The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: Container Desktop – Podman Desktop Companion
Show HN: Container Desktop – Podman Desktop Companion
Show HN: A CLI tool I made to self-host any app with two commands on a VPS
Show HN: I've Built an Accounting System
It can create invoices and receive payments.<p>Not quite production ready, yet.<p>Only need PostgreSQL installed to try.<p>I will add support to choose SQLite when they add native support for geography types.
Show HN: I made crowdwave – imagine Twitter/Reddit but every post is a voicemail
Hey it's Andrew - author of <a href="https://www.crowdwave.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.crowdwave.com</a> here!<p>- crowdwave works best on your phone - unless you've got your headset and microphone plugged in to your desktop, in which case desktop works great too.<p>Here's the story:<p>So about six months ago I saw this post on HN <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39910119">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39910119</a><p><a href="https://afterthebeep.tel" rel="nofollow">https://afterthebeep.tel</a> is really cool - it's an anonymous voicemail box - you call the provided phone the number and leave a message. Blaine - the guy who runs the site (eventually) listens to and approves your message and writes a headline. It was fun, and I found I kept going back to it and listening to the messages. I left a message once and several weeks later it appeared on the site. Blaine, from comments I read, didn't seem in a hurry to take the site much further, which got me thinking...<p>And I simply could not get one question out of my head - "what would happen if users could just hit record on their phone, instead of having to dial a phone number?".<p>When I get a software idea I get pretty obsessive and that question just kept gnawing at me.<p>So, like the any reasonable programmer would, I stopped working on the project I had been working on for literally YEARS and took a detour. Because that's what you do isn't it - you just drop those multiple years of work and pick up the shiny new thing.<p>I saw that afterthebeep is open source and I loved the UI design - the Windows 3.1 aesthetic really appealed to me - it seems perfect for voicemail, so I grabbed the open source code and started development. I couldn't make much sense of the code - it was using tech I'm not familiar with, so I ditched it all except the layout and the graphics.<p>Fortunately, the project I had been working on for YEARS is basically a Twitter/Reddit clone, so I ripped the UI out of the afterthebeep open source project and did open heart surgery until like some bizarre Frankenstein's monster I had put the afterthebeep open source UI onto my code.<p>And I added in the functionality that I craved so much - a "record" button. Sigh.... relief. It was incredibly satisfying to hit record and see a message appear almost immediately. Nerd craving fulfilled.<p>But my satisfaction did not last long. I REALLY HAD TO fix that problem of getting the posts approved and headlines written. So I made a back end audio processing pipeline and fed the messages into an LLM, which ripped the text from the speech and I then shoved it into OpenAI and asked it to make nice headlines. And it worked beautifully - now you only have to wait 30 seconds to see your message with a nice headline! Ahhhh..... sigh, satisfaction... (it wouldn't be 2024 without an AI twist, would it now?).<p>But hang on! It would be <i>SO much better</i> if there was some sort of category system almost like subreddits - then people could post their messages into areas of interest. So I built the channel system and sat back.... job done.<p>Looking at the calendar, dreading to see..... I've dropped into obsessive coding mode and and I've been down this rabbit hole full time for MONTHS. I'm getting wary - and I'm also getting tired and sick of the effort - when's this going to end?<p>But wait, another idea! How much more cool would it be if you could have your own user account, and follow and like and subscribe! I've just GOT TO make that. AND surely it has to be multi language doesn't it? I mean Germans like talking too don't they? And user profile pics, and channel banner images, and options and settings. And if you don't put in terms and conditions and privacy and a cookie message then won't the Eurpoeans turn up and arrest me? At this stage I'm like a drunken junkie wanting just one more thing, one more thing...... scope ain't just creeping, the scope is up and racing away faster than Usain Bolt.<p>I'm now like nearly five months into this and packing all this functionality into a UI that both make sense and fits onto a tiny phone screen is becoming a huge challenge - a challenge I don't know if I can actually solve - and if I can't make the UI make sense then the whole thing will be unusable. The UI MUST be minimal and yet still reveal to the user pretty much everything within fewer than five pages in total. The UI had to work BEST on a phone. That was a HUGE challenge, and I really didn't know until the end of the project if I could do it at all. But finally the UI seemed to come together and it was a tight squeeze but fit onto the limited screen resolution of even my old iPhone 6s (yes it's my main phone).<p>Then, a few days ago, after many months of grueling grind, there was nothing left on the todo list. crowdwave was done! All the features were done and I'd finally chased down that scope creep.<p>Which brings us to today. Give <a href="https://www.crowdwave.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.crowdwave.com</a> a go on your phone or desktop if you have microphone. It's brand new so there WILL be bugs - hopefully not too severe. Thanks to Blaine at <a href="https://blaines.world/" rel="nofollow">https://blaines.world/</a> for the inspiration!
Show HN: Electrico – Electron Without Node and Chrome
Show HN: Open Scanner, an open-source document scanning app for iPhone
Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative
Hey HN, I'm Andrew, one of the creators of Void. I made this open source version of Cursor where you can get all of Cursor's core features but in a fully-customizable IDE (ctrl+k, ctrl+L). We love Cursor but there are so many other features we want to build, like allowing AI to edit multiple files at once, or giving AI better understanding of your file system. Void is the open-source, fully customizable tool we've been wanting.<p>The hard part: we're building Void as a fork of vscode. The repo has great documentation for extensions, but going deeper gets pretty involved. All of the code is OOP-based, and they mount DOM nodes the old-school way (which is what React was supposed to solve..). So adding new UI features isn't exactly trivial. Microsoft also made its extension marketplace closed-source so we (and Cursor) have to hack our way through it. One thing we're excited about is refactoring and creating docs so that it's much easier for anyone to contribute.<p>The other benefit of open source is we don't need to hide how our prompts are built, so we can transfer the private API logic that Cursor has right onto your local machine. This lets you host a model on-prem and have your data stay completely private. It also means you can go directly to LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic) instead of going through us as a middleman.<p>There's still a lot to build, and full disclosure, we are very early stage. But we're super excited about building and have a working prototype that we're quickly adding features to.<p>Let us know if there's anything you want to see in a Cursor-style editor. Or feel free to shoot us a pull request. Cheers!
Show HN: Wordllama – Things you can do with the token embeddings of an LLM
After working with LLMs for long enough, I found myself wanting a lightweight utility for doing various small tasks to prepare inputs, locate information and create evaluators. This library is two things: a very simple model and utilities that inference it (eg. fuzzy deduplication). The target platform is CPU, and it’s intended to be light, fast and pip installable — a library that lowers the barrier to working with strings <i>semantically</i>. You don’t need to install pytorch to use it, or any deep learning runtimes.<p>How can this be accomplished? The model is simply token embeddings that are average pooled. To create this model, I extracted token embedding (nn.Embedding) vectors from LLMs, concatenated them along the embedding dimension, added a learnable weight parameter, and projected them to a smaller dimension. Using the sentence transformers framework and datasets, I trained the pooled embedding with multiple negatives ranking loss and matryoshka representation learning so they can be truncated. After training, the weights and projections are no longer needed, because there is no contextual calculations. I inference the entire token vocabulary and save the new token embeddings to be loaded to numpy.<p>While the results are not impressive compared to transformer models, they perform well on MTEB benchmarks compared to word embedding models (which they are most similar to), while being much smaller in size (smallest model, 32k vocab, 64-dim is only 4MB).<p>On the utility side, I’ve been adding some tools that I think it’ll be useful for. In addition to general embedding, there’s algorithms for ranking, filtering, clustering, deduplicating and similarity. Some of them have a cython implementation, and I’m continuing to work on benchmarking them and improving them as I have time. In addition to “standard” models that use cosine similarity for some algorithms, there are binarized models that use hamming distance. This is a slightly faster, similarity algorithm, with significantly less memory per embedding (float32 -> 1 bit).<p>Hope you enjoy it, and find it useful. PS I haven’t figured out Windows builds yet, but Linux and Mac are supported.
Show HN: Wordllama – Things you can do with the token embeddings of an LLM
After working with LLMs for long enough, I found myself wanting a lightweight utility for doing various small tasks to prepare inputs, locate information and create evaluators. This library is two things: a very simple model and utilities that inference it (eg. fuzzy deduplication). The target platform is CPU, and it’s intended to be light, fast and pip installable — a library that lowers the barrier to working with strings <i>semantically</i>. You don’t need to install pytorch to use it, or any deep learning runtimes.<p>How can this be accomplished? The model is simply token embeddings that are average pooled. To create this model, I extracted token embedding (nn.Embedding) vectors from LLMs, concatenated them along the embedding dimension, added a learnable weight parameter, and projected them to a smaller dimension. Using the sentence transformers framework and datasets, I trained the pooled embedding with multiple negatives ranking loss and matryoshka representation learning so they can be truncated. After training, the weights and projections are no longer needed, because there is no contextual calculations. I inference the entire token vocabulary and save the new token embeddings to be loaded to numpy.<p>While the results are not impressive compared to transformer models, they perform well on MTEB benchmarks compared to word embedding models (which they are most similar to), while being much smaller in size (smallest model, 32k vocab, 64-dim is only 4MB).<p>On the utility side, I’ve been adding some tools that I think it’ll be useful for. In addition to general embedding, there’s algorithms for ranking, filtering, clustering, deduplicating and similarity. Some of them have a cython implementation, and I’m continuing to work on benchmarking them and improving them as I have time. In addition to “standard” models that use cosine similarity for some algorithms, there are binarized models that use hamming distance. This is a slightly faster, similarity algorithm, with significantly less memory per embedding (float32 -> 1 bit).<p>Hope you enjoy it, and find it useful. PS I haven’t figured out Windows builds yet, but Linux and Mac are supported.
Show HN: Bullshit Remover
Show HN: Meet.hn – Meet the Hacker News community in your city
Hey HN!<p>I just published <a href="https://meet.hn" rel="nofollow">https://meet.hn</a>, a map to find hackers in your city.<p>How it works?<p>Demo of the signup process: <a href="https://x.com/meet_hn/status/1834918518904746329" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/meet_hn/status/1834918518904746329</a><p>1. Fill the form: username, city+country<p>2. Copy the text generated in the box below the form, and paste it in your HN description.<p>3. Click "Add me on the map"<p>Optionnaly (it's recommended!) you can add links to your socials as well as some tags to showcase your interests.<p>Why does it exist?<p>I created this because, despite its harsh reputation on the internet, I love the HN community.
I have fewer than a handful of friends who are as curious and eager to think and reflect as the people on HN.
Also, the city I currently live in is more focused on industry than on technology and entrepreneurship, which are core to HN.<p>This led me to want to meet the HN community IRL.
After trying `site:news.ycombinator.com/user toulouse` on Google and getting only one result, I decided to create meet.hn.<p>My first goal with this is to meet at least one HN member in my city: Toulouse, France.
If you are ever in the area, hit me up! I'm sirobg at <a href="https://meet.hn/city/fr-Toulouse" rel="nofollow">https://meet.hn/city/fr-Toulouse</a><p>Additional details:<p>- meet.hn has a twitter page: <a href="https://x.com/meet_hn" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/meet_hn</a>. If you meet IRL thanks to meet.hn, don't hesitate to tag it with a picture, it would mean the world to me.<p>- the code is open source: <a href="https://github.com/borisghidaglia/meet-hn">https://github.com/borisghidaglia/meet-hn</a><p>- meet.hn integrates with <a href="https://at.hn/" rel="nofollow">https://at.hn/</a> from @padolsey (<a href="https://padolsey.at.hn/" rel="nofollow">https://padolsey.at.hn/</a>), registered on meet.hn at <a href="https://meet.hn/city/cn-Beijing" rel="nofollow">https://meet.hn/city/cn-Beijing</a><p>Finally, many thanks to these people for their help and/or feedbacks!
Ordered alphabetically:<p>- <a href="https://x.com/ericbureltech" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/ericbureltech</a><p>- <a href="https://x.com/fredkisss" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/fredkisss</a><p>- <a href="https://x.com/JulienDuquesne1" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/JulienDuquesne1</a><p>- <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbasseto/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbasseto/</a><p>- <a href="https://x.com/lcswillems" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/lcswillems</a><p>- <a href="https://x.com/leeerob" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/leeerob</a><p>- <a href="https://x.com/padolsey" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/padolsey</a><p>- <a href="https://x.com/tomlienard" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/tomlienard</a><p>I hope you will enjoy this!
Please share any feedback in the comments.
Show HN: Meet.hn – Meet the Hacker News community in your city
Hey HN!<p>I just published <a href="https://meet.hn" rel="nofollow">https://meet.hn</a>, a map to find hackers in your city.<p>How it works?<p>Demo of the signup process: <a href="https://x.com/meet_hn/status/1834918518904746329" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/meet_hn/status/1834918518904746329</a><p>1. Fill the form: username, city+country<p>2. Copy the text generated in the box below the form, and paste it in your HN description.<p>3. Click "Add me on the map"<p>Optionnaly (it's recommended!) you can add links to your socials as well as some tags to showcase your interests.<p>Why does it exist?<p>I created this because, despite its harsh reputation on the internet, I love the HN community.
I have fewer than a handful of friends who are as curious and eager to think and reflect as the people on HN.
Also, the city I currently live in is more focused on industry than on technology and entrepreneurship, which are core to HN.<p>This led me to want to meet the HN community IRL.
After trying `site:news.ycombinator.com/user toulouse` on Google and getting only one result, I decided to create meet.hn.<p>My first goal with this is to meet at least one HN member in my city: Toulouse, France.
If you are ever in the area, hit me up! I'm sirobg at <a href="https://meet.hn/city/fr-Toulouse" rel="nofollow">https://meet.hn/city/fr-Toulouse</a><p>Additional details:<p>- meet.hn has a twitter page: <a href="https://x.com/meet_hn" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/meet_hn</a>. If you meet IRL thanks to meet.hn, don't hesitate to tag it with a picture, it would mean the world to me.<p>- the code is open source: <a href="https://github.com/borisghidaglia/meet-hn">https://github.com/borisghidaglia/meet-hn</a><p>- meet.hn integrates with <a href="https://at.hn/" rel="nofollow">https://at.hn/</a> from @padolsey (<a href="https://padolsey.at.hn/" rel="nofollow">https://padolsey.at.hn/</a>), registered on meet.hn at <a href="https://meet.hn/city/cn-Beijing" rel="nofollow">https://meet.hn/city/cn-Beijing</a><p>Finally, many thanks to these people for their help and/or feedbacks!
Ordered alphabetically:<p>- <a href="https://x.com/ericbureltech" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/ericbureltech</a><p>- <a href="https://x.com/fredkisss" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/fredkisss</a><p>- <a href="https://x.com/JulienDuquesne1" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/JulienDuquesne1</a><p>- <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbasseto/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbasseto/</a><p>- <a href="https://x.com/lcswillems" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/lcswillems</a><p>- <a href="https://x.com/leeerob" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/leeerob</a><p>- <a href="https://x.com/padolsey" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/padolsey</a><p>- <a href="https://x.com/tomlienard" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/tomlienard</a><p>I hope you will enjoy this!
Please share any feedback in the comments.
Show HN: FlowTracker – Track data flowing through Java programs
FlowTracker, a Java agent that tracks data flowing through Java programs.
It helps you understand where any program got its output from, what it means, and why it wrote it.<p>Watch the video or explore the live demo yourself, and read how it works at <a href="https://github.com/coekie/flowtracker">https://github.com/coekie/flowtracker</a>
Show HN: Konty – A Balsamiq-alternative lo-fi wireframe tool for modern apps
Show HN: iFixit created a new USB-C, repairable soldering system
After years of making screwdrivers and teaching people to repair electronics, we just made our first electronic tool. It's been a journey for us to build while hewing to our repairable principles. We're really excited about it.<p>It's a USB-C powered soldering iron and smart battery power hub. Super repairable, of course. Our goal is to make soldering so easy everyone can do it:
<a href="https://www.ifixit.com/fixhub" rel="nofollow">https://www.ifixit.com/fixhub</a><p>We didn’t want to make just another iron, so we spent years sweating the details and crafting something that met our exacting standards. This is a high-performance iron: it can output 100W of heat, gets to soldering temperature in under 5 seconds, and automatically cools off when you set it down. The accelerometer detects when you pick it up and heats it back up. Keeping the iron at a lower temperature while you’re not soldering shouold prolong the life of the tip.<p>What’s the difference between this iron and other USB-C irons on the market? Here’s a quick list:<p>Higher power (our Smart Iron is 100W, competitors max out at 60W over USB-C, 88W over DC Supply)<p>Heat-resistant storage cap (you just have to try this out, it’s a real game changer in day-to-day use)
Polished user experience<p>A warranty and a local company to talk to (I can’t find any contact information for Miniware)<p>Comfier / more natural grip<p>Shorter soldering tip length<p>No-tangle, heat-resistant cable<p>Locking ring on the cable, so it can’t snag and get disconnected (this happens to me all the time on other irons)<p>More intuitive settings, either on the Power Station or on the computer<p>We used Web Serial <a href="https://caniuse.com/web-serial" rel="nofollow">https://caniuse.com/web-serial</a> for the interface, which is only supported in Chromium browsers. The biggest bummer with that is that no mobile browsers support it, yet. Hopefully that changes soon.<p>Hardware is hard! It's been a journey for us. Happy to answer any questions about how we made it.<p>Schematics and repair information are online here: <a href="https://www.ifixit.com/Device/FixHub_Portable_Soldering_Station" rel="nofollow">https://www.ifixit.com/Device/FixHub_Portable_Soldering_Stat...</a>
Show HN: YourNextStore – an open-source Shopify with Stripe as the back end
We’re building Your Next Store, a modern, ultra-fast, open-source commerce in Next.js with Stripe as the backend - no DB required.<p>Selling online is often more complex than it needs to be. Setting up a storefront with great performance can feel daunting and time-consuming. There are many plugins, libraries, etc - the choice can be overwhelming.<p>Plus, in e-commerce, the backend and frontend are often written in different languages (e.g., PHP, Python, or Ruby for the backend). This increases the complexity and makes code management more challenging, especially for teams.<p>After working in e-commerce for several years, Michał and I set out to build the fastest and most compelling storefront for small to medium-sized merchants. Fast e-commerce sites are crucial because slow pages hurt sales [1]. Unfortunately, performance issues are still very common. The beauty of Your Next Store is its simplicity. No additional tools and no databases - just Next.js and Stripe.<p>On the technical side, we use App Router, React Server Component, Partial Pre-Rendering, Optimistic Updates, and Streaming with Suspense to make the store faster and leaner so it feels almost like a static website.<p>In summary:<p>Modern & Popular Stack: Built with Next.js, React.js, and TypeScript, making development faster and hiring easier compared to platforms that use less common frameworks like Shopify’s Liquid.<p>No Database Needed: Stripe handles the backend, reducing the need for complex infrastructure and simplifying the setup process.<p>Open Source: Free and open (AGPL), with the option for a commercial license if needed.<p>This is just the beginning. We want to make YNS even better and easier to use and eventually provide a good, open-source alternative to Shopify.<p>Check our code at <a href="https://github.com/yournextstore/yournextstore">https://github.com/yournextstore/yournextstore</a><p>We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback! What features would you like to see next?<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.deloitte.com/ie/en/services/consulting/research/milliseconds-make-millions.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.deloitte.com/ie/en/services/consulting/research/...</a>
Show HN: I mapped HN's favorite books with GPT-4o
Hey HN! I love finding new books to read on here. I wanted to gather the most mentioned books and recreate the serendipity of physical browsing. I scraped 20k comments from HN threads related to reading, extracted the references and opinions using GPT-4o mini, and visualised their embeddings as a map.<p>- OpenAI's embeddings were processed using UMAP and HDBSCAN. A direct 2D projection from the text embeddings didn't yield visually interesting results. Instead, HDBSCAN is first applied on a high-dimensional projection. Those clusters tend to correspond to different genres. The genre memberships are then embedded using a second round of UMAP (using Hellinger distance) which results in pleasingly dense structures.<p>- The books' descriptions are based on extractions from the comments and GPT's general knowledge. Quality levels vary, and it leads to some oddly specific points, but I haven't found any yet that are straight up wrong.<p>- There are multiple books with the same title. Currently, only the most popular one of those makes it onto the map.<p>- It's surprisingly hard to get high quality book cover images. I tried Google Books and a bunch of open APIs, but they all had their issues. In the end, I got the covers from GoodReads through a hacked together process that combines their autocomplete search with GPT for data linkage. Does anyone know of a reliable source?
Show HN: Using SQL's Turing completeness to build Tetris
Show HN: Using SQL's Turing completeness to build Tetris