The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: Draw a fish and watch it swim with the others
Made this website as an exercise in vibe-coding and GCP. It was posted about a few times around the internet, on sites like [Morning Brew](<a href="https://www.morningbrew.com/issues/business-buzzkill" rel="nofollow">https://www.morningbrew.com/issues/business-buzzkill</a>), [MetaFilter](<a href="https://www.metafilter.com/209703/Draw-A-Fish" rel="nofollow">https://www.metafilter.com/209703/Draw-A-Fish</a>), boingboing.net, etc. I think it's cute!<p>I built a basic CNN trained against penises and swastikas, and then anything that doesn't hit the 63% confidence score gets sent to a mod queue, a [vibe-coded fish-tinder](<a href="https://bsky.app/profile/bigass.bsky.social/post/3luvikxn3f22n" rel="nofollow">https://bsky.app/profile/bigass.bsky.social/post/3luvikxn3f2...</a>).<p>Was a fun exercise, spent about a month on it. Frontend is HTML5 hosted on github pages, backend is Node.JS on GCP.
Show HN: Draw a fish and watch it swim with the others
Made this website as an exercise in vibe-coding and GCP. It was posted about a few times around the internet, on sites like [Morning Brew](<a href="https://www.morningbrew.com/issues/business-buzzkill" rel="nofollow">https://www.morningbrew.com/issues/business-buzzkill</a>), [MetaFilter](<a href="https://www.metafilter.com/209703/Draw-A-Fish" rel="nofollow">https://www.metafilter.com/209703/Draw-A-Fish</a>), boingboing.net, etc. I think it's cute!<p>I built a basic CNN trained against penises and swastikas, and then anything that doesn't hit the 63% confidence score gets sent to a mod queue, a [vibe-coded fish-tinder](<a href="https://bsky.app/profile/bigass.bsky.social/post/3luvikxn3f22n" rel="nofollow">https://bsky.app/profile/bigass.bsky.social/post/3luvikxn3f2...</a>).<p>Was a fun exercise, spent about a month on it. Frontend is HTML5 hosted on github pages, backend is Node.JS on GCP.
Show HN: Draw a fish and watch it swim with the others
Made this website as an exercise in vibe-coding and GCP. It was posted about a few times around the internet, on sites like [Morning Brew](<a href="https://www.morningbrew.com/issues/business-buzzkill" rel="nofollow">https://www.morningbrew.com/issues/business-buzzkill</a>), [MetaFilter](<a href="https://www.metafilter.com/209703/Draw-A-Fish" rel="nofollow">https://www.metafilter.com/209703/Draw-A-Fish</a>), boingboing.net, etc. I think it's cute!<p>I built a basic CNN trained against penises and swastikas, and then anything that doesn't hit the 63% confidence score gets sent to a mod queue, a [vibe-coded fish-tinder](<a href="https://bsky.app/profile/bigass.bsky.social/post/3luvikxn3f22n" rel="nofollow">https://bsky.app/profile/bigass.bsky.social/post/3luvikxn3f2...</a>).<p>Was a fun exercise, spent about a month on it. Frontend is HTML5 hosted on github pages, backend is Node.JS on GCP.
Show HN: I made a website that makes you cry
Show HN: I made a website that makes you cry
Show HN: AgentMail – Email infra for AI agents
Hey HN, we're Haakam, Michael, and Adi. We're building AgentMail (<a href="https://agentmail.to/">https://agentmail.to/</a>), an API to give AI agents their own email inboxes. We’re not talking about AI for your email, this is email for your AI.<p>We started building email agents because they can converse with users in their inboxes, automate email-based workflows, and authenticate with third-party applications. Given these unique capabilities, we think email will be a core interface for agents.<p>But we were building on top of Gmail, which was a struggle: poor API support, expensive subscriptions, rate limits, sending limits, GCP Pub/Sub, OAuth, crappy keyword search, and an overall terrible developer experience.<p>Gmail and other providers didn’t work for us. So we decided to bite the bullet and build our own.<p>AgentMail is like Gmail, but API-first, with programmatic inbox creation, events over webhooks and websockets, simple API key auth, organization-wide semantic search, structured data extraction, and usage-based pricing that scales with emails sent/received.<p>Here’s a demo of building an email agent: <a href="https://youtu.be/1V7BISeFUTM" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/1V7BISeFUTM</a>, and here’s a demo of a voice agent with its own email inbox: <a href="https://youtu.be/eG2fCsRK4RY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/eG2fCsRK4RY</a><p>So far AgentMail has been deployed to use cases such as apps with dedicated inboxes for each user, voice agents that receive documents in real time, automated account provisioning and QA testing, cold outbound platforms with thousands of inboxes, automations for processing invoices, and agents that coordinate work with humans and other agents.<p>We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. You can try our playground at <a href="https://chat.agentmail.to">https://chat.agentmail.to</a>
Show HN: Mcp-use – Connect any LLM to any MCP
Hey Pietro and Luigi here, we are the authors of mcp-use (<a href="https://github.com/mcp-use/mcp-use">https://github.com/mcp-use/mcp-use</a>).<p>When the first MCP servers came out we were very excited about the technology, but as soon as we wanted to get our hands dirty, we found out that MCP could be used only through Claude Desktop or Cursor. As engineers, we did not like that. MCP seemed like something you wanted to use to build products and applications yourself, not something to hide behind a closed source application.<p>So we approached the SDK but were pretty dissatisfied with the developer experience (double async loops, lots of boilerplate). We decided to write mcp-use to make our lives easier.<p>mcp-use lets you connect any LLM to any MCP server in just 6 lines of code. We provide a high level abstraction over the official MCP SDK that makes your life easier and supports all the functionalities of the protocol.<p>Demo video here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL_B6LZAsp4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL_B6LZAsp4</a>.<p>The key abstractions we provide are called MCPClient and MCPAgent.<p>MCPClient takes in a set of server configurations, automatically detects the transport type and creates a background task which handles the stream from/to the server.<p>MCPAgent is a combination of the MCPClient, an LLM, and a custom system prompt. It consumes the MCP client by transforming the tools, resources and prompts into model agnostic tools that can be called by the LLM.<p>The library also contains some cool utilities:<p>- secure sandboxed execution of MCP servers (we know the protocol doesn't shine for security)<p>- meta-tools that allow the agent to search over available servers and tools (to avoid context flooding) and connect dynamically to the server it needs (you could create the omnipotent agent with this).<p>Some cool things we did with this:
- write an agent that can use a browser and create/read linear tickets updated with latest information on the internet<p>- write an agent that has access to the metrics of our company to automatically create weekly reports.<p>- I connected an agent to an IKEA curtain I hacked an MCP on to adapt the lighting of my room from images of the lighting situation.<p>- recreated am open source claude code like CLI, with full MCP capability but with custom models and BYOK (<a href="https://github.com/mcp-use/mcp-use-cli">https://github.com/mcp-use/mcp-use-cli</a>).<p>We recently crossed 100,000 download and we are used by many organizations, including NASA!<p>We’d love to hear what you think of it, most importantly how we can improve it! We are happy to answer any questions and look forward to your comments.
Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game
It's a web app that uses AI to turn any book into a playable text adventure. Your favorite book, but your choices, hence your story. You can even "remix" the genre like playing Dune as a noir detective story.<p>Note: Work in progress. Suggestions are welcome.
Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game
It's a web app that uses AI to turn any book into a playable text adventure. Your favorite book, but your choices, hence your story. You can even "remix" the genre like playing Dune as a noir detective story.<p>Note: Work in progress. Suggestions are welcome.
Show HN: Companies use AI to take your calls. I built AI to make them for you
We're living in this weird asymmetry where companies use AI to talk to us, but we're still manually dialing them. Companies everywhere are adopting AI voice agents lately. Big retail, family dentist clinics, local pharmacy. This year, I've been in a few calls where it's super natural sounding AI, which has been pretty cool to experience. But then it got me thinking - why are we, the consumers, still the ones making calls if they're using robots for theirs?<p>So I built Piper: basically AI that makes phone calls for you. You tell it what you need (book appointment, check on an order, dispute some charge, whatever), and it handles the entire conversation while you do actual work. Right now it's a web app, Chrome extension is pending approval but soon you'll be able to click any phone number anywhere and just let Piper handle it.<p>Technical stuff that was harder than expected:<p>Latency - every millisecond counts in conversation, had to optimize around kv cache, got it down to ~1000ms to first word over PSTN for telephony, which feels pretty natural<p>Keeping the voice agents on track - built custom context engineering logic that constantly updates the agent's situational awareness, so it knows when it's been transferred, when it's on hold, etc<p>Done ~50 successful calls with early testers so far. Main failures are when they need complex verification or documents. Also had to take down our IVR navigation temporarily :/, found some edge cases that were causing unnecessary transfers but working on fixing that.<p>I really think we're heading toward this world where AI talks to AI for most routine things, and phone calls might be the first real example of this happening at scale!<p>you can check out the a voice demo on our website. <a href="https://pipervoice.com" rel="nofollow">https://pipervoice.com</a>
Show HN: Companies use AI to take your calls. I built AI to make them for you
We're living in this weird asymmetry where companies use AI to talk to us, but we're still manually dialing them. Companies everywhere are adopting AI voice agents lately. Big retail, family dentist clinics, local pharmacy. This year, I've been in a few calls where it's super natural sounding AI, which has been pretty cool to experience. But then it got me thinking - why are we, the consumers, still the ones making calls if they're using robots for theirs?<p>So I built Piper: basically AI that makes phone calls for you. You tell it what you need (book appointment, check on an order, dispute some charge, whatever), and it handles the entire conversation while you do actual work. Right now it's a web app, Chrome extension is pending approval but soon you'll be able to click any phone number anywhere and just let Piper handle it.<p>Technical stuff that was harder than expected:<p>Latency - every millisecond counts in conversation, had to optimize around kv cache, got it down to ~1000ms to first word over PSTN for telephony, which feels pretty natural<p>Keeping the voice agents on track - built custom context engineering logic that constantly updates the agent's situational awareness, so it knows when it's been transferred, when it's on hold, etc<p>Done ~50 successful calls with early testers so far. Main failures are when they need complex verification or documents. Also had to take down our IVR navigation temporarily :/, found some edge cases that were causing unnecessary transfers but working on fixing that.<p>I really think we're heading toward this world where AI talks to AI for most routine things, and phone calls might be the first real example of this happening at scale!<p>you can check out the a voice demo on our website. <a href="https://pipervoice.com" rel="nofollow">https://pipervoice.com</a>
Show HN: Use Their ID – Use your local UK MP’s ID for the Online Safety Act
Hi HN -
I made a site that takes a UK postcode, grabs the local MP's information and generates an AI mockup of what their ID might look like.<p>It's a small, silly protest at the stupidity of the Online Safety Act that just came into force.<p>edit - My open AI credits got hugged to death, please use a known postcode (like one from Kier Starmer's constituency, WC2B6NH) in the meantime.
Show HN: Use Their ID – Use your local UK MP’s ID for the Online Safety Act
Hi HN -
I made a site that takes a UK postcode, grabs the local MP's information and generates an AI mockup of what their ID might look like.<p>It's a small, silly protest at the stupidity of the Online Safety Act that just came into force.<p>edit - My open AI credits got hugged to death, please use a known postcode (like one from Kier Starmer's constituency, WC2B6NH) in the meantime.
Show HN: Windows 7 GUI for the web
Show HN: Windows 7 GUI for the web
Show HN: Windows 7 GUI for the web
Show HN: Apple Health MCP Server
Hey HN,<p>This is an MCP server to chat with Apple Health data. I built it because I'm working on (yet another) personal trainer tool that keeps track of my workout goals, etc. and does scheduling for me. Part of that is weekly check-ins. I thought pairing those check-ins with sensor data could be useful, so here we are.<p>It seems there isn't a way to automate access to Apple Health data, so this relies on an iOS app that can quickly/easily export key data to CSV. So the process at the moment is to export the data every Sunday before doing a check-in. More steps than I'd like, but in practice isn't a big lift.<p>Under the hood this is mostly a thin wrapper around duckdb.<p>There's a video of it in action here: <a href="https://x.com/realtron/status/1947710791521591514" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/realtron/status/1947710791521591514</a>
Show HN: Apple Health MCP Server
Hey HN,<p>This is an MCP server to chat with Apple Health data. I built it because I'm working on (yet another) personal trainer tool that keeps track of my workout goals, etc. and does scheduling for me. Part of that is weekly check-ins. I thought pairing those check-ins with sensor data could be useful, so here we are.<p>It seems there isn't a way to automate access to Apple Health data, so this relies on an iOS app that can quickly/easily export key data to CSV. So the process at the moment is to export the data every Sunday before doing a check-in. More steps than I'd like, but in practice isn't a big lift.<p>Under the hood this is mostly a thin wrapper around duckdb.<p>There's a video of it in action here: <a href="https://x.com/realtron/status/1947710791521591514" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/realtron/status/1947710791521591514</a>
Show HN: Price Per Token – LLM API Pricing Data
The LLM providers are constantly adding new models and updating their API prices. Anyone building AI applications knows that these prices are very important to their bottom line. The only place I am aware of is going to these provider's individual website pages to check the price per token.<p>To solve this inconvenience I spent a few hours making pricepertoken.com which has the latest model's up-to-date prices all in one place.<p>Thinking about adding image models too especially since you have multiple options (fal, replicate) to use the same model and the prices are not always the same.
Show HN: Price Per Token – LLM API Pricing Data
The LLM providers are constantly adding new models and updating their API prices. Anyone building AI applications knows that these prices are very important to their bottom line. The only place I am aware of is going to these provider's individual website pages to check the price per token.<p>To solve this inconvenience I spent a few hours making pricepertoken.com which has the latest model's up-to-date prices all in one place.<p>Thinking about adding image models too especially since you have multiple options (fal, replicate) to use the same model and the prices are not always the same.