The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
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Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons
<a href="https://pardonned.com" rel="nofollow">https://pardonned.com</a><p>Inspired by the videos of Liz Oyer, I wanted to be able to verify her claims and just look up all the pardons more easily.<p>Tech Stack:
Playwright - to sccrape the DOJ website
SQLite - local database
Astro 6 - Build out a static website from the sqlite db<p>All code is open source and available on Github.
Show HN: Is Hormuz open yet?
I built this because I was interested in the data. Didn't fully get it to what I wanted, but thought I'd share it nonetheless. Maybe someone has better data sources they could share!<p>Turns out live ship tracking APIs are expensive so I manually just copied the json from <a href="https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:57.4/centery:26.4/zoom:8" rel="nofollow">https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:57.4/cente...</a> I'll probably have an ai agent do the same thing on some cron interval, if this gets any fanfare.<p>To actually know if the port is open without live ship tracking I found <a href="https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a1730" rel="nofollow">https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a...</a> which was perfect, except it has 4 day lag!<p>I also thought of adding news feed parsing or prediction market data to get a more definitive answer on if it's open right when you load it, but I spent a few hours and am gonna move on for now.
Show HN: An interactive map of Tolkien's Middle-earth
An interactive map of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, with events from across the legendarium plotted as markers.<p>I have been commuting a fair bit between the East and West coast, and thanks to American Airlines' free onboard WiFi, I was able to vibe-code a full interactive map of Middle-earth right from my economy seat at the back of the bus.<p>It's rather amazing how much an LLM knows about Tolkien's work, and it was fun to delve into many of the nooks and crannies of Tolkien's lore.<p>Some features:
- Plot on the map the journey of the main characters in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
- Follow a list of events in the chronological Timeline
- Zoom in on the high-def map and explore many of the off-the-main-plotline places
- Use the 'measure distances' feature to see how far apart things are.<p>I also had a lot of fun learning about tiling to allow for efficient zooming.<p>If you are anything like me, this should provide a fun companion to reading the books or watching the movies (note that on this site, I followed the book narrative, and did not include Peter Jackson's many departures)<p>If you get the chance to check it out, I would love more feedback, and if there is demand, I might do the same for Game of Thrones.
Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead
Last week SWYX nerd-sniped me into building an Open-source Dropbox.<p>Here is Locker: the ultimate open-source Google Drive/box/Dropbox alternative
- Provider agnostic (S3, R2, vercel blob, local)
- BYOB (Bring your own bucket)
- Virtual file system
- QMD Search plugin
Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)
Show HN: GovAuctions lets you browse government auctions at once
I've long been into finding deals on government auction sites (seizures, surplus sales etc.) - right now for example San Diego DHS is selling 26 tons of lead shot, with bidding starting at $1,000 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯<p>It has historically been extremely tedious though: scanning dozens of janky sites which have interminable page loading times; back buttons take you all the way back to the homepage etc.<p>The site I built - GovAuctions - lets you search every government surplus auction at once. You can filter by location, category, and price, save items to a watchlist, and get alerts when new auctions match what you're looking for.<p>Let me know what you think, if you have any suggestions, and if you find any deals in your area!
Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS
I built this because I wanted to see how far I could get with a voice-to-text app that used 100% local models so no data left my computer. I've been using a ton for coding and emails. Experimenting with using it as a voice interface for my other agents too. 100% open-source MIT license, would love feedback, PRs, and ideas on where to take it.
Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
Show HN: I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work
Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food.<p>Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
Show HN: A game where you build a GPU
Thought the resources for GPU arch were lacking, so here we are
Show HN: A game where you build a GPU
Thought the resources for GPU arch were lacking, so here we are
European alternatives to Google, Apple, Dropbox and 120 US apps
Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
Github: <a href="https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel</a>
Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs
With social media and now AI, its important to keep the indie web alive. There are many people who write frequently. Blogosphere tries to highlight them by fetching the recent posts from personal blogs across many categories.<p>There are two versions:
Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): <a href="https://text.blogosphere.app/" rel="nofollow">https://text.blogosphere.app/</a>
Non-minimal: <a href="https://blogosphere.app/" rel="nofollow">https://blogosphere.app/</a><p>If you don't find your blog (or your favorite ones), please add them. I will review and approve it.
Show HN: Dull – Instagram Without Reels, YouTube Without Shorts (iOS)
I kept deleting and redownloading Instagram because I couldn't stop watching Reels but needed the app for DMs. Tried screen time limits, just overrode them. So I built this.<p>Dull loads Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and X and filters out short-form content with a mix of CSS and JS injection. MutationObserver handles anything that lazy-loads after the page renders, which is most of the annoying stuff since these platforms love to load content dynamically.<p>The ongoing work is maintaining the filters. Platforms change their DOM all the time, Instagram obfuscates class names, YouTube restructures how Shorts appear in the feed, etc. It's a cat-and-mouse thing that never really ends.<p>Also has grayscale mode, time limits, and usage tracking.<p>Happy to answer questions.
Show HN: Git bayesect – Bayesian Git bisection for non-deterministic bugs
Show HN: CLI to order groceries via reverse-engineered REWE API (Haskell)
I just had the best time learning about the REWE (German supermarket chain) API, how they use mTLS and what the workflows are. Also `mitmproxy2swagger`[1] is a great tool to create OpenAPI spec automatically.<p>And then 2026 feels like the perfect time writing Haskell. The code is handwritten, but whenever I got stuck with the build system or was just not getting the types right, I could fall back to ask AI to unblock me. It was never that smooth before.<p>Finally the best side projects are the ones you actually use and this one will be used for all my future grocery shopping.<p>[1]<a href="https://github.com/alufers/mitmproxy2swagger" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/alufers/mitmproxy2swagger</a>
Show HN: 1-Bit Bonsai, the First Commercially Viable 1-Bit LLMs
Show HN: Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too.<p>The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our own extension appeared daunting. We'd need a small team of sharp engineers and 6-12 months, I figured. And we'd probably still fall short of the performance of a mature system like Parade/Tantivy.<p>Or would we? I'd be experimenting long enough with AI-boosted development at that point to realize that with the latest tools (Claude Code + Opus) and an experienced hand (I've been working in database systems internals for 25 years now), the old time estimates pretty much go out the window.<p>I told our CTO I thought I could solo the project in one quarter. This raised some eyebrows.<p>It did take a little more time than that (two quarters), and we got some real help from the community (amazing!) after open-sourcing the pre-release. But I'm thrilled/exhausted today to share that pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license), on Tiger Data cloud, and hopefully soon, a hyperscalar near you:<p><a href="https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearch" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearch</a><p>In the blog post accompanying the release, I overview the architecture and present benchmark results using MS-MARCO. To my surprise, we were not only able to meet Parade/Tantivy's query performance, but exceed it substantially, measuring a 4.7x advantage on query throughput at scale:<p><a href="https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-full-text-search-postgres" rel="nofollow">https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-full-text-...</a><p>It's exciting (and, to be honest, a little unnerving) to see a field I've spent so much time toiling in change so quickly in ways that enable us to be more ambitious in our technical objectives. Technical moats are moats no longer.<p>The benchmark scripts and methodology are available in the github repo. Happy to answer any questions in the thread.<p>Thanks,<p>TJ (tj@tigerdata.com)
Show HN: 30u30.fyi – Is your startup founder on Forbes' most fraudulent list?