The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: WallHop – 12ft.io is gone, so I built a replacement
Hi HN, I'm Josh. WallHop is a free paywall bypass: paste an article URL (or prefix any URL with wallhop.io/) and you get the readable article without the paywall popup, ads or clutter. No signup, no extension.<p>I built it after 12ft.io went away. The News Media Alliance took it down in July 2025 and I missed having something I could hit from my phone.<p>How it works: it started as a fork of everywall/ladder (GPL-3.0) and I've modified it heavily since. Instead of relying on one trick, it chains several bypass methods per request and falls back to archive.is when they all fail, so one site blocking one technique doesn't break it.<p>Things that might be interesting:<p>- iOS Shortcut: on iPhone, tap Share > WallHop from any article in Safari or another app. This is how I use it 95% of the time.
- It works on Medium member-only posts, which 12ft never handled.
- Bookmarklet for desktop, plus /raw/<url> and /api/<url> endpoints if you want to script it.<p>I've tested it against most major news outlets and a bunch of local papers. It won't work everywhere. There are SOME server-side paywalls that are out of reach, and I'd rather say that up front. If you find a site that breaks, I'd love the link, and I can likely figure out a way to bypass it!
Show HN: The rarest tech books and docs you've probably never read
Show HN: Carrier-Explode: iPhone, Pixel and Galaxy carrier settings decoded
Showing off carrier-explode, one of my side projects that continuously archives carrier settings for all major phone brands.<p>carrier-explode also contains decoders and explanations for all the common baseband configurations, etc.<p>There’s still quite a bit of work to be done in checking my assumptions, but the tool has already been proven useful for a few enthusiast groups.
Show HN: Quake ported to safe Rust, playable in browser
Show HN: Let your AI agents paint big arrows, boxes and text on your screen
Show HN: Making a flexible "neon" t-shirt with LED filaments
Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years
Ten years ago I was 19 and traveling through East Africa, and I spent a summer in Ibumila, a village in the Njombe highlands of Tanzania. There's no school in the village. The nearest one is a boarding school an hour away that costs a few hundred dollars a year, which is out of reach for most families there and was about two weeks of summer job money for me. The daughter of the family I stayed with, Anwarite, was 11. I offered to pay her fees and told myself I'd keep paying as long as she wanted to keep going.<p>This summer she graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam with a degree in Language Studies, and last week she told me she'd been accepted into a Master of Arts in Swahili program there. Roughly 2% of people from Njombe ever finish a university degree. Her goal is to get a PhD and then to bring it back to the region.<p>Her entire 18-month master's program (tuition, registration, fees, books, supplies) comes to 3,060,000 TSh, about $1,161.<p>Since this worked out, I kept adding students as I could afford to, and in 2021 I registered it as a 501(c)(3), the Tanzania Education Project. It supports five students from Ibumila now, school fees and healthcare. I kept it small while I was finishing my PhD because I didn't want commitments I couldn't personally guarantee for a decade; I've since started a postdoc, so it feels like the right time to grow past my own paycheck. The long-term goal is that every kid in the village has access to education and healthcare. I sometimes think of this project as a slow experiment. How much could the village itself change over someone's lifetime if the kids have access to education?<p><a href="https://tanzaniaeducationproject.org/" rel="nofollow">https://tanzaniaeducationproject.org/</a> is the website. Nobody takes a salary, and aside from bank fees the money goes to the students. If anyone wants to fund Anwarite's master's specifically, it's here: <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/send-anwarite-to-her-masters-program" rel="nofollow">https://www.gofundme.com/f/send-anwarite-to-her-masters-prog...</a><p>Happy to answer any questions or take any tips you all might have about doing this sort of thing.
Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app
Show HN: Glashütte Trash Clock – A 30-minute pendulum clock made from trash
This is a functional 30-minute pendulum clock entirely from discarded materials—cardboard, zip ties, tape, a yardstick, and a paperclip escapement, built in the German Eldorado of precision watchmaking: Glashütte.<p>It also acts as a reference clock for GTC, a new satirical universal time standard.
Show HN: AI search for every photo and every frame of video on macOS
Aleph Alpha Kolibri: How the sovereign German LLM works
<a href="https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/kolibri-has-landed-a-sovereign-open-weight-model/" rel="nofollow">https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/kolibri-has-landed-a-soverei...</a>
Show HN: Giving Opus 5.5 a simulated paint canvas
Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met
Show HN: Ledge.sh – Runnable Markdown Notes
Hi HN,<p>Ledge is a Markdown notebook that runs shell commands, code, SQL, etc from inside your own notes.<p>I built Ledge because I spend much of my day copy/pasting commands from my notes into the terminal. I was inspired by how much cmux helped me organize my terminals - but there was still a split brain between my notes and frequently run commands. I've been daily-driving it for the past few weeks and use it for deploys, API calls, smoke tests, etc.<p>Ledge runs your real shell just like a terminal app and can be hosted locally or remotely over SSH using ledge-server. I've been building it since July and have recently added support for all the major platforms: Mac (Silicon), Windows (WSL required), Linux, iOS, Android. Mobile devices require SSH access to a ledge-server and Android is still in beta and looking for beta testers (see link on website)!<p>It's built on Bun and Electrobun and is free and open-source. Feel free to review the code and contribute at <a href="https://github.com/ledgesh/ledge" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ledgesh/ledge</a><p>Feedback is very much welcome. Any must-have features that are missing?
Show HN: Real-time Solar System with 526k asteroids and all tracked satellites
Show HN: NSL – WSL for Linux
One of the things that Windows really got right is WSL2. I drive an atomic Linux distro for daily use, but wanted a way to develop with multiple different distros with that same WSL UX. NSL is my answer. It is a faithful reproduction of the developer experience, powered by a single VM that hosts one or more systemd-nspawn containers with your development instances. Host file edits and port sharing come along for the ride, just like WSL. Take a look and tell me what you think... It's yet another step in my long journey to keep my host installation free from all the changing and breaking dev dependencies that force a reinstall every few months.
Show HN: Destroy Any Website with Stickman
Show HN: PaperMono, e-ink fridge magnet shopping list with mobile web page
Fridge magnet shopping list on an M5Stack PaperMono (ESP32-S3, e-ink
touchscreen), synced with a phone web app over Wi-Fi. Works offline,
~2,400 lines of C++.<p>This is a great wee device! BLE, Wi-Fi and LoRa on one board makes it flexible
for way more than a shopping list, this is just what I built first. This
firmware only uses Wi-Fi.<p>Fully vibe-coded with Claude Code, I didn't hand-write this. I wanted to see
how Claude would get on with building something useful for a new hardware device.<p>As it's stuck to the fridge it's easy for the family to use, and it's already being used day to day which I'll admit is a first for a home built project like this
Show HN: HN.watch – Videos of all Hacker News posts
Hi HN, I’m Per, founder of Scrimba (YC S20). We’ve spent the last decade teaching people how to code with an HTML-based video format. We’ve now plugged an LLM into it, so that people can create explainer videos about anything. It’s called “Scrimba Explain”.<p>To demo this technology for Hacker News, we built HN.watch. It’s like HN, but with explainer videos instead of articles. We create them on-the-fly the first time someone clicks on a link.<p>While there are obvious visual drawbacks of using HTML instead of diffusion models, there are three big benefits: - Speed: Much faster to generate than pixel-based videos (just a few seconds from click to playback) - Cost: Our cost per video is ~$0.04. (Excluding image generation, which some videos utilize. Quickly blows up the cost) - Easy editing: the above benefits also make AI-assisted editing cheap & fast<p>Our hypothesis is that if video creation goes from “dollars and minutes” to “cents and seconds”, a bunch of new use cases will be unlocked. Here are some we see already: - A video explanation of every single Pull Request (we do this internally) - Give every page in your internal/extrernal docs a video - Turn a complex article into a video in ~4 seconds (via our Chrome extension) - Course creators can quickly draft lessons before recording the real thing - People also create a lot of personal stuff stories for their kids, wedding invitations, birthdays, etc<p>The stack is based on an open-source programming language (Imba) created by our CTO, Sindre Aarsæther. It compiles to JavaScript, so it interoperates fully with the npm + node ecosystem. You can learn more here: <a href="https://imba.io/" rel="nofollow">https://imba.io/</a><p>We’ve also built our own sync engine (OP), and a context management system for agents (Q). We feared this would make the LLMs struggle when writing code for us, as neither is in their training data (there’s very little Imba in there too). However, we’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that LLMs actually are really good at our stack. This is probably because the stack is extremely dense. Imba is compact, and so is OP, where a single declaration sets storage, sync, permissions, UI, and what the AI sees. This means there’s no translations between frontend, API, db and JSON where the model can get confused and get things wrong.<p>Simply said, instead of using React.js, Express, Supabase, and LangChain, we built it all from scratch. Definitely suffering from the “not invented here” syndrome, lol! As for the models, we use Gemini, GPTs, Inworld, ElevenLabs, and a few others.<p>If you want to try it out, just take your pick: - The Web UI (scrimba.com/explain) - MCP (add it to your coding agent) - ChatGPT Plugin - Chrome Extension<p>You can find a link to all of the above in our docs: <a href="https://docs.scrimba.com/explain/introduction" rel="nofollow">https://docs.scrimba.com/explain/introduction</a><p>And finally, a real pixel-based video of the tool: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rbHmBxSEs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rbHmBxSEs</a><p>Would love to hear your feedback and if anyone has ideas for other use cases.<p>PS: I expect quite a bit of pushback from HN for this launch, given how fan of text the HN crowd is. This kind of tool is not for everyone. But there are a lot of people today who prefer videos over text, especially in the younger generations.
Show HN: HN.watch – Videos of all Hacker News posts
Hi HN, I’m Per, founder of Scrimba (YC S20). We’ve spent the last decade teaching people how to code with an HTML-based video format. We’ve now plugged an LLM into it, so that people can create explainer videos about anything. It’s called “Scrimba Explain”.<p>To demo this technology for Hacker News, we built HN.watch. It’s like HN, but with explainer videos instead of articles. We create them on-the-fly the first time someone clicks on a link.<p>While there are obvious visual drawbacks of using HTML instead of diffusion models, there are three big benefits: - Speed: Much faster to generate than pixel-based videos (just a few seconds from click to playback) - Cost: Our cost per video is ~$0.04. (Excluding image generation, which some videos utilize. Quickly blows up the cost) - Easy editing: the above benefits also make AI-assisted editing cheap & fast<p>Our hypothesis is that if video creation goes from “dollars and minutes” to “cents and seconds”, a bunch of new use cases will be unlocked. Here are some we see already: - A video explanation of every single Pull Request (we do this internally) - Give every page in your internal/extrernal docs a video - Turn a complex article into a video in ~4 seconds (via our Chrome extension) - Course creators can quickly draft lessons before recording the real thing - People also create a lot of personal stuff stories for their kids, wedding invitations, birthdays, etc<p>The stack is based on an open-source programming language (Imba) created by our CTO, Sindre Aarsæther. It compiles to JavaScript, so it interoperates fully with the npm + node ecosystem. You can learn more here: <a href="https://imba.io/" rel="nofollow">https://imba.io/</a><p>We’ve also built our own sync engine (OP), and a context management system for agents (Q). We feared this would make the LLMs struggle when writing code for us, as neither is in their training data (there’s very little Imba in there too). However, we’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that LLMs actually are really good at our stack. This is probably because the stack is extremely dense. Imba is compact, and so is OP, where a single declaration sets storage, sync, permissions, UI, and what the AI sees. This means there’s no translations between frontend, API, db and JSON where the model can get confused and get things wrong.<p>Simply said, instead of using React.js, Express, Supabase, and LangChain, we built it all from scratch. Definitely suffering from the “not invented here” syndrome, lol! As for the models, we use Gemini, GPTs, Inworld, ElevenLabs, and a few others.<p>If you want to try it out, just take your pick: - The Web UI (scrimba.com/explain) - MCP (add it to your coding agent) - ChatGPT Plugin - Chrome Extension<p>You can find a link to all of the above in our docs: <a href="https://docs.scrimba.com/explain/introduction" rel="nofollow">https://docs.scrimba.com/explain/introduction</a><p>And finally, a real pixel-based video of the tool: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rbHmBxSEs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rbHmBxSEs</a><p>Would love to hear your feedback and if anyone has ideas for other use cases.<p>PS: I expect quite a bit of pushback from HN for this launch, given how fan of text the HN crowd is. This kind of tool is not for everyone. But there are a lot of people today who prefer videos over text, especially in the younger generations.