The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: Every single torrent is on this website
Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads
I got tired of fighting through spammy tool sites just to do something simple, so I made Toolbrew in a few hours on Replit. Just a bunch of free little tools in one place. Text converters, SEO checks, video downloaders, that kind of stuff. No signups, no ads.<p>If there is a tool you wish existed, you can request it on the site and I will build it. Do your worst. Seriously, ANY tool.<p>Maybe it helps, maybe not. Enjoy!
Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads
I got tired of fighting through spammy tool sites just to do something simple, so I made Toolbrew in a few hours on Replit. Just a bunch of free little tools in one place. Text converters, SEO checks, video downloaders, that kind of stuff. No signups, no ads.<p>If there is a tool you wish existed, you can request it on the site and I will build it. Do your worst. Seriously, ANY tool.<p>Maybe it helps, maybe not. Enjoy!
Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads
I got tired of fighting through spammy tool sites just to do something simple, so I made Toolbrew in a few hours on Replit. Just a bunch of free little tools in one place. Text converters, SEO checks, video downloaders, that kind of stuff. No signups, no ads.<p>If there is a tool you wish existed, you can request it on the site and I will build it. Do your worst. Seriously, ANY tool.<p>Maybe it helps, maybe not. Enjoy!
Show HN: I spent 4 months building Duolingo but for your life
Show HN: I spent 4 months building Duolingo but for your life
Show HN: A little notebook for learning linear algebra with Python
Show HN: A little notebook for learning linear algebra with Python
Show HN: Vibe Linking
Show HN: Vibe Linking
Show HN: Vibe Linking
A vibrator helped me debug a motorcycle brake light system
A vibrator helped me debug a motorcycle brake light system
Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day
Hi HN! I've been building Dayflow, a macOS app that automatically tracks what you're actually working on (not just which apps you have open).<p>Here's what it does:<p>- It creates a semantic timeline of your day;<p>- It does it by understanding the content on your screen (with local or cloud VLMs);<p>- This allows you to see exactly where your time went without any manual logging.<p>Traditional time trackers tell you "3 hours in Chrome" which is not very helpful. Dayflow actually understands if you're reading documentation, debugging code, or scrolling HN. Instead of "Chrome: 3 hours", you get "Reviewed PR comments: 45min", "Read HN thread about Rust: 20min", "Debugged auth flow: 1.5hr".<p>I was an early Rewind user but rarely used the retrieval feature. I built Dayflow because I saw other interesting uses for screen data. I find that it helps me stay on track while working - I check it every few hours and make sure I’m spending my time the way I intended - if I’m not, I try to course correct.<p>Here’s what you need to know about privacy:<p>- Run 100% locally using qwen2.5-vl-3b (~4GB model)<p>- No cloud uploads, no account<p>- Full source available under MIT license (<a href="https://github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayflow" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayflow</a>)<p>- Optional: BYO Gemini API key for better quality (stored in Keychain, with free-tier workaround to prevent training on your data)<p>The tech stack is pretty simple, SwiftUI with a local sqlite DB. Uses native macOS apis for efficient screen captures. Since most people who run LLMs locally already have their tool of choice (Ollama, LLMStudio, etc.), I decided to not embed an LLM into Dayflow.<p>By far the biggest challenge was adapting from SOTA vision models like Gemini 2.5 Pro to small, local models. My constraints were that it had to take up <4GB of ram and have vision capabilities. I had to do a lot of evals to figure out that Qwen2.5VL-3B was the best balance of size and quality, but there was still a sizable tradeoff in quality that I had to accept. I also got creative with sampling rates and prompt chunking to deal with the 100x smaller context window. Processing a 15 minute segment takes ~32 local LLM calls vs 2 Gemini calls!<p>Here’s what I’m working on next:<p>Distillation: Using Gemini's high-quality outputs as training data to teach a local model the patterns it needs, hopefully closing the quality gap.<p>Custom dashboards where you can track answers to any question like "How long did I spend on HN?" or "Hours until my first deep work session of the day<p>I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially if you've struggled with productivity tracking or have ideas for what you'd want from a tool like this.
Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day
Hi HN! I've been building Dayflow, a macOS app that automatically tracks what you're actually working on (not just which apps you have open).<p>Here's what it does:<p>- It creates a semantic timeline of your day;<p>- It does it by understanding the content on your screen (with local or cloud VLMs);<p>- This allows you to see exactly where your time went without any manual logging.<p>Traditional time trackers tell you "3 hours in Chrome" which is not very helpful. Dayflow actually understands if you're reading documentation, debugging code, or scrolling HN. Instead of "Chrome: 3 hours", you get "Reviewed PR comments: 45min", "Read HN thread about Rust: 20min", "Debugged auth flow: 1.5hr".<p>I was an early Rewind user but rarely used the retrieval feature. I built Dayflow because I saw other interesting uses for screen data. I find that it helps me stay on track while working - I check it every few hours and make sure I’m spending my time the way I intended - if I’m not, I try to course correct.<p>Here’s what you need to know about privacy:<p>- Run 100% locally using qwen2.5-vl-3b (~4GB model)<p>- No cloud uploads, no account<p>- Full source available under MIT license (<a href="https://github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayflow" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayflow</a>)<p>- Optional: BYO Gemini API key for better quality (stored in Keychain, with free-tier workaround to prevent training on your data)<p>The tech stack is pretty simple, SwiftUI with a local sqlite DB. Uses native macOS apis for efficient screen captures. Since most people who run LLMs locally already have their tool of choice (Ollama, LLMStudio, etc.), I decided to not embed an LLM into Dayflow.<p>By far the biggest challenge was adapting from SOTA vision models like Gemini 2.5 Pro to small, local models. My constraints were that it had to take up <4GB of ram and have vision capabilities. I had to do a lot of evals to figure out that Qwen2.5VL-3B was the best balance of size and quality, but there was still a sizable tradeoff in quality that I had to accept. I also got creative with sampling rates and prompt chunking to deal with the 100x smaller context window. Processing a 15 minute segment takes ~32 local LLM calls vs 2 Gemini calls!<p>Here’s what I’m working on next:<p>Distillation: Using Gemini's high-quality outputs as training data to teach a local model the patterns it needs, hopefully closing the quality gap.<p>Custom dashboards where you can track answers to any question like "How long did I spend on HN?" or "Hours until my first deep work session of the day<p>I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially if you've struggled with productivity tracking or have ideas for what you'd want from a tool like this.
Show HN: Software Freelancers Contract Template
I started working as a freelancer [in Finland] a year ago and was surprised to learn that no decent contract template was available for direct assignments. There were some free contract templates available for intermediated assignments, but not for direct assignments. The "golden standard" of contract templates in Finland is an extremely heavy-handed and expensive template that costs ~500€ PER YEAR to use. Personally at the time I decided to just do a DIY contract for my first freelancing project.<p>Over time, as I got more engaged in the Finnish freelancing community, I realized that many people struggled with the same issue. After discussing this in our freelancing co-op Ohjelmistofriikit, we decided to invest both time and money into solving this problem. We decided right from the start that we were gonna open source everything and give it out for free.<p>We first developed a traditional document template in collaboration with a law firm. After that we developed a web generator that makes it easy to fill out the template. The user flow of the generator is designed to eliminate boilerplate-type work (such as hiding sections instead of showing "skip this section if condition X does not apply to you") and also to reduce mistakes users might make when editing a traditional document template (such as copypasting something incorrectly).<p>Although the legalese is designed for the Finnish jurisdiction, the contract template can be useful as an example for similar work in other jurisdictions.<p>Go ahead and draft a contract right there in your browser!
Show HN: Software Freelancers Contract Template
I started working as a freelancer [in Finland] a year ago and was surprised to learn that no decent contract template was available for direct assignments. There were some free contract templates available for intermediated assignments, but not for direct assignments. The "golden standard" of contract templates in Finland is an extremely heavy-handed and expensive template that costs ~500€ PER YEAR to use. Personally at the time I decided to just do a DIY contract for my first freelancing project.<p>Over time, as I got more engaged in the Finnish freelancing community, I realized that many people struggled with the same issue. After discussing this in our freelancing co-op Ohjelmistofriikit, we decided to invest both time and money into solving this problem. We decided right from the start that we were gonna open source everything and give it out for free.<p>We first developed a traditional document template in collaboration with a law firm. After that we developed a web generator that makes it easy to fill out the template. The user flow of the generator is designed to eliminate boilerplate-type work (such as hiding sections instead of showing "skip this section if condition X does not apply to you") and also to reduce mistakes users might make when editing a traditional document template (such as copypasting something incorrectly).<p>Although the legalese is designed for the Finnish jurisdiction, the contract template can be useful as an example for similar work in other jurisdictions.<p>Go ahead and draft a contract right there in your browser!
Show HN: Tips to stay safe from NPM supply chain attacks
Hi everyone, given the recent increase of attacks on the NPM supply chain, I've put together a list of tips and tricks to help developers stay secure on this specific topic: <a href="https://github.com/bodadotsh/npm-security-best-practices" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bodadotsh/npm-security-best-practices</a><p>I'd love for you to check it out, and contribute your own insights and best practices to make this a comprehensive resource for the community.<p>Cheers!
Show HN: I wrote an OS in 1000 lines of Zig
Show HN: I wrote an OS in 1000 lines of Zig