The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
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Show HN: Decomp Academy – Learn to decompile GameCube games into matching C
Over the past few months I've been heavily involved in the decompilation community. I've been hands-on decompiling a beloved game from my childhood (Star Fox Adventures). I started this journey with zero prior decomp experience—and to make things worse I had never really touched C nor assembly either.<p>Learning how to decompile was challenging. It's difficult to find any good learning resources for it and any open-source projects for this are inactive and/or contain little actual learning material.<p>So I put together Decomp Academy! Decomp Academy is an interactive way to learn how to decompile PowerPC assembly back into C. The site runs a live Metrowerks CodeWarrior GC/2.0 compiler, converts your C into assembly, and then checks how close your assembly matches the target. If even 1 instruction or bit is off, that's a fail. This is the gold standard for video game decompilation and this is much stricter than a normal decompile.<p>As of writing there are 250+ lessons on the site and the lessons start at the very basics so anyone with a little programming experience should be able to jump straight in, even if you're not a C expert. Some lessons also have real functions taken from live open source decomp projects (Star Fox Adventures, Mario Party 4, Pikmin, Metroid Prime). The idea being you learn everything you need to know to be able to jump in and contribute to a real decompilation project when done.<p>The site is completely free, open source and you have access to all lessons without having to sign up. All lessons are stored in markdown in the repo (src/curriculum), it's trivial to add or modify lessons. The site is very new and the lessons are rapidly changing every day with a whole C++ section on the way. The site has already been well received by the decomp community and I'm happy to share it with HN. I'm very keen on others to contribute to this project and I hope this becomes the best resource on the internet for learning the art of decompilation. Please let me know what you think!<p>Source: <a href="https://github.com/JackPriceBurns/decomp-academy-fe" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JackPriceBurns/decomp-academy-fe</a>
Show HN: Adrafinil – keep a lid-closed Mac awake only while agents work
A month ago there was a wave of posts and tweets about engineers walking around cafes and parks with their MacBooks propped half-open, as fully closing the lid forces sleep that stops their AI agents. Some people made snarky comments about using tmux or Amphetamine, and some defended their choice with “but I only need it sometimes, and forgetting to disable Amphetamine and finding my laptop discharged in my bag is worse.”<p>This is a solution to this problem. Unlike caffeinate, it will prevent your MacBook from sleeping even with the lid closed, with no external power or display, using pmset disablesleep 1. Unlike other sleep-preventing apps, Adrafinil only activates when there’s an agent actively doing something. It detects agent activity through hooks it installs into Claude Code, Codex, and others. To reassure you it’s working, the app shows the active status in the menu bar, and it plays a chime when you close the lid.<p>Once the agent is done, Adrafinil detects it and lets the laptop go to sleep by setting pmset disablesleep back to 0. It will also let it sleep in case of overheating. And if you want to manually toggle it, you can install an optional MCP and tell your agent to keep the MacBook awake for a specific time.<p>It has four binaries, one of which is a root helper exposing a single setSleepBlocked call. All the logic and policy live in the unprivileged parts. They’re all notarized, and the app is fully open source (MIT).
Show HN: Smart model routing directly in Claude, Codex and Cursor
We built a model router that plugs into coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) and intelligently sends requests to the best model to serve them. Here's a quick demo of running it locally: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isKhAyivtfM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isKhAyivtfM</a>.<p>At Weave, we write most of our code with AI, and it's been getting more expensive. This came to a head when Opus 4.7 was released and, thanks to its tokenizer changes, our costs shot up. We knew we didn't need Opus for <i>everything</i> but we didn't want to lose out on the intelligence for the cases where you really need it. So we decided to build a model router to handle this for us.<p>The Weave Router acts as an Anthropic/OpenAI endpoint specifically for coding agents. It looks at every inference request and intelligently (more on that in a sec) decides what model to send it to, handling all the translations required along the way. So it can use faster/cheaper models (e.g. DeepSeek v4, GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.6) when possible, and frontier models (Opus 4.8 & GPT 5.5 (& Fable whenever it's back)) when necessary.<p>How do we know what model to route to? We trained an RL model on tens of thousands (so far!) of agent traces. We reward the routing model when it selects an LLM that successfully completes the given task.<p>Here's an example: if you ask the router to plan a complex change, it will (probably) route that request to Opus 4.8. Subagents exploring the codebase to gather context will be routed to more suitable models (e.g. DeepSeek V4 Flash). Then when you have the plan ready to implement, it will be (most likely) be handed to a quicker model (e.g. GLM 5.2) to carry it out.<p>We've been using this internally for the last month or so. We've saved 40% on tokens vs. what we otherwise would have paid, with no noticeable differences in quality or velocity.<p>The router is source-available under Elastic License 2.0, so you can self-host it. Or if you prefer, you can also use our hosted version: weaverouter.com.<p>I'll be here to answer any questions you may have!
Show HN: Smart model routing directly in Claude, Codex and Cursor
We built a model router that plugs into coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) and intelligently sends requests to the best model to serve them. Here's a quick demo of running it locally: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isKhAyivtfM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isKhAyivtfM</a>.<p>At Weave, we write most of our code with AI, and it's been getting more expensive. This came to a head when Opus 4.7 was released and, thanks to its tokenizer changes, our costs shot up. We knew we didn't need Opus for <i>everything</i> but we didn't want to lose out on the intelligence for the cases where you really need it. So we decided to build a model router to handle this for us.<p>The Weave Router acts as an Anthropic/OpenAI endpoint specifically for coding agents. It looks at every inference request and intelligently (more on that in a sec) decides what model to send it to, handling all the translations required along the way. So it can use faster/cheaper models (e.g. DeepSeek v4, GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.6) when possible, and frontier models (Opus 4.8 & GPT 5.5 (& Fable whenever it's back)) when necessary.<p>How do we know what model to route to? We trained an RL model on tens of thousands (so far!) of agent traces. We reward the routing model when it selects an LLM that successfully completes the given task.<p>Here's an example: if you ask the router to plan a complex change, it will (probably) route that request to Opus 4.8. Subagents exploring the codebase to gather context will be routed to more suitable models (e.g. DeepSeek V4 Flash). Then when you have the plan ready to implement, it will be (most likely) be handed to a quicker model (e.g. GLM 5.2) to carry it out.<p>We've been using this internally for the last month or so. We've saved 40% on tokens vs. what we otherwise would have paid, with no noticeable differences in quality or velocity.<p>The router is source-available under Elastic License 2.0, so you can self-host it. Or if you prefer, you can also use our hosted version: weaverouter.com.<p>I'll be here to answer any questions you may have!
Show HN: Chess-Inspired Roguelike
Show HN: Chess-Inspired Roguelike
Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion
Hi HN, Nick here. We’re launching OpenKnowledge (<a href="https://openknowledge.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://openknowledge.ai/</a>), a “what you see is what you get” markdown editor that has direct integrations with Claude, Codex, and other agents. Available as MacOS app or Web UI+CLI. Fully free/local and OSS.<p>We built this because we wanted a Notion-like experience for writing and sharing markdown files across our team. Obsidian is the best alternative we tried, but found it doesn’t have a true WYSWIG UI and it didn’t integrate well with Claude/Codex outside of community plugins.<p>So we built OpenKnowledge. It takes shape as:<p>1. A MacOS app with a file navigator, the WYSIWYG editor, and link explorer.<p>2. Integrations with the Claude, Codex, and Cursor desktop apps. The agents can open an OpenKnowledge editor within their embedded web browsers for a side-by-side experience.<p>3. Built-in mcps, skills, and RAG for LLM-wiki and “AI Second Brain” scenarios + spec writing<p>4. An embedded terminal and CLI for TUI-first users<p>OSS stack includes: Tiptap/prosemirror, CodeMirror, yjs (CRDT), Electron (MacOS app), Orama, remark/rehype/micromark/mdast, @pierre/trees<p>On the architecture side, the interesting eng. challenges included:<p>1. A pipeline to convert ProseMirror to markdown in a bidirectional lossless way. ProseMirror uses ASTs, which are not designed to have byte-fidelity.<p>2. A dual-observer CRDT to keep the ProseMirror and markdown state in-sync.<p>The CRDT + git also power a collaborative experience that shows what Agents are doing in the markdown, have undo/redo, and version history. The “Share” and cloud-sync functionality are geared for team collaboration. They feel “no-code” but leverage git/GitHub under the hood, which also means data stays fully private.<p>In that spirit, we made OpenKnowledge open source for anybody who’s curious or who’d like to contribute.<p>We’re actively thinking about plugins/extensibility and what’s next. If you have suggestions or feedback, would love to hear it.
Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion
Hi HN, Nick here. We’re launching OpenKnowledge (<a href="https://openknowledge.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://openknowledge.ai/</a>), a “what you see is what you get” markdown editor that has direct integrations with Claude, Codex, and other agents. Available as MacOS app or Web UI+CLI. Fully free/local and OSS.<p>We built this because we wanted a Notion-like experience for writing and sharing markdown files across our team. Obsidian is the best alternative we tried, but found it doesn’t have a true WYSWIG UI and it didn’t integrate well with Claude/Codex outside of community plugins.<p>So we built OpenKnowledge. It takes shape as:<p>1. A MacOS app with a file navigator, the WYSIWYG editor, and link explorer.<p>2. Integrations with the Claude, Codex, and Cursor desktop apps. The agents can open an OpenKnowledge editor within their embedded web browsers for a side-by-side experience.<p>3. Built-in mcps, skills, and RAG for LLM-wiki and “AI Second Brain” scenarios + spec writing<p>4. An embedded terminal and CLI for TUI-first users<p>OSS stack includes: Tiptap/prosemirror, CodeMirror, yjs (CRDT), Electron (MacOS app), Orama, remark/rehype/micromark/mdast, @pierre/trees<p>On the architecture side, the interesting eng. challenges included:<p>1. A pipeline to convert ProseMirror to markdown in a bidirectional lossless way. ProseMirror uses ASTs, which are not designed to have byte-fidelity.<p>2. A dual-observer CRDT to keep the ProseMirror and markdown state in-sync.<p>The CRDT + git also power a collaborative experience that shows what Agents are doing in the markdown, have undo/redo, and version history. The “Share” and cloud-sync functionality are geared for team collaboration. They feel “no-code” but leverage git/GitHub under the hood, which also means data stays fully private.<p>In that spirit, we made OpenKnowledge open source for anybody who’s curious or who’d like to contribute.<p>We’re actively thinking about plugins/extensibility and what’s next. If you have suggestions or feedback, would love to hear it.
Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments
Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments
Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives
Originally we (Andrey, Marcus, Juho) built MonoLisa in 2020 as we realised there's room for a better monospaced typeface for developers. The key insight was to make the glyphs slightly wider to make more room for design to make letters like m feel less cramped.<p>Since then we've released a variable v2 (2022) and now we're happy to expand the typeface with a new family called MonoLisa Text. The reasoning was to cover *other* use cases beyond coding with this proportional font.<p>We hope you give Monolisa a go as there's a free trial to try. We also welcome feedback!
Show HN: An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine
Show HN: Nub – A Bun-like all-in-one toolkit for Node.js
Colin here, creator of Nub. I’ve had the general shape of this in mind for years. Nub runs your code with stock `node`, augmented with a `--require` preload hook[0] that adds a transpiler (oxc-powered, packaged as a Node-API add-on), registers a module resolution hook[1], and injects polyfills as needed for APIs like `Worker`, `Temporal`, etc. All purely additive, your code ultimately runs using Node’s actual engine & stdlib implementations.<p>[0] <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module</a><p>[1] <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoptions" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoption...</a>
Show HN: Nub – A Bun-like all-in-one toolkit for Node.js
Colin here, creator of Nub. I’ve had the general shape of this in mind for years. Nub runs your code with stock `node`, augmented with a `--require` preload hook[0] that adds a transpiler (oxc-powered, packaged as a Node-API add-on), registers a module resolution hook[1], and injects polyfills as needed for APIs like `Worker`, `Temporal`, etc. All purely additive, your code ultimately runs using Node’s actual engine & stdlib implementations.<p>[0] <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module</a><p>[1] <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoptions" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoption...</a>
Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX
Hi all! TikZ is a widely-used LaTeX package for drawing figures in papers. It uses commands like \draw[->] (0,0) -- (1,2); to draw lines, shapes, text, etc. Academics usually code up their figures by hand, so there is lots of twiddling around with the coordinates and recompiling until things look nice. I guess it’s a bit like SVG, but it’s more code than markup, for example it has loops with \foreach.<p>I built an open-source WYSIWYG TikZ editor (available for web and desktop) that allows you to edit your TikZ source code visually by dragging and resizing elements. It simultaneously shows the source code and the rendered figure, and lets you edit either one while the two views stay in sync. I’m not aware of any other editors that are simultaneously source editors and WYSIWYG (even for editing SVG or HTML), and I’m quite pleased with how well the combination works.<p>The way the app is implemented is by parsing the TikZ code, and at all times keeping track of the exact source location of each object. Thereby, when a user drags an element to a new position, the app can override just the numbers in the coordinate without changing anything else in the code (such as line breaks or indentation).<p>This approach essentially required reimplementing a large fraction of TikZ, which is the kind of task that no human would ever want to do. I think building software that doesn’t exist yet because it would be impossibly tedious to code up is one of the great new possibilities thanks to coding agents, and it’s worth brainstorming for other examples. (This app was built almost entirely by Codex.)<p>Implementing the app came with lots of fun side quests, including building converters from SVG / pptx / ipe to TikZ, re-implementing the LaTeX hyphenation and line-breaking algorithm to support multi-line nodes, and making a color picker that uses the red!20!black color mixing notation used in LaTeX papers.
Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX
Hi all! TikZ is a widely-used LaTeX package for drawing figures in papers. It uses commands like \draw[->] (0,0) -- (1,2); to draw lines, shapes, text, etc. Academics usually code up their figures by hand, so there is lots of twiddling around with the coordinates and recompiling until things look nice. I guess it’s a bit like SVG, but it’s more code than markup, for example it has loops with \foreach.<p>I built an open-source WYSIWYG TikZ editor (available for web and desktop) that allows you to edit your TikZ source code visually by dragging and resizing elements. It simultaneously shows the source code and the rendered figure, and lets you edit either one while the two views stay in sync. I’m not aware of any other editors that are simultaneously source editors and WYSIWYG (even for editing SVG or HTML), and I’m quite pleased with how well the combination works.<p>The way the app is implemented is by parsing the TikZ code, and at all times keeping track of the exact source location of each object. Thereby, when a user drags an element to a new position, the app can override just the numbers in the coordinate without changing anything else in the code (such as line breaks or indentation).<p>This approach essentially required reimplementing a large fraction of TikZ, which is the kind of task that no human would ever want to do. I think building software that doesn’t exist yet because it would be impossibly tedious to code up is one of the great new possibilities thanks to coding agents, and it’s worth brainstorming for other examples. (This app was built almost entirely by Codex.)<p>Implementing the app came with lots of fun side quests, including building converters from SVG / pptx / ipe to TikZ, re-implementing the LaTeX hyphenation and line-breaking algorithm to support multi-line nodes, and making a color picker that uses the red!20!black color mixing notation used in LaTeX papers.
Show HN: Got sick of ads, so I made my own logic puzzle site
Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents
Oak is a version control system I've been working on designed for agents (<a href="https://oak.space" rel="nofollow">https://oak.space</a>). It improves the speed and context your agents need when working on serious projects. With virtual mounts, agents locally and in the cloud no longer need a full copy of a repo to get working. You can work on many tasks in parallel without needing to download everything or fight worktrees. Version control shouldn't waste you or your agents time. It should be fast, creative and fun to make things with agents.<p>Oak is still early in development. There's no Windows build and missing plenty of features (no CI, no issues, no comments). We still use GitHub Actions for building Oak now, but we've been fully bootstrapped on Oak with no Git backup for several months: <a href="https://oak.space/oak/oak" rel="nofollow">https://oak.space/oak/oak</a>.<p>Blog post: <a href="https://oak.space/blog#git-is-forever" rel="nofollow">https://oak.space/blog#git-is-forever</a><p>Docs: <a href="https://oak.space/docs" rel="nofollow">https://oak.space/docs</a>
Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch
Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
<a href="https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare_release/" rel="nofollow">https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare_release/</a><p><a href="https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare/" rel="nofollow">https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare/</a>