The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week

Latest posts:

Show HN: I open-sourced the in-memory PostgreSQL I built at work for E2E tests

Show HN: Online database diagram editor

Hey all! I released drawDB about a month ago and now it's open source. I hope you find it useful.<p>If you want to check out the app you can go to <a href="https://drawdb.vercel.app/" rel="nofollow">https://drawdb.vercel.app/</a> .<p>Thank you:)

Show HN: Kyoo – Self-hosted media browser (Jellyfin/Plex alternative)

I started working on Kyoo almost 5 years ago because I did not like the options at the time. It started as a "sandbox" project where I could learn about tech I was interested in, and slowly became more than that.

Show HN: Plandex – an AI coding engine for complex tasks

Hey HN, I'm building Plandex (<a href="https://plandex.ai" rel="nofollow">https://plandex.ai</a>), an open source, terminal-based AI coding engine for complex tasks.<p>I built Plandex because I was tired of copying and pasting code back and forth between ChatGPT and my projects. It can complete tasks that span multiple files and require many steps. It uses the OpenAI API with your API key (support for other models, including Claude, Gemini, and open source models is on the roadmap). You can watch a 2 minute demo here: <a href="https://player.vimeo.com/video/926634577" rel="nofollow">https://player.vimeo.com/video/926634577</a><p>Here's a prompt I used to build the AWS infrastructure for Plandex Cloud (Plandex can be self-hosted or cloud-hosted): <a href="https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex/blob/main/test/test_prompts/aws-infra.txt">https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex/blob/main/test/test_pr...</a><p>Something I think sets Plandex apart is a focus on working around bad outputs and iterating on tasks systematically. It's relatively easy to make a great looking demo for any tool, but the day-to-day of working with it has a lot more to do with how it handles edge cases and failures. Plandex tries to tighten the feedback loop between developer and LLM:<p>- Every aspect of a Plandex plan is version-controlled, from the context to the conversation itself to model settings. As soon as things start to go off the rails, you can use the `plandex rewind` command to back up and add more context or iterate on the prompt. Git-style branches allow you to test and compare multiple approaches.<p>- As a plan proceeds, tentative updates are accumulated in a protected sandbox (also version-controlled), preventing any wayward edits to your project files.<p>- The `plandex changes` command opens a diff review TUI that lets you review pending changes side-by-side like the GitHub PR review UI. Just hit the 'r' key to reject any change that doesn’t look right. Once you’re satisfied, either press ctrl+a from the changes TUI or run `plandex apply` to apply the changes.<p>- If you work on files you’ve loaded into context outside of Plandex, your changes are pulled in automatically so that the model always uses the latest state of your project.<p>Plandex makes it easy to load files and directories in the terminal. You can load multiple paths:<p><pre><code> plandex load components/some-component.ts lib/api.ts ../sibling-dir/another-file.ts </code></pre> You can load entire directories recursively:<p><pre><code> plandex load src/lib -r </code></pre> You can use glob patterns:<p><pre><code> plandex load src/**/*.{ts,tsx} </code></pre> You can load directory layouts (file names only):<p><pre><code> plandex load src --tree </code></pre> Text content of urls:<p><pre><code> plandex load https://react.dev/reference/react/hooks </code></pre> Or pipe data in:<p><pre><code> cargo test | plandex load </code></pre> For sending prompts, you can pass in a file:<p><pre><code> plandex tell -f "prompts/stripe/add-webhooks.txt" </code></pre> Or you can pop up vim and write your prompt there:<p><pre><code> plandex tell </code></pre> For shorter prompts you can pass them inline:<p><pre><code> plandex tell "set the header's background to #222 and text to white" </code></pre> You can run tasks in the background:<p><pre><code> plandex tell "write tests for all functions in lib/math/math.go. put them in lib/math_tests." --bg </code></pre> You can list all running or recently finished tasks:<p><pre><code> plandex ps </code></pre> And connect to any running task to start streaming it:<p><pre><code> plandex connect </code></pre> For more details, here’s a quick overview of commands and functionality: <a href="https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex/blob/main/guides/USAGE.md">https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex/blob/main/guides/USAGE...</a><p>Plandex is written in Go and is statically compiled, so it runs from a single small binary with no dependencies on any package managers or language runtimes. There’s a 1-line quick install:<p><pre><code> curl -sL https://plandex.ai/install.sh | bash </code></pre> It's early days, but Plandex is working well and is legitimately the tool I reach for first when I want to do something that is too large or complex for ChatGPT or GH Copilot. I would love to get your feedback. Feel free to hop into the Discord (<a href="https://discord.gg/plandex-ai" rel="nofollow">https://discord.gg/plandex-ai</a>) and let me know how it goes. PRs are also welcome!

Show HN: I've built a locally running Perplexity clone

The video demo runs a 7b Model on a normal gaming GPU. I think it already works quite well (accounting for the limited hardware power). :)

Show HN: OneUptime – open-source Datadog Alternative

Show HN: DN$ – an innovative, ad-supported DNS resolver

Tired of companies snooping through your DNS traffic? Don't you wish you could get advertisements with your DNS records?<p>Today we're introducing the innovative, privacy-focused, ad-supported DNS resolver - DN$! Traditional DNS resolvers provided by your internet service provider, cloudflare, or google could be tracking your internet activity and selling it to third-party data vendors. We at DN$ want to fix that and cut out these nefarious actors (until we've amassed a critical number of users to exploit).<p>In order to support such a radically new business model, our service needs to serve adverts because $INSERT_FAKE_REASONS. Open source and built in rust - our software is secure and blazingly fast because it is open source and built in rust.<p>As a corporate entity, our executives are not liable for prison time and will probably only be fined small financial penalties for any serious crimes we commit. However, we promise that we are NOT doing anything nefarious like tracking and selling your user data and internet behavior. We will also NOT be using the data (we are <i>not</i> collecting : ) to train AI models to make ourselves rich.<p>Did we mention that it's built in rust therefore it's safe and fast?<p>Send your DNS queries to `35.223.197.204` :) to try it out:<p>``` dig @35.223.197.204 hackernews.com ```

Show HN: I just made my profitable online form builder open-sourced

Show HN: Truncate, a word-based strategy game

Truncate is a chess flavoured word game that blends spatial reasoning and wordplay. In puzzle mode, you beat back your NPC opponent's words and take over their territory.<p>Truncate started as a pen and paper game between a friend and I, evolved into a handmade board game, and finally arrived at an online puzzle game. Like any good word game, there is of course a daily mode, shareable with the tried and true grid of emojis<p>We've been playtesting it with friends and family for a few months, which has helped iron out the tutorials and gameplay, and we're finally happy with an MVP worth sharing!<p>Technical deets: The client and server are written in Rust, with the visuals built using egui (as an experiment in Rust's GUI ecosystem).<p>We'd love any feedback!

Show HN: Truncate, a word-based strategy game

Truncate is a chess flavoured word game that blends spatial reasoning and wordplay. In puzzle mode, you beat back your NPC opponent's words and take over their territory.<p>Truncate started as a pen and paper game between a friend and I, evolved into a handmade board game, and finally arrived at an online puzzle game. Like any good word game, there is of course a daily mode, shareable with the tried and true grid of emojis<p>We've been playtesting it with friends and family for a few months, which has helped iron out the tutorials and gameplay, and we're finally happy with an MVP worth sharing!<p>Technical deets: The client and server are written in Rust, with the visuals built using egui (as an experiment in Rust's GUI ecosystem).<p>We'd love any feedback!

Show HN: Libmui is a macOS Classic widget lib for Linux

Not sure if I would post this for the last day of #marchintosh OR wait for tomorrow the 1st of April. Both apply equally.<p>Anyway, here's a pet project of mine, I made it as a glued on for another pet project of mine, but it developed a life of it's own now and can soar skyward toward success, fame, and glory.

Show HN: Libmui is a macOS Classic widget lib for Linux

Not sure if I would post this for the last day of #marchintosh OR wait for tomorrow the 1st of April. Both apply equally.<p>Anyway, here's a pet project of mine, I made it as a glued on for another pet project of mine, but it developed a life of it's own now and can soar skyward toward success, fame, and glory.

I scraped all of OpenAI's Community Forum

Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

Hi everyone! I’m the founder of Explanations (https://explanations.app). I’m building a website where students can get college level math & physics help for 1/10th the cost of private tutoring. You’d type a question, and your teacher replies by drawing a Youtube/KhanAcademy-style video; and this happens asynchronously throughout the week.<p>When I was studying at MIT, I often had to wait 40-60 minutes in line just to get 5 minutes of “help” from a TA - when I needed 1-2 hours. I understood that TAs can’t spend all their time helping me. That’s understandable. But what made me bitter was that, the school went the extra mile to ensure I don’t have the resources to learn on my own,<p>1. Blocking access to solutions for past problems (to prevent cheating)<p>2. Purposely not recording explanations to increase attendance: https://piazza.com/class/ky0jj3k89mz5d2/post/9<p>3. Insisting that Office Hours is a 1-by-1 format even when crowded (to prevent solutions from leaking)<p>These policies have good intentions - it’s to encourage a synchronous, in-person learning experience. But in practice, it had side-effects:<p>1. Help resources become inefficient - because so much material is restricted, and so much time is spent on delivering live lectures, there’d often be 40 students competing for help from 2 TAs in a 2-hour Office Hours<p>2. Because help resources are inefficient, it’s very hard to catch-up: once you fall behind, you have no way to review past material efficiently enough to compensate the difference - like credit card debt<p>3.Every day, I’d wake up, go to a lecture I don’t understand, go to Office Hours so I can hopefully ask for a review (which’d would take a few hours), realize TAs aren’t willing to do that, then realize there is nothing I can do to recover. I fell into a depression for many years, and my bitterness fueled me to work on the early versions of explanations.app<p>It turns out that universities succeed by being prestigious, not by teaching well. To win at prestige, be highly selective (by keeping supply low), keep a huge endowment (because it affects school rankings), and hire the best researchers (not teachers). This is actually the fundamental reason for the odd incentives in higher education, and something felt wrong.<p>So explanations.app is completely inspired by KhanAcademy and Youtube. The mystery to me was - why weren’t there more Youtube teachers & KhanAcademy videos? I believe it’s a combination of:<p>1. People who teach college subjects well often have better opportunities e.g. work, research<p>2. Lack of rewards: even Youtubers with 100K views and 10K subscribers would have at most 1-5 paying members on Patreon<p>On the one hand, there are all these free resources, where teachers changed the world way more than they ever got rewarded for. Then on the other hand, there is private tutoring - very effective - but very expensive e.g. $100/hour for college level subjects.<p>I believe the balanced solution is a system where lots of students pay $10/week to a few teachers who make videos, like a paid, Q&A Youtube/KhanAcademy, so it’s personalized, effective, but still affordable.<p>There are currently 2 teachers on explanations.app - Ben & Esther - both MIT grads, teaching physics & math for subjects like linear algebra and electromagnetism. 3 students - Laquazia, Lidija and Chandra from US, Serbia and Korea joined this month following r/physicsStudents launch: [https://www.reddit.com/r/PhysicsStudents/comments/1b2t5u6/i_started_a_program_where_mit_grads_do_physics/]<p>While explanations.app is focused on college-level math and physics, the platform is completely open for anyone to learn and/or teach. I hope you can try it :^) and give me the chance to work with you.

Show HN: Nano-web – a low latency one binary webserver designed for serving SPAs

I'd found that whilst there's a lot of good options out there for webservers, I was looking for something that is a single deployable binary for usage with containers or unikernels and solves some of the problems that you get with other setups like nginx.<p>It uses a single compiled binary, it's going to have extremely low latency on account of caching all files in memory at runtime, and also the fun feature and really useful that's good for SPAs (e.g. Vite) or things like Astro is that you can inject configuration variables into it at runtime and access them from within your frontend code, so you don't have to rebuild any images for different environments as part of your CI.<p>Whilst I'm sure this problem has been solved time and time again, I could never get a solution to be quite right.<p>Also, serving things like Astro from S3 gets to be tricky because CloudFront doesn't support index pages in subdirectories so the routing breaks. This fixes this.<p>Use it or don't, I think it's a cool little project and it's been a while since I worked on and released something :)

Show HN: Detecting adblock, without JavaScript, by abusing HTTP 103 responses

Show HN: Tracecat – Open-source security alert automation / SOAR alternative

Hi HN, we are building Tracecat (<a href="https://tracecat.com/">https://tracecat.com/</a>), an open source automation platform for security alerts. Tracecat automates the tasks a security analyst has to do when responding to a security alert: e.g. contact victims, investigate security logs, report vulnerability.<p>The average security analyst deals with 100 alerts per day. As soon as an alert comes in, you have to investigate and respond. An average alert takes ~30 minutes to analyze (and 100 x 30 min = 50 hours > one whole day) Lots of things get dropped, and this creates vulnerabilities. Many breaches can be traced back to week old alerts that didn’t get properly investigated.<p>Since the risks and costs are so high, top security teams currently pay Splunk SOAR $100,000/year to help automate alert processing. It’s a click-and-drag workflow builder with webhooks, REST API integrations, and JSON processors. A security engineer would use it to build alert automations that look like this: (1) webhook to receive alert (e.g. unusual powershell cmd) from Microsoft Defender; (2) send yes/no Slackbot to ask employee about the alert; (3) if confirmed as suspicious, send malware sample to VirusTotal for report (4) collect evidence from previous steps and dump it into a ticket.<p>If $100k a year seems wildly expensive for a Zapier-like platform, you’d be half right. Splunk SOAR is actually a Zapier + log search + Jira ticketing system.<p>Log storage—that’s how Splunk turns a $99/month workflow automation tool into a pricey enterprise product. Every piece of evidence collected (e.g. Slackbot response, malware report, GeoIP enrichment) and every past workflow trail has to be searchable by a human incident responder or auditor. Security teams need to know why every alert escalated to a SEV1 or not.<p>My cofounder and I are data engineers who fell into this space. We heard our security friends constantly complain about being priced out of a SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response platform) like Splunk SOAR.<p>We both wrote a lot of event-driven code at school (Master’s thesis) and work (Meta / PwC). We’re also early adopters of Quickwit / Tantivy, an OSS alternative to Elasticsearch / Apache Lucene that is cheaper and faster. It didn’t seem that difficult to build a cheaper open source SOAR, so we decided to do it.<p>Tracecat is also different as it can run in a single VM / laptop. Splunk SOAR and Tines are built for Fortune 10 needs, which means expensive Kubernetes clusters. Most security teams don’t need that scale, but are forced to pay the K8s “premium” (high complexity, hard to maintain). Tracecat uses OSS embedded databases (SQLite) and an event processing engine we built using Python 3.12 asyncio.<p>So far, we’ve just got a bare-bones alpha but you can already do quite a few things with it. e.g. trigger event-driven workflows from webhooks; use REST API integrations; parse responses using JSONPath; control flow using conditional blocks; store logs cheaply in Tantivy; open cases directly from workflows; prioritize and manage cases in a Jira-like table.<p>Tracecat uses Pydantic V2 for fast input / output validation and Zod for fast form validation. We care a lot about data quality! It’s also Apache-2.0 licensed so anyone can self-host the platform.<p>On our roadmap: integrations with popular security tools (Crowdstrike, Microsoft defender); pre-built workflows (e.g. investigating phishing email); better docs; more AI features like auto-labeling tickets, extracting data from unstructured text etc.<p>We’re still early so would love your feedback and opinions. Feel free to try us out or share it with your security friends. We have a cloud version up and running: <a href="https://platform.tracecat.com">https://platform.tracecat.com</a>.<p>Dear HN readers, we’d love to hear your incident response stories and the software you use (or not) to automate the work. Stories from security, site reliability engineering, or even physical systems like critical infrastructure monitoring are all very welcome!

Show HN: Jampack – Optimizes static websites as a post-processing step

Hi!<p>Jampack is a post-processing tool that takes the output of your Static Site Generator (aka SSG) and optimizes it for best user experience and best Core Web Vitals scores.<p>As of today it can:<p>- Optimize local images, CDN images or external images<p>- Optimize above-the-fold vs below-the-fold<p>- Limit images max width<p>- Inline critical CSS<p>- Prefetch links on scroll<p>- Improve browser compatibility<p>- Auto-fixes HTML issues<p>- Warn for HTML accessibility issues<p>- Compress all assets in the end<p>It processes directly the static output so it's compatible with any SSG or framework. We are intensively using it as a post-processing step to our Astro websites for example.<p>With Jampack, we end-up focusing more on how simple, readable and maintainable our code is, throw images of any size, and let it optimize for maximum performance.<p>We hope this can be helpful to lot of people! Cheers, Georges and the ‹div›RIOTS team!

Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language

Hi HN, For over two years I've been working on an App to learn languages (currently French, Italian and Spanish), together with my partner, a language teacher. I think it is finally ready to share with this community!<p>The idea is to introduce vocabulary and grammar whilst you read eBooks in your own language. I've found that it is easier to remember vocabulary 'in context' and with regular repetition. Plus you don't have to carve out dedicated time for language learning. Other apps require you to build a habit around various exercises or ‘games’, whereas lots of people already read books.<p>From testing with early users so far it's proving effective for building a basic understanding of a language and quickly getting to the point where you can read and broadly understand text in the target language. It’s even better in combination with other apps that help with listening/speaking like Pimsleur.<p>There were lots of technical challenges making this. It turned out to be (reassuringly) hard to get accuracy to an acceptable level, requiring a rabbit-hole into machine translation. There was a lot of testing required to optimise the engine that chooses the translations to show and to reduce the friction when reading books. And the backend to support uploading books is a beast in itself. I’d love to share details if there is interest.<p>Roadmap<p>- Accuracy - 100% accuracy is the target, but at present there can be errors. Feedback from users will be important here so that accuracy issues can be generalised and solved at scale. Errors can be reported within the app - please do so if you spot anything!<p>- Dynamic difficulty - rather than have a progression of difficulty levels I’d prefer to introduce vocabulary and grammar automatically in response to user progress, balancing against the friction of seeing unfamiliar words. There’s a lot ‘under the hood’ to manage this today, but plenty of room to improve.<p>- More practice features - to reinforce vocabulary/grammar and support writing, listening and speaking.<p>- Better eBook support - improving the formatting of eBooks within the app and providing more methods for finding good books to read.<p>Use of AI<p>- LLMs provided a step change in accuracy and have enabled a feature that explains translations and grammar to the user<p>- vastly improving the utility versus a year ago.<p>- I believe apps like this, which use AI to enhance or scale functionality rather than simply acting as a wrapper over APIs, will be the major beneficiaries as LLMs improve.<p>Take a look, and let me know your thoughts or questions!

Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language

Hi HN, For over two years I've been working on an App to learn languages (currently French, Italian and Spanish), together with my partner, a language teacher. I think it is finally ready to share with this community!<p>The idea is to introduce vocabulary and grammar whilst you read eBooks in your own language. I've found that it is easier to remember vocabulary 'in context' and with regular repetition. Plus you don't have to carve out dedicated time for language learning. Other apps require you to build a habit around various exercises or ‘games’, whereas lots of people already read books.<p>From testing with early users so far it's proving effective for building a basic understanding of a language and quickly getting to the point where you can read and broadly understand text in the target language. It’s even better in combination with other apps that help with listening/speaking like Pimsleur.<p>There were lots of technical challenges making this. It turned out to be (reassuringly) hard to get accuracy to an acceptable level, requiring a rabbit-hole into machine translation. There was a lot of testing required to optimise the engine that chooses the translations to show and to reduce the friction when reading books. And the backend to support uploading books is a beast in itself. I’d love to share details if there is interest.<p>Roadmap<p>- Accuracy - 100% accuracy is the target, but at present there can be errors. Feedback from users will be important here so that accuracy issues can be generalised and solved at scale. Errors can be reported within the app - please do so if you spot anything!<p>- Dynamic difficulty - rather than have a progression of difficulty levels I’d prefer to introduce vocabulary and grammar automatically in response to user progress, balancing against the friction of seeing unfamiliar words. There’s a lot ‘under the hood’ to manage this today, but plenty of room to improve.<p>- More practice features - to reinforce vocabulary/grammar and support writing, listening and speaking.<p>- Better eBook support - improving the formatting of eBooks within the app and providing more methods for finding good books to read.<p>Use of AI<p>- LLMs provided a step change in accuracy and have enabled a feature that explains translations and grammar to the user<p>- vastly improving the utility versus a year ago.<p>- I believe apps like this, which use AI to enhance or scale functionality rather than simply acting as a wrapper over APIs, will be the major beneficiaries as LLMs improve.<p>Take a look, and let me know your thoughts or questions!