The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: I made tool that let's you see everything about any website
Yes, it's open source: <a href="https://github.com/lissy93/web-check">https://github.com/lissy93/web-check</a> :)<p>Why I'm building this? There are a lot of tools out there for discovering meta and security data relating to a website, IP or server. But currently, there isn't anything that does everything, all in one place and without a paywall/ user sign up.<p>It's still a WIP, and I'm working on a new version, with some more comprehensive checks, so any feedback would be much appreciated :)
Show HN: I made tool that let's you see everything about any website
Yes, it's open source: <a href="https://github.com/lissy93/web-check">https://github.com/lissy93/web-check</a> :)<p>Why I'm building this? There are a lot of tools out there for discovering meta and security data relating to a website, IP or server. But currently, there isn't anything that does everything, all in one place and without a paywall/ user sign up.<p>It's still a WIP, and I'm working on a new version, with some more comprehensive checks, so any feedback would be much appreciated :)
Show HN: Eidos – Offline alternative to Notion
I'm a big fan of Notion, having used it for 7 years. When I first met Notion, it was just a block document editor, and it didn't excite me until it released the Database. Later, I learned about Airtable, and a bunch of similar products, all of them are SaaS, with such powerful tables but poor performance. Why isn't there a personal offline version table? Most of the time, I don't need to collaborate with others. What I really want is a personalized, offline version of Notion with better performance and more flexibility. So that I can have full control over my data.<p>Notion, like most SaaS products, is not open-source, so I can't customize it to my heart's content. I can only wait and vote for new features, but I can code, and I don't want to wait. I really like the concepts of FOSS, solid, and local-first. SaaS could die. Long may the SQLite. So, I built Eidos based on sqlite for managing my personal data throughout my lifetime in one place. Eidos is a long-term project for me. It looks like Notion, but the core is more like "obsidian.sqlite" with a powerful extension system.<p>Here are a few key ideas:<p>- Eidos is built based on sqlite-wasm and runs entirely in the browser. It can be used immediately, with no installation or configuration required. It's a pure PWA, with full offline support.<p>- A block-styled document editor and an Airtable-like table, built on top of SQLite, where each table is a real SQLite table.<p>- A powerful extension system inspired by Figma plugin and Cloudflare worker. You can write scripts in TypeScript directly in the browser. It is easy to manipulate data in docs, tables, and the file system. It also supports API.<p>- If you're not a developer, you're still in luck. We're living in an AI era. LLM empowers people to craft their own software without writing any code. Eidos deeply integrated with LLM. You can translate, summarize, talk to your data, process table data in batches, and more. It makes your life easier with AI. You can fully customize your prompts and freely choose your LLM provider, without being locked to any vendor.<p>To be honest, so far, there are still some bugs and shortcomings, and it hasn't yet reached my envisioned perfection. There is still some work to be done, but the basic framework has taken shape. I've been working on it for a year and have eaten my own dog food for the past half year. To help Eidos become better (and celebrate the release of the Elden Ring's DLC), I've decided to make it open-source and gather more feedback. Now, I'm going to take a break and play Shadow of the Erdtree.<p>- <a href="https://eidos.space" rel="nofollow">https://eidos.space</a>
Show HN: I made a puzzle game that gently introduces my favorite math mysteries
This is the first iteration of a short game I’m making that tries to interactively explain some of my favorite math questions / ideas. My goal is mostly to get the player curious and not necessarily to explain absolutely everything.<p>There were a lot of fun technical parts to building this:<p>- For implementation reasons, it’s much easier if the lines all have integer intersection points with each other. To do this, when a new line is added I “cheat” by rounding intersections to integers and then splitting the old lines at the intersection into new linds (with potentially different slopes) going through the rounded point<p>- I had to draw semi accurate maps of actual places (UK, South America, US west coast) in the HTML canvas using just line segments. I tried a few different solutions, including using SVG data. I ended up using the topojson library to give nice line approximations to GeoJSON maps<p>- I use a simple backtracking algorithm to handle the live coloring of graphs<p>- I use turf.js’s polygonize function to handle finding polygons from line segments (very happy I didn’t have to implement this myself!)<p>- I wanted to make the game as mobile friendly as possible (don’t think I’ve nailed this quite yet)<p>There were also a few tradeoffs I made:<p>- I wanted give links earlier in the game for players to learn more, but I decided to wait until the end to maintain the flow of the game<p>- In order to make the game more mobile-friendly, I generally stuck to maps with a small number of regions (at least for maps people have to interact with them). So for the most part all of the instances in the game are “easy”
Show HN: I made a puzzle game that gently introduces my favorite math mysteries
This is the first iteration of a short game I’m making that tries to interactively explain some of my favorite math questions / ideas. My goal is mostly to get the player curious and not necessarily to explain absolutely everything.<p>There were a lot of fun technical parts to building this:<p>- For implementation reasons, it’s much easier if the lines all have integer intersection points with each other. To do this, when a new line is added I “cheat” by rounding intersections to integers and then splitting the old lines at the intersection into new linds (with potentially different slopes) going through the rounded point<p>- I had to draw semi accurate maps of actual places (UK, South America, US west coast) in the HTML canvas using just line segments. I tried a few different solutions, including using SVG data. I ended up using the topojson library to give nice line approximations to GeoJSON maps<p>- I use a simple backtracking algorithm to handle the live coloring of graphs<p>- I use turf.js’s polygonize function to handle finding polygons from line segments (very happy I didn’t have to implement this myself!)<p>- I wanted to make the game as mobile friendly as possible (don’t think I’ve nailed this quite yet)<p>There were also a few tradeoffs I made:<p>- I wanted give links earlier in the game for players to learn more, but I decided to wait until the end to maintain the flow of the game<p>- In order to make the game more mobile-friendly, I generally stuck to maps with a small number of regions (at least for maps people have to interact with them). So for the most part all of the instances in the game are “easy”
Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
Hey everyone! I'm introducing Radius - a project I've been working on for too long! It's an early stage and pretty minimal (which, according to YC means I launched early enough) alternative to Meetup.com, built using Ruby on Rails. It's a platform for creating thriving communities and discovering events around you.<p>What can you do on Radius?<p>- Want to create a group, post events and gather RSVPs? You're covered!<p>- Want event discovery? Coming soon™!<p>I'm a software engineer based in the UK. My first attempt to make this failed spectacularly when I hired a budget dev years ago to "build an MVP" when I had next to no knowledge of software development. So naturally, I changed my career and learned how to build it myself.<p>I wanted to build something that made it easy to find out what was happening around you. We have all these platforms focused on ticketing, meetups, and other event types - but they're all niche enough that they each only list a fragment of what's going on around us. Then you have another subset of groups which host their own website/mailing list and may only advertise an event on -insert social network- and you never know about it until it's too late.<p>The issue I have with existing platforms:<p>- Meetup excludes too many groups by not offering a free tier for smaller/non-profit groups which make up for a huge number of small communities. So many groups just end up dying because one person has to pay the fees. Then there's the fact that their search experience is just terrible. FWIW, I also think they have a marketing issue with the name Meetup.<p>- Eventbrite does ticketing pretty well, but completely failed to develop the group/community aspect and doesn't seem to have put much emphasis on the discovery of events either. They, like Meetup, only attract a certain subset of groups/events as well.<p>So, it feels like there's an opportunity to fill the gap with something that focuses on a wider range of events/groups and emphasises discovery and community. There's so much activity happening around us in the real world - and that's what I'd eventually like Radius to capture.<p>I'm aware that the discovery app category falls into the list of "YC honeypot ideas" but in the time that I've cared about this, nobody has built the thing I wanted to exist, damn it (Maybe that's a sign NOT to build it..).<p>At best, people might find this useful and at worst, it's been a fantastic learning experience.<p>--<p>Feedback -<p>There are a bunch of groups using it for events at the moment, and they've given great feedback to date. I haven't advertised it much though, so this is my attempt at gathering the next wave of feedback. Feel free to:<p>- Try it out: See if Radius works for your groups and events.<p>- Give feedback: Let me know what you think and how we can improve.<p>- Request features: Tell me what features would make Radius even better.<p>Thanks!<p>Link:- <a href="https://www.radius.to/" rel="nofollow">https://www.radius.to/</a><p>Example group:- <a href="https://www.radius.to/groups/toronto-ruby" rel="nofollow">https://www.radius.to/groups/toronto-ruby</a><p>Example event:- <a href="https://www.radius.to/groups/toronto-ruby/events/s1tczn2usqf5" rel="nofollow">https://www.radius.to/groups/toronto-ruby/events/s1tczn2usqf...</a>
Show HN: I made an open source and local translation app
A few years ago, right after high school, I decided to try to make a simultaneous translation app for Android as a side project, it took longer than expected (about 2 years) and I had to make a lot of compromises (I had to use Google's API and therefore make users use a developer key because at the time there were no free solutions for speech recognition and translation that had good quality). At the end of university, I decided to pick it up again and finally, using OpenAi's Whisper for speech recognition and Meta's NLLB for translation (with both running locally on the phone), I managed to make it free and totally open-source (as it was meant to be from the beginning).
The app is still in beta, so I would love your feedback.
Show HN: Billard – Generate music from ball collisions in 2D space
Hello HN! Here's Billard. It combines music and physics into a unique creative tool, as I explore various unconventional methods for generating music.<p>Most traditional music composition tools revolve around the idea of a repeatable pattern. Billard is a webapp that never repeats itself. It generates music automatically based on the collisions of balls in a 2D space. Collisions trigger notes (or chords) in a given key. One can add balls or move them (y-position is pitch); the app remembers its state between reloads; or it can be reset with the 'init' button on the top left. Gravity can be adjusted in real time to change the behavior of the balls.<p>It owes a lot of inspiration to Brian Eno and Erik Satie (inventor of <i>musique d'ameublement</i>, or "furniture music"). Some may think the lack of pattern makes it not musical enough -- but this lets it be listened to —and watched— for a while without boredom.<p>The webapp is made using plain JavaScript. (All SVG icons were made 'by hand'.) It uses Tone.js only for triggering piano samples. Beyond piano, it's MIDI-enabled and works well at slow speed with haunting, dark synth sounds.<p>Hope you like it!
Show HN: Token price calculator for 400+ LLMs
Hey HN! Tokencost is a utility library for estimating LLM costs. There are hundreds of different models now, and they all have their own pricing schemes. It’s difficult to keep up with the pricing changes, and it’s even more difficult to estimate how much your prompts and completions will cost until you see the bill.<p>Tokencost works by counting the number of tokens in prompt and completion messages and multiplying that number by the corresponding model cost. Under the hood, it’s really just a simple cost dictionary and some utility functions for getting the prices right. It also accounts for different tokenizers and float precision errors.<p>Surprisingly, most model providers don't actually report how much you spend until your bills arrive. We built Tokencost internally at AgentOps to help users track agent spend, and we decided to open source it to help developers avoid nasty bills.
Show HN: We made a small and cheap network switch
Hello, we're Max and Byran from MUREX Robotics, a high school robotics team from Exeter, New Hampshire. We are super proud to have made this open source piece of technology! It is only 6.9 dollars (actually!) from JLCPCB :) I hope you like it.<p>You can find us at byran@mrx.ee and max@mrx.ee as well if you have any questions.<p>We will be putting a small run of these boards for sale somewhere (we have <25 units of stock), probably for $10+shipping. Let us know if you're interested in more!<p>Board files for everything we make is here:
<a href="https://github.com/murexrobotics/electrical-2024">https://github.com/murexrobotics/electrical-2024</a>
Show HN: We made a small and cheap network switch
Hello, we're Max and Byran from MUREX Robotics, a high school robotics team from Exeter, New Hampshire. We are super proud to have made this open source piece of technology! It is only 6.9 dollars (actually!) from JLCPCB :) I hope you like it.<p>You can find us at byran@mrx.ee and max@mrx.ee as well if you have any questions.<p>We will be putting a small run of these boards for sale somewhere (we have <25 units of stock), probably for $10+shipping. Let us know if you're interested in more!<p>Board files for everything we make is here:
<a href="https://github.com/murexrobotics/electrical-2024">https://github.com/murexrobotics/electrical-2024</a>
Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative
shpool is a terminal session persistence tool developed internally at google to support remote workflows, which we have open sourced.
Show HN: Restate – Low-latency durable workflows for JavaScript/Java, in Rust
We'd love to share our work with you: Restate, a system for workflows-as-code (durable execution). With SDKs in JS/Java/Kotlin and a lightweight runtime built in Rust/Tokio.<p><a href="https://github.com/restatedev/">https://github.com/restatedev/</a>
<a href="https://restate.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://restate.dev/</a><p>It is free and open, SDKs are MIT-licensed, runtime permissive BSL (basically just the minimal Amazon defense).
We worked on that for a bit over a year. A few points I think are worth mentioning:<p>- Restate's runtime is a single binary, self-contained, no dependencies aside from a durable disk. It contains basically a lightweight integrated version of a durable log, workflow state machine, state storage, etc. That makes it very compact and easy to run both on a laptop and a server.<p>- Restate implements durable execution not only for workflows, but the core building block is durable RPC handlers (or event handler). It adds a few concepts on top of durable execution, like virtual objects (turn RPC handlers into virtual actors), durable communication, and durable promises. Here are more details: <a href="https://restate.dev/programming-model" rel="nofollow">https://restate.dev/programming-model</a><p>- Core design goal for APIs was to keep a familiar style. An app developer should look at Restate examples and say "hey, that looks quite familiar". You can let us know if that worked out.<p>- Basically every operation (handler invocation, step, ...) goes through a consensus layer, for a high degree of resilience and consistency.<p>- The lightweight log-centric architecture gives Restate still good latencies: For example around 50ms roundtrip (invoke to result) for a 3-step durable workflow handler (Restate on EBS with fsync for every step).<p>We'd love to hear what you think of it!
Show HN: Revideo – Create Videos with Code
Hey HN! We’re building Revideo (<a href="https://github.com/redotvideo/revideo">https://github.com/redotvideo/revideo</a>), an open source framework for programmatic video editing.<p>Revideo lets you create video templates in Typescript and render them with dynamic inputs through an API. It also comes with a <Player /> component that lets you preview your projects in the browser and integrate video editing functionality into web apps.<p>The project is useful for anyone who wants to build apps that automate certain video editing tasks. A lot of companies in the space build their own custom stack for this, like Opus (<a href="https://www.opus.pro/" rel="nofollow">https://www.opus.pro/</a>), which automatically creates highlight videos from podcasts, or Clueso (<a href="https://www.clueso.io/">https://www.clueso.io/</a>), which lets you create stutter-free product walkthroughs with AI voiceovers.<p>Revideo is based on the HTML Canvas API and is forked from Motion Canvas (<a href="https://github.com/motion-canvas/motion-canvas">https://github.com/motion-canvas/motion-canvas</a>), a tool that lets you create canvas animations. While Motion Canvas is intended by its maintainer to exclusively be a standalone application [1], we have turned Revideo into a library that developers can integrate into their apps, while specifically focusing on video use cases. To support this, we have, among other things, added the ability to do headless rendering, made video rendering much faster and added support for syncing and exporting audio.<p>We’re excited about programmatic video editing because of the possibility to automate content creation with AI. One of our users is building StoriesByAngris (<a href="https://storiesbyangris.com/" rel="nofollow">https://storiesbyangris.com/</a>), which lets you create video-based RPG stories from language prompts. Other users are marketing-tech companies that help their customers generate and A/B test different versions of video ads.<p>We started to work on video tooling because we ourselves explored a bunch of product ideas in the space of AI-based video creation earlier this year. For example, we built apps that automatically create educational short videos and tinkered with apps that let you create memes.<p>While building these products, we were frustrated with the video editing frameworks we used: Moviepy (<a href="https://github.com/Zulko/moviepy">https://github.com/Zulko/moviepy</a>), which we used initially, doesn’t work in the browser, so we’d often have to wait minutes for a video to render just to test our code changes. Remotion (<a href="https://github.com/remotion-dev/remotion">https://github.com/remotion-dev/remotion</a>), which we switched to later, is pretty good, but we didn’t want to rely on it as it is not FOSS (source-available only).<p>We had already followed Motion Canvas for some time and really liked it, so we thought that extending it would get us to something useful much faster than building an animation library from scratch. We initially tried to build Revideo as a set of Motion Canvas plugins, but we soon realized that the changes we were making were too drastic and far too complex to fit into plugins. This is why we ultimately created a fork. We’re unsure if this is the right way to go in the long term, and would prefer to find a way to build Revideo without feeling like we’re dividing the community - if you have experience with this (keeping forks with complex changes in sync with upstream) or other suggestions on how to solve this, we’d love your input.<p>Our current focus is improving the open source project. In the long term, we want to make money by building a rendering service for developers building apps with Revideo.<p>We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions on what we can improve! You can find our repo at <a href="https://github.com/redotvideo/revideo">https://github.com/redotvideo/revideo</a>, and you can explore example projects at <a href="https://github.com/redotvideo/examples">https://github.com/redotvideo/examples</a><p>[1] “Motion Canvas is not a normal npm package. It's a standalone tool that happens to be distributed via npm.” - <a href="https://github.com/orgs/motion-canvas/discussions/1015">https://github.com/orgs/motion-canvas/discussions/1015</a>
Show HN: Unforget, the note-taking app I always wanted: offline first, encrypted
Hi HN! I created Unforget out of years of frustration with Google Keep and the lack of alternative that met all my needs. I hope you find it useful too!<p>Features include:<p><pre><code> - import from Google Keep
- offline first including search
- sync when online
- own your data and fully encrypted
- Desktop, mobile, web
- lightweight, progressive web app without Electron.js
- markdown support
- programmable with public APIs
- open source [1]
</code></pre>
While I still use org mode for long-form notes with lots of code, Unforget has become my go-to for quickly jotting down ideas and to-do lists after migrating the thousands of notes I had on Google Keep.<p>In addition, I'm thrilled to announce the opening of our software agency, Computing Den [2]. We specialize in helping businesses transition from legacy software, manual workflows, and Excel spreadsheets to modern, automated systems. Please get it touch to discuss how we can help you or if you wish to join our team.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/computing-den/unforget">https://github.com/computing-den/unforget</a><p>[2] <a href="https://computing-den.com" rel="nofollow">https://computing-den.com</a>
ARC Prize – a $1M+ competition towards open AGI progress
Hey folks! Mike here. Francois Chollet and I are launching ARC Prize, a public competition to beat and open-source the solution to the ARC-AGI eval.<p>ARC-AGI is (to our knowledge) the only eval which measures AGI: a system that can efficiently acquire new skill and solve novel, open-ended problems. Most AI evals measure skill directly vs the acquisition of new skill.<p>Francois created the eval in 2019, SOTA was 20% at inception, SOTA today is only 34%. Humans score 85-100%. 300 teams attempted ARC-AGI last year and several bigger labs have attempted it.<p>While most other skill-based evals have rapidly saturated to human-level, ARC-AGI was designed to resist “memorization” techniques (eg. LLMs)<p>Solving ARC-AGI tasks is quite easy for humans (even children) but impossible for modern AI. You can try ARC-AGI tasks yourself here: <a href="https://arcprize.org/play" rel="nofollow">https://arcprize.org/play</a><p>ARC-AGI consists of 400 public training tasks, 400 public test tasks, and 100 secret test tasks. Every task is novel. SOTA is measured against the secret test set which adds to the robustness of the eval.<p>Solving ARC-AGI tasks requires no world knowledge, no understanding of language. Instead each puzzle requires a small set of “core knowledge priors” (goal directedness, objectness, symmetry, rotation, etc.)<p>At minimum, a solution to ARC-AGI opens up a completely new programming paradigm where programs can perfectly and reliably generalize from an arbitrary set of priors. At maximum, unlocks the tech tree towards AGI.<p>Our goal with this competition is:<p>1. Increase the number of researchers working on frontier AGI research (vs tinkering with LLMs). We need new ideas and the solution is likely to come from an outsider!
2. Establish a popular, objective measure of AGI progress that the public can use to understand how close we are to AGI (or not). Every new SOTA score will be published here: <a href="https://x.com/arcprize" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/arcprize</a>
3. Beat ARC-AGI and learn something new about the nature of intelligence.<p>Happy to answer questions!
Show HN: Crawl a modern website to a zip, serve the website from the zip
Show HN: Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe
Show HN: Markdown HN profiles at {user}.at.hn
Very opportunistic toy project as I saw the domain was up for grabs: 'at.hn' is a little site where people can have their own subdomains for whatever their HN username is (opt-in only by adding a slug to your bio). It doesn't really do much. Just shows your HN bio rendered as markdown plus meta stuff. I'm thinking of adding an aggregated user listing on the homepage so people can explore profiles. There's a bunch of interesting people on HN but discoverability is a bit longwinded. I'm wondering what other features people want. Otherwise shall likely leave it as-is. I remember hnbadges was a thing for a while, but can't remember what happened to it. Did people like that? Anyway, at.hn's on github if people want to contribute. - <a href="https://github.com/padolsey/at.hn">https://github.com/padolsey/at.hn</a>
Show HN: Markdown HN profiles at {user}.at.hn
Very opportunistic toy project as I saw the domain was up for grabs: 'at.hn' is a little site where people can have their own subdomains for whatever their HN username is (opt-in only by adding a slug to your bio). It doesn't really do much. Just shows your HN bio rendered as markdown plus meta stuff. I'm thinking of adding an aggregated user listing on the homepage so people can explore profiles. There's a bunch of interesting people on HN but discoverability is a bit longwinded. I'm wondering what other features people want. Otherwise shall likely leave it as-is. I remember hnbadges was a thing for a while, but can't remember what happened to it. Did people like that? Anyway, at.hn's on github if people want to contribute. - <a href="https://github.com/padolsey/at.hn">https://github.com/padolsey/at.hn</a>