The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: I made a tool to clean and convert any webpage to Markdown
My partner usually writes substack posts which I then mirror to our website’s blog section.<p>To automate this, I made a simple tool to scrape the post and clean it so that I can drop it to our blog easily. This might be useful to others as well.<p>Oh and ofcourse you can instruct GPT to make any final edits :D
Show HN: 5 Years Ago I made the Recovery Kit, I just made the RK2
The Recovery Kit 2 is another cyberdeck that for me is part computer, part backup device, and part functional movie prop. It's been fun to build, and the HN community has been great with ideas- especially around hosting and getting me off Squarespace. I hope you all enjoy!
Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
Hello everyone!<p>At a company I worked for, we needed to develop an MVP (basically a web page) and apply certain business logic to a Google Drive spreadsheet that was frequently updated by the Sales team.<p>In this case, we had two options:<p>Develop a backend to replace the current spreadsheet and have the sales team use it as a new "backoffice" - This would take a very long time, and if the hypothesis we were testing was wrong, it would be time wasted.<p>Create the web page and use Google's SDK to extract data from the spreadsheet.<p>We chose to go with the second option because it was quicker. Indeed, it was much faster than creating a new backoffice. But not as quick as we imagined. Integrating with Google's SDK requires some effort, especially to handle the OAuth logic, configure it in the console, and understand the documentation (which is quite shallow, by the way).<p>Anyway! We did the project and I realized that maybe other devs might have encountered similar issues. Therefore, I developed a tool that transforms Google spreadsheets into "realtime APIs" with PATCH, GET, POST, and DELETE methods.<p>Since it's a product for devs, I think it would be cool to hear your opinions. It's still quite primitive, but the basic features already work.<p><a href="https://zerosheets.com" rel="nofollow">https://zerosheets.com</a>
Show HN: Mazelit - My wife and I released our first game
Hey folks,<p>About a year ago my wife and I, both closing in on 40, quit our jobs at Red Hat to start a games company and learn game development. Many things happened along the road, and about a week ago we released our first (small) game on Steam.<p><a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/2816120/Mazelit/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/2816120/Mazelit/</a><p>The demo is free to play up to level 8 (the final game plays up to level 80) and we'd appreciate any feedback you have, whether it's for the store page or the game itself.<p>We made the game in Godot 4.2 in roughly 3 months and I was working full time next to it. Since we ran into a bunch of roadblocks, we decided to also offer the entire source code up as a DLC in case someone wants to go look how we implemented the game, mod the game, or compile it for a different platform. The only thing we can't redistribute with the game code is the Steamworks SDK, which is available for download from Steam. (The game minus integration is fully runnable without the SDK, though.)<p>Cheers and happy weekend!
Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
Here's a "behind-the-scenes" look at my development of a cool sensor during my PhD (electrical engineering). This sensor is only about 1/3 of my total research for my degree and took about a year.<p>I've been on HN for a while now and I've seen my fair share of posts about the woes of pursuing a PhD. Now that I'm done with mine I wanna share some anecdotal evidence that doing a PhD can actually be enjoyable (not necessarily easy) and also be doable in 3 years.<p>When I started I knew I didn't want to work on something that would never leave the lab or languish in a dissertation PDF no one will ever read. Thanks to an awesome advisor I think I managed to thread the needle between simplicity and functionality.<p>Looking back, the ideas and methods behind it are pretty straightforward, but getting there took some doing. It’s funny how things seem obvious once you've figured them out!<p>Oh, I love creating GUIs for sensor data and visualizations as you'll see -- it's such a game changer! pyqtgraph is my go-to at the moment - such a great library.
Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
Here's a "behind-the-scenes" look at my development of a cool sensor during my PhD (electrical engineering). This sensor is only about 1/3 of my total research for my degree and took about a year.<p>I've been on HN for a while now and I've seen my fair share of posts about the woes of pursuing a PhD. Now that I'm done with mine I wanna share some anecdotal evidence that doing a PhD can actually be enjoyable (not necessarily easy) and also be doable in 3 years.<p>When I started I knew I didn't want to work on something that would never leave the lab or languish in a dissertation PDF no one will ever read. Thanks to an awesome advisor I think I managed to thread the needle between simplicity and functionality.<p>Looking back, the ideas and methods behind it are pretty straightforward, but getting there took some doing. It’s funny how things seem obvious once you've figured them out!<p>Oh, I love creating GUIs for sensor data and visualizations as you'll see -- it's such a game changer! pyqtgraph is my go-to at the moment - such a great library.
Show HN: Sonauto – A more controllable AI music creator
Hey HN,<p>My cofounder and I trained an AI music generation model and after a month of testing we're launching 1.0 today. Ours is interesting because it's a latent diffusion model instead of a language model, which makes it more controllable: <a href="https://sonauto.ai/">https://sonauto.ai/</a><p>Others do music generation by training a Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder like Descript Audio Codec (<a href="https://github.com/descriptinc/descript-audio-codec">https://github.com/descriptinc/descript-audio-codec</a>) to turn music into tokens, then training an LLM on those tokens. Instead, we ripped the tokenization part off and replaced it with a normal variational autoencoder bottleneck (along with some other important changes to enable insane compression ratios). This gave us a nice, normally distributed latent space on which to train a diffusion transformer (like Sora). Our diffusion model is also particularly interesting because it is the first audio diffusion model to generate coherent lyrics!<p>We like diffusion models for music generation because they have some interesting properties that make controlling them easier (so you can make <i>your own</i> music instead of just taking what the machine gives you). For example, we have a rhythm control mode where you can upload your own percussion line or set a BPM. Very soon you'll also be able to generate proper variations of an uploaded or previously generated song (e.g., you could even sing into Voice Memos for a minute and upload that!). @Musicians of HN, try uploading your songs and using Rhythm Control/let us know what you think! Our goal is to enable more of you, not replace you.<p>For example, we turned this drum line (<a href="https://sonauto.ai/songs/uoTKycBghUBv7wA2YfNz">https://sonauto.ai/songs/uoTKycBghUBv7wA2YfNz</a>) into this full song (<a href="https://sonauto.ai/songs/KSK7WM1PJuz1euhq6lS7">https://sonauto.ai/songs/KSK7WM1PJuz1euhq6lS7</a> skip to 1:05 if impatient) or this other song I like better (<a href="https://sonauto.ai/songs/qkn3KYv0ICT9kjWTmins">https://sonauto.ai/songs/qkn3KYv0ICT9kjWTmins</a> - we accidentally compressed it with AAC instead of Opus which hurt quality, though)<p>We also like diffusion models because while they're expensive to train, they're cheap to serve. We built our own efficient inference infrastructure instead of using those expensive inference as a service startups that are all the rage. That's why we're making generations on our site free and unlimited for as long as possible.<p>We'd love to answer your questions. Let us know what you think of our first model! <a href="https://sonauto.ai/">https://sonauto.ai/</a>
Show HN: I made a discrete logic network card
Show HN: We built PriceLevel to find out what companies pay for SaaS
Hey HN! Christine and Steven here. As a PM and engineer, we’ve both evaluated and purchased a lot of software. One of the biggest frustrations was figuring out how much it would cost us without having to go through the sales process. When we did have a quote, we had no idea if we were getting a good deal or ripped off.<p>We built a site where you can see what other companies are actually paying for SaaS and enterprise software. Buyers contribute prices via quotes, pricing proposals, and other documentation to ensure quality.<p>We unlocked Talkdesk for Show HN users so that you can use the product without needing to sign in or upgrade. Check it out at <a href="https://www.pricelevel.com/showhn" rel="nofollow">https://www.pricelevel.com/showhn</a>. Would love to hear any feedback, thank you!
Show HN: I open-sourced the in-memory PostgreSQL I built at work for E2E tests
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!