The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman
Last time I posted this it didn't garner much interest. There have been lots of improvements and fixes since the last release.<p>Quick list of features:<p><pre><code> - Workspaces
- Tabs
- Nested Folders
- Lots of context menus
- Response history
- Plugins
- Runs fully in the browser and runs offline if necessary
- Chrome and Firefox extension to bypass CORS restrictions
- Desktop builds for all platforms
- GraphQL support
- Import collections exported from Postman and Insomnia
- Simple user friendly interface
</code></pre>
I built this because I love Insomnia but wanted a portable version that I could run in the browser.<p>If you're tired of Postman's bloated interface and slow startup times, do give this a try.
Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman
Last time I posted this it didn't garner much interest. There have been lots of improvements and fixes since the last release.<p>Quick list of features:<p><pre><code> - Workspaces
- Tabs
- Nested Folders
- Lots of context menus
- Response history
- Plugins
- Runs fully in the browser and runs offline if necessary
- Chrome and Firefox extension to bypass CORS restrictions
- Desktop builds for all platforms
- GraphQL support
- Import collections exported from Postman and Insomnia
- Simple user friendly interface
</code></pre>
I built this because I love Insomnia but wanted a portable version that I could run in the browser.<p>If you're tired of Postman's bloated interface and slow startup times, do give this a try.
Show HN: I made a new AI colorizer
Hi HN, I’m Emil, the maker behind Palette. I’ve been tinkering with AI and colorization for about five years. This is my latest colorization model. It’s a text-based AI colorizer, so you can edit the colorizations with natural language. To make it easier to use, I also automatically create captions and generate filters.<p>Let me know what you think.<p>You can see some of my results on my reddit page: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/emilwallner/?sort=top" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/user/emilwallner/?sort=top</a>
Show HN: I made a new AI colorizer
Hi HN, I’m Emil, the maker behind Palette. I’ve been tinkering with AI and colorization for about five years. This is my latest colorization model. It’s a text-based AI colorizer, so you can edit the colorizations with natural language. To make it easier to use, I also automatically create captions and generate filters.<p>Let me know what you think.<p>You can see some of my results on my reddit page: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/emilwallner/?sort=top" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/user/emilwallner/?sort=top</a>
Show HN: Linen – Open-source Slack for communities
Hi HN, My name is Kam. I'm the founder of Linen.dev. Linen communities is a Slack/Discord alternative that is Google-searchable and customer-support friendly. Today we are open-sourcing Linen and launching Linen communities. You can now create a community on Linen.dev without syncing it from Slack and Discord!<p>I initially launched Linen as a tool to sync Slack and Discord conversations to a search engine-friendly website. As I talked to more community managers, I quickly realized that Slack and Discord communities don't scale well and that there needs to be a better tool, especially for open-source knowledge-based communities. Traditionally these communities have lived on forums that solved many of these problems. However, from talking to communities, I found most of them preferred chat because it feels more friendly and modern. We want to bring back a bunch of the advantages of forums while maintaining the look and feel of a chat-based community.<p>Slack and Discord are closed apps that are not indexable by the internet, so a lot of content gets lost. Traditional chat apps are not search engine friendly because most search engines have difficulty crawling JS-heavy sites. We built Linen to be search engine friendly, and our communities have over 30,000 pages/threads indexed by google. Our communities that have synced their Slack and Discord conversations under their domain have additional 40,000 pages indexed. We accomplish this by conditionally server rendering pages based on whether or not the browser client is a crawler bot. This way, we can bring dynamic features and a real-time feel to Linen and support search engines.<p>Most communities become a support channel, and managing this many conversations is not what these tools are designed for. I've seen community admins hack together their own syncs and internal devices to work to stay on top of the conversations. This is why we created a feed view, a single view for all the threads in all the channels you care about. We added an open and closed state to every thread so you can track them similarly to GitHub issues or a ticketing system. This way, you and your team won't miss messages and let them drop. We also allow you to filter conversations you are @mentioned as a way of assigning tickets. I think this is a good starting point, but there is a lot more we can improve on.<p>How chat is designed today is inherently interrupt-driven and disrupts your team's flow state. Most of the time, when I am @mentioning a team member, I actually don't need them to respond immediately. But I do want to make sure that they do eventually see it. This is why we want to redesign how the notification system works. We are repurposing @mentions to show up in your feed and your conversation sections and adding a !mention. A @mention will appear in your feed but doesn't send any push notifications, whereas a !mention will send a notification for when things need a real-time synchronous conversation. This lets you separate casual conversations from urgent conversations. When everything is urgent, nothing is. (credit: Incredibles) This, along with the feed, you can get a very forum-like experience to browse the conversations.<p>Linen is free with unlimited history for public communities under <a href="https://linen.dev/community" rel="nofollow">https://linen.dev/community</a> domain. We monetize by offering a paid version based on communities that want to host Linen under their subdomain and get the SEO benefits without managing their own self-hosted instance.<p>We are a small team of 3, and this is the first iteration, so we apologize for any missing features or bugs. There are many things we want to improve in terms of UX. In the near term, we want to improve search and add more deep integrations, DMs, and private channels. We would appreciate any feedback, and if you are curious about what the experience looks like, you can join us here at Linen.dev/s/linen
Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time
Show HN: I have built a library of screenplays for movies and TV shows
Show HN: I have built a library of screenplays for movies and TV shows
Show HN: Carefulwords.com, a more inspiring thesaurus
I began this in late September purely on the whims of frustration with thesaurus.com, which does not bother to focus the input box! So I made my own site that focuses the input box. And because I wanted a thesaurus where I could type just the term in the address bar (eg type carefulwords.com/word) to get my results.<p>It is very rough around the edges right now. There are far too many synonyms, which themselves are only organized alphabetically. I hope to take the site in a more inspiring direction over time than merely synonyms. Perhaps euphemisms, or other poetic uses from the past, or author commentary, or something altogether different.
Show HN: America – Road Trip Simulator
APIs are a little like the open road—always waiting, full of opportunity, but hardly utilized. So here’s America, composed of several APIs that paint a vivid, real-time picture of a good old-fashioned road trip. Get local classifieds and photos. Tune into local radio stations. Talk wit other drivers. And more.<p>Exploring the country by car was an invaluable experience for me during my time in the states. I’ve since moved to Barcelona, and find myself missing the territory. This is my attempt at recreating the magic.
Show HN: America – Road Trip Simulator
APIs are a little like the open road—always waiting, full of opportunity, but hardly utilized. So here’s America, composed of several APIs that paint a vivid, real-time picture of a good old-fashioned road trip. Get local classifieds and photos. Tune into local radio stations. Talk wit other drivers. And more.<p>Exploring the country by car was an invaluable experience for me during my time in the states. I’ve since moved to Barcelona, and find myself missing the territory. This is my attempt at recreating the magic.
Show HN: FrankenPHP, an app server for PHP written in Go
Show HN: FrankenPHP, an app server for PHP written in Go
Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app
Cofounder of Obsidian here. We're excited to announce Obsidian 1.0 is live!<p>Obsidian 1.0 introduces two big changes: a UI overhaul and an new tabbed interface. We've put a lot of care into making the app more approachable and more accessible. We've also prioritized using more native OS features for menus, windows, and many details.<p>We got our first private beta users from a comment under a HN thread about org-roam [1], and our waiting list was an innocent Google Form. Good times!<p>Our initial launch on HN was over two years ago [2], when terms like "second brain" and "tools for thought" were still in their infancy. Since then, the landscape has continued to evolve and new ideas are sprouting in the space every day. Obsidian has always embraced its "hacker" nature and thrives off its community of tinkerers. We now have over 670 plugins that push the envelope of what's possible in the app.<p>We want to continue to foster that same hacker spirit, but at the same time, we want to provide a polished product that can stand on its own. In the last several months, we've expanded the team and refocused ourselves on providing a product that's polished and easy to use.<p>We have big plans to continue making Obsidian the best and most refined thought-processing app for decades to come. Obsidian 1.0 is just the start!<p>Special credits go to Stephan Ango (@kepano) for the redesign and Liam Cain for tirelessly polishing this release.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767658" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767658</a>
[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598</a>
Show HN: Komorebi – A tiling window manager for Windows 10/11 written in Rust
Show HN: Open-Sourcing InboxSDK (YC S11) – Build Apps in Gmail
Hi HN! We’re Aleem, Chris, Borys, Meichen and Zach from Streak (YC S11) and today we’re open sourcing our InboxSDK <a href="https://www.inboxsdk.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.inboxsdk.com</a>, which makes it easy to build apps for Gmail.<p>Over 1.8B users spend their days in Gmail! Having your app built into the Gmail workflow is a better user experience and gives you great user retention. InboxSDK gives you a high-level, declarative API to insert your UI into Gmail without having to directly manipulate the DOM yourself. End users install a browser extension to use your app.<p>The SDK can add UI to multiple areas of Gmail. For example, adding a button is as simple as:<p><pre><code> composeView.addButton({
title: "My Nifty Button!",
iconUrl: 'https://example.com/foo.png',
onClick: function(event) {
event.composeView.insertTextIntoBodyAtCursor('Hello World!');
},
});
</code></pre>
InboxSDK enables you to add info to the sidebar on threads, add items in the left navigation tree, insert results into the search box, navigate to full page routes, add toolbar buttons to the compose window, add label indicators to thread list views and many more. You can see some examples in my comment posted below.<p>Hubspot, Dropbox, Giphy, Clickup, Loom, Todoist, Clearbit and our own Streak have all built apps using the InboxSDK. The InboxSDK is open source dual-licensed under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses for maximum flexibility.<p>Why use the InboxSDK over rolling it yourself? Several reasons: (1) it’s hard to do DOM manipulation in a performant way; (2) you need to handle all the different configurations of Gmail—there are a lot, and they change often: e.g. conversation view on/off, multiple inboxes, chat left/right, personal vs Workspace accounts; (3) You have to maintain compatibility with tons of other Gmail extensions so you don’t stomp over each other.<p>On a technical level, the InboxSDK handles all the DOM watching and manipulation, XHR interception, multiple extension coordination, and exposes a high level API to developers. We make use of page-parser-tree, another package we open sourced that helps detect elements on the page performantly. The trickiest bit we handle is intercepting and modifying network requests that Gmail makes in order to support several of the APIs we expose.<p>We’ve been building this SDK for years - it’s what powers Streak (www.streak.com), an 8 figure ARR SaaS business. We built the InboxSDK for ourselves because we wanted to separate our logic for wrangling Gmail from that of our app. Several years ago we let developers use a hosted version of our SDK. We didn’t want anyone else to go through the same pain to integrate deeply with Gmail. There were two unexpected benefits:<p>It vastly increased the number of end users (20M+) using apps built on our SDK. This gave us significant leverage with Google. They are super supportive of the SDK and give us early access to several builds to ensure the SDK doesn’t break when they make updates to Gmail.<p>We spent an ungodly amount of time maintaining compatibility with other Gmail extensions. Once the InboxSDK became a defacto standard, all the apps (currently >1000) that used it were instantly compatible (the InboxSDK operates under the model that there will be several extensions running at the same time and it elects a leader to route all modification through).<p>Why open source it now? First, several companies were nervous about us hosting the SDK. We mainly did this so that every extension was running the same version of the SDK, but with the recent Chrome manifest V3 changes, remote code execution is no longer supported. Not hosting the SDK removed the primary reason why the project needed to be closed source. We do need to figure out a new way of keeping all developers relatively up to date on the latest version of the SDK, <i>any ideas?</i><p>We’d love feedback! The repo is <a href="https://github.com/inboxSDK/inboxsdk" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/inboxSDK/inboxsdk</a>, and the docs are: <a href="https://inboxsdk.github.io/inboxsdk-docs" rel="nofollow">https://inboxsdk.github.io/inboxsdk-docs</a>
Show HN: InvokeAI, an open source Stable Diffusion toolkit and WebUI
Hey everyone!<p>Excited to be able to share the release of `InvokeAI 2.0 - A Stable Diffusion Toolkit`, an open source project that aims to provide both enthusiasts and professionals a suite of robust image creation tools. Optimized for efficiency, InvokeAI needs only ~3.5GB of VRAM to generate a 512x768 image (and less for smaller images), and is compatible with Windows/Linux/Mac (M1 & M2).<p>InvokeAI was one of the earliest forks off of the core CompVis repo (formerly lstein/stable-diffusion), and recently evolved into a full-fledged community driven and open source stable diffusion toolkit titled InvokeAI. The new version of the tool introduces an entirely new WebUI Front-end with a Desktop mode, and an optimized back-end server that can be interacted with via CLI or extended with your own fork.<p>This version of the app improves in-app workflows leveraging GFPGAN and Codeformer for face restoration, and RealESRGAN upscaling - Additionally, the CLI also supports a large variety of features:
- Inpainting
- Outpainting
- Prompt Unconditioning
- Textual Inversion
- Improved Quality for Hi-Resolution Images (Embiggen, Hi-res Fixes, etc.)
- And more...<p>Future updates planned included UI driven outpainting/inpainting, robust Cross Attention support, and an advanced node workflow for automating and sharing your workflows with the community.<p>We're excited by the release, and about the future of democratizing the ability to create. Check out the repo (<a href="https://github.com/invoke-ai/InvokeAI" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/invoke-ai/InvokeAI</a>) to get started, and join us on Discord (<a href="https://discord.gg/ZmtBAhwWhy" rel="nofollow">https://discord.gg/ZmtBAhwWhy</a>)!
Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software
Hello HN!<p>I've found my SQL knowledge to be lacking, so I made a project that uses SQLite as a backend.<p>As it is intended for self-hosting I aim to make it easy to set up and maintain. Getting it up & running takes no more than a few commands (bar setting up a proxy such as nginx, which is out of scope).<p>I've set up a "demo" site at <a href="https://forum.agreper.com/" rel="nofollow">https://forum.agreper.com/</a> if you want to try out the UI.
Show HN: I built a site that lets users find playlists by songs they contain
Show HN: I built a site that lets users find playlists by songs they contain