The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: I simulated closing the Strait of Hormuz on real oil trade data
OP here: I created this visualization tool as the byproduct of a supply chain class I taught at Columbia. The pedagogical exercise grew into a full blown visualization and paper about global oil trade.<p>The model:
The mechanics are the same as the financial network Eisenberg-Noe: Instead of banks, every country consumes oil interconnected via bilateral trading. Shocks propagate throughout the network, depleting oil reserves when bottleneck nodes (such as the Strait of Hormuz) are blocked.<p>Insights:
The interesting part is the mechanics of how the crisis unfolds: for example, France receives 0 oil from Hormuz directly, yet their reserves are depleted faster because other countries reactively increase their safety oil stock, increasing oil price, making stockouts more expensive for everyone.<p>The model also gives price dynamics which are interesting on their own: the price increase is not immediate, it follows sequentially as countries reserves deplete.<p>Some caveats:
1. For producer nodes, depletion means their export slack is reduced/exhausted.
2. No sanctioned trade (UN Comtrade data)<p>Technical Details:
The visualization is 600 lines of flask plus js frontend (LLM assisted visualization with ground-truth matching the original numerical exercise of the paper)<p>Paper with proofs/theory:
<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17491" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17491</a>
Show HN: Echo – Fable-level results at 1/3 the cost using open-weight models
I’ve been building Echo (<a href="https://echo.tracerml.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://echo.tracerml.ai/</a>), an experiment in making one AI system out of a pool of open-weight models rather than choosing a single model and using it for every task.<p>It started with a simple experiment. I took a group of models, including GLM-5.2, Kimi K2.7 and others, and ran them on the same evaluations. Then I measured what would happen if, for each problem, you somehow knew in advance which models would be useful and how their outputs should be combined.<p>That hypothetical system performed substantially better than any individual model in the pool. Of course, it is not something you can actually deploy because it relies on knowing which decisions were good after seeing the result. Echo is my attempt to recover some of that advantage without having that information in advance.<p>For each request, Echo decides how much computation to allocate, which models should participate, and how their work should be combined. Some prompts may only need a relatively small amount of inference, while others benefit from multiple models working on different parts of the problem.<p>One thing that surprised me while building it was how complementary the models are. A model that is clearly weaker overall can still be extremely useful on particular problems or as part of a combination.<p>On my first evaluation mix, Echo consistently performed better than the best individual model in its pool. It also reached roughly the same aggregate result as Fable, which I used as one of the stronger comparison systems, at around one third of the inference cost.<p>There are still some cases where Echo makes the wrong allocation or combination decision. I’m currently spending a lot of time understanding those failures, as well as testing whether the same approach holds up on coding and agentic tasks where measuring the quality of each decision becomes much harder.<p>I built a chat interface (echo.tracerml.ai) and an OpenAI-compatible API (<a href="https://echo.tracerml.ai/docs/api" rel="nofollow">https://echo.tracerml.ai/docs/api</a>) so the system can be tested outside the evaluation setup.<p>Here is a short/high level video on how it works: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJFJSvOdXhg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJFJSvOdXhg</a><p>I wrote up the evaluation methodology, individual model results, costs and current limitations here: <a href="https://echo.tracerml.ai/eval" rel="nofollow">https://echo.tracerml.ai/eval</a><p>I would love for you to try it! Especially if you hit any weird failure cases or places where the allocation looks unintuitive.
Show HN: Echo – Fable-level results at 1/3 the cost using open-weight models
I’ve been building Echo (<a href="https://echo.tracerml.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://echo.tracerml.ai/</a>), an experiment in making one AI system out of a pool of open-weight models rather than choosing a single model and using it for every task.<p>It started with a simple experiment. I took a group of models, including GLM-5.2, Kimi K2.7 and others, and ran them on the same evaluations. Then I measured what would happen if, for each problem, you somehow knew in advance which models would be useful and how their outputs should be combined.<p>That hypothetical system performed substantially better than any individual model in the pool. Of course, it is not something you can actually deploy because it relies on knowing which decisions were good after seeing the result. Echo is my attempt to recover some of that advantage without having that information in advance.<p>For each request, Echo decides how much computation to allocate, which models should participate, and how their work should be combined. Some prompts may only need a relatively small amount of inference, while others benefit from multiple models working on different parts of the problem.<p>One thing that surprised me while building it was how complementary the models are. A model that is clearly weaker overall can still be extremely useful on particular problems or as part of a combination.<p>On my first evaluation mix, Echo consistently performed better than the best individual model in its pool. It also reached roughly the same aggregate result as Fable, which I used as one of the stronger comparison systems, at around one third of the inference cost.<p>There are still some cases where Echo makes the wrong allocation or combination decision. I’m currently spending a lot of time understanding those failures, as well as testing whether the same approach holds up on coding and agentic tasks where measuring the quality of each decision becomes much harder.<p>I built a chat interface (echo.tracerml.ai) and an OpenAI-compatible API (<a href="https://echo.tracerml.ai/docs/api" rel="nofollow">https://echo.tracerml.ai/docs/api</a>) so the system can be tested outside the evaluation setup.<p>Here is a short/high level video on how it works: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJFJSvOdXhg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJFJSvOdXhg</a><p>I wrote up the evaluation methodology, individual model results, costs and current limitations here: <a href="https://echo.tracerml.ai/eval" rel="nofollow">https://echo.tracerml.ai/eval</a><p>I would love for you to try it! Especially if you hit any weird failure cases or places where the allocation looks unintuitive.
Show HN: HN Hall of Fame – browse 3,100 legendary Hacker News links
Show HN: Bento - An entire PowerPoint in one HTML file (edit+view+data+collab)
Over the past few months, our team has been building more and more slidedecks using web frontend technologies with coding harnesses like Claude Code, but a common complaint is to make even small edits we need to edit the code either manually or via the harness.<p>To avoid this loop, I ended up creating Bento, a single HTML file with everything you need in a slide tool including animations and shared editing. There's no install or cloud login, everything works offline. The default deck is around 560 KB and it doesn't need to fetch anything once you got it.<p>Open it in a browser and then you can edit, present, print and save. Share it via email or via Airdrop and all they need is a browser to edit, present and also do live collab on the slides. Drop it in to Claude or ChatGPT to transform existing pptx files into Bento slides. There is no cloud involved, only an encrypted blind relay to allow for shared editing. The relay doesn't see any of the data.<p>Check it out at <a href="https://bento.page/slides/" rel="nofollow">https://bento.page/slides/</a> which takes you straight to the editor.<p>Go to <a href="https://bento.page/guestbook/" rel="nofollow">https://bento.page/guestbook/</a> to try out the live guestbook to experience share editing / collab.<p>There is also a gallery with some sample decks on the website - <a href="https://bento.page/" rel="nofollow">https://bento.page/</a><p>All the code is MIT licensed and you can find it here - <a href="https://github.com/nyblnet/bento" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nyblnet/bento</a> . I used reveal.js with several other libraries (including some homegrown ones), and Claude Code.
Show HN: Justif – Knuth-Plass justification and microtypography for the web
Justif is a drop-in JavaScript library that progressively enhances web pages to TeX-level text justification. Installation is a single <script> line, standard text and accessibility affordances are unchanged, and users with JS disabled get native browser rendering.<p>I made justif because I've long been a fan of justified text. I think it looks clean and elegant, and makes reading more enjoyable. But bad justification is the opposite, with gaping spaces that distract me to the point of making the text near unreadable.<p>Browsers have got better recently at handling justified text [0][1], but still use suboptimal greedy algorithms for the most part, and are not near that TeX/InDesign level of quality that I crave. `text-wrap: pretty` exists but is far from a panacea, as you can see for yourself in the demo.<p>Justif also has the benefit of providing more consistent text layout across browsers. Blink (Chrome), Gecko (Firefox) and WebKit (Safari) all justify text differently, so normally what the user sees depends on what browser they use.<p>Take a look at the demo, play around with it, see if you can break anything. I'm open to improvements of the API design as well, so please let me know your thoughts.<p>For more details, see the README: <a href="https://github.com/lyallcooper/justif" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lyallcooper/justif</a><p>0: <a href="https://cloudfour.com/thinks/justified-text-better-than-expected/" rel="nofollow">https://cloudfour.com/thinks/justified-text-better-than-expe...</a><p>1: <a href="https://owickstrom.github.io/the-proportional-web/" rel="nofollow">https://owickstrom.github.io/the-proportional-web/</a>
Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat tour of grace cathedral, San Francisco
Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
I might be the only SRE on Earth with his own bowling center. It's a more in-depth gig than you'd think.<p>My family and I bought an abandoned 8-lane bowling center in the rural mid-west. In our small town there weren't many recreation options for families. You've heard of a food desert? This is an R&R desert.<p>It had been abandoned for a good reason. The roof leaks, the electrical system was constantly surging, and my 70-year-old bowling equipment (still) doesn't work perfectly. The system that keeps your score is particularly interesting to me. It's the thing you watch during your game, but it fades into the background beyond that. Turns out these things are really cool, but absurdly expensive.<p>Ours was installed in 2008 and cost six figures. It's calculating ball speed and trajectory, camera-based pin detection (object detection and trig, on ICs!), runs the fouling, the animations, the pinsetting machine and ball return. Very cool stuff for its age.<p>From the business perspective, my facility only cost me $105k. To forklift-replace the score keeping system runs anywhere between $80-$120k, depending on features, vendor, and unit age. No upgrades or service contracts, mind you, and every feature and customization is a new line item. That's for a 1:1 replacement on a system installed in 2008. Incredible, given how fast the tech world moves.<p>Replacement parts cost a shocking $4000 per pair of lanes. But wait, the bowling machines themselves are 70 years old, so what's this "advanced" system actually doing back there? Actuating a single relay to trigger that big old machine. Everything else is strictly mechanical. Meanwhile I've got a six-figure invoice in my hand. I'm upset.<p>Given the state of open hardware, computer vision, real-time event streaming, and open source running megascale products worldwide, there had to be a way to do this myself.<p>So far I've built an equivalent prototype for about $200 per lane-pair, $400 if you're fancy. ESP32 and ESPNow with an RS485 fallback, reporting to a raspberry pi lane computer that's really just redis and a state machine bolted to an ESP32 gateway for the mesh.<p>Since it's all ESP32, I've got a fistful of spare controllers in a drawer, pre-flashed or waiting to be. All common off-the-shelf hardware: microcontrollers wired to relays, optocouplers, and IR-break-beam sensors, each running slightly different firmware. Writing the firmware and protocol is the actual hard part.<p>It's an ESPNow star-topology mesh: each node emits events from its sensors and accepts commands for its controls, reporting to a gateway node connected to the raspi over UART. From there it's event streaming: RX packets get translated and tossed into redis, commands relay back out to the mesh as needed. RS485 sits underneath as a wired fallback for noisy RF environments.<p>Once the data's in redis, it's familiar middleware/React/websocket/pub-sub stuff. Any React dev can build their own UI and bowling animations. Since it all runs on commodity hardware, I can do legit anything I want as the proprietor, and I own all my data. Repairs take five minutes; I can swap the rig on a lane pair in under 10. I'd bet a house like mine could go from zero to running in an hour or two.<p>We're calling it OpenLaneLink, and I plan to open source the hardware, firmware, and software stack when it's ready. Bowling is fun, and I want to help keep it affordable for alleys like mine.
I hate vendor lock-in. I'm not a fan of closed systems, calling support for every hiccup, or paying to "white label" my own equipment. Want to go Tron-themed for a night? Good luck finding a neon neumorphic theme in something bought at the turn of the century.<p>All that bugged me. Sure, bowling equipment is niche, but the open hardware and software landscape is amazing.<p>Thanks for reading! Let me know if anyone's interested in more posts about this bowling nonsense.
Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
I might be the only SRE on Earth with his own bowling center. It's a more in-depth gig than you'd think.<p>My family and I bought an abandoned 8-lane bowling center in the rural mid-west. In our small town there weren't many recreation options for families. You've heard of a food desert? This is an R&R desert.<p>It had been abandoned for a good reason. The roof leaks, the electrical system was constantly surging, and my 70-year-old bowling equipment (still) doesn't work perfectly. The system that keeps your score is particularly interesting to me. It's the thing you watch during your game, but it fades into the background beyond that. Turns out these things are really cool, but absurdly expensive.<p>Ours was installed in 2008 and cost six figures. It's calculating ball speed and trajectory, camera-based pin detection (object detection and trig, on ICs!), runs the fouling, the animations, the pinsetting machine and ball return. Very cool stuff for its age.<p>From the business perspective, my facility only cost me $105k. To forklift-replace the score keeping system runs anywhere between $80-$120k, depending on features, vendor, and unit age. No upgrades or service contracts, mind you, and every feature and customization is a new line item. That's for a 1:1 replacement on a system installed in 2008. Incredible, given how fast the tech world moves.<p>Replacement parts cost a shocking $4000 per pair of lanes. But wait, the bowling machines themselves are 70 years old, so what's this "advanced" system actually doing back there? Actuating a single relay to trigger that big old machine. Everything else is strictly mechanical. Meanwhile I've got a six-figure invoice in my hand. I'm upset.<p>Given the state of open hardware, computer vision, real-time event streaming, and open source running megascale products worldwide, there had to be a way to do this myself.<p>So far I've built an equivalent prototype for about $200 per lane-pair, $400 if you're fancy. ESP32 and ESPNow with an RS485 fallback, reporting to a raspberry pi lane computer that's really just redis and a state machine bolted to an ESP32 gateway for the mesh.<p>Since it's all ESP32, I've got a fistful of spare controllers in a drawer, pre-flashed or waiting to be. All common off-the-shelf hardware: microcontrollers wired to relays, optocouplers, and IR-break-beam sensors, each running slightly different firmware. Writing the firmware and protocol is the actual hard part.<p>It's an ESPNow star-topology mesh: each node emits events from its sensors and accepts commands for its controls, reporting to a gateway node connected to the raspi over UART. From there it's event streaming: RX packets get translated and tossed into redis, commands relay back out to the mesh as needed. RS485 sits underneath as a wired fallback for noisy RF environments.<p>Once the data's in redis, it's familiar middleware/React/websocket/pub-sub stuff. Any React dev can build their own UI and bowling animations. Since it all runs on commodity hardware, I can do legit anything I want as the proprietor, and I own all my data. Repairs take five minutes; I can swap the rig on a lane pair in under 10. I'd bet a house like mine could go from zero to running in an hour or two.<p>We're calling it OpenLaneLink, and I plan to open source the hardware, firmware, and software stack when it's ready. Bowling is fun, and I want to help keep it affordable for alleys like mine.
I hate vendor lock-in. I'm not a fan of closed systems, calling support for every hiccup, or paying to "white label" my own equipment. Want to go Tron-themed for a night? Good luck finding a neon neumorphic theme in something bought at the turn of the century.<p>All that bugged me. Sure, bowling equipment is niche, but the open hardware and software landscape is amazing.<p>Thanks for reading! Let me know if anyone's interested in more posts about this bowling nonsense.
Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index
Show HN: Watch bots interact with an SSH honeypot in real time
Show HN: Watch bots interact with an SSH honeypot in real time
Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly
This is the entire Firefox browser rendering to a <canvas> element. Gecko, all UI components, and the Spidermonkey JS engine are all compiled and running in WebAssembly.<p>Here are a few things you might find interesting:<p>- This is fully end to end encrypted! We use the WISP protocol for TCP-over-websockets.<p>- There is a novel WASM->JS JIT for experimental site speedup<p>- This port cost over 25k in opus/fable tokens for debugging and JIT research<p>This was just a fun experiment to push the boundaries of WebAssembly. For a more usable "browser in browser" experience, we also built <a href="https://github.com/HeyPuter/browser.js" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/HeyPuter/browser.js</a> that eats a bit less RAM.
Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works
This came from an idea that had been knocking around in my head for several years. I had been collecting opening lines of famous works and thought it would be cool to see one everyday as I opened the browser. I tried different styles but landed on the simple background with the text, let the words speak for themselves. Over time i've added more quotes I believe now there are close to 60, so hopefully you can refresh a few times and get a fresh one every time. I hope you guys like it, enjoy!
Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE
Hello HN, I don't post on here much, but wanted to get some eyes on a new project I'm just launching. I think we definitely need one more AI code agent..<p>I'm a long-term C++ dev, and over 30+ years I've created some successful audio dev tools (JUCE, the Tracktion DAW, the Cmajor DSP language). All of these came from me getting annoyed with something I had to use, and deciding to have a go at my own take on whatever it was.<p>So Juggler is my attempt at an AI code agent, after spending too many hours loving what the models could do, but hating the CLI experience, and having some opinions of what a better UX might be for this stuff.<p>Lots more blurb on the website and github, but a quick tech dump which might grab your attention if you're into these things:<p>A session is a document, not a log file. Each conversation is a Yjs CRDT tree. It can branch into sub-threads (recursively), and you can drill down, backtrack, edit, undo/redo, and inspect everything: tool calls, approvals, and the raw context JSON going to the model, etc. The UI is based around Finder-style Miller columns rather than a big doom-scroll, and is quick to navigate.<p>Because it's a CRDT behind a local web server, multiple clients can attach P2P to a live session: the native desktop app, a browser tab, or your phone. Run the headless server on the box where the code lives, view it from wherever.<p>Almost everything is a JavaScript plugin: every item in the context (read/write/bash/etc.), the LLM loop strategies, slash commands, and their UIs. You can inspect, fork, or replace any of them. I don't do much agent customisation myself, but lots of people do, and I'd love to see what they think of with this plugin API.<p>Go backend, Wails for windowing (no Electron), plain type-checked JS (strict JSDoc), Yjs for the documents. Usual BYOK provider support: Claude (CLI or API), OpenAI/Codex, Gemini, Ollama, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, etc.<p>The app's AGPLv3; the extension SDK and bundled extensions are Apache-2.0, so extensions have no copyleft strings attached. No signup, no telemetry, trying to make it frictionless for people to try it out..<p>It's very much a beta, and is a one-man side project. It hasn't yet had a proper kicking from the real world, but I'm confident some people with similar preferences to my own will like it!<p><a href="https://juggler.studio" rel="nofollow">https://juggler.studio</a>
Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop
Show HN: Super Dario
Show HN: Mindwalk – Replay coding-agent sessions on a 3D map of your codebase
Show HN: Mindwalk – Replay coding-agent sessions on a 3D map of your codebase
Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
Hello HN!<p>I'm the author of Ant, a JavaScript ecosystem built around a runtime with its own JavaScript engine. Ant also includes a package manager, the ants.land package registry, a platform for deploying and hosting applications, and Ant Desktop for building native desktop apps with web technologies, similar to Electron.<p>The goal is for these pieces to work as one coherent platform while remaining compatible with the wider JavaScript ecosystem. It's still early, and I'd appreciate any feedback on the overall direction or what you'd like to see from an e2e alternative to the existing JavaScript stacks.<p>P.S. I’ve shared Ant here before as a runtime; since then, it has grown into the broader ecosystem you see today.