The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units
I created a TUI for systemd/systemctl called isd (interactive systemd).<p>It provides a fuzzy search for units, auto-refreshing previews, smart sudo handling, and a fully customizable, keyboard-focused interface for power users and newcomers alike.<p>It is a more powerful (but heavier) version of sysz, which was the inspiration for the project.<p>This should be a huge timesaver for anybody who frequently interacts with or edits systemd units/services. And if not, please let me know why! :)
Show HN: Interactive game teaching dark patterns in UX design
I built this educational game to help people identify and understand dark patterns in digital products. It features 10 interactive scenarios based on real-world examples.<p>The game includes:<p>• Interactive pattern recognition scenarios
• Explanations of psychological principles
• Simulated real-world examples with guided feedback<p>Built with Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind.<p>I'd especially appreciate feedback on the educational approach and scenario design.
Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams
Show HN: I built a fair alternative to Product Hunt for indie makers
I’m an indie maker, just like many of you. A few months back, I launched a product on one of the big platforms, and... nothing. It got buried under dozens of other launches within hours. All that work, all that excitement is gone in the blink of an eye. No one even saw it.<p>It stung. I wasn’t mad, well, maybe a little but mostly, I just felt invisible. The truth is, indie makers like me don’t have big teams or budgets to fight for visibility. We rely on genuine support and connections. I couldn’t stop thinking about how many great ideas never get the attention they deserve because they’re overshadowed.<p>So, I decided to build something different: <a href="https://itslaunched.com" rel="nofollow">https://itslaunched.com</a><p>Here’s the idea:<p>• 10 launches per day, max. Limiting the number of daily launches ensures that every product gets its moment in the spotlight.<p>• 2 votes per user, per day. This isn’t a popularity contest. You only get two votes, so people have to really think about which products they want to support. It’s quality over quantity.<p>• “Under Radar” feature. This one’s my favorite. If a product doesn’t get much love on its launch day, it gets a second chance to shine the next day. Because timing shouldn’t be the only thing standing between you and success.<p>There’s more like badges, comments, streaks but the heart of it is simple: a fair shot for indie makers.<p>I built this because I believe every product deserves to be seen, especially the ones built by solo makers and small teams putting their heart into something they truly care about. And I didn’t build this to compete with Product Hunt. I built it to give indie makers the platform they deserve, one where their creativity truly gets noticed.<p>If this sounds like something you’d want to check out, I’d love your thoughts. I’m still tweaking and improving it every day based on feedback.<p>Let me know what you think and if you’ve got a product you’re proud of, I’d love to see it shine.
Show HN: A blocklist to remove spam and bad websites from search results
Hi HN!<p>I've been fed up with search results so much that I decided to make a giant blocklist to remove garbage links by using uBlacklist.<p>I browsed other blocklists and wasn't very satisfied from what exists now; the goal of this one is to be super organized and transparent, explaining why each site was blocked via issues. Contributions welcome!<p>Even though around 100 domains are blocked so far, I already noticed a big improvement in casual searches. You'd be surprised how some AI generated websites can dominate the #1 page on DuckDuckGo.
Show HN: Doom (1993) in a PDF
I made a Doom source port that runs within a PDF file.<p>I was inspired by the recent HN post about Tetris in a PDF (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218</a>) and I wondered if I could get Doom to run using a similar method.<p>It turns out that old versions of Emscripten can compile C to asm.js code that will happily run inside the limited JS runtime of the PDF engine. I used the doomgeneric (<a href="https://github.com/ozkl/doomgeneric">https://github.com/ozkl/doomgeneric</a>) fork of the original Doom source, as that made writing the IO fairly easy. All I had to do was implement a framebuffer and keyboard inputs.<p>Unlike previous interactive PDF demos, the output for DoomPDF is achieved by creating a text field for each row of pixels in the screen, then setting their contents to various ASCII characters. This gives me a 6 color monochrome display, that can be updated reasonably quickly (80ms per frame).<p>The source code is available at: <a href="https://github.com/ading2210/doompdf">https://github.com/ading2210/doompdf</a><p>Note that this PDF can only run in Chromium-based browsers that use the PDFium engine.
Show HN: Doom (1993) in a PDF
I made a Doom source port that runs within a PDF file.<p>I was inspired by the recent HN post about Tetris in a PDF (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218</a>) and I wondered if I could get Doom to run using a similar method.<p>It turns out that old versions of Emscripten can compile C to asm.js code that will happily run inside the limited JS runtime of the PDF engine. I used the doomgeneric (<a href="https://github.com/ozkl/doomgeneric">https://github.com/ozkl/doomgeneric</a>) fork of the original Doom source, as that made writing the IO fairly easy. All I had to do was implement a framebuffer and keyboard inputs.<p>Unlike previous interactive PDF demos, the output for DoomPDF is achieved by creating a text field for each row of pixels in the screen, then setting their contents to various ASCII characters. This gives me a 6 color monochrome display, that can be updated reasonably quickly (80ms per frame).<p>The source code is available at: <a href="https://github.com/ading2210/doompdf">https://github.com/ading2210/doompdf</a><p>Note that this PDF can only run in Chromium-based browsers that use the PDFium engine.
Show HN: A Better Log Service
Hello everyone, there are many log services available and this is my attempt at a better one.<p>Most online logging tools feature convoluted UIs, arbitrary mandatory fields, questionable AI/insights, complex pricing, etc. I hope my application fixes most of these issues. It also has some nice features, such as automatic Geo IP checks and public dashboards.<p>Although I've created lots of software, this is my first open source application (MIT license), the tutorial for selfhosting is hopefully sufficient! Most of my development career has been with C#, NodeJS and PHP. For this project I've used PHP (8.3) which is an absolute joy to work with. The architecture is very scalable, but I've only tested up to a few billion logs. The current version is used in production for a few months now. Hope you enjoy/fork it as you see fit!
Show HN: TypeScript/React/Vue Window Layout Manager (Tabs, Floating, Popouts)
Show HN: TypeScript/React/Vue Window Layout Manager (Tabs, Floating, Popouts)
Show HN: Kate's App
Caregiving is a natural, human act of compassion and caring, and most of us, at some point, will rely on someone to help us with our health care (> 70%) or be tasked with helping someone else (> 10%).<p>Kate's App is a tool to coordinate doctor contact information, prescriptions, pharmacies, appointments, notes, and other information with family and caregivers, and do it safely and privately. This is not a clinic portal, and is not associated with any insurance or medical providers.<p>The app is 95% complete, and is entirely usable as is (for any interested beta users). I intend to clean up the rest of it, and go GA within a few weeks. In the meantime, I would love to answer any questions or hear helpful critiques.<p>BTW, Show HN is the best.
Show HN: Kate's App
Caregiving is a natural, human act of compassion and caring, and most of us, at some point, will rely on someone to help us with our health care (> 70%) or be tasked with helping someone else (> 10%).<p>Kate's App is a tool to coordinate doctor contact information, prescriptions, pharmacies, appointments, notes, and other information with family and caregivers, and do it safely and privately. This is not a clinic portal, and is not associated with any insurance or medical providers.<p>The app is 95% complete, and is entirely usable as is (for any interested beta users). I intend to clean up the rest of it, and go GA within a few weeks. In the meantime, I would love to answer any questions or hear helpful critiques.<p>BTW, Show HN is the best.
Show HN: Stagehand – an open source browser automation framework powered by AI
Hi HN! I’m Anirudh — longtime lurker, first time poster, and I couldn’t be more excited to show you Stagehand.<p>Stagehand is a TypeScript project that extends Playwright with three simple AI methods — act, extract, and observe. We’d love for you to try it out using the command below:<p><pre><code> npx create-browser-app --example quickstart
</code></pre>
Here’s a sample workflow:<p><pre><code> const stagehand = new Stagehand();
await stagehand.init();
// Stagehand overrides the Playwright Page and Context classes
const { page, context } = stagehand
await page.goto("instadash.com") // Regular Playwright
// Take action on the page
await page.act({ action: "click on taqueria cazadores" })
// Extract relevant data from the page
const { price } = await page.extract({
instruction: "extract the price of the super burrito",
schema: z.object({
price: z.number()
})
})
</code></pre>
We built Stagehand because we loved building browser automations using Playwright and Selenium, but we grew frustrated at how cumbersome it is to just get started and write simple browser automations. These frameworks, while incredibly powerful, are built for QA testing and are thus notoriously prone to fail if there are minor changes in the UI or underlying DOM structure.<p>The goal of Stagehand is twofold:<p>1. Make browser automations easier to write
2. Make browser automations more resilient to DOM changes.<p>We were super energized by what we’ve been seeing with vision-based computer use agents. We think with a browser, you can provide even richer data by leveraging the information in the DOM + a11y tree in addition to what’s rendered on the page. However, we didn’t want to go so far as to build an agent, since we wanted fine-grained control over each step that an agent can take.<p>Therefore, the happy medium we built was to extend the existing powerful functionalities of Playwright with simple and extensible AI APIs that return the decision-making power back to the developer at each step.<p>Check out our docs: <a href="https://docs.stagehand.dev" rel="nofollow">https://docs.stagehand.dev</a><p>We’d love for you to join and give us feedback on Slack as well: <a href="https://stagehand.dev/slack" rel="nofollow">https://stagehand.dev/slack</a>
Show HN: Factorio Blueprint Visualizer
Hey there, I'm a big fan of the game Factorio and the beauty of factories in the game. That's why I created a website to artfully visualize Factorio blueprints a few years ago. With the new 2.0 update, a few things broke. I took the opportunity to rewrite everything from Python to JavaScript and support Factorio 2.0 and the Space Age DLC. It's now also possible to easily modify the style of the drawings. Let me know if you find any bugs or if you have ideas for features.
Show HN: Tetris in a PDF
I realized that the PDF engines of modern desktop browsers (PDFium and PDF.js) support JavaScript with enough I/O primitives to make a basic game like Tetris.<p>It was a bit tricky to find a union of features that work in both engines, but in the end it turns out that showing/hiding annotation "fields" works well to make monochrome pixels, and keyboard input can be achieved by typing in a text input box.<p>All in all it's quite janky but a nice reminder of how general purpose PDF scripting can be. The linked PDF is all ASCII so you can just open it in a text editor, or have a look at the source code here: <a href="https://github.com/ThomasRinsma/pdftris/blob/main/gengrid.py">https://github.com/ThomasRinsma/pdftris/blob/main/gengrid.py</a>
Show HN: Tetris in a PDF
I realized that the PDF engines of modern desktop browsers (PDFium and PDF.js) support JavaScript with enough I/O primitives to make a basic game like Tetris.<p>It was a bit tricky to find a union of features that work in both engines, but in the end it turns out that showing/hiding annotation "fields" works well to make monochrome pixels, and keyboard input can be achieved by typing in a text input box.<p>All in all it's quite janky but a nice reminder of how general purpose PDF scripting can be. The linked PDF is all ASCII so you can just open it in a text editor, or have a look at the source code here: <a href="https://github.com/ThomasRinsma/pdftris/blob/main/gengrid.py">https://github.com/ThomasRinsma/pdftris/blob/main/gengrid.py</a>
Show HN: Atlas of Space
Hello HN! Sharing a recent side project of mine, the Atlas of Space, that I built out to explore the Solar System.<p>As a long-time space nerd, I realized recently that I didn't have a good intuition on the scale, speed, and relative orientation of the celestial bodies around us. So over the break I built out a kind of spatial Wikipedia to click around and learn about planets, moons, asteroids, and other bodies orbiting the Sun.<p>The physics is all simulated in the browser using simple Newtonian mechanics. There's a lot left to do from here, including modeling objects in non-Keplerian orbits and replaying different spacecraft missions.<p>Hope you have fun clicking around, and curious to hear what I should improve next!
Show HN: HipScript – Run CUDA in the browser with WebAssembly and WebGPU
CUDA is NVIDIA's language for GPU programming, allowing you to mix write CPU and GPU code in C++ in one file. By chaining a few projects that compile CUDA to OpenCL, then Vulkan, then WebGPU, you can experiment with this GPGPU language on any hardware.
Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines
Hello everyone, I would like to see if there is any interest in this little project that I have been working on for the past few years.<p>Could be relevant, seeing the direction in which the mainstream game engines are going.<p>I didn't really like any of the already existing options, so I tried to make my own and it turned out to be easier than expected.<p>It's sort of like a low-budget Unreal/Source, but with open-world streaming support and it is free and open source. Very old-school. But optimized for more modern hardware. Very fast too.<p>Still not production ready, but it seems like it is mostly working.<p>I want to finish a few larger projects with it to see what happens.<p>Btw, the name is probably temporary.
Show HN: Struggle with CSS Flexbox? This Playground Is for You
Experiment with different flex properties to understand how they affect layout. Adjust the controls below to see changes in real-time and copy the generated CSS code.