The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: Super Snowflake Maker
Hi all! Just released Super Snowflake Maker!<p>Draw on the pie with freeform or polygon tools, change the number of sections, click on the large snowflake to see fold, and.... download!<p>Enjoy + Happy Holidays!<p>(tech: threejs/r3f, react, ts, useSpring, tailwind, canvas, svg, offscreen canvas, paperjs)
Show HN: I made a website to semantically search ArXiv papers
As a grad student (and an ADHDer), I had trouble doing literature review systematically. To combat this, I made a website that finds similar papers using the meaning of the thing I am looking for.<p>I used MixedBread's [^1] embedding model to generate vectors from the abstracts. I store and search similar vectors using Milvus [^2] and finally use Gradio [^3] to serve the frontend. I update the vector database weekly by pulling the metadata dataset from Kaggle [^4].<p>To speed up the search process on my free oracle instance, I binarise the embeddings and use Hamming distance as a metric.<p>I would love your feedback on the site :)
Happy Holidays!<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.mixedbread.ai/docs/embeddings/mxbai-embed-large-v1" rel="nofollow">https://www.mixedbread.ai/docs/embeddings/mxbai-embed-large-...</a>
[2]: <a href="https://milvus.io/" rel="nofollow">https://milvus.io/</a>
[3]: <a href="https://www.gradio.app/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gradio.app/</a>
[4]: <a href="https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/Cornell-University/arxiv" rel="nofollow">https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/Cornell-University/arxiv</a>
Show HN: I made a website to semantically search ArXiv papers
As a grad student (and an ADHDer), I had trouble doing literature review systematically. To combat this, I made a website that finds similar papers using the meaning of the thing I am looking for.<p>I used MixedBread's [^1] embedding model to generate vectors from the abstracts. I store and search similar vectors using Milvus [^2] and finally use Gradio [^3] to serve the frontend. I update the vector database weekly by pulling the metadata dataset from Kaggle [^4].<p>To speed up the search process on my free oracle instance, I binarise the embeddings and use Hamming distance as a metric.<p>I would love your feedback on the site :)
Happy Holidays!<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.mixedbread.ai/docs/embeddings/mxbai-embed-large-v1" rel="nofollow">https://www.mixedbread.ai/docs/embeddings/mxbai-embed-large-...</a>
[2]: <a href="https://milvus.io/" rel="nofollow">https://milvus.io/</a>
[3]: <a href="https://www.gradio.app/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gradio.app/</a>
[4]: <a href="https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/Cornell-University/arxiv" rel="nofollow">https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/Cornell-University/arxiv</a>
Show HN: FixBrowser – a lightweight web browser created from scratch
Hello, I'm working on a web browser that focuses on being truly lightweight and designed for privacy.<p>At some point I've realized that much of the complexity and resource requirements of web browsers comes from JavaScript. This is because every part needs to be dynamic and optimized for speed.<p>So a few years ago I've started to work on a web browser that intentionally doesn't implement JavaScript, instead it contains an updated set of scripts that fix and improve various websites.<p>I've been using this approach using a proxy server for a few years as my primary way of web browsing with good results. It uses a whitelist approach where no resources are loaded from different domains by default (the fix scripts can override it to load images from CDNs, etc.). This avoids any trackers by default.<p>You can find more details on the homepage of the project:<p><a href="https://www.fixbrowser.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.fixbrowser.org/</a><p>I'm currently running a fundraiser to get it really going. All the foundation blocks are there it just needs some more work. Any support is welcome.
Show HN: FixBrowser – a lightweight web browser created from scratch
Hello, I'm working on a web browser that focuses on being truly lightweight and designed for privacy.<p>At some point I've realized that much of the complexity and resource requirements of web browsers comes from JavaScript. This is because every part needs to be dynamic and optimized for speed.<p>So a few years ago I've started to work on a web browser that intentionally doesn't implement JavaScript, instead it contains an updated set of scripts that fix and improve various websites.<p>I've been using this approach using a proxy server for a few years as my primary way of web browsing with good results. It uses a whitelist approach where no resources are loaded from different domains by default (the fix scripts can override it to load images from CDNs, etc.). This avoids any trackers by default.<p>You can find more details on the homepage of the project:<p><a href="https://www.fixbrowser.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.fixbrowser.org/</a><p>I'm currently running a fundraiser to get it really going. All the foundation blocks are there it just needs some more work. Any support is welcome.
Show HN: Complete decompilation of Lego Island
Show HN: Complete decompilation of Lego Island
Show HN: Keypub.sh – OAuth for the terminal using SSH keys
Hi HN! I built KeyPub.sh to solve the problem of user verification for CLI applications. It's essentially OAuth for the terminal, but using SSH keys that developers and users already have.<p>- No installation needed - works with existing SSH setup
- Privacy-focused: users control what email info is shared
- Simple email verification process
- Free public service
- Perfect for CLI app developers who don't want to build user verification<p>Try it with:
`$ ssh keypub.sh about`<p>Source code: <a href="https://github.com/skariel/keypub">https://github.com/skariel/keypub</a>
Show HN: Keypub.sh – OAuth for the terminal using SSH keys
Hi HN! I built KeyPub.sh to solve the problem of user verification for CLI applications. It's essentially OAuth for the terminal, but using SSH keys that developers and users already have.<p>- No installation needed - works with existing SSH setup
- Privacy-focused: users control what email info is shared
- Simple email verification process
- Free public service
- Perfect for CLI app developers who don't want to build user verification<p>Try it with:
`$ ssh keypub.sh about`<p>Source code: <a href="https://github.com/skariel/keypub">https://github.com/skariel/keypub</a>
Show HN: Eonfall – A new third-person co-op action game built for the web
Hi all, I'm excited to share Eonfall with Hacker News Community!<p>It's been 2-years in the making built by a 2 man team. Eonfall, is a new third-person co-op action game with rogue-lite elements built exclusively for the web! We've finally reached a release candidate state and set our official public release date for Jan 15th! The game's current version 5.0.0-beta is live and available to test play today!<p>Unity game engine was used to develop the game along with other services to handle the backend, and Nuxt 3 + Nuxt UI to handle the front-end.<p>We welcome any and all questions, feedback & suggestions!<p>Thanks all, Jon
Show HN: Eonfall – A new third-person co-op action game built for the web
Hi all, I'm excited to share Eonfall with Hacker News Community!<p>It's been 2-years in the making built by a 2 man team. Eonfall, is a new third-person co-op action game with rogue-lite elements built exclusively for the web! We've finally reached a release candidate state and set our official public release date for Jan 15th! The game's current version 5.0.0-beta is live and available to test play today!<p>Unity game engine was used to develop the game along with other services to handle the backend, and Nuxt 3 + Nuxt UI to handle the front-end.<p>We welcome any and all questions, feedback & suggestions!<p>Thanks all, Jon
Show HN: Artemis, a Calm Web Reader
Earlier this year, I made a web reader that only showed a list of post titles, author domains, and links. The reader only updated once per day, so I wouldn't feel compelled to keep checking for new posts.<p>I have been using the tool, which I called Artemis, for several months. Every morning, I looked forward to my "morning paper" of blogs I love reading.<p>There are no notifications, read vs. unread states, counts of posts, etc. Only the last seven days of posts are available. The colour scheme is changeable. Dark mode is supported. All popular feed formats are supported.<p>There is no reading interface to read blog posts; rather, the links take you to the authors' websites. Many of my favourite bloggers put a lot of effort into the design of their blogs and like to change things up; I wanted an experience that embraced that.<p>The reader is now available for anyone to use (with invite code "hn").
Show HN: WebGPU Tech Demo
WebGPU tech demo running in modern browsers showcasing various rendering techniques like deferred rendering with 400+ dynamic lights, Hi-Z screen space reflections and cascaded shadow mapping.
Show HN: Mizu.js – Lightweight HTML templating library for any-side rendering
Hey HN,<p>I'd like to share a fun project I've been working on: mizu.js.<p>It's a js library that add functional attributes support into your html, designed to be a simple and flexible alternative to fully-fledged web frameworks (such as Vue, React, and Angular), while offering more capabilities than other lightweight options (like Alpine.js and htmx).<p>As it's written using modern ES features and due to its isomorphic nature, it can be run in both browsers and runtimes (Node, Deno, Bun) without any changes.
This makes it ideal for client-side and server-side rendering, as well as static site generation, whichever environment you prefer.<p>Just include the script in any web page (or backend) to get started.
You can template content, bind attributes, add interactivity, handle HTTP interactions, create custom components, and much more — all out of the box, without any configuration, transpilation steps, or builds.<p>I hope you'll find mizu.js as exciting and useful as I do and I'd love to get your feedback!
You can learn more about it at <a href="https://mizu.sh" rel="nofollow">https://mizu.sh</a>!<p>Online playground: <a href="https://mizu.sh/playground" rel="nofollow">https://mizu.sh/playground</a>
Custom builder: <a href="https://mizu.sh/build" rel="nofollow">https://mizu.sh/build</a>
Code coverage: <a href="https://mizu.sh/coverage" rel="nofollow">https://mizu.sh/coverage</a>
GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/lowlighter/mizu">https://github.com/lowlighter/mizu</a><p>## Motivation ##<p>Nowadays, setting up a complete environment and installing thousands of packages is often required just to create a simple "Hello World" page.
Yet, with the current ECMAScript standard, vanilla JS has never been more powerful.
It offers built-in custom HTML components, proxies for changes tracking, weak references for better memory management, and many new data structures and methods.<p>So why is web development still insanely complex?<p>mizu.js aims to avoid adding bloat on top of native features, and instead focus on providing convenience helpers.
It's basically "glue" around all these native features with added sugar, a recipe for a lightweight yet powerful utility.<p>All evaluated expressions are interpreted as vanilla JavaScript, and you add your instructions directly into your HTML.
So if you know already know about JS/HTML, then you're already 80% know of how to use mizu.js (add an extra 10% if you've used Vue, Alpine.js or htmx in the past as some syntax and concepts are inspired by it), the rest is basically just remembering the directive names.
The learning curve is that small.<p>Also, you may have heard of <a href="https://matcha.mizu.sh" rel="nofollow">https://matcha.mizu.sh</a>, a CSS stylesheet to instantly make your web page stylized.
Well, it's a great companion to mizu.js. With both of them, you can create MVPs for your projects super fast!
Show HN: I built an open-source data pipeline tool in Go
Every data pipeline job I had to tackle required quite a few components to set up:<p>- One tool to ingest data<p>- Another one to transform it<p>- If you wanted to run Python, set up an orchestrator<p>- If you need to check the data, a data quality tool<p>Let alone this being hard to set up and taking time, it is also pretty high-maintenance. I had to do a lot of infra work, and while this being billable hours for me I didn’t enjoy the work at all. For some parts of it, there were nice solutions like dbt, but in the end for an end-to-end workflow, it didn’t work. That’s why I decided to build an end-to-end solution that could take care of data ingestion, transformation, and Python stuff. Initially, it was just for our own usage, but in the end, we thought this could be a useful tool for everyone.<p>In its core, Bruin is a data framework that consists of a CLI application written in Golang, and a VS Code extension that supports it with a local UI.<p>Bruin supports quite a few stuff:<p>- Data ingestion using ingestr (<a href="https://github.com/bruin-data/ingestr">https://github.com/bruin-data/ingestr</a>)<p>- Data transformation in SQL & Python, similar to dbt<p>- Python env management using uv<p>- Built-in data quality checks<p>- Secrets management<p>- Query validation & SQL parsing<p>- Built-in templates for common scenarios, e.g. Shopify, Notion, Gorgias, BigQuery, etc<p>This means that you can write end-to-end pipelines within the same framework and get it running with a single command. You can run it on your own computer, on GitHub Actions, or in an EC2 instance somewhere. Using the templates, you can also have ready-to-go pipelines with modeled data for your data warehouse in seconds.<p>It includes an open-source VS Code extension as well, which allows working with the data pipelines locally, in a more visual way. The resulting changes are all in code, which means everything is version-controlled regardless, it just adds a nice layer.<p>Bruin can run SQL, Python, and data ingestion workflows, as well as quality checks. For Python stuff, we use the awesome (and it really is awesome!) uv under the hood, install dependencies in an isolated environment, and install and manage the Python versions locally, all in a cross-platform way. Then in order to manage data uploads to the data warehouse, it uses dlt under the hood to upload the data to the destination. It also uses Arrow’s memory-mapped files to easily access the data between the processes before uploading them to the destination.<p>We went with Golang because of its speed and strong concurrency primitives, but more importantly, I knew Go better than the other languages available to me and I enjoy writing Go, so there’s also that.<p>We had a small pool of beta testers for quite some time and I am really excited to launch Bruin CLI to the rest of the world and get feedback from you all. I know it is not often to build data tooling in Go but I believe we found ourselves in a nice spot in terms of features, speed, and stability.<p><a href="https://github.com/bruin-data/bruin">https://github.com/bruin-data/bruin</a><p>I’d love to hear your feedback and learn more about how we can make data pipelines easier and better to work with, looking forward to your thoughts!<p>Best, Burak
Show HN: SmartHome – An Adventure Game
SmartHome is a free, browser-based game written in vanilla JavaScript and no libraries. I don't want to spoil anything about the gameplay, but if you like text adventures, point-and-click adventure games, puzzle games, escape room games, art games, incremental games, cozy games, and/or RPGs, then this might be your speed.<p>If you find it too hard and don't mind some mild spoilers, then check out the hints page: <a href="https://smarthome.steviep.xyz/help" rel="nofollow">https://smarthome.steviep.xyz/help</a><p>Enjoy!
Show HN: SmartHome – An Adventure Game
SmartHome is a free, browser-based game written in vanilla JavaScript and no libraries. I don't want to spoil anything about the gameplay, but if you like text adventures, point-and-click adventure games, puzzle games, escape room games, art games, incremental games, cozy games, and/or RPGs, then this might be your speed.<p>If you find it too hard and don't mind some mild spoilers, then check out the hints page: <a href="https://smarthome.steviep.xyz/help" rel="nofollow">https://smarthome.steviep.xyz/help</a><p>Enjoy!
Show HN: A simple web game to help learn chords and basic progressions
Hi Hacker News,<p>I've created Chord Nebula, a simple web-based game designed to help users learn and practice piano chords, basic progressions, and harmony fundamentals. The game integrates with MIDI keyboards, allowing you to play chords in real-time and receive immediate feedback based on the key you choose.<p>GitHub Repository:
<a href="https://github.com/yottanami/chord_nebula">https://github.com/yottanami/chord_nebula</a>
Live Demo: <a href="https://chords.yottanami.com" rel="nofollow">https://chords.yottanami.com</a><p>Requirements:
To use Chord Nebula, you'll need a MIDI keyboard connected to your computer.<p>Current Status:
Chord Nebula is still a simple project. I'm committed to improving it based on user feedback and would greatly appreciate any support or contributions from the community.<p>Looking for Feedback and Collaborators:
I'm eager to hear your thoughts on Chord Nebula! Whether it's suggestions for new features, improvements, or bug reports, your feedback is invaluable. Additionally, if you're interested in collaborating to enhance the game, feel free to reach out or contribute directly via GitHub.<p>Thanks for taking the time to check out Chord Nebula!
Show HN: Svader – Create GPU-rendered Svelte components
Svader is a library for rendering 2D shaders on Svelte websites, using either WebGL or WebGPU.<p>It's streamlined for the specific use case of rendering 2D graphics using fragment shaders as an alternative to SVG or the JS canvas API, so it's not meant for doing 3D objects like three.js, for example.<p>This started as something I needed for my own project, but I eventually decided to split it into a separate library. I've since found that this use case fits really well into the Svelte compiler-based approach and its fine-grained reactivity system.<p>In general, I think using shaders like these has some really positive upsides compared to traditional ways of doing graphics on the web — not just for games and stuff, but also for something like data visualizations and aesthetic details. My dream is that one day, you'll see web developers using small, isolated shader components ubiquitously across web applications, just as naturally as something like SVGs are used today.
Show HN: Open-sourcing my failed startup Buzee – A file search application
Buzee is a file search application that helps you find your files effortlessly.<p>As a modern-day knowledge worker, I have several thousand documents, presentations and other files on my computer. I built Buzee in my free time to help me weave my way through this maze. I have been using it pretty much everyday since the day I built it - and I love it!<p>I thought I could turn Buzee into a startup. I reached out to offices and helped set it up for them. But it didn't pan out.<p>I am now letting go of this project because I have other priorities in life.<p>Please feel free to do with this project as you wish. I am happy to help you get started with the codebase.<p>Do share what you build. I would love to see it!<p>Cheers