The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: Destroy Any Website with Stickman
Show HN: PaperMono, e-ink fridge magnet shopping list with mobile web page
Fridge magnet shopping list on an M5Stack PaperMono (ESP32-S3, e-ink
touchscreen), synced with a phone web app over Wi-Fi. Works offline,
~2,400 lines of C++.<p>This is a great wee device! BLE, Wi-Fi and LoRa on one board makes it flexible
for way more than a shopping list, this is just what I built first. This
firmware only uses Wi-Fi.<p>Fully vibe-coded with Claude Code, I didn't hand-write this. I wanted to see
how Claude would get on with building something useful for a new hardware device.<p>As it's stuck to the fridge it's easy for the family to use, and it's already being used day to day which I'll admit is a first for a home built project like this
Show HN: HN.watch – Videos of all Hacker News posts
Hi HN, I’m Per, founder of Scrimba (YC S20). We’ve spent the last decade teaching people how to code with an HTML-based video format. We’ve now plugged an LLM into it, so that people can create explainer videos about anything. It’s called “Scrimba Explain”.<p>To demo this technology for Hacker News, we built HN.watch. It’s like HN, but with explainer videos instead of articles. We create them on-the-fly the first time someone clicks on a link.<p>While there are obvious visual drawbacks of using HTML instead of diffusion models, there are three big benefits: - Speed: Much faster to generate than pixel-based videos (just a few seconds from click to playback) - Cost: Our cost per video is ~$0.04. (Excluding image generation, which some videos utilize. Quickly blows up the cost) - Easy editing: the above benefits also make AI-assisted editing cheap & fast<p>Our hypothesis is that if video creation goes from “dollars and minutes” to “cents and seconds”, a bunch of new use cases will be unlocked. Here are some we see already: - A video explanation of every single Pull Request (we do this internally) - Give every page in your internal/extrernal docs a video - Turn a complex article into a video in ~4 seconds (via our Chrome extension) - Course creators can quickly draft lessons before recording the real thing - People also create a lot of personal stuff stories for their kids, wedding invitations, birthdays, etc<p>The stack is based on an open-source programming language (Imba) created by our CTO, Sindre Aarsæther. It compiles to JavaScript, so it interoperates fully with the npm + node ecosystem. You can learn more here: <a href="https://imba.io/" rel="nofollow">https://imba.io/</a><p>We’ve also built our own sync engine (OP), and a context management system for agents (Q). We feared this would make the LLMs struggle when writing code for us, as neither is in their training data (there’s very little Imba in there too). However, we’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that LLMs actually are really good at our stack. This is probably because the stack is extremely dense. Imba is compact, and so is OP, where a single declaration sets storage, sync, permissions, UI, and what the AI sees. This means there’s no translations between frontend, API, db and JSON where the model can get confused and get things wrong.<p>Simply said, instead of using React.js, Express, Supabase, and LangChain, we built it all from scratch. Definitely suffering from the “not invented here” syndrome, lol! As for the models, we use Gemini, GPTs, Inworld, ElevenLabs, and a few others.<p>If you want to try it out, just take your pick: - The Web UI (scrimba.com/explain) - MCP (add it to your coding agent) - ChatGPT Plugin - Chrome Extension<p>You can find a link to all of the above in our docs: <a href="https://docs.scrimba.com/explain/introduction" rel="nofollow">https://docs.scrimba.com/explain/introduction</a><p>And finally, a real pixel-based video of the tool: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rbHmBxSEs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rbHmBxSEs</a><p>Would love to hear your feedback and if anyone has ideas for other use cases.<p>PS: I expect quite a bit of pushback from HN for this launch, given how fan of text the HN crowd is. This kind of tool is not for everyone. But there are a lot of people today who prefer videos over text, especially in the younger generations.
Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi
Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi
Show HN: Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things
I love making diagrams to help understand, plan, etc. However, the options are (A) auto-placement languages like Mermaid or Graphviz (which don't let me decide how the diagram looks), or (B) software like Draw.io which are powerful but are very time consuming (and inefficient for agents to manipulate).<p>I wanted to have the benefits of both, where you can define a diagram in a diagram language, but also retain a high degree of control over what the diagram looks like.<p>I also wanted this to work well for humans and agents.<p>On the Github link, there's a playground where you can try it out without installation. There's also instructions for a simple npm install and for installing a skill you can use with Claude or other agents.
Show HN: Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things
I love making diagrams to help understand, plan, etc. However, the options are (A) auto-placement languages like Mermaid or Graphviz (which don't let me decide how the diagram looks), or (B) software like Draw.io which are powerful but are very time consuming (and inefficient for agents to manipulate).<p>I wanted to have the benefits of both, where you can define a diagram in a diagram language, but also retain a high degree of control over what the diagram looks like.<p>I also wanted this to work well for humans and agents.<p>On the Github link, there's a playground where you can try it out without installation. There's also instructions for a simple npm install and for installing a skill you can use with Claude or other agents.
Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red
Hey HN! Wanted to share a fun project I've been hacking on. Given Jev can make decisions really fast (but not fast enough to play Doom yet sadly), I wanted to try and push it to play a more complex game than Tetris. So I went with Pokémon.<p>I've spent endless hours playing this game as a child so building this was a ton of fun.<p>I open sourced everything in case you want to hack on it yourself here: <a href="https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon</a><p>The game is being streamed live including the tokens and cost - hopefully we get all the badges and don't get stuck in a cave :)
Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red
Hey HN! Wanted to share a fun project I've been hacking on. Given Jev can make decisions really fast (but not fast enough to play Doom yet sadly), I wanted to try and push it to play a more complex game than Tetris. So I went with Pokémon.<p>I've spent endless hours playing this game as a child so building this was a ton of fun.<p>I open sourced everything in case you want to hack on it yourself here: <a href="https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon</a><p>The game is being streamed live including the tokens and cost - hopefully we get all the badges and don't get stuck in a cave :)
Show HN: Koi.rest – watch some fish and regain your balance
Hi there. My name is Paul. I’m a developer, an explorer and I’ve got ADHD. As of the beginning of August, I’m also unemployed.<p>This last part, along with everything else this past year, has caused me a great deal of stress.<p>While our balcony zen garden project is yet to be completed, I had an idea to create a virtual one that everyone can use.<p>It's an idea that, unfortunately, I’ve been postponing for a while now, mostly because I have no fucking idea how to do it as I don’t know JavaScript, and I don't have the capacity to learn it right now.<p>So I let perfect be the enemy of good and, well... just kept the idea to myself.<p>Then I said "fuck it" and used AI to make the thing I really wanted to make.<p>I realized I didn't want "perfect". I wanted "good enough".<p>I tweaked, added, removed, drew, researched, questioned, tested... I just wasn't the one coding it.<p>So now, instead of occupying my brain, it now lives on the internet for others to enjoy.<p>Yes, there’s something noble about making something entirely on your own, but what good is an idea that just sits in my head?<p>So here I am. I made the thing. The weird, little, quiet koi pond.<p>The silly project of passion. The little corner of the internet to let strangers watch fish quietly, together.<p>I hope this pond helps you as much as it helped me.
Show HN: Koi.rest – watch some fish and regain your balance
Hi there. My name is Paul. I’m a developer, an explorer and I’ve got ADHD. As of the beginning of August, I’m also unemployed.<p>This last part, along with everything else this past year, has caused me a great deal of stress.<p>While our balcony zen garden project is yet to be completed, I had an idea to create a virtual one that everyone can use.<p>It's an idea that, unfortunately, I’ve been postponing for a while now, mostly because I have no fucking idea how to do it as I don’t know JavaScript, and I don't have the capacity to learn it right now.<p>So I let perfect be the enemy of good and, well... just kept the idea to myself.<p>Then I said "fuck it" and used AI to make the thing I really wanted to make.<p>I realized I didn't want "perfect". I wanted "good enough".<p>I tweaked, added, removed, drew, researched, questioned, tested... I just wasn't the one coding it.<p>So now, instead of occupying my brain, it now lives on the internet for others to enjoy.<p>Yes, there’s something noble about making something entirely on your own, but what good is an idea that just sits in my head?<p>So here I am. I made the thing. The weird, little, quiet koi pond.<p>The silly project of passion. The little corner of the internet to let strangers watch fish quietly, together.<p>I hope this pond helps you as much as it helped me.
Show HN: Whiteboard (YC W26) – An open-source IDE for thoughtful software design
Hello! We’re Sid, Alex, Ketan, and Milan. We’re building Whiteboard (<a href="https://whiteboard.dev.fast/">https://whiteboard.dev.fast/</a>), an open-source desktop app where humans and agents can architect software together in a common workspace. Here’s our repo: <a href="https://github.com/devdotfast/whiteboard" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/devdotfast/whiteboard</a>.<p>We were missing the feeling of a “whiteboard session” with another dev where you leave with a deep understanding of a system, so we built this app for ourselves. Whiteboard plugs into the tools you already use - e.g. Claude Code, Codex, etc. – and gives your agent an SDK to draw on an in-app canvas to describe its work. We began with an MVP based on HTML artifacts and started rethinking the app as we ran into limitations:<p>1. Built on top of CodeOSS: We found that in pure HTML tools it was hard to connect a spec or diagram to code. In Whiteboard, when you click on visualizations like a sequence diagram, an entity relationship diagram, or a quote from the agent’s trace, you can jump to the underlying code directly. When navigating code, you get keybindings and LSP support from VSCode out of the box. We’ve found this is especially valuable because tradeoffs are often only discovered after a first pass at implementation (re: slop)<p>2. Semantic diff viewer: we wrote a semantic, AST-aware diff viewer in Rust so you can only view the code changes which are relevant to you [1]. We’ve set up some sane defaults: large added functions are summarized as pseudocode, and things like unit tests and large documentation changes are collapsed / hidden. This is all customizable with a WASM-based plugin system.<p>3. Decision Log: We found it difficult to reason about what set of decisions our agents made autonomously. So we built tools for agents to query and link their own traces to the Whiteboard, so you can understand how the requirements that you set were implemented, and understand what decisions your agent made autonomously.<p>Here’s a quick demo video explaining more: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChPn3ftULWE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChPn3ftULWE</a><p>Folks at companies like Salesforce and Modal are using Whiteboard today as a review tool for architecture or spec-level changes – really any change where they want to be involved:<p>1. Reviewing your own coding agent’s work: because Whiteboard makes it easier to review large amounts of code, folks will typically have their AI agents create a prototype and a corresponding Whiteboard session so they can iterate on the design.<p>2. Reviewing other people’s changes: We’ve found that Whiteboard is particularly helpful when composed with tools like Greptile. For example, you can run an automated code reviewer on small changes and escalate to a Whiteboard session for the changes that require human judgement.<p>Why we built this: we’re four buddies from college who quit our jobs as tech leads right before agentic coding became industry standard. As we iterated towards an MVP for a previous idea, we struggled to maintain a comprehensible codebase while reaping all the velocity benefits of agentic coding. As more PRs were merged without our understanding, we felt a ‘cognitive debt’ begin to seep in, until it became difficult for us to even contribute to the system [2].<p>We’re releasing our desktop app under an MIT license. Please poke through and feel free to contribute! Eventually we’ll charge companies for a hosted web version that manages whiteboard session creation alongside features like trajectory storage and multiplayer reviews. Everything will always remain self-hostable.<p>Thanks for reading, and we hope you try it out! We would love to hear any feedback and to learn from your expertise.<p>Here’s are the project links again: <a href="https://github.com/devdotfast/whiteboard" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/devdotfast/whiteboard</a>, and you can install (for MacOS + Linux) at <a href="https://install.dev.fast">https://install.dev.fast</a><p>[1] diffs library: <a href="https://github.com/devdotfast/diffr" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/devdotfast/diffr</a>
[2] Credit for the term ‘cognitive debt’ goes to <a href="https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2026/07/02/understanding-is-the-new-bottleneck" rel="nofollow">https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2026/07/02/understanding-is-the...</a>
Show HN: Whiteboard (YC W26) – An open-source IDE for thoughtful software design
Hello! We’re Sid, Alex, Ketan, and Milan. We’re building Whiteboard (<a href="https://whiteboard.dev.fast/">https://whiteboard.dev.fast/</a>), an open-source desktop app where humans and agents can architect software together in a common workspace. Here’s our repo: <a href="https://github.com/devdotfast/whiteboard" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/devdotfast/whiteboard</a>.<p>We were missing the feeling of a “whiteboard session” with another dev where you leave with a deep understanding of a system, so we built this app for ourselves. Whiteboard plugs into the tools you already use - e.g. Claude Code, Codex, etc. – and gives your agent an SDK to draw on an in-app canvas to describe its work. We began with an MVP based on HTML artifacts and started rethinking the app as we ran into limitations:<p>1. Built on top of CodeOSS: We found that in pure HTML tools it was hard to connect a spec or diagram to code. In Whiteboard, when you click on visualizations like a sequence diagram, an entity relationship diagram, or a quote from the agent’s trace, you can jump to the underlying code directly. When navigating code, you get keybindings and LSP support from VSCode out of the box. We’ve found this is especially valuable because tradeoffs are often only discovered after a first pass at implementation (re: slop)<p>2. Semantic diff viewer: we wrote a semantic, AST-aware diff viewer in Rust so you can only view the code changes which are relevant to you [1]. We’ve set up some sane defaults: large added functions are summarized as pseudocode, and things like unit tests and large documentation changes are collapsed / hidden. This is all customizable with a WASM-based plugin system.<p>3. Decision Log: We found it difficult to reason about what set of decisions our agents made autonomously. So we built tools for agents to query and link their own traces to the Whiteboard, so you can understand how the requirements that you set were implemented, and understand what decisions your agent made autonomously.<p>Here’s a quick demo video explaining more: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChPn3ftULWE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChPn3ftULWE</a><p>Folks at companies like Salesforce and Modal are using Whiteboard today as a review tool for architecture or spec-level changes – really any change where they want to be involved:<p>1. Reviewing your own coding agent’s work: because Whiteboard makes it easier to review large amounts of code, folks will typically have their AI agents create a prototype and a corresponding Whiteboard session so they can iterate on the design.<p>2. Reviewing other people’s changes: We’ve found that Whiteboard is particularly helpful when composed with tools like Greptile. For example, you can run an automated code reviewer on small changes and escalate to a Whiteboard session for the changes that require human judgement.<p>Why we built this: we’re four buddies from college who quit our jobs as tech leads right before agentic coding became industry standard. As we iterated towards an MVP for a previous idea, we struggled to maintain a comprehensible codebase while reaping all the velocity benefits of agentic coding. As more PRs were merged without our understanding, we felt a ‘cognitive debt’ begin to seep in, until it became difficult for us to even contribute to the system [2].<p>We’re releasing our desktop app under an MIT license. Please poke through and feel free to contribute! Eventually we’ll charge companies for a hosted web version that manages whiteboard session creation alongside features like trajectory storage and multiplayer reviews. Everything will always remain self-hostable.<p>Thanks for reading, and we hope you try it out! We would love to hear any feedback and to learn from your expertise.<p>Here’s are the project links again: <a href="https://github.com/devdotfast/whiteboard" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/devdotfast/whiteboard</a>, and you can install (for MacOS + Linux) at <a href="https://install.dev.fast">https://install.dev.fast</a><p>[1] diffs library: <a href="https://github.com/devdotfast/diffr" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/devdotfast/diffr</a>
[2] Credit for the term ‘cognitive debt’ goes to <a href="https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2026/07/02/understanding-is-the-new-bottleneck" rel="nofollow">https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2026/07/02/understanding-is-the...</a>
Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard
A joke tool that abuses OpenType's ligature feature to mix fonts. It works pretty fast on client-side by loading Python in WASM.
Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard
A joke tool that abuses OpenType's ligature feature to mix fonts. It works pretty fast on client-side by loading Python in WASM.
Show HN: Drop – A rootless Linux sandbox with gVisor support
I created Drop because I always felt uneasy installing and running third-party programs using my main user account. A single compromised dependency means a full compromise of the system. What is even worse, because I ship software from my computer, a single compromised dependency can lead to compromise of all the users of my software.<p>Containers and VMs are one solution, but for local work, they are often detrimental to productivity. It takes effort to configure a machine with all the tools and configs needed for productive work, but a container or a VM will be stripped of all these tools. This is great for production deployments, where the aim is a reproducible system with minimal dependencies, but can get in the way of productive local work.<p>Drop is language independent, but the workflow is inspired by Python's virtualenv. With virtualenv the environment isolation is only a convention that relies on installed dependencies being good citizens. With Drop the isolation is enforced.<p>Each Drop environment gets its own writable and easily disposable home dir, with only selected config files and dirs from the original home mounted, mostly read-only.<p>Drop uses Linux namespaces for isolation (user, mount, network, PID, IPC, cgroup), doesn't require root and, as an option, uses gVisor user-space kernel, which adds protection against exploiting host kernel vulnerabilities to escape the sandbox.<p>I don't want to make the introductory post too lengthy, but I'm here to answer any questions and give any additional technical details.<p>Note: This is my 3rd submission of the project, the first two did not draw attention. Since then I have added support for gVisor and created a project website to better explain the concept and organize documentation.
Show HN: Drop – A rootless Linux sandbox with gVisor support
I created Drop because I always felt uneasy installing and running third-party programs using my main user account. A single compromised dependency means a full compromise of the system. What is even worse, because I ship software from my computer, a single compromised dependency can lead to compromise of all the users of my software.<p>Containers and VMs are one solution, but for local work, they are often detrimental to productivity. It takes effort to configure a machine with all the tools and configs needed for productive work, but a container or a VM will be stripped of all these tools. This is great for production deployments, where the aim is a reproducible system with minimal dependencies, but can get in the way of productive local work.<p>Drop is language independent, but the workflow is inspired by Python's virtualenv. With virtualenv the environment isolation is only a convention that relies on installed dependencies being good citizens. With Drop the isolation is enforced.<p>Each Drop environment gets its own writable and easily disposable home dir, with only selected config files and dirs from the original home mounted, mostly read-only.<p>Drop uses Linux namespaces for isolation (user, mount, network, PID, IPC, cgroup), doesn't require root and, as an option, uses gVisor user-space kernel, which adds protection against exploiting host kernel vulnerabilities to escape the sandbox.<p>I don't want to make the introductory post too lengthy, but I'm here to answer any questions and give any additional technical details.<p>Note: This is my 3rd submission of the project, the first two did not draw attention. Since then I have added support for gVisor and created a project website to better explain the concept and organize documentation.
Show HN: Mini-AGI – Dynamic continual learning model trained on 8GB VRAM
Sorry for the pretentious name, I know, I know.. It just contains all the pieces I would like to see a AGI model to have, and I can't stand the temptation. Before throwing rocks at me, please take a glance at the Readme, and I hope it will cover your mood a little bit.<p>So, first of all it does work and you can see the sample from the whole training run here: <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/volotat/mini-AGI/refs/heads/main/runs/samples.txt" rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/volotat/mini-AGI/refs/head...</a><p>Here is the scaling law graph I have so far, and it looks very promising:
<a href="https://github.com/volotat/mini-AGI/blob/main/assets/scaling.png" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/volotat/mini-AGI/blob/main/assets/scaling...</a><p>The model was built under my deep dissatisfaction so we cannot really train even moderately big models (1B+ scale) on the consumer's hardware. We can inference and fine-tune them for sure, but I would like to have full control over what the model sees over the training run, so it is fully aligned with my interests, not some corporations.<p>I was thinking about for some time and come up with two interesting ideas I thought worth pursuing: MoE with a lot of experts that gets added and pruned from the model while it trains, where only a small subset of of experts are actually in use at any particular moment + batch 1 training on the single continuous stream of data.<p>First allows us to be bounded only by the disk space in terms of number of parameters and load and unload experts only when they are needed. The second (if figured out and it turns out to be doable) allows us to get aways with small VRAM capacity because we do not need to store big randomized batches and their respective gradients.<p>I started brainstorming with Claude and after some time we found an approach that seems to be promising, and low and behold, a few weeks pass and you can see the results yourself.<p>Obviously, I did use AI in the process of making this project and I am pretty sure it would be completely impossible for me to do something like this without it, so I hope it is more than justified.<p>The model is still running over the first of 7.8B characters corpus I selected for training, so the weights are not out yet, and it's about a couple weeks of waiting until they are cooked at the current reading speed. And yeah, the model just read continuous interleaved passages from the dataset, each by 32K characters long each as a single stream. Just as you or I would do.<p>The set up seems to be really simple so you can git clone the project, run it and observe everything for yourself.<p>Thanks for your attention.
Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com Alternative
Hello HN!<p>I'm relaunching Radius [1] - far too long after the original Show HN [2] (I'll blame the day job for that).<p>Radius started out from my frustration with not knowing what was going on around me. The initial plan was to "show all and every type of event" from big to small, but over time I narrowed the focus to communities, groups, events, and helping people connect through them.<p>The initial Show HN gave me 150+ comments (surprising, looking back, given how terrible the plain Bootstrap UI was...) with a huge amount of useful feedback and feature requests. I've spent the time since then working through that, along with additional requests from groups using Radius, and it finally feels ready for a proper relaunch.<p>I've also recently added "Activities" [3] - which are lightweight events, independent of groups, intended to help people find others to do things with - for example:<p>> John is going for a cycle and a coffee in New York at 10am<p>People can join and vote for a time that works for them.<p>I've got a bunch of ideas for where to go next with this, including things like open sourcing and federation, but those are for another day!<p>Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!<p>P.S. it's built with Ruby on Rails, for those interested. I highly suspect it would have taken me 2 more years to get to this point without Rails!<p>[1] <a href="https://radius.to/" rel="nofollow">https://radius.to/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398</a><p>[3] <a href="https://radius.to/documentation/activities/post-an-activity" rel="nofollow">https://radius.to/documentation/activities/post-an-activity</a>
Show HN: Microsoft Office running with Wine on Linux with no virtualization
Microsoft Office famously hasn't worked well with Wine since Office 2007. There are lots of solutions out there to work around this, but all of them involve fairly heavy virtualization.<p>Multiple people have told me that their biggest hangup for switching to Linux from Windows is the lack of the desktop version of Microsoft Office, and they don't want to run a VM to get around it.<p>I recently fell into a bunch of free time with a Claude Max subscription, so I got Fable to hack at this until it worked! And with this, we have Microsoft Office running on Linux, with no Windows in sight!<p>I can't promise that this will work on everyone's computer, <i>but</i> I did put this all in Nix Flakes, so ideally it should be relatively reproducible on any Linux system with the Nix package manager and Flakes enabled. Also, it does <i>not</i> work very well with X, but Wayland appears to work fine.<p>This is not warez. You need a valid license for Office 365 for this to work. You also need to register <i>on Microsoft's website in a browser</i>; the flow for registering in the app proved to be tricky and not worth pursuing.<p>This is more proof of concept than anything else; I have no doubt that there are bugs and improvements to be made. I have only tested this with NixOS on Sway and KDE, and as stated it only really works with Wayland and the absolute latest GE-Proton, but I believe it would work fine with Gnome or any other Wayland desktop.<p>Full disclosure, Claude Code with Fable did the vast <i>vast</i> majority of the work on this. I ended up primarily just reading log messages and complaining back to it.