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Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites

<a href="https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare_release/" rel="nofollow">https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare_release/</a><p><a href="https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare/" rel="nofollow">https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare/</a>

Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts

Show HN: Are You in the Weights?

With more traffic moving off-web and into LLMs, I got curious about what traces we leave "in the weights". My design partner and I built a site in the past few weeks that checks recognition across frontier and small models. It queries many of them in parallel, clusters the responses, and tells you how strongly they recognize you. Happy to answer any questions here!

Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation

I've made a drawing app based on my physical sketching practice, using fluid sim and some shader tricks to mimic watercolor-style ink washes. Best used on iPad or with a drawing tablet. The linked article shows how the core engine works, with plenty of little interactive demos. It was fun to make, sharing in hopes others find it fun too :)

Show HN: High-Res Neural Cellular Automata

Neural CAs model self-organizing pattern formation.<p>Now they can generate patterns at HD resolution in real-time, enabled by turning each CA cell into a Neural Field.<p>Try 3 demos: grow a pattern from a seed (and damage it, it heals), synthesize PBR textures that can regenerate, or create 3D textures like clouds.

Show HN: An 8-bit live gamecast for baseball

Hey HN, I built a website to watch live baseball games in an 8-bit broadcast. It takes live MLB data streams and converts them into near real-time pixel art gamecasts.<p>Been waiting to share this for when there’s actually a good slate of games happening since the site is pretty bare otherwise.<p>Here is today's schedule:<p>Mets @ Reds - 9:40am PDT <a href="https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/824503" rel="nofollow">https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/824503</a><p>Royals @ Nationals - 10:05am PDT <a href="https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/822721" rel="nofollow">https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/822721</a><p>Marlins @ Phillies - 10:05am PDT <a href="https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/823450" rel="nofollow">https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/823450</a><p>Tigers @ Astros - 11:10am PDT <a href="https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/824178" rel="nofollow">https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/824178</a><p>Padres @ Cardinals - 11:15am PDT <a href="https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/823044" rel="nofollow">https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/823044</a><p>..and another 14 games throughout the later day.<p>I'm still early on in this project, but I've tried to add little details with actual stadiums, day and night modes, between inning graphics and interstitials, live scoreboards, etc.<p>Would love any feedback and ideas. Thanks for checking it out!

Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?

Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

I'm the developer of Trace, a non-intrusive, shortcut-driven Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on-device. I know, another meeting transcription app. Please bear with me though, I'm confident that this is at least a little novel.<p>I primarily built Trace for myself. I'd been using MacWhisper, but there was enough fiddling before each call that I'd forget to start it and walk out of an hour-long meeting with nothing written down. So the things I cared about most were that it's quick to activate and stays out of the way. You activate Trace by pressing a global shortcut (configurable), which reveals a small bar at the bottom of your screen (there's also a keystroke and/or option to hide it entirely if you'd rather not see it at all).<p>As I was building it I wanted to bake in a couple of workflows I'd wished for in other transcription apps.<p>1. Mid-meeting you can press another global shortcut to mark a "key moment" and type a note. The note shows up in the resulting transcript inline at that timestamp. I wanted to add this because I kept catching myself thinking "wait, that bit matters" in meetings and reaching to jot it down in a separate app like Obsidian, which I then needed to add context to, which took me out of the meeting. I use it all the time. If I paste the transcript into an LLM afterwards (which I find myself doing more and more these days) the important moments are flagged so it doesn't gloss over them. This is more noticeable in longer meetings with lots of topics. 2. With another keyboard shortcut you can summon a rough live recap (subtitles, basically) to quickly recap what's just been said.<p>Trace uses standard macOS microphone and system recording APIs to capture both sides of the conversation as two separate tracks and then runs the system side through on-device diarization to identify speakers. Right now we only label them as "Speaker 1", "Speaker 2", etc but there are plans for speaker labelling in the future. You can also show a "live recap" as the call is happening to review what someone just said.<p>All transcription models run on your machine. To be clear though, Trace doesn't do any of the summarising itself, it just produces a markdown transcript, so if you want summaries then you need to pass the output to an AI.<p>The app is sandboxed and your audio/transcripts are never uploaded anywhere - they just exist as audio files and markdown on disk. The only network call Trace is required to make is on the first run to download the speech and speaker models (around 500MB) from Hugging Face, and after that it can be used fully offline. If enabled, a Google Calendar integration can auto-name sessions but that needs a network connection.<p>The app is £9.99 on the macOS App Store. I've been using it every day for months now and I'm super happy with how it's improved my workflow. Feedback very welcome.

Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing

Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing

Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire

Driving home from work one day, I wanted to know how many people we knew the names of who lived during the Roman era. Searching around, I found lists of Consuls and officials, but nothing that covered ordinary people or even most people like freedmen and slaves. So I ended up building a pipeline to process the more than 500k Latin inscriptions in the Epigraphic Database Clauss-Slaby <a href="https://edcs.hist.uzh.ch/en/" rel="nofollow">https://edcs.hist.uzh.ch/en/</a> and extract the names of people (and attempt to cluster them, but this is a work in progress).<p>There are databases where Classicists have done this manually for specific regions, Trismegistos <a href="https://www.trismegistos.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.trismegistos.org/</a> and Latin Inscriptions of the Roman Empire (LIRE) <a href="https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/publications/latin-inscriptions-of-the-roman-empire-lire/" rel="nofollow">https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/publications/latin-inscriptions...</a> are two major efforts I found. But there doesn't seem to be a project that did what I set out to do, although I have read in some places that it was believed to be possible.<p>I am not a classicist or a web developer, but I have Claude and Gemini and I can sort of read basic Latin - so I set to work. I used LIRE and another database as ground truth and built a pipeline to extract and process the inscriptions to recover the names. The process I developed uses a high end LLM like Sonnet or Gemini Pro to supervise the extraction and tuning process on a regional basis until the obvious error rate is reasonable. For this, so far, reasonable to me means less than 1-2% in the smaller initial samples of 100-500 and no observed systemic issues. The different regions often need different prompts, so this basically became an exercise in letting the higher level AI tune the prompt for the lower level AI. The extraction when measured against LIRE produces an F1 score between 0.64 and 0.87, but take this with a grain of salt.<p>Once I had done a few regions, I wanted to see the work, so I threw together a pretty crude website but as I am not a web developer, it was crude in how it accessed its data. It does look cool and I also added summarization, and machine translation to each entry. I wanted to eventually get feedback from an actual team of classicists and make the website work better, so I am rewriting it as we speak but it is broadly functional now with a few extra bugs but substantially improved performance compared to the old one. All entries link back to the proper sources, and the old web app linked to several additional sources where the data was present, but I haven't gotten that working again just yet on the new one. (The old web interface is still available at <a href="https://roman-names.com" rel="nofollow">https://roman-names.com</a>, but I will warn you it is clunky and not mobile friendly at all)<p>Key findings so far:<p>AI supervised AI extraction saved me time. I was manually tuning things for a while and then the runbook became an idea that I feed my instructions in and let the big AI go with sparse oversight from me.<p>The extraction improved significantly (by about 10 F1 points) when I fed the model the raw text including the markers, vs a cleaned up version of the text.<p>I just thought it was a cool little project and wanted to share. If you happen to work in any adjacent space and there is something I could do better etc let me know.

Show HN: Putt.day a daily mini golf game

Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in public

Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0

Today, I’m proud to announce Homebrew 6.0.0. The most significant changes since 5.1.0 are a new tap trust security mechanism, the new faster, smaller, default internal Homebrew JSON API, sandboxing on Linux, better defaults informed by our user survey, many brew bundle improvements, improved performance and initial support for macOS 27 (Golden Gate).<p>Happy to discuss any questions here!

Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps

We're open-sourcing 14 components & examples today for PDF, DOCX, and XLSX viewers, plus bounding box citations, file upload, e-signature, and more. It's MIT licensed and fully customizable.<p>Demo video here: <a href="https://share.extend.ai/kRmSGKRF">https://share.extend.ai/kRmSGKRF</a><p>When we started, we tried every file viewer and document component library we could find. Unfortunately, none of them had all the functionality (and polish) that we wanted, so we ended up building our own for <a href="https://extend.ai/">https://extend.ai/</a>. It was only ever meant to be internal, but enough customers kept asking for it that we decided to open source it.<p>It's useful for building document processing agents, real-time user facing document intake flows, or all kinds of internal tooling.<p>We naively thought this would be a solved problem. Turns out, making PDF/XLSX/DOCX viewers that work at scale is not trivial...we use and maintain it for Extend ourselves, so we've fixed a lot of edge cases that came up while running millions of pages / day through our own system. Our hope is that with our resources + community support, it'll keep getting better over time.

Show HN: Gravity – Interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein

Just for fun and self education, I've built this over a weekend to teach myself why orbits exist, not just show planets going around. Something that was never clearly explain to me in school. It opens with a guided tour that builds the idea up step by step: two bodies and the equal/opposite force, inertia (the Sun is removed and Earth just drifts straight), then "an orbit is falling and continuously missing," cosmic velocities with a little rocket, Voyager 1 & 2's real gravity assists (the clock runs the actual 1977–1989 dates so the planets orbit into their grand-tour alignment and the slingshots line up), and it ends on Einstein — gravity as curved spacetime, the classic rubber-sheet well. What's real: every body uses its real radius/mass and J2000 orbital elements; positions come from solving Kepler's equation each frame. You can toggle to an N-body mode (symplectic leapfrog) that shows live energy drift (~1e-6%) so you can see the integrator is honest. The only thing faked is scale — at true scale you can't see anything — so there's a toggle between true scale and a log-remapped "visual" scale, with physics always running in real AU. Tech: TypeScript + Three.js + Vite, fully client-side, no backend, works offline (surface textures are generated procedurally from value-noise; only Earth uses a real image). Source: <a href="https://github.com/qunabu/Gravity" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/qunabu/Gravity</a><p>Happy to answer questions — and feedback on the physics or the explanations is very welcome. This project might be totally inaccurate in terms of real physics, this is how i do understand this on my own - i'm happy to confront this with reality

Show HN: Gitdot – A better GitHub. Open-source, written in Rust

What works now: user signups, org creations, private/public repos, and importing GitHub repositories (both as read-only mirrors and full migrations). So basically, you can create, push and pull to a repo, but we don't have many features quite yet (issues, PRs, CI).<p>What is a bit unique is: 1) we built it in Rust and 2) the website is a little odd. Its design is inspired by CLIs (e.g., fzf, broot, vim) instead of web apps, and as such, lacks some affordances that you might typically expect in favor of keyboard-driven instant navigations (we have the very ambitious goal of an FCP of 100ms). In case you're curious, here's how we we built it: <a href="https://gitdot.io/designs">https://gitdot.io/designs</a><p>We recognize that we're making some bold claims here and are also well aware that we have much to learn. Building software is still hard, and that's a fact we seem to relearn everyday.<p>But we wanted to share what we built so far nonetheless.<p>Cheers, thank y'all for reading, and till the next —paul & mikkel.

Show HN: Performative-UI – A react component library of design tropes

hope you enjoy

Show HN: I Derived a Pancake

After 25 years of making other people's pancake recipes - always yearning for more tang, more fluff, and more predictability - I decided to derive the pancake recipe from the chemistry.<p>You mark checkboxes for what you have on hand (ricotta, sour cream, kefir, buttermilk, yogurt, cottage cheese, lemon, cream of tartar, etc.) and it computes the best recipe based on targets for acid, fat, salt, sugar, and CO2.<p>My particular favorite are the yeast-raised lemon ricotta kefir pancakes - the best I've ever had.<p>The math is done in a small pure-ESM library: ingredient composition to component masses and acid moles, a stoichiometry layer, and a bisection solver for the target deficits.<p>I'm not a chemist, so if something is off, tell me and I will fix it!

Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

Hey HN!<p>Lathe is an experiment in using LLMs to teach me something new, instead of doing the work for me. It generates a hands-on, source-backed tutorial for any technical topic you want to learn. Then you work through it yourself by reading and typing the code by hand (<i>gasp</i>) in a local UI built for exactly that.<p>It's a Go CLI plus LLM agent skills (Claude Code / Cursor / Codex). You prompt something like "/lathe build a 3D slicer in Erlang", run `lathe serve` to spin up a local webapp, and read it in your browser. Every tutorial comes with the things that have made self-learning a pleasant experience for me in the past:<p>- table of contents that follows along as you scroll - side-notes that nudge you to think - exercises for the reader - sources backing up the content that you can use to take you deeper<p>To help make up for the lack of human brainpower behind the tutorial, you can also ask questions about the content, have another LLM verify the tutorial actually compiles and runs, or extend it with another part (no more "Part 4 of 6" that hasn't seen an update since 2021).<p>I didn't build lathe to replace human-written tutorials. I built lathe because I _love_ human-written tutorials, but wanted to learn technical domains where no good human-written tutorial exists yet (building a 3D slicer from scratch, making embedded Zig approachable, etc). There's a longer story in the README about how I got started with programming through PSP homebrew tutorials, and why losing that to LLMs bugged me enough to build this.<p>I'm not here to sell you anything (there's nothing close to a VC-backed startup here :D). It's an LLM, and its output is usually good but not perfect by any means. So far, my experience is that because you're the one typing and actually engaged, you catch the weird stuff (and I'm finding that pushing back on it is its own kind of learning). And yes, it's vibecoded, because it's low scope, low risk, and scratching a personal itch. I run it on Claude Code + macOS personally, other setups should work but I haven't been able to verify them yet.<p>If you can find resources to learn something that was written by a human, read that first. But Lathe is here to fill in the gaps when that isn't the case, and I hope it serves as an example where LLMs can help us think better, rather than less.<p>Repo: <a href="https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe</a><p>Would love your feedback if you decide to check it out!