The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: ScrapScript – A tiny functional language for sharable software
Hi friends,<p>I started casually working on scrapscript in 2015. I built a few compilers over the years to test out various ideas/implementations, and I think I'm finally happy with the overall design.<p>The code is not public yet. Email me at hello@taylor.town if you're interested in joining the core team later this year.<p>Let me know if you have any questions or feedback :)
Show HN: Neat – Minimalist CSS Framework
Today I fixed a couple little bugs and released a new version of my minimalist CSS framework. I built this to scratch my own itch and I've been using it for a few years as the starting point for most of my own websites.<p>I noticed I hadn't shared this with HN for about 18 months (5 or 6 minor version changes) so I thought it might be okay to do that now.<p>Edit: Err, I missed a post from 7 months ago.<p>Previous Posts:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32990838" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32990838</a>
(7 months ago)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24594381" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24594381</a> (Sept 25, 2021)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26308052" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26308052</a> (March 1, 2021)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25660317" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25660317</a> (January 20, 2021)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221957" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221957</a> (May 28, 2020)
Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
GB Renewables Map an energy experiment created entirely in my free time (day job is visualisation at Octopus Energy).<p>It's an interactive map showing live generation for major wind farms in Great Britain, showing what each wind farm is generating both now and in the past, and where that generation is physically located.<p>Animated weather data is from WeatherLayers and shows current and historic wind conditions on the map, providing context to wind generation around the country.<p>History mode allows you to go back in time and see wind generation and weather conditions for a particular date and time. It's great for exploring days of record generation, such as the 21.6GW record on January 10th, 2023!<p>Prediction mode lets you see what wind farms are estimated to be generating using current wind conditions and model based on historic generation and wind speeds. Is a wind farm generating as you expect, or is there something to look into?<p>An experimental feature allows you to see what future wind farms could be generating today (or in the past!) if they were already built and operational. If you click the "sparkle" button on the map you'll get to see what the upcoming 3.6GW Dogger Bank wind farm is estimated to generate if it was operational today.<p>There's an "About" section on the site that goes into detail on the various public data sources and how some of the features work. I also document a lot of this on my Twitter @robhawkes if you're curious.<p>This is just the start and there are many more features to come!<p>Please let me know your comments and suggestions.
Show HN: I built a multiplayer voxel browser game engine
Show HN: Homemade rocketship treehouse – hardware to custom OS
(This was previously submitted as <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2246856" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2246856</a>)<p>The Ravenna Ultra-Low-Altitude Vehicle is a backyard rocketship treehouse nestled in the Seattle neighborhood of Ravenna. Click the link to see a demo video (<a href="http://rocket.jonh.net" rel="nofollow">http://rocket.jonh.net</a>).<p>The hexagonal treehouse is about 6.5 feet (2 meters) across at its widest point. The frame is welded mild steel with riveted aluminum siding. It contains nearly 800 LEDs forming dozens of numeric displays spread across 14 control panels, each with an acrylic face laser-cut and etched with labels such as "Lunar Distance" and "Hydraulic Pressure". The pilot controls the rocket using a joystick and panels full of working switches, knobs and buttons. Underneath the capsule are three "thrusters" that shoot plumes of water and compressed air under the control of the pilot's joystick, simulating real positioning thrusters. Takeoff and docking sequences are augmented by a paint-shaker that simulates the vibration of a rocket engine. Sound effects complete the illusion, with a powered subwoofer that gives the rocket a satisfying rumble.<p>When it was built in 2011, rocket operations were controlled by three Atmega328 microprocessors on custom-fabricated printed circuit boards, running a small operating system, RULOS, built just for this project. A trench running from the house to the rocket carries 12VDC power for the lighting and electronics, water for the thrusters, compressed air, and several data signals.<p>Since 2011, the two-person team has upgraded it, here is a recent update from the makers:<p>One of the most visible changes is replacing the primary 4-line display with a slicker 6-line display (i.e., 6 rows of 8 columns of 7-segment LEDs). The audio synthesizer has been upgraded to a PCB that can generate 50khz, 16-bit audio. The interconnection bus, which had been flat IDC cable carrying individual on/off lines, was upgraded to a true I2C-based networked distributed system with over a dozen individually addressable targets, all interconnected by standard cat5 cable that carries both our I2C protocol and power. We also moved much of the electronics from 8-bit atmega328s to newer, 32-bit STM32F3's. RULOS has been expanded into a pretty general purpose embedded systems platform ported to 5 major lines of CPU (atmega, attiny, stm32, nxp lpc, and esp32). We've used it for dozens of other projects in the last 12 years, including a nanosecond-accurate timestamper, a GPS datalogger, an air quality sensor, various little electronic control boards for toys (e.g. these, and this), and an autonomous boat (that sank). It is all available on Github: <a href="https://github.com/jelson/rulos">https://github.com/jelson/rulos</a>.
Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
Show HN: I made a SQL game to help people learn / challenge their skills
Show HN: I made a SQL game to help people learn / challenge their skills
Show HN: WasmGPT – “ChatGPT” in the browser, no WebGPU and no server needed
Using threaded emscripten to speed up the generation and offload the main loop. No SIMD or other optimizations. Might work faster with #enable-experimental-webassembly-features enabled.<p>Tested in x86 Chrome and Firefox, Apple Silicon Safari<p>Run it yourself: <a href="https://github.com/lxe/ggml/tree/wasm-demo">https://github.com/lxe/ggml/tree/wasm-demo</a><p>Thanks, <a href="https://github.com/ggerganov/ggml">https://github.com/ggerganov/ggml</a>,
Show HN: TxtNet Browser – Browse the Web over SMS, No Wi-Fi/Mobile Data Needed
Hello all,<p>This is my second year of working on a project[1] with the goal of browsing the web, on an Android smartphone, without reliance on Wi-Fi or mobile data. While this concept might seem aimless, my goal was to provide a way for people in areas with limited, expensive, or censored cellular internet access a way to view the web in a basic format. I finished work on a basic client-server model last year[2], and this year, I implemented a new pseudo-distributed peer-to-peer model that allows any TxtNet Browser user to use their own smartphone to run a background server service that communicates via the user's own primary mobile number. The main advantage to this model over last year's use of the Twilio API is the fact that with an unlimited SMS plan from a consumer carrier, you will likely end up paying significantly less than the amount you would pay for Twilio credits (averaging about ~$0.50 per website). There's a lot going on with the stateless nature of SMS, GSM-7 encoding, and Brotli compression, so please ask any questions you might have!<p>I've also started up a test server instance running on a +1 country code phone number, so feel free to test out the app with your own smartphone. Like mentioned in the GitHub repo, please be aware that I (necessarily) have access to every phone number and associated request that is sent. Of course, anyone can host their own server instance, and if you would like to share it, feel free to get in touch so I can add the number to the repo! Also, there are likely many bugs still lurking, so feel free to report those.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/lukeaschenbrenner/TxtNet-Browser/">https://github.com/lukeaschenbrenner/TxtNet-Browser/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905496" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905496</a>
Show HN: TxtNet Browser – Browse the Web over SMS, No Wi-Fi/Mobile Data Needed
Hello all,<p>This is my second year of working on a project[1] with the goal of browsing the web, on an Android smartphone, without reliance on Wi-Fi or mobile data. While this concept might seem aimless, my goal was to provide a way for people in areas with limited, expensive, or censored cellular internet access a way to view the web in a basic format. I finished work on a basic client-server model last year[2], and this year, I implemented a new pseudo-distributed peer-to-peer model that allows any TxtNet Browser user to use their own smartphone to run a background server service that communicates via the user's own primary mobile number. The main advantage to this model over last year's use of the Twilio API is the fact that with an unlimited SMS plan from a consumer carrier, you will likely end up paying significantly less than the amount you would pay for Twilio credits (averaging about ~$0.50 per website). There's a lot going on with the stateless nature of SMS, GSM-7 encoding, and Brotli compression, so please ask any questions you might have!<p>I've also started up a test server instance running on a +1 country code phone number, so feel free to test out the app with your own smartphone. Like mentioned in the GitHub repo, please be aware that I (necessarily) have access to every phone number and associated request that is sent. Of course, anyone can host their own server instance, and if you would like to share it, feel free to get in touch so I can add the number to the repo! Also, there are likely many bugs still lurking, so feel free to report those.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/lukeaschenbrenner/TxtNet-Browser/">https://github.com/lukeaschenbrenner/TxtNet-Browser/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905496" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905496</a>
Show HN: We built a ClickHouse-based logging service
Hey hn! I'm one of the co-founders of highlight.io, an open source monitoring tool.<p>Today we're sharing a ClickHouse-based logging solution we've been working on. We wanted to showcase how we built it and share how you could try it out to give feedback.
Since we started working on highlight.io, we've been hyper-focused on "cohesion", or ensuring that when you install your monitoring stack, all of the resources in that stack (user interactions, requests, traces, logs, etc.) are connected in a consumable way. We've written up more about our philosophy on this here [1].<p>We started building towards this by connecting your client-side app and your server-side exceptions with session replay and exception monitoring; i.e. if an error happened in a server-side app, we would make it easy (with session replay) to trace all the steps that a user took leading up to it.<p>Especially for larger companies using highlight.io, the request to tie in logs came up repeatedly, and we wanted to build this with the same philosophy in mind. Now, you'll see client-side and server-side logs all in one place, brought together in the context of a user session, as well as logs in the context of an error.<p>Like the rest of our stack, this project is written in Go and Typescript, and for log ingestion/querying, we're using ClickHouse [2]. Before deciding on ClickHouse, we were planning to use OpenSearch (an aws fork of elasticsearch [3]) for this part of our product, but as our traffic has increased, we encountered quite a few pains with write throughput for OpenSearch. After evaluating a few options, we eventually landed with ClickHouse (their cloud offering was icing on the cake), which has also proven to be much more cost-effective so far.<p>Building with ClickHouse from scratch has been an exciting journey. Eric (the mastermind behind this project) wrote a blog post [4] on a handful of ClickHouse learnings we've gathered since starting the project.<p>For those wanting to try out the product locally, you can run the following commands [5]:<p>git clone --recurse-submodules <a href="https://github.com/highlight/highlight">https://github.com/highlight/highlight</a>
cd highlight/docker;
./run-hobby.sh;<p>To send logs to highlight, you can use your own OpenTelemetry implementation [6] or use our SDKs [7] which provide lightweight wrappers over OTEL.<p>Like the rest of highlight.io, we plan to make money from this with our hosted cloud offering. For those interested in trying out the cloud-hosted version, you can get setup at app.highlight.io.<p>To open the floor for feedback, we would love to get some thoughts on what we've built so far. Beyond that, what are parts of a logging product you wish you had with your current setup? And are there any notable pain-points of using a hosted monitoring product? (We're toying with the idea of an enterprise deployment). Excited to hear from everyone.<p>[1]: <a href="https://highlight.io/docs/general/company/product-philosphy">https://highlight.io/docs/general/company/product-philosphy</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://clickhouse.com" rel="nofollow">https://clickhouse.com</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26780848" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26780848</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://www.highlight.io/blog/how-we-built-logging-with-clickhouse">https://www.highlight.io/blog/how-we-built-logging-with-clic...</a><p>[5]: <a href="https://www.highlight.io/docs/getting-started/self-host/self-hosted-hobby-guide">https://www.highlight.io/docs/getting-started/self-host/self...</a><p>[6]: <a href="https://www.highlight.io/docs/getting-started/backend-logging/http">https://www.highlight.io/docs/getting-started/backend-loggin...</a><p>[7]: <a href="https://www.highlight.io/docs/getting-started/overview#for-your-backend-logging">https://www.highlight.io/docs/getting-started/overview#for-y...</a>
Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023
Spent the past few days making this - something halfway between a demoscene program and an experimental film. I wanted to celebrate the unique computer-y aesthetics of flash, while showing off some weird and obscure tricks I've picked up over the years since it's been deprecated. (Also, some maybe-not-subtle commentary about AI-art and the tools of the future)
Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023
Spent the past few days making this - something halfway between a demoscene program and an experimental film. I wanted to celebrate the unique computer-y aesthetics of flash, while showing off some weird and obscure tricks I've picked up over the years since it's been deprecated. (Also, some maybe-not-subtle commentary about AI-art and the tools of the future)
Show HN: CozoDB, Hybrid Relational-Graph-Vector Database
Hi HN! We're thrilled to share CozoDB v0.6, a monumental update to our FOSS database, which already unifies relational and graph features. With the addition of vector search, CozoDB becomes an even better companion for LLMs like ChatGPT.<p>This release introduces vector search using HNSW indices within Datalog, enabling seamless integration with powerful features such as ad-hoc joins, recursive Datalog, and classical whole-graph algorithms. This update significantly broadens CozoDB's capabilities.<p>Check out the linked release note for an in-depth look at the new features, comparisons to other systems, and intriguing AI development possibilities. We'd love for you to take a look! I'll be here to answer any questions you might have.<p>Looking forward to your feedback!
Show HN: A 15 min daily stretch routine for desk workers
Show HN: A 15 min daily stretch routine for desk workers
Show HN: AI Playground by Vercel Labs
Hey, Jared Palmer (creator of this playground) here. Really excited to ship this.
I’ve been building this over the past few weeks to compare LLMs from different providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, etc. At Vercel, I manage our Frameworks division (including Next.js, Svelte, and Turbo) and wanted to also dogfood some of the latest features in a slightly larger application.
This playground takes a lot of inspiration from <a href="https://nat.dev" rel="nofollow">https://nat.dev</a> and is built on Tailwind, ui.shadcn.com, and some upcoming Vercel products we’re announcing soon. We’re going to continue adding models to compare and add other frameworks to generate code snippets from.
Show HN: WikiBinge – discover how all things are vaguely connected
Connect two articles on Wikipedia, but do it the long way. I've always been a fan of the theory of six degree of separation, but it's an overused concept when exploring the Wiki-graph.<p>Instead of showing the shortest path, which in my opinion is "boring" and ends up connecting super-important central articles, I came up with my own method: WikiBinge selects the smaller, less represented articles on Wikipedia. In a WikiBinge path, the underdogs are the kings!<p>How does it work? It's pretty straightforward! Compute PageRank on the Wiki-graph and assign as weight of each edge the PageRank value of the destination node. A WikiBinge path is then simply a shortest path using these weights: the algorithm will then favor paths passing through articles with lower PageRank values.<p>More on the motives to build this here: <a href="https://www.jamez.it/project/wikibinge/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jamez.it/project/wikibinge/</a><p>This is an older project of mine, but it never got much exposure, so I'm humbly submitting it now.