward: First, we discovered that piping Lua into the Factorio console over TCP enables running (almost) arbitrary code without directly modding the game. Second, we developed a first-class Python API that wraps these Lua programs to provide a clean, type-hinted interface for AI agents to interact with Factorio through familiar programming paradigms.<p>Agents interact with FLE through a REPL pattern:
1. They observe the world (seeing the output of their last action)
2. Generate Python code to perform their next action
3. Receive detailed feedback (including exceptions and stdout)<p>We provide two main evaluation settings:
- Lab-play: 24 structured tasks with fixed resources
- Open-play: An unbounded task of building the largest possible factory on a procedurally generated map<p>We found that while LLMs show promising short-horizon skills, they struggle with spatial reasoning in constrained environments. They can discover basic automation strategies (like electric-powered drilling) but fail to achieve more complex automation (like electronic circuit manufacturing). Claude Sonnet 3.5 is currently the best model (by a significant margin).<p>The code is available at <a href="https://github.com/JackHopkins/factorio-learning-environment" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JackHopkins/factorio-learning-environment</a>.<p>You'll need:
- Factorio (version 1.1.110)
- Docker
- Python 3.10+<p>The README contains detailed installation instructions and examples of how to run evaluations with different LLM agents.<p>We would love to hear your thoughts and see what others can do with this framework!
Show HN: Seven39, a social media app that is only open for 3 hours every evening
I built this site as a quick test if a time boxed social media experience feels better than an endless one. So far I've just been using it with friends and it feels nice, but it seems like it is time to bring it to a larger audience.<p>Let me know what you think! It is just based on EST for now, sorry.
Show HN: I built an app to get daily wisdom from Mr. Worldwide
Pitbull is coming to Stockholm. As a part of that prep, I built an app with glassmorphism style counting down to the big day
Show HN: I built an app to get daily wisdom from Mr. Worldwide
Pitbull is coming to Stockholm. As a part of that prep, I built an app with glassmorphism style counting down to the big day