The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: I built an AI dataset generator
Show HN: Scream to Unlock – Blocks social media until you scream “I'm a loser”
Hi all,<p>I kept wasting time on social media, even though I’d promised myself I’d stay focused. Regular site blockers didn’t help.<p>I needed something that felt annoying enough to break the habit. That’s how the idea came up: make the blocker ask me to say something embarrassing out loud before it lets me back in. If I actually have to yell “I’m a loser” into my mic. Even better - the louder I screamed, the more time I’d get.<p>So I put together Scream to Unlock. It’s silly, but so far it’s done its job. My social feeds stay locked unless I really want them.<p>Extension link - <a href="https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/scream-to-unlock-yell-to/pmmikajpbkehhpomkmelipgiafampkah?authuser=0&hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/scream-to-unlock-ye...</a><p>Its open source and transparent - <a href="https://github.com/Pankajtanwarbanna/scream-to-unlock">https://github.com/Pankajtanwarbanna/scream-to-unlock</a>. No data collection or tracking, Audio processing happens locally in your browser. No recordings saved or transmitted.
Show HN: Scream to Unlock – Blocks social media until you scream “I'm a loser”
Hi all,<p>I kept wasting time on social media, even though I’d promised myself I’d stay focused. Regular site blockers didn’t help.<p>I needed something that felt annoying enough to break the habit. That’s how the idea came up: make the blocker ask me to say something embarrassing out loud before it lets me back in. If I actually have to yell “I’m a loser” into my mic. Even better - the louder I screamed, the more time I’d get.<p>So I put together Scream to Unlock. It’s silly, but so far it’s done its job. My social feeds stay locked unless I really want them.<p>Extension link - <a href="https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/scream-to-unlock-yell-to/pmmikajpbkehhpomkmelipgiafampkah?authuser=0&hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/scream-to-unlock-ye...</a><p>Its open source and transparent - <a href="https://github.com/Pankajtanwarbanna/scream-to-unlock">https://github.com/Pankajtanwarbanna/scream-to-unlock</a>. No data collection or tracking, Audio processing happens locally in your browser. No recordings saved or transmitted.
Show HN: Autumn – Open-source infra over Stripe
Hey HN, I’m Ayush from Autumn (<a href="https://useautumn.com/">https://useautumn.com/</a>). Autumn is an open source layer over Stripe that decouples pricing and billing logic from your application. We let you efficiently manage pricing plans, feature permissions, and payments, regardless of the pricing model being used. It’s a bit like if Supabase and Stripe had a baby.<p>Typically, you have to write code to handle checkouts, upgrades/downgrades, failed payments, then receive webhooks to provision features, reset usage limits etc. We abstract this into one function call for all payments flows (checkouts, upgrades, downgrades etc), one function to record usage (so we can track usage limits), and a customer state React hook you can access from your frontend (to handle paywalls, display usage data etc).<p>Here’s a demo: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFARthC7JXc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFARthC7JXc</a><p>Stripe’s great! But there are 2 main reasons people use Autumn over a direct Stripe setup:<p>(1) Billing infra can get complex. After payments, there’s still handling webhooks, permission management, metering, usage resets, and connecting them all to upgrade, downgrade, cancellation and failed payments states.<p>(2) Growing companies iterate on pricing often: raising prices, experimenting with credits or charging for new features, etc. We save you from having to handle usage-based limits (super common in pricing today), rebuilding in-app flows, DB migrations, internal dashboards for custom pricing, and grandfathering users on different pricing.<p>Ripping out billing flows etc, really sucks. With Autumn, you just make pricing changes in our UI and it all auto-updates. We have a shadcn/ui component library that helps with this.<p>Because we support a lot of different pricing models (subscriptions, usage, credits, seat based etc), we have to handle a lot of different scenarios and cases under the hood. We try to keep setup simple while maintaining flexibility of a native integration. Here’s a little snippet of the architecture of our main endpoint: <a href="https://useautumn.com/blog/attach">https://useautumn.com/blog/attach</a><p>Currently, the users who get the most value out of us are founders that need to move fast and keep things flexible, but also new/non-technical devs that are more AI native.<p>You can clone the project and explore the repo, or try it out at <a href="https://useautumn.com/">https://useautumn.com/</a>, where it’s free for builders. Our repo is <a href="https://github.com/useautumn/autumn">https://github.com/useautumn/autumn</a>, docs are at <a href="https://docs.useautumn.com/">https://docs.useautumn.com/</a> and demo at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFARthC7JXc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFARthC7JXc</a><p>We’d love to hear your feedback and how we could make it better!
Show HN: Lego Island Playable in the Browser
Show HN: Lego Island Playable in the Browser
Show HN: Luna Rail – Treating night trains as a spatial optimization problem
Hi HN, I'm Anton, founder of Luna Rail.<p>I've always thought night trains are a fantastic, sustainable alternative to short-haul flights, but they're often held back by a lack of privacy, comfort, and poor economics due to low passenger capacity.<p>I became overly fascinated with this puzzle. I view it as a kind of night train Tetris (my wife less charitably calls it "sardinology"). I spent way too much time learning about and sketching various layouts, trying to figure out how to fit the maximum number of private cabins into a standard railcar, while making them attractive for both day and night travel.<p>This eventually led to a physical workshop (in Berlin) and a hands-on rapid prototyping process. We've built a series of full-scale mockups, starting with wood and cardboard and progressing to high-fidelity versions with 3D-printed and CNC-milled parts, with various functional elements.<p>Hundreds of people have come in to test our various iterations, because you can't test ergonomics or comfort by looking at renderings (although we did create a bunch of nice ones).<p>The link goes to our home page showing our approach and some of the thinking behind them. It’s been a lot of fun working on this puzzle, and we're excited to share what we've come up with. We hope you think it's cool too and would love to hear your thoughts.
Show HN: Luna Rail – Treating night trains as a spatial optimization problem
Hi HN, I'm Anton, founder of Luna Rail.<p>I've always thought night trains are a fantastic, sustainable alternative to short-haul flights, but they're often held back by a lack of privacy, comfort, and poor economics due to low passenger capacity.<p>I became overly fascinated with this puzzle. I view it as a kind of night train Tetris (my wife less charitably calls it "sardinology"). I spent way too much time learning about and sketching various layouts, trying to figure out how to fit the maximum number of private cabins into a standard railcar, while making them attractive for both day and night travel.<p>This eventually led to a physical workshop (in Berlin) and a hands-on rapid prototyping process. We've built a series of full-scale mockups, starting with wood and cardboard and progressing to high-fidelity versions with 3D-printed and CNC-milled parts, with various functional elements.<p>Hundreds of people have come in to test our various iterations, because you can't test ergonomics or comfort by looking at renderings (although we did create a bunch of nice ones).<p>The link goes to our home page showing our approach and some of the thinking behind them. It’s been a lot of fun working on this puzzle, and we're excited to share what we've come up with. We hope you think it's cool too and would love to hear your thoughts.
Show HN: Report idling vehicles in NYC (and get a cut of the fines) with AI
New York City has this cool program that lets anyone report idling commercial vehicles and get a large cut of the fines [1]. It's been in the news recently [2].<p>I've filed a few reports, and I found the process frustrating and error-prone. The forms are fiddly, there's way too much information that needs to be copied down from the video by hand, you have to use a third-party app to take a timestamped video and a different app to compress it before uploading, and approximately none of it can be done on your phone — the device you probably used to record your video in the first place.<p>I built Idle Reporter to make filing complaints into a five-minute process that you can do entirely from your phone.<p>Idle Reporter uses AI to automatically extract all the required information and screenshots from the video and fill out the form for you. It compresses your video, adds the required screenshots, and uploads the whole thing to DEP. All you have to do is log in, give it a final check, and submit.<p>The AI features cost me money to run, so I put those behind a subscription ($5.99/month, which can pay for itself after a single report). There's a one-week free trial so you can test it out. All the other features — including a fully-featured timestamp camera, which other apps charge for, and an editor for filling out the forms manually and submitting in a single step — will be free forever, as a service to the community.<p>The app is iOS-only for now — part of this was an exercise in learning SwiftUI in my spare time.<p>Check it out on the App Store and let me know what you think!<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air-complaint-program.page" rel="nofollow">https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-idling-law-reporters/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-idling-law-report...</a>
Show HN: Report idling vehicles in NYC (and get a cut of the fines) with AI
New York City has this cool program that lets anyone report idling commercial vehicles and get a large cut of the fines [1]. It's been in the news recently [2].<p>I've filed a few reports, and I found the process frustrating and error-prone. The forms are fiddly, there's way too much information that needs to be copied down from the video by hand, you have to use a third-party app to take a timestamped video and a different app to compress it before uploading, and approximately none of it can be done on your phone — the device you probably used to record your video in the first place.<p>I built Idle Reporter to make filing complaints into a five-minute process that you can do entirely from your phone.<p>Idle Reporter uses AI to automatically extract all the required information and screenshots from the video and fill out the form for you. It compresses your video, adds the required screenshots, and uploads the whole thing to DEP. All you have to do is log in, give it a final check, and submit.<p>The AI features cost me money to run, so I put those behind a subscription ($5.99/month, which can pay for itself after a single report). There's a one-week free trial so you can test it out. All the other features — including a fully-featured timestamp camera, which other apps charge for, and an editor for filling out the forms manually and submitting in a single step — will be free forever, as a service to the community.<p>The app is iOS-only for now — part of this was an exercise in learning SwiftUI in my spare time.<p>Check it out on the App Store and let me know what you think!<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air-complaint-program.page" rel="nofollow">https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-idling-law-reporters/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-idling-law-report...</a>
Show HN: Report idling vehicles in NYC (and get a cut of the fines) with AI
New York City has this cool program that lets anyone report idling commercial vehicles and get a large cut of the fines [1]. It's been in the news recently [2].<p>I've filed a few reports, and I found the process frustrating and error-prone. The forms are fiddly, there's way too much information that needs to be copied down from the video by hand, you have to use a third-party app to take a timestamped video and a different app to compress it before uploading, and approximately none of it can be done on your phone — the device you probably used to record your video in the first place.<p>I built Idle Reporter to make filing complaints into a five-minute process that you can do entirely from your phone.<p>Idle Reporter uses AI to automatically extract all the required information and screenshots from the video and fill out the form for you. It compresses your video, adds the required screenshots, and uploads the whole thing to DEP. All you have to do is log in, give it a final check, and submit.<p>The AI features cost me money to run, so I put those behind a subscription ($5.99/month, which can pay for itself after a single report). There's a one-week free trial so you can test it out. All the other features — including a fully-featured timestamp camera, which other apps charge for, and an editor for filling out the forms manually and submitting in a single step — will be free forever, as a service to the community.<p>The app is iOS-only for now — part of this was an exercise in learning SwiftUI in my spare time.<p>Check it out on the App Store and let me know what you think!<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air-complaint-program.page" rel="nofollow">https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-idling-law-reporters/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-idling-law-report...</a>
We moved from AWS to Hetzner, saved 90%, kept ISO 27001 with Ansible
Earlier this year I led our migration off AWS to European cloud (Hetzner + OVHcloud), driven by cost (we cut 90%) and data sovereignty (GDPR + CLOUD Act concerns).<p>We rebuilt key AWS features ourselves using Terraform for VPS provisioning, and Ansible for everything from hardening (auditd, ufw, SSH policies) to rolling deployments (with Cloudflare integration). Our Prometheus + Alertmanager + Blackbox setup monitors infra, apps, and SSL expiry, with ISO 27001-aligned alerts. Loki + Grafana Agent handle logs to S3-compatible object storage.<p>The stack includes:
• Ansible roles for PostgreSQL (with automated s3cmd backups + Prometheus metrics)
• Hardening tasks (auditd rules, ufw, SSH lockdown, chrony for clock sync)
• Rolling web app deploys with rollback + Cloudflare draining
• Full monitoring with Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana Agent, Loki, and exporters
• TLS automation via Certbot in Docker + Ansible<p>I wrote up the architecture, challenges, and lessons learned: <a href="https://medium.com/@accounts_73078/goodbye-aws-how-we-kept-iso-27001-slashed-costs-by-90-914ccb4b89fc" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@accounts_73078/goodbye-aws-how-we-kept-i...</a><p>I’m happy to share insights, diagrams, or snippets if people are interested — or answer questions on pitfalls, compliance, or cost modeling.
Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
Hi HN - we're Nithin and Nikhil, twin brothers and founders of nxtscape.ai (YC S24). We're building Nxtscape ("next-scape") - an open-source, agentic browser for the AI era.<p>-- Why bother building a new browser?
For the first time since Netscape was released in 1994, it feels like we can reimagine browsers from scratch for the age of AI agents. The web browser of tomorrow might not look like what we have today.<p>We saw how tools like Cursor gave developers a 10x productivity boost, yet the browser—where everyone else spends their entire workday—hasn't fundamentally changed.<p>And honestly, we feel like we're constantly fighting the browser we use every day. It's not one big thing, but a series of small, constant frustrations. I'll have 70+ tabs open from three different projects and completely lose my train of thought. And simple stuff like reordering tide pods from amazon or filling out forms shouldn't need our full attention anymore. AI can handle all of this, and that's exactly what we're building.<p>Here’s a demo of our early version <a href="https://dub.sh/nxtscape-demo" rel="nofollow">https://dub.sh/nxtscape-demo</a><p>-- What makes us different
We know others are exploring this space (Perplexity, Dia), but we want to build something open-source and community-driven. We're not a search or ads company, so we can focus on being privacy-first – Ollama integration, BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys), ad-blocker.<p>Btw we love what Brave started and stood for, but they've now spread themselves too thin across crypto, search, etc. We are laser-focused on one thing: making browsers work for YOU with AI. And unlike Arc (which we loved too but got abandoned), we're 100% open source. Fork us if you don't like our direction.<p>-- Our journey hacking a new browser
To build this, we had to fork Chromium. Honestly, it feels like the only viable path today—we've seen others like Brave (started with electron) and Microsoft Edge learn this the hard way.<p>We also started with why not just build an extension. But realized we needed more control. Similar to the reason why Cursor forked VSCode. For example, Chrome has this thing called the Accessibility Tree - basically a cleaner, semantic version of the DOM that screen readers use. Perfect for AI agents to understand pages, but you can't use it through extension APIs.<p>That said, working with the 15M-line C++ chromium codebase has been an adventure. We've both worked on infra at Google and Meta, but Chromium is a different beast. Tools like Cursor's indexing completely break at this scale, so we've had to get really good with grep and vim. And the build times are brutal—even with our maxed-out M4 Max MacBook, a full build takes about 3 hours.<p>Full disclosure: we are still very early, but we have a working prototype on GitHub. It includes an early version of a "local Manus" style agent that can automate simple web tasks, plus an AI sidebar for questions, and other productivity features (grouping tabs, saving/resuming sessions, etc.).<p>Looking forward to any and all comments!<p>You can download the browser from our github page: <a href="https://github.com/nxtscape/nxtscape">https://github.com/nxtscape/nxtscape</a>
Show HN: Claude Code Usage Monitor – real-time tracker to dodge usage cut-offs
I kept slamming into Claude Code limits mid-session and couldn’t find a quick way to see how close I was getting, so I hacked together a tiny local tracker.<p>Streams your prompt + completion usage in real time<p>Predicts whether you’ll hit the cap before the session ends<p>Runs 100 % locally (no auth, no server)<p>Presets for Pro, Max × 5, Max × 20 — tweak a JSON if your plan’s different<p>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/Maciek-roboblog/Claude-Code-Usage-Monitor">https://github.com/Maciek-roboblog/Claude-Code-Usage-Monitor</a><p>It’s already spared me a few “why did my run just stop?” moments, but it’s still rough around the edges. Feedback, bug reports, and PRs welcome!
Show HN: I wrote a new BitTorrent tracker in Elixir
Hello everyone!<p>I'm currently in a journey to learn and improve my Elixir and Go skills (my daily job uses C++) and looking through my backlog for projects to take on I decided Elixir is the perfect language to write a highly-parallel BitTorrent tracker.
So I have spent my free time these last 3 months writing one! Now I think it has enough features to present it to the world (and a docker image to give it a quick try).<p>I know some people see trackers as relics of the past now that DHT and PEX are common but I think they still serve a purpose in today's Internet (purely talking about public trackers). That said there is not a lot going on in terms of new developments since everyone just throws opentracker in a vps a calls it a day (honorable exceptions: aquatic and torrust).<p>I plan to continue development for the foreseeable future and add some (optional) esoteric features along the way so if anyone currently operates a tracker please give a try and enjoy the lack of crashes.<p>note: only swarm_printout.ex has been vibe coded, the rest has all been written by hand.
Show HN: Unregistry – “docker push” directly to servers without a registry
I got tired of the push-to-registry/pull-from-registry dance every time I needed to deploy a Docker image.<p>In certain cases, using a full-fledged external (or even local) registry is annoying overhead. And if you think about it, there's already a form of registry present on any of your Docker-enabled hosts — the Docker's own image storage.<p>So I built Unregistry [1] that exposes Docker's (containerd) image storage through a standard registry API. It adds a `docker pussh` command that pushes images directly to remote Docker daemons over SSH. It transfers only the missing layers, making it fast and efficient.<p><pre><code> docker pussh myapp:latest user@server
</code></pre>
Under the hood, it starts a temporary unregistry container on the remote host, pushes to it through an SSH tunnel, and cleans up when done.<p>I've built it as a byproduct while working on Uncloud [2], a tool for deploying containers across a network of Docker hosts, and figured it'd be useful as a standalone project.<p>Would love to hear your thoughts and use cases!<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/psviderski/unregistry">https://github.com/psviderski/unregistry</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud">https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud</a>
Show HN: Workout.cool – Open-source fitness coaching platform
I was the main contributor to workout.lol, an open-source fitness app to easily build a workout routine. The project had traction (1.4k GitHub stars, 95 forks, ~20K visits/month), but was eventually sold due to video licensing hurdles.
The new owner stopped maintaining it, and the repo went abandoned.<p>Over the next 9 months, I sent 15 emails to try to save it : no replies. Feature requests & issues were ignored. The community was left with a "broken" tool let's say.<p>I couldn't just let it die So I built the new version from scratch with the same open-source spirit, but a better architecture long-term vision, more features and no license problems.<p>It's called : Workout.cool (<a href="https://workout.cool" rel="nofollow">https://workout.cool</a>). What it offers: 100% open-source, MIT-licensed - 1200+ exercises (with videos, attributes, translations) - Progress tracking - Multilingual-ready - Self-hostable<p>I'm not doing this for money. I'm doing it because I believe in open fitness tools, and I’ve been passionate about strength training for 15+ years.<p>If this resonates with you, feel free to: - Star the repo - Share with fitness/tech friends - Suggest features - Contribute code/design/docs<p>Together, we can build the open-source fitness platform we all wanted to easily build a workout routine and get in shape<p>Website: <a href="https://workout.cool" rel="nofollow">https://workout.cool</a>
GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/Snouzy/workout-cool">https://github.com/Snouzy/workout-cool</a>
Show HN: Canine – A Heroku alternative built on Kubernetes
Hello HN!<p>I've been working on Canine for about a year now. It started when I was sick of paying the overhead of using stuff like Heroku, Render, Fly, etc to host some web apps that I've built. At one point I was paying over $400 a month for hosting these in the cloud. Last year I moved all my stuff to Hetzner.<p>For a 4GB machine, the cost of various providers:<p>Heroku = $260
Fly.io = $65
Render = $85
Hetzner = $4<p>(This problem gets a lot worse when you need > 4GB)<p>The only downside of using Hetzner is that there isn’t a super straightforward way to do stuff like:<p>- DNS management / SSL certificate management
- Team management
- Github integration<p>But I figured it should be easy to quickly build something like Heroku for my Hetzner instance. Turns out it was a bit harder than expected, but after a year, I’ve made some good progress<p>The best part of Canine, is that it also makes it trivial to host any helm chart, which is available for basically any open source project, so everything from databases (e.g. Postgres, Redis), to random stuff like torrent tracking servers, VPN’s endpoints, etc.<p>Open source: <a href="https://github.com/czhu12/canine">https://github.com/czhu12/canine</a>
Cloud hosted version is: <a href="https://canine.sh" rel="nofollow">https://canine.sh</a>
Show HN: Chawan TUI web browser
A terminal-based web browser in Nim.[1] Has acceptable (YMMV) CSS
rendering, some JS support, and inline images (sixel/kitty). It can
also use various protocols other than http(s) such as (s)ftp, gopher,
gemini, ...<p>Chawan started out as a w3m clone, and the UI still resembles it.
However, the architecture has turned out quite different, with pages
loaded in separate processes, and protocol/file type handling separated
out into external binaries. An interesting result is that you can even
register decoders for custom inline image formats, although practical
use cases of this are rather minimal.<p>There is a gallery showcasing some websites being rendered here:
<a href="https://chawan.net/gallery/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://chawan.net/gallery/index.html</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://nim-lang.org" rel="nofollow">https://nim-lang.org</a>
Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust
$1,500 an hour and still using the software my grandma used to make bingo fliers!?<p>Hi HN! I'd like to submit for your consideration Tritium (<a href="https://tritium.legal" rel="nofollow">https://tritium.legal</a>). Tritium aims to bring the power of the integrated development environment (IDE) to corporate lawyers.<p>My name is Drew Miller, and I'm lawyer admitted to the New York bar. I have spent the last 13 years in and out of corporate transactional practice, while building side projects in various languages using vanilla Vim. One day at work, I was asked to implement a legal technology product at my firm. Of course the only product available for editing and running programs in a locked-down environment was VS Code and its friends like Puppeteer from Microsoft.<p>I was really blown away at all of the capabilities of go-to definition and out-of-the box syntax highlighting as well as the debugger integration. I made the switch to a full IDE for my side projects immediately. And it hit me: why don't we have this exact same tool in corporate law?<p>Corporate lawyers spent hours upon hours fumbling between various applications and instances of Word and Adobe. There are sub-par differencing products that make `patch` look like the future. They do this while charging you ridiculous rates.<p>I left my practice a few months later to build Tritium. Tritium aims to be the lawyer's VS Code: an all-in-one drafting cockpit that treats a deal's entire document suite as a single, searchable, AI-enhanced workspace while remaining fast, local, and secure.<p>Tritium is implemented in pure Rust. It is cross-platform and I'm excited for the prospect of lawyers running Linux as their daily driver. It leverages a modified version of the super fast egui.rs immediate-mode GUI library. The windows build includes a Rust COM implementation which was probably one of the more technical challenges other than laying out and rendering the text.<p>Download a copy at <a href="https://tritium.legal/download" rel="nofollow">https://tritium.legal/download</a> or try out a web-only WASM preview here: <a href="https://tritium.legal/preview" rel="nofollow">https://tritium.legal/preview</a><p>Let me know your thoughts! Your criticisms are the most important. Thank you for the time.