The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
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Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button
Hi HN! Porter Cloud (<a href="https://porter.run/porter-cloud">https://porter.run/porter-cloud</a>) is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) like Heroku, but we make it easy for you to migrate to AWS, Azure, or GCP when you're ready.<p>Like Heroku, Porter takes care of a lot of generic DevOps work for you (like setting up CI/CD, containerizing your applications, autoscaling, SSL certificates, setting up a reverse proxy) and lets you deploy your apps with a few clicks — saving you a lot of time while developing. However, as you probably know, there’s a downside: platforms like this become constraining if and when your app takes off and you need to scale. The time you saved while developing can get pretty expensive once you’re paying for a lot of users — and the platforms tend to try to keep you locked in!<p>Our idea is to give you the best of both worlds: use Porter Cloud for as long as it saves you time and development cost, but at any time you can press the “eject button” to migrate your app to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account as you please. We make it seamless to break out, so you’re no longer subject to the rigid constraints of a conventional PaaS. You can migrate in a few simple steps outlined here: <a href="https://docs.porter.run/other/eject">https://docs.porter.run/other/eject</a>.<p>A bit of background: we first launched on HN almost 3 years ago with our original product (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26993421">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26993421</a>, <a href="https://porter.run">https://porter.run</a>), which deploys your applications to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account with the simple experience of a PaaS.<p>Since then, we’ve helped countless companies migrate from a PaaS to one of the big three cloud providers. Most of them had gotten started on a PaaS in the early days to optimize for speed and ease of use, but ultimately had to go through a painful migration to AWS, Azure, or GCP as they scaled and ran into various constraints on their original PaaS.<p>Interestingly, we learned that many companies that start on a PaaS are fully aware that they’ll have to migrate to one of the big three public clouds [1] at some point. Yet they choose to deploy on a PaaS anyway because outgrowing a cloud platform is a “champagne problem” when you’re focused on getting something off the ground. This, however, becomes a very tangible problem when you need to migrate your entire production infrastructure while serving many users at scale. It’s a “nice problem to have”, until it isn’t.<p>We’ve built Porter Cloud so that the next generation of startups can get off the ground as quickly as possible, with a peace of mind that you can effortlessly move to one of the tried and true hyperscalers when you are ready to scale.<p>We are excited to see what people build on Porter Cloud. If you’ve ever dealt with a migration from a PaaS to one of the big three cloud providers, we’d also love to hear about your experience in the comments. Looking forward to feedback and discussion!<p>[1] By “big three clouds” we mean the lower-level primitives of each cloud provider. We don’t mean their higher level offerings like AWS App Runner, Google Cloud Run, or Azure App Service, since those run into the same PaaS problems described above.
Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button
Hi HN! Porter Cloud (<a href="https://porter.run/porter-cloud">https://porter.run/porter-cloud</a>) is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) like Heroku, but we make it easy for you to migrate to AWS, Azure, or GCP when you're ready.<p>Like Heroku, Porter takes care of a lot of generic DevOps work for you (like setting up CI/CD, containerizing your applications, autoscaling, SSL certificates, setting up a reverse proxy) and lets you deploy your apps with a few clicks — saving you a lot of time while developing. However, as you probably know, there’s a downside: platforms like this become constraining if and when your app takes off and you need to scale. The time you saved while developing can get pretty expensive once you’re paying for a lot of users — and the platforms tend to try to keep you locked in!<p>Our idea is to give you the best of both worlds: use Porter Cloud for as long as it saves you time and development cost, but at any time you can press the “eject button” to migrate your app to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account as you please. We make it seamless to break out, so you’re no longer subject to the rigid constraints of a conventional PaaS. You can migrate in a few simple steps outlined here: <a href="https://docs.porter.run/other/eject">https://docs.porter.run/other/eject</a>.<p>A bit of background: we first launched on HN almost 3 years ago with our original product (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26993421">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26993421</a>, <a href="https://porter.run">https://porter.run</a>), which deploys your applications to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account with the simple experience of a PaaS.<p>Since then, we’ve helped countless companies migrate from a PaaS to one of the big three cloud providers. Most of them had gotten started on a PaaS in the early days to optimize for speed and ease of use, but ultimately had to go through a painful migration to AWS, Azure, or GCP as they scaled and ran into various constraints on their original PaaS.<p>Interestingly, we learned that many companies that start on a PaaS are fully aware that they’ll have to migrate to one of the big three public clouds [1] at some point. Yet they choose to deploy on a PaaS anyway because outgrowing a cloud platform is a “champagne problem” when you’re focused on getting something off the ground. This, however, becomes a very tangible problem when you need to migrate your entire production infrastructure while serving many users at scale. It’s a “nice problem to have”, until it isn’t.<p>We’ve built Porter Cloud so that the next generation of startups can get off the ground as quickly as possible, with a peace of mind that you can effortlessly move to one of the tried and true hyperscalers when you are ready to scale.<p>We are excited to see what people build on Porter Cloud. If you’ve ever dealt with a migration from a PaaS to one of the big three cloud providers, we’d also love to hear about your experience in the comments. Looking forward to feedback and discussion!<p>[1] By “big three clouds” we mean the lower-level primitives of each cloud provider. We don’t mean their higher level offerings like AWS App Runner, Google Cloud Run, or Azure App Service, since those run into the same PaaS problems described above.
Show HN: HackerNews but for research papers
Hey guys, I love HN! I wanted to extend the same aesthetic and community towards things beyond tech-related news.<p>I thought it would be cool to get the same quality of community gathered around the latest and greatest research coming out.<p>Let me know what you guys think of what I have so far. It's still early so there are probably bugs and other quality issues.<p>If there's any features missing that you'd want let me know.<p>ALSO, if any of you are familiar with the map of the territory of any particular field, please let me know! Would love to pick your brain and to come up with a 'most important papers' section for each field.<p>Thank you!!<p>-stefan
Show HN: HackerNews but for research papers
Hey guys, I love HN! I wanted to extend the same aesthetic and community towards things beyond tech-related news.<p>I thought it would be cool to get the same quality of community gathered around the latest and greatest research coming out.<p>Let me know what you guys think of what I have so far. It's still early so there are probably bugs and other quality issues.<p>If there's any features missing that you'd want let me know.<p>ALSO, if any of you are familiar with the map of the territory of any particular field, please let me know! Would love to pick your brain and to come up with a 'most important papers' section for each field.<p>Thank you!!<p>-stefan
Show HN: Route your prompts to the best LLM
Hey HN, we've just finished building a dynamic router for LLMs, which takes each prompt and sends it to the most appropriate model and provider. We'd love to know what you think!<p>Here is a quick(ish) screen-recroding explaining how it works: <a href="https://youtu.be/ZpY6SIkBosE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ZpY6SIkBosE</a><p>Best results when training a custom router on your own prompt data: <a href="https://youtu.be/9JYqNbIEac0" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/9JYqNbIEac0</a><p>The router balances user preferences for quality, speed and cost. The end result is higher quality and faster LLM responses at lower cost.<p>The quality for each candidate LLM is predicted ahead of time using a neural scoring function, which is a BERT-like architecture conditioned on the prompt and a latent representation of the LLM being scored. The different LLMs are queried across the batch dimension, with the neural scoring architecture taking a single latent representation of the LLM as input per forward pass. This makes the scoring function very modular to query for different LLM combinations. It is trained in a supervised manner on several open LLM datasets, using GPT4 as a judge. The cost and speed data is taken from our live benchmarks, updated every few hours across all continents. The final "loss function" is a linear combination of quality, cost, inter-token-latency and time-to-first-token, with the user effectively scaling the weighting factors of this linear combination.<p>Smaller LLMs are often good enough for simple prompts, but knowing exactly how and when they might break is difficult. Simple perturbations of the phrasing can cause smaller LLMs to fail catastrophically, making them hard to rely on. For example, Gemma-7B converts numbers to strings and returns the "largest" string when asking for the "largest" number in a set, but works fine when asking for the "highest" or "maximum".<p>The router is able to learn these quirky distributions, and ensure that the smaller, cheaper and faster LLMs are only used when there is high confidence that they will get the answer correct.<p>Pricing-wise, we charge the same rates as the backend providers we route to, without taking any margins. We also give $50 in free credits to all new signups.<p>The router can be used off-the-shelf, or it can be trained directly on your own data for improved performance.<p>What do people think? Could this be useful?<p>Feedback of all kinds is welcome!
Show HN: Openpanel – An open-source alternative to Mixpanel
I have created an open-source alternative to Mixpanel and will explain a bit about why I decided to do this.<p>Mixpanel is a GREAT tool and quite easy to understand (compared to GA4 and similar). I have used Mixpanel extensively for one of my React Native apps, but the last invoice was $300, which was way over my budget. I think I was paying for MTU (monthly tracked users), which was around 7000-10k users.<p>However, a downside of Mixpanel is that it is purely a product analytics tool; you don't get any basic web analytics similar to what GA4 or Plausible offers.<p>Therefore, I have combined the best features of Mixpanel and Plausible to create what I believe is the ultimate experience in an analytics tool (product and web).<p>The focus has always been: it should be easy yet also powerful. This has been a challenging balance, but I think I have managed to keep it somewhat simple.<p>Key Features:
- Privacy-first
- Visualize your events like Mixpanel
- Plausible-like overview
- Self-hostable
- Better support for React Native than Plausible
- Real-time (no delays for events)
Ability to access all individual events and sessions<p>It's currently in beta and completely free during the beta period.<p>Give it a spin: <a href="https://openpanel.dev" rel="nofollow">https://openpanel.dev</a>
Show HN: I built a game to help you learn neural network architectures
Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
I used to work for Facebook and Google and constantly got asked questions like "Hey, my Instagram account got blocked for no reason. Could you help me get it back?". I'd say yes, it would take me 10 min to fill out an internal form and 1 week later the account was back.<p>Even years after leaving, I still get these requests. So I built a marketplace for them. Let me know what you think!
Show HN: Peanut Butter Spinner
Show HN: Peanut Butter Spinner
Show HN: I built a website to create financial models for any stock online
Show HN: I built a website to create financial models for any stock online
Show HN: I made a Mac app to search my images and videos locally with ML
Desktop Docs is a Mac app that lets you search all your photos and videos in seconds with AI.<p>Once you find the file you're looking for you can resize it, export it to Adobe Premiere Pro, or drag and drop it into another app.<p>I built Desktop Docs because I keep tons of media files on my computer and I can never remember where I save stuff (lots of screenshots, memes, and downloads). The Apple Photos app also only supports photos in your iCloud.<p>Desktop Docs supports adding folders or individual files to an AI Library where you can search by the contents of your files, not just file titles.<p>You can search by objects ("cardboard box"), actions ("man smiling", "car driving"), by emotion ("surprised woman", "sad cowboy"), or the text in the frame (great for screenshots or memes).<p>It's also 100% private. Make any media searchable without it ever leaving your computer.<p>How I built it:
- 100% Javascript (I'm using Electron JS and React JS).
- Embedding generation (CLIP from OpenAI is used to compute the image embeddings and text embeddings for user queries).
- Redis (storing and doing KNN search on the embeddings with this DB).
- Image/video editing (the app ships with FFmpeg binaries to explode videos into individual frames and scale images).<p>Demo: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIUgPNHOKKc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIUgPNHOKKc</a><p>If there are any features you'd like to see in Desktop Docs or want to learn more about how I built it, drop me a comment below. Happy to share more.
Show HN: I built a math website the internet loved, I'm back with more features
A few months back, I published my website, teachyourselfmath, which shows you a list of math problems parsed automatically from PDFs around the world. It received a tremendous amount of feedback and interest. And I was honestly overwhelmed by the response and then life happened.<p>Over the past few weeks, I have been actively working on this project, trying to incorporate all the feedback and I’d love to share it with the world again. New features:
1. Filter problems by difficulty and category
2. Bookmark your favorite problems
3. Editor in the comment section supports markdown formatting
4. ...and some UI improvements throughout the website<p>I am also starting a small telegram community of math nerds who would like to discuss all things math, as well as talk about upcoming features and feedback for the website. Here is the link - (<a href="https://t.me/teachyourselfmath" rel="nofollow">https://t.me/teachyourselfmath</a>)<p>If you’d like to support my work through small donations, you can do it here - (<a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/viveknathani">https://www.buymeacoffee.com/viveknathani</a>). Right now, teachyourselfmath runs for free. Later, I’d love to make features that people would love to pay for but fundamentally, the goal is to make math accessible through technology. There’s a lot of peer learning involved in the comments section of these math problems. All of this gives me more reason to keep working on this.<p>Happy hacking!
Show HN: Open-source BI and analytics for engineers
We are building Quary (<a href="https://quary.dev">https://quary.dev</a>), an engineer-first BI/analytics product. You can find our repo at <a href="https://github.com/quarylabs/quary">https://github.com/quarylabs/quary</a> and our website at <a href="https://www.quary.dev/">https://www.quary.dev/</a>. There’s a demo video here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3hO65_lkGU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3hO65_lkGU</a><p>As engineers who have worked on data at startups and Amazon, we were frustrated by self-serve BI tools. They seemed dumbed down and they always required us to abandon our local dev tools we know and love (e.g. copilot, git). For us and for everyone we speak to, they end up being a mess.<p>Based on this, we decided there was a need for engineer-oriented BI and analytics software.<p>Quary solves these pain points by bringing standard software practices (version control, testing, refactoring, ci/cd, open-source, etc.) to the BI and analytics workflow.<p>We integrate with many databases, but we’re showcasing our slick Supabase integration, because it: (1) keeps your data safe by running on your machine without data flowing through our servers; and (2) enables you to quickly build an analytics layer on top of your Supabase Postgres instances. Check out our Supabase guide: <a href="https://www.quary.dev/docs/quickstart-supabase">https://www.quary.dev/docs/quickstart-supabase</a><p>What we’re launching today is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. We plan to keep the developer core open source and add paid features like a web platform to easily share data models (per-seat pricing), and an orchestration engine to materialize your data models.<p>Please try Quary at <a href="https://quary.dev">https://quary.dev</a> and let us know what you think! We're excited to put the power of BI and analytics into the hands of engineers.
Show HN: An open source framework for voice assistants
I've been obsessed for the past ~year with the possibilities of talking to LLMs. I built a bunch of one-off prototypes, shared code on X, started a Meetup group in SF, and co-hosted a big hackathon. It turns out that there are a few low-level problems that everybody building conversational/real-time AI needs to solve on the way to building/shipping something that works well: low-latency media transport, echo cancellation, voice activity detection, phrase endpointing, pipelining data between models/services, handling voice interruptions, swapping out different models/services.<p>On the theory that something like a LlamaIndex or LangChain for real-time/conversational AI would be useful, a few of us started working on a Python library for voice (and multimodal) AI assistants/agents.<p>So ... Pipecat: a framework for building things like personal coaches, meeting assistants, story-telling toys for kids, customer support bots, virtual friends, and snarky social bots.<p>Most of the core contributors to Pipecat so far work together at our day jobs. This has been a kind of "20% time" thing at our company. But we're serious about welcoming all contributions. We want Pipecat to support any and all models, services, transport layers, and infrastructure tooling. If you're interested in this stuff, please check it out and let us know what you think. Submit PRs. Become a maintainer. Join the Discord. Post cool stuff. Post funny stuff when your voice agent goes completely off the rails (as mine sometimes do).
Show HN: Pi-C.A.R.D, a Raspberry Pi Voice Assistant
Pi-card is an AI powered voice assistant running locally on a Raspberry Pi. It is capable of doing anything a standard LLM (like ChatGPT) can do in a conversational setting. In addition, if there is a camera equipped, you can also ask Pi-card to take a photo, describe what it sees, and then ask questions about that.<p>It uses distributed models so latency is something I'm working on, but I am curious on where this could go, if anywhere.<p>Very much a WIP. Feedback welcome :-)
Show HN: I made an open-source Loom alternative
Show HN: I made an open-source Loom alternative
Show HN: Open-Source Video Editor Web App
Hey everyone, for the past like six months I've been working on a portfolio project. I got tired of doing easy projects, so I decided to tackle something bigger and more challenging. That's when I came up with the idea of a video editor. This piece of work is intended to showcase my skills and land me a job, but I like to think when working on projects that my idea is so cool that people will like to use it, and I treat every project like a startup idea. Also I havent seen many open source video editors especially on web so that was one of the points why I decided to make that and not something else, but in the end its learning experience and im not expecting much if at all.<p>A bit about the video editor itself:<p>-website: <a href="https://omniclip.app/" rel="nofollow">https://omniclip.app/</a><p>-its free<p>-its open source (MIT Licensed)<p>-its using Webcodecs API for quick rendering<p>-works fully inside browser, client side, no private data is kept<p>-I made some readme with more details, im not expecting contributions but I added bit about it: <a href="https://github.com/aegir-assembly/omni-clip">https://github.com/aegir-assembly/omni-clip</a><p>Features:<p>-Trimming<p>-Splitting<p>-Supports - Text, Audio, Video (mp4) and Images<p>-Clip editing on preview - rotating, resizing, text styling and more<p>-Undo/Redo<p>-Render in different resolutions, up to 4k.<p>Things to know before using this editor:<p>-it is simple editor, but its my main project im working on and improving it.<p>-right now it only works with videos 25 fps and more but not less<p>-only 4 tracks -- its something I could improve quickly but forgot<p>-bug here and there (eg. filmstrip not rendering until timeline scroll moved)<p>-its not working on phones yet (drag and drop API problems)<p>I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback on it.