The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
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Show HN: Sphinx – A hook that quizzes you on your AI's code before shipping
FOSS, Basically it plugs into your existing coding agent workflow and every time you push to prod it'll throw up a questionnaire that checks if you understand how the code you're pushing works.
Show HN: Llmspeed – feel how fast a local LLM runs before you buy the hardware
Show HN: Gemini 4 Argon plays StarCraft
I've refreshed StarSkirmish Bench, a benchmark where LLMs play StarCraft BW by writing code, with results from the flagship models of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Muse
Show HN: Unfenced – Land for sale that borders public land
Show HN: Petal, open-source CoScreen/ScreenHero finally free
Hi HN!<p>I’m Jason Thomas, one of the founders of CoScreen.<p>As some of you may know, Datadog sunset the CoScreen service on July 31st.<p>Four of us from the original CoScreen team have spent the last couple months building a free and open source pair programming tool inspired by those that came before us: It’s called Petal (<a href="https://github.com/kiruna-labs/petal" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kiruna-labs/petal</a>)<p>Some history first, because when we started CoScreen we had hoped to break the sad and established pattern of this industry.<p>Screenhero was an exceptional tool that a lot of us loved for pairing. Multiple cursors, low latency, you could click your partner’s editor, and just start typing. It felt like magic while we had it. Then Slack bought it in 2015, and shut down the standalone app in December 2017.<p>When Till, Max, and I started CoScreen, we were aware of this history, and wanted to build an even more magical collaboration and screen sharing experience: the entire concept was “throw a window from your laptop up on someone else’s screen, and start collaborating with zero friction.”<p>Datadog acquired us in 2022, and thus began the great adventure of adapting our real-time technology into Datadog products, while also continue developing CoScreen as a standalone tool from the Datadog ecosystem. Datadog invested in the product for years and we’re thankful for that. But CoScreen itself proved, like so many other screen sharing tool acquisitions, to be too tangential from the customer base and core mission. We instead built other communication features in Datadog, the integrations with other video platforms, and also its wildly successful MCP server.
We weren't the only ones. Around was bought by Miro and shut down in March 2025. Multi (formerly Remotion) was acqui-hired by OpenAI in 2024 and shut down about a month later. It's nearly always the same story: a small team builds something hard that people love, a platform buys it for the team or the feature, and the standalone product doesn't survive the integration.
So we decided firmly to do things differently this time. Petal is completely free and open source and we aren't monetizing it. If we lose interest or get hit by a bus, you can self-host it or fork it, and nobody can sunset it on you. Honestly it's a love letter to everyone in this community that supported us, believed in us, and to liberate collaborative screen sharing from this vicious cycle.<p>We hope through this we can help foster a large and vibrant community around innovating in this product sector.
What Petal does: shared windows show up as real windows on your desktop, movable and resizable, not tiles in a grid. Several people can share at once, everyone gets a labeled cursor, and you can click into any shared window to type and scroll. Rooms are persistent, so you click once to join "eng-sync" instead of passing links around.
It runs on macOS and Windows (Linux is next, this time for real and you can help us!), plus a web app. Media goes over LiveKit. You can use our hosted instance with zero config, or point the app at your own LiveKit server with one docker-compose if you want the traffic to stay on your network or even use an entirely different video backend if you want to.
The part that still feels strange to us: CoScreen took almost six years to build. The first version of Petal took under eight weeks, from scratch, with frontier models like Fable and Astra doing a lot of the work. Real-time video and window capture is some of the most unforgiving code we have ever written, so we didn't expect that. We will do a proper writeup on what worked and what didn't, and are happy to answer questions about it here.
Till, Darren, Max and I will be in the thread.
Show HN: How random are you?
Show HN: Use your OpenAI subscription to create audiobooks
Show HN: Guitoro, a virtual guitar you strum with your keyboard
Guitoro is a free browser guitar using recordings of real instruments. You can strum with your keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen, choose acoustic, classical, electric guitar or bass, and see chord fingering and each stroke. Song practice can be slowed to 20%, and there are free chord tools and tuners. No signup or download.<p>1 minute video demo: <a href="https://youtu.be/DtcluMLdSgs" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/DtcluMLdSgs</a><p>I would love feedback on how the strumming feels and sounds.
Show HN: PS2 games statically recompiled to WebAssembly
Show HN: BetterWispr – Free, open-source dictation for Mac
Show HN: WallHop – 12ft.io is gone, so I built a replacement
Hi HN, I'm Josh. WallHop is a free paywall bypass: paste an article URL (or prefix any URL with wallhop.io/) and you get the readable article without the paywall popup, ads or clutter. No signup, no extension.<p>I built it after 12ft.io went away. The News Media Alliance took it down in July 2025 and I missed having something I could hit from my phone.<p>How it works: it started as a fork of everywall/ladder (GPL-3.0) and I've modified it heavily since. Instead of relying on one trick, it chains several bypass methods per request and falls back to archive.is when they all fail, so one site blocking one technique doesn't break it.<p>Things that might be interesting:<p>- iOS Shortcut: on iPhone, tap Share > WallHop from any article in Safari or another app. This is how I use it 95% of the time.
- It works on Medium member-only posts, which 12ft never handled.
- Bookmarklet for desktop, plus /raw/<url> and /api/<url> endpoints if you want to script it.<p>I've tested it against most major news outlets and a bunch of local papers. It won't work everywhere. There are SOME server-side paywalls that are out of reach, and I'd rather say that up front. If you find a site that breaks, I'd love the link, and I can likely figure out a way to bypass it!
Show HN: The rarest tech books and docs you've probably never read
Show HN: Carrier-Explode: iPhone, Pixel and Galaxy carrier settings decoded
Showing off carrier-explode, one of my side projects that continuously archives carrier settings for all major phone brands.<p>carrier-explode also contains decoders and explanations for all the common baseband configurations, etc.<p>There’s still quite a bit of work to be done in checking my assumptions, but the tool has already been proven useful for a few enthusiast groups.
Show HN: Quake ported to safe Rust, playable in browser
Show HN: Let your AI agents paint big arrows, boxes and text on your screen
Show HN: Making a flexible "neon" t-shirt with LED filaments
Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years
Ten years ago I was 19 and traveling through East Africa, and I spent a summer in Ibumila, a village in the Njombe highlands of Tanzania. There's no school in the village. The nearest one is a boarding school an hour away that costs a few hundred dollars a year, which is out of reach for most families there and was about two weeks of summer job money for me. The daughter of the family I stayed with, Anwarite, was 11. I offered to pay her fees and told myself I'd keep paying as long as she wanted to keep going.<p>This summer she graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam with a degree in Language Studies, and last week she told me she'd been accepted into a Master of Arts in Swahili program there. Roughly 2% of people from Njombe ever finish a university degree. Her goal is to get a PhD and then to bring it back to the region.<p>Her entire 18-month master's program (tuition, registration, fees, books, supplies) comes to 3,060,000 TSh, about $1,161.<p>Since this worked out, I kept adding students as I could afford to, and in 2021 I registered it as a 501(c)(3), the Tanzania Education Project. It supports five students from Ibumila now, school fees and healthcare. I kept it small while I was finishing my PhD because I didn't want commitments I couldn't personally guarantee for a decade; I've since started a postdoc, so it feels like the right time to grow past my own paycheck. The long-term goal is that every kid in the village has access to education and healthcare. I sometimes think of this project as a slow experiment. How much could the village itself change over someone's lifetime if the kids have access to education?<p><a href="https://tanzaniaeducationproject.org/" rel="nofollow">https://tanzaniaeducationproject.org/</a> is the website. Nobody takes a salary, and aside from bank fees the money goes to the students. If anyone wants to fund Anwarite's master's specifically, it's here: <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/send-anwarite-to-her-masters-program" rel="nofollow">https://www.gofundme.com/f/send-anwarite-to-her-masters-prog...</a><p>Happy to answer any questions or take any tips you all might have about doing this sort of thing.
Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app
Show HN: Glashütte Trash Clock – A 30-minute pendulum clock made from trash
This is a functional 30-minute pendulum clock entirely from discarded materials—cardboard, zip ties, tape, a yardstick, and a paperclip escapement, built in the German Eldorado of precision watchmaking: Glashütte.<p>It also acts as a reference clock for GTC, a new satirical universal time standard.
Show HN: AI search for every photo and every frame of video on macOS