The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
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Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals
I've been studying interval arithmetic for the past few weeks and it's a really interesting field because while there is a ton of super interesting research published over the past decades, it has never really gotten the recognition that it deserves, IMO.<p>One reason for this is that standard interval arithmetic has really poor handling of division by intervals containing zero. If you compute 1 / [-1, 2] in regular interval arithmetic, you get either [-∞, +∞], or you have to say that the operation is undefined. Both solutions are virtually useless. The real answer of course is [-∞, -1] U [0.5, +∞]: i.e. a union of two disjoint intervals.<p>This is useful because you can confidently exclude a non empty set of the real numbers ([-1, 0.5]) from the set of possible values that you can get by dividing 1 by a number between -1 and 2.<p>But this definition of interval division yields a value that is not an interval. This is a problem if you want to define a closed arithmetic system, where you can build and evaluate arbitrary expression over interval values.<p>(This behavior extends to any non continuous function like tan() for example, which is implemented in my project - not without difficulties!)<p>Well the obvious solution is to define your arithmetic over disjoint unions of intervals. This is the subject of a 2017 paper called "Interval Unions" by by Schichl, H., Domes, F., Montanher, T. and Kofler, K..<p>This open-source project I made implements interval union arithmetic in TypeScript in the form of a simple interactive calculator, so you can try it out for yourself! The underlying TypeScript library is dependency free and implements interval union arithmetic over IEEE 754 double precision floats (JS native number type) with outward rounding. This guarantees accuracy of interval results in the presence of rounding issue inherent to floating point.
Show HN: PanicLock – Close your MacBook lid disable TouchID –> password unlock
I wrote this after the case of a Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, was compelled to unlock her computer with her fingerprint. This resulted in access to her Desktop Signal on her computer, revealing sources and their conversations.<p><a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/washington-post-raid-proves-face-153402560.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/washington-post-raid-pro...</a><p>Edit: I've a lot more details about the legality and precedence on the apps landing page <a href="https://paniclock.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://paniclock.github.io/</a>
Show HN: Stage – Putting humans back in control of code review
Hey HN! We're Charles and Dean, and we're building Stage: a code review tool that guides you through reading a PR step by step, instead of piecing together a giant diff.<p>Here's a demo video: <a href="https://www.tella.tv/video/stage-demo-1pph" rel="nofollow">https://www.tella.tv/video/stage-demo-1pph</a>.
You can play around with some example PRs here: <a href="https://stagereview.app/explore">https://stagereview.app/explore</a>.<p>Teams are moving faster than ever with AI these days, but more and more engineers are merging changes that they don't really understand. The bottleneck isn't writing code anymore, it's reviewing it.<p>We're two engineers who got frustrated with GitHub's UI for code review. As coding agents took off, we saw our PR backlog pile up faster than we could handle. Not only that, the PRs themselves were getting larger and harder to understand, and we found ourselves spending most of our time trying to build a mental model of what a PR was actually doing.<p>We built Stage to make reviewing a PR feel more like reading chapters of a book, not an unorganized set of paragraphs. We use it every day now, not just to review each other's code but also our own, and at this point we can't really imagine going back to the old GitHub UI.<p>What Stage does: when a PR is opened, Stage groups the changes into small, logical "chapters". These chapters get ordered in the way that makes most sense to read. For each chapter, Stage tells you what changed and specific things to double check. Once you review all the chapters, you're done reviewing the PR.<p>You can sign in to Stage with your GitHub account and everything is synced seamlessly (commenting, approving etc.) so it fits into the workflows you're already used to.<p>What we're not building: a code review bot like CodeRabbit or Greptile. These tools are great for catching bugs (and we use them ourselves!) but at the end of the day humans are responsible for what gets shipped. It's clear that reviewing code hasn't scaled the same way that writing did, and they (we!) need better tooling to keep up with the onslaught of AI generated code, which is only going to grow.<p>We've had a lot of fun building this and are excited to take it further. If you're like us and are also tired of using GitHub for reviewing PRs, we'd love for you to try it out and tell us what you think!
Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
Show HN: Every CEO and CFO change at US public companies, live from SEC
Built this solo. It watches SEC filings for executive and board changes, extracts the data, and shows it in real time. 2,100+ changes in the last 30 days. The comp data is interesting: average new CEO total comp is $8.4M across 284 appointments. The /explore page is fully open, no login needed.
Show HN: Ithihāsas – a character explorer for Hindu epics, built in a few hours
Hi HN!<p>I’ve always found it hard to explore the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa online. Most content is either long-form or scattered, and understanding a character like Karna or Bhishma usually means opening multiple tabs.<p>I built <a href="https://www.ithihasas.in/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ithihasas.in/</a> to solve that. It is a simple character explorer that lets you navigate the epics through people and their relationships instead of reading everything linearly.<p>This was also an experiment with Claude CLI. I was able to put together the first version in a couple of hours. It helped a lot with generating structured content and speeding up development, but UX and data consistency still needed manual work.<p>Would love feedback on the UX and whether this way of exploring mythology works for you.
Show HN: I built a social media management tool in 3 weeks with Claude and Codex
Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)
Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
Hi HN!<p>I recently switched from a Fedora/GNOME laptop to a MacBook Air. My old setup served me well as a portable workstation, but I’ve started traveling more while working remotely and needed something with similar performance but better battery life. The main thing I missed was a simple taskbar that shows the windows in the current workspace instead of a Dock that mixes everything together.<p>I built boringBar so I would not have to use the Dock. It shows only the windows in the current Space, lets you switch Spaces by scrolling on the bar, and adds a desktop switcher so you can jump directly to any Space. You can also hide the system Dock, pin apps, preview windows with thumbnails, and launch apps from a searchable menu (I keep Spotlight disabled because for some reason it uses a lot of system resources on my machine).<p>I’ve been dogfooding it for a few months now, and it finally felt polished enough to share.<p>It’s for people who like macOS but want window management to feel a bit more like GNOME, Windows, or a traditional taskbar. It’s also for people like me who wanted an easier transition to macOS, especially now that Windows feels increasingly user-hostile.<p>I’d love feedback on the UX, bugs, and whether this solves the same Dock/Spaces pain for anyone else.<p>P.S. It might also appeal to people who feel nostalgic for the GNOME 2 desktop of yore. I started my Linux journey with it, and boringBar brings back some of that feeling for me.
Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons
<a href="https://pardonned.com" rel="nofollow">https://pardonned.com</a><p>Inspired by the videos of Liz Oyer, I wanted to be able to verify her claims and just look up all the pardons more easily.<p>Tech Stack:
Playwright - to sccrape the DOJ website
SQLite - local database
Astro 6 - Build out a static website from the sqlite db<p>All code is open source and available on Github.
Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons
<a href="https://pardonned.com" rel="nofollow">https://pardonned.com</a><p>Inspired by the videos of Liz Oyer, I wanted to be able to verify her claims and just look up all the pardons more easily.<p>Tech Stack:
Playwright - to sccrape the DOJ website
SQLite - local database
Astro 6 - Build out a static website from the sqlite db<p>All code is open source and available on Github.
Show HN: Is Hormuz open yet?
I built this because I was interested in the data. Didn't fully get it to what I wanted, but thought I'd share it nonetheless. Maybe someone has better data sources they could share!<p>Turns out live ship tracking APIs are expensive so I manually just copied the json from <a href="https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:57.4/centery:26.4/zoom:8" rel="nofollow">https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:57.4/cente...</a> I'll probably have an ai agent do the same thing on some cron interval, if this gets any fanfare.<p>To actually know if the port is open without live ship tracking I found <a href="https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a1730" rel="nofollow">https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a...</a> which was perfect, except it has 4 day lag!<p>I also thought of adding news feed parsing or prediction market data to get a more definitive answer on if it's open right when you load it, but I spent a few hours and am gonna move on for now.
Show HN: An interactive map of Tolkien's Middle-earth
An interactive map of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, with events from across the legendarium plotted as markers.<p>I have been commuting a fair bit between the East and West coast, and thanks to American Airlines' free onboard WiFi, I was able to vibe-code a full interactive map of Middle-earth right from my economy seat at the back of the bus.<p>It's rather amazing how much an LLM knows about Tolkien's work, and it was fun to delve into many of the nooks and crannies of Tolkien's lore.<p>Some features:
- Plot on the map the journey of the main characters in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
- Follow a list of events in the chronological Timeline
- Zoom in on the high-def map and explore many of the off-the-main-plotline places
- Use the 'measure distances' feature to see how far apart things are.<p>I also had a lot of fun learning about tiling to allow for efficient zooming.<p>If you are anything like me, this should provide a fun companion to reading the books or watching the movies (note that on this site, I followed the book narrative, and did not include Peter Jackson's many departures)<p>If you get the chance to check it out, I would love more feedback, and if there is demand, I might do the same for Game of Thrones.
Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead
Last week SWYX nerd-sniped me into building an Open-source Dropbox.<p>Here is Locker: the ultimate open-source Google Drive/box/Dropbox alternative
- Provider agnostic (S3, R2, vercel blob, local)
- BYOB (Bring your own bucket)
- Virtual file system
- QMD Search plugin
Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)
Show HN: GovAuctions lets you browse government auctions at once
I've long been into finding deals on government auction sites (seizures, surplus sales etc.) - right now for example San Diego DHS is selling 26 tons of lead shot, with bidding starting at $1,000 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯<p>It has historically been extremely tedious though: scanning dozens of janky sites which have interminable page loading times; back buttons take you all the way back to the homepage etc.<p>The site I built - GovAuctions - lets you search every government surplus auction at once. You can filter by location, category, and price, save items to a watchlist, and get alerts when new auctions match what you're looking for.<p>Let me know what you think, if you have any suggestions, and if you find any deals in your area!
Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS
I built this because I wanted to see how far I could get with a voice-to-text app that used 100% local models so no data left my computer. I've been using a ton for coding and emails. Experimenting with using it as a voice interface for my other agents too. 100% open-source MIT license, would love feedback, PRs, and ideas on where to take it.
Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
Show HN: I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work
Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food.<p>Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
Show HN: A game where you build a GPU
Thought the resources for GPU arch were lacking, so here we are