The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
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.
Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi
Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi
Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi
Show HN: Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things
I love making diagrams to help understand, plan, etc. However, the options are (A) auto-placement languages like Mermaid or Graphviz (which don't let me decide how the diagram looks), or (B) software like Draw.io which are powerful but are very time consuming (and inefficient for agents to manipulate).<p>I wanted to have the benefits of both, where you can define a diagram in a diagram language, but also retain a high degree of control over what the diagram looks like.<p>I also wanted this to work well for humans and agents.<p>On the Github link, there's a playground where you can try it out without installation. There's also instructions for a simple npm install and for installing a skill you can use with Claude or other agents.
Show HN: Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things
I love making diagrams to help understand, plan, etc. However, the options are (A) auto-placement languages like Mermaid or Graphviz (which don't let me decide how the diagram looks), or (B) software like Draw.io which are powerful but are very time consuming (and inefficient for agents to manipulate).<p>I wanted to have the benefits of both, where you can define a diagram in a diagram language, but also retain a high degree of control over what the diagram looks like.<p>I also wanted this to work well for humans and agents.<p>On the Github link, there's a playground where you can try it out without installation. There's also instructions for a simple npm install and for installing a skill you can use with Claude or other agents.
Show HN: Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things
I love making diagrams to help understand, plan, etc. However, the options are (A) auto-placement languages like Mermaid or Graphviz (which don't let me decide how the diagram looks), or (B) software like Draw.io which are powerful but are very time consuming (and inefficient for agents to manipulate).<p>I wanted to have the benefits of both, where you can define a diagram in a diagram language, but also retain a high degree of control over what the diagram looks like.<p>I also wanted this to work well for humans and agents.<p>On the Github link, there's a playground where you can try it out without installation. There's also instructions for a simple npm install and for installing a skill you can use with Claude or other agents.
Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red
Hey HN! Wanted to share a fun project I've been hacking on. Given Jev can make decisions really fast (but not fast enough to play Doom yet sadly), I wanted to try and push it to play a more complex game than Tetris. So I went with Pokémon.<p>I've spent endless hours playing this game as a child so building this was a ton of fun.<p>I open sourced everything in case you want to hack on it yourself here: <a href="https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon</a><p>The game is being streamed live including the tokens and cost - hopefully we get all the badges and don't get stuck in a cave :)
Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red
Hey HN! Wanted to share a fun project I've been hacking on. Given Jev can make decisions really fast (but not fast enough to play Doom yet sadly), I wanted to try and push it to play a more complex game than Tetris. So I went with Pokémon.<p>I've spent endless hours playing this game as a child so building this was a ton of fun.<p>I open sourced everything in case you want to hack on it yourself here: <a href="https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon</a><p>The game is being streamed live including the tokens and cost - hopefully we get all the badges and don't get stuck in a cave :)
Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red
Hey HN! Wanted to share a fun project I've been hacking on. Given Jev can make decisions really fast (but not fast enough to play Doom yet sadly), I wanted to try and push it to play a more complex game than Tetris. So I went with Pokémon.<p>I've spent endless hours playing this game as a child so building this was a ton of fun.<p>I open sourced everything in case you want to hack on it yourself here: <a href="https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon</a><p>The game is being streamed live including the tokens and cost - hopefully we get all the badges and don't get stuck in a cave :)
Show HN: Koi.rest – watch some fish and regain your balance
Hi there. My name is Paul. I’m a developer, an explorer and I’ve got ADHD. As of the beginning of August, I’m also unemployed.<p>This last part, along with everything else this past year, has caused me a great deal of stress.<p>While our balcony zen garden project is yet to be completed, I had an idea to create a virtual one that everyone can use.<p>It's an idea that, unfortunately, I’ve been postponing for a while now, mostly because I have no fucking idea how to do it as I don’t know JavaScript, and I don't have the capacity to learn it right now.<p>So I let perfect be the enemy of good and, well... just kept the idea to myself.<p>Then I said "fuck it" and used AI to make the thing I really wanted to make.<p>I realized I didn't want "perfect". I wanted "good enough".<p>I tweaked, added, removed, drew, researched, questioned, tested... I just wasn't the one coding it.<p>So now, instead of occupying my brain, it now lives on the internet for others to enjoy.<p>Yes, there’s something noble about making something entirely on your own, but what good is an idea that just sits in my head?<p>So here I am. I made the thing. The weird, little, quiet koi pond.<p>The silly project of passion. The little corner of the internet to let strangers watch fish quietly, together.<p>I hope this pond helps you as much as it helped me.