The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
Latest posts:
Show HN: I built a transit travel time map
This was something I built while trying to look for housing in Toronto that was decently transit-accessible to my office while still cheap.<p>The backend is written in Rust. It parses public GTFS data from transit agencies and performs a simple heuristics-based BFS on the bus lines to calculate how long to reach all points in a city.<p>The frontend uses React and Mapbox GL to render each individual road segment based on how long it takes to reach.<p>This project was a great excuse to learn Rust, deployments, and mapping. The source code is here if you are interested: <a href="http://github.com/econaxis/time2reach">http://github.com/econaxis/time2reach</a>
Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
Hey everyone! After another year of building as a solo dev on nights and weekends, I'm back with an update on this post: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31083093">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31083093</a>.<p>TL;DR - ProjectionLab (<a href="https://projectionlab.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://projectionlab.com</a>) is a privacy-friendly personal finance planning tool where you can create financial plans that go beyond the standard online retirement calculators. And by popular request, it now supports self-hosting for Lifetime users!<p>Something I'm grateful for is that our community here on HN is the difference between PL existing and not. There was actually a time early on when I was one day away from halting work on it. I posted here on a whim, and was shocked to receive some really constructive and energizing feedback that went on to power my indie dev journey over the past two and a half years.<p>As a quick recap, the story started when I dove head-first down the financial independence rabbit hole. I wanted a hands-on and visual way to explore the trade-offs between different life paths. One thing led to another, and I decided to build ProjectionLab.<p>After last year's Show HN, I really put my nose to the grindstone, and here are some of the big developments:<p>- Self-hosting for Lifetime users (spin up your own private deployment, based on Docker Compose, includes support for auth/encryption)<p>- Cash-flow visualization for each simulated year (sankey charts)<p>- Tax analytics (detailed breakdowns for projected income, taxes, marginal rates, effective brackets, etc)<p>- Major redesign of entire app, with landing page and resources now split into separate project<p>- Filing separately option to improve support for international locations that don't have joint filing<p>- Roth Conversions and 72t (SEPP) distribution modeling<p>- Improvements to US tax estimation (Secure 2.0 updates, rental property tax deductions, Medicare + IRMAA, NIIT, principal residence exclusion, etc)<p>- Better support for planning as a couple<p>- More modeling options for cash-flow priorities to support different budgeting philosophies and goals<p>- Extra liquidity + withdrawal options, ability to fund expenses with specific accounts or route income to specific accounts<p>- Customization options for Monte Carlo simulations (characterization of success rates and outcome types, option to set random seed, etc)<p>- And a whole bunch more! (<a href="https://projectionlab.com/changelog" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://projectionlab.com/changelog</a>)<p>The HN community has had a huge role in shaping my overall direction with PL, and I can't wait to hear what you all think of the updates and where you would like to see things go from here.<p>As always, PL is free to try, with no need to create an account. It does not ask to link your financial accounts, and it has a sandbox mode if you just want to hop in and see how it works.<p>--Kyle
Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
Hey everyone! After another year of building as a solo dev on nights and weekends, I'm back with an update on this post: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31083093">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31083093</a>.<p>TL;DR - ProjectionLab (<a href="https://projectionlab.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://projectionlab.com</a>) is a privacy-friendly personal finance planning tool where you can create financial plans that go beyond the standard online retirement calculators. And by popular request, it now supports self-hosting for Lifetime users!<p>Something I'm grateful for is that our community here on HN is the difference between PL existing and not. There was actually a time early on when I was one day away from halting work on it. I posted here on a whim, and was shocked to receive some really constructive and energizing feedback that went on to power my indie dev journey over the past two and a half years.<p>As a quick recap, the story started when I dove head-first down the financial independence rabbit hole. I wanted a hands-on and visual way to explore the trade-offs between different life paths. One thing led to another, and I decided to build ProjectionLab.<p>After last year's Show HN, I really put my nose to the grindstone, and here are some of the big developments:<p>- Self-hosting for Lifetime users (spin up your own private deployment, based on Docker Compose, includes support for auth/encryption)<p>- Cash-flow visualization for each simulated year (sankey charts)<p>- Tax analytics (detailed breakdowns for projected income, taxes, marginal rates, effective brackets, etc)<p>- Major redesign of entire app, with landing page and resources now split into separate project<p>- Filing separately option to improve support for international locations that don't have joint filing<p>- Roth Conversions and 72t (SEPP) distribution modeling<p>- Improvements to US tax estimation (Secure 2.0 updates, rental property tax deductions, Medicare + IRMAA, NIIT, principal residence exclusion, etc)<p>- Better support for planning as a couple<p>- More modeling options for cash-flow priorities to support different budgeting philosophies and goals<p>- Extra liquidity + withdrawal options, ability to fund expenses with specific accounts or route income to specific accounts<p>- Customization options for Monte Carlo simulations (characterization of success rates and outcome types, option to set random seed, etc)<p>- And a whole bunch more! (<a href="https://projectionlab.com/changelog" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://projectionlab.com/changelog</a>)<p>The HN community has had a huge role in shaping my overall direction with PL, and I can't wait to hear what you all think of the updates and where you would like to see things go from here.<p>As always, PL is free to try, with no need to create an account. It does not ask to link your financial accounts, and it has a sandbox mode if you just want to hop in and see how it works.<p>--Kyle
Show HN: My Pen Plotting Journey
Show HN: I made a customizable iOS browser for minimalists and myself
Hello HN!<p>So early this year I decided to build an iOS browser offering a large range of customization options, to accommodate anyone’s usage and visual preferences. Been using it as my default browser for 6 months and not looking back.<p>On first launch it looks and behaves a bit like Safari, but to give you an idea, here are the various ways I customized it on my phone.<p>- More screen real estate for the webpage, less for the toolbar.<p>- A compact toolbar containing only the buttons for actions I use the most: new tab, close tab, open tab list. Since I use them hundred times a day, I need them available with button taps instead of swipe gestures.<p>- A toolbar button layout adapted to my left-handedness.<p>- A toolbar that disappears on scroll to allow full-screen reading.<p>- The toolbar and address bar at the bottom, as they should be.<p>- A popup menu showing the full URL and the buttons I use less frequently: back/forward (already available as screen edge gestures), share, reload, settings, etc.<p>- Showing the page title in the toolbar.<p>- Read time estimation for each tab.<p>- Opening the keyboard automatically when I open a new tab.<p>- Sorting tabs by read time, so that I can decide what to read based on how much time and focus I have.<p>- Grouping tabs by domain.<p>- A flat, condensed tab list, without snapshots.<p>- A full-black toolbar in dark mode to read at night.<p>It’s still early days but things like content blockers, reader mode, iPad support, and more should arrive soon enough.<p>And of course, no analytics/monitoring/telemetry, no account creation, no backend. It’s not open source, but you can also inspect the app’s web views with Safari developer tools to see what’s going on under the hood.<p>Would love to hear if the level of personalization my app provides resonates with like-minded people.<p>Have a great day!
Show HN: I made a customizable iOS browser for minimalists and myself
Hello HN!<p>So early this year I decided to build an iOS browser offering a large range of customization options, to accommodate anyone’s usage and visual preferences. Been using it as my default browser for 6 months and not looking back.<p>On first launch it looks and behaves a bit like Safari, but to give you an idea, here are the various ways I customized it on my phone.<p>- More screen real estate for the webpage, less for the toolbar.<p>- A compact toolbar containing only the buttons for actions I use the most: new tab, close tab, open tab list. Since I use them hundred times a day, I need them available with button taps instead of swipe gestures.<p>- A toolbar button layout adapted to my left-handedness.<p>- A toolbar that disappears on scroll to allow full-screen reading.<p>- The toolbar and address bar at the bottom, as they should be.<p>- A popup menu showing the full URL and the buttons I use less frequently: back/forward (already available as screen edge gestures), share, reload, settings, etc.<p>- Showing the page title in the toolbar.<p>- Read time estimation for each tab.<p>- Opening the keyboard automatically when I open a new tab.<p>- Sorting tabs by read time, so that I can decide what to read based on how much time and focus I have.<p>- Grouping tabs by domain.<p>- A flat, condensed tab list, without snapshots.<p>- A full-black toolbar in dark mode to read at night.<p>It’s still early days but things like content blockers, reader mode, iPad support, and more should arrive soon enough.<p>And of course, no analytics/monitoring/telemetry, no account creation, no backend. It’s not open source, but you can also inspect the app’s web views with Safari developer tools to see what’s going on under the hood.<p>Would love to hear if the level of personalization my app provides resonates with like-minded people.<p>Have a great day!
Show HN: I made a customizable iOS browser for minimalists and myself
Hello HN!<p>So early this year I decided to build an iOS browser offering a large range of customization options, to accommodate anyone’s usage and visual preferences. Been using it as my default browser for 6 months and not looking back.<p>On first launch it looks and behaves a bit like Safari, but to give you an idea, here are the various ways I customized it on my phone.<p>- More screen real estate for the webpage, less for the toolbar.<p>- A compact toolbar containing only the buttons for actions I use the most: new tab, close tab, open tab list. Since I use them hundred times a day, I need them available with button taps instead of swipe gestures.<p>- A toolbar button layout adapted to my left-handedness.<p>- A toolbar that disappears on scroll to allow full-screen reading.<p>- The toolbar and address bar at the bottom, as they should be.<p>- A popup menu showing the full URL and the buttons I use less frequently: back/forward (already available as screen edge gestures), share, reload, settings, etc.<p>- Showing the page title in the toolbar.<p>- Read time estimation for each tab.<p>- Opening the keyboard automatically when I open a new tab.<p>- Sorting tabs by read time, so that I can decide what to read based on how much time and focus I have.<p>- Grouping tabs by domain.<p>- A flat, condensed tab list, without snapshots.<p>- A full-black toolbar in dark mode to read at night.<p>It’s still early days but things like content blockers, reader mode, iPad support, and more should arrive soon enough.<p>And of course, no analytics/monitoring/telemetry, no account creation, no backend. It’s not open source, but you can also inspect the app’s web views with Safari developer tools to see what’s going on under the hood.<p>Would love to hear if the level of personalization my app provides resonates with like-minded people.<p>Have a great day!
Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
Hi all! Excited to share cc.dev after months of work and refinement.<p>The idea for this product came from trying to do email marketing for my side project, CubeDesk, a site where Rubik's Cube enthusiasts can time themselves, race with one another, train algorithms — it's a fun niche!<p>With over 40k users, sending even a single campaign was becoming expensive with MailChimp. I knew AWS SES would be much cheaper, but it’s just an API with none of the other necessities you need for a robust email marketing platform.<p>Beyond cost, I was also frustrated with having to make sure my database was always in sync with MailChimp and the audience schema they enforced. If I wanted to email every user who had completed 10 solves, that would be a whole ordeal and eat up hours of my day.<p>So, I started (and am now launching):<p><a href="https://cc.dev" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://cc.dev</a><p>cc.dev connects directly to your database and lets you write SQL queries to target your audience. It's backed by AWS SES, so the cost to send emails is significantly less than what you're used to seeing. Combined with a template builder, media management, and campaign monitoring, cc.dev is meant to be your final destination whenever you need to send marketing emails to your users.<p>Would love to hear your feedback on this! If you're interested in trying out cc.dev as your email marketing platform, shoot me an email and let's have a chat: kash at cc.dev
Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
Hi all! Excited to share cc.dev after months of work and refinement.<p>The idea for this product came from trying to do email marketing for my side project, CubeDesk, a site where Rubik's Cube enthusiasts can time themselves, race with one another, train algorithms — it's a fun niche!<p>With over 40k users, sending even a single campaign was becoming expensive with MailChimp. I knew AWS SES would be much cheaper, but it’s just an API with none of the other necessities you need for a robust email marketing platform.<p>Beyond cost, I was also frustrated with having to make sure my database was always in sync with MailChimp and the audience schema they enforced. If I wanted to email every user who had completed 10 solves, that would be a whole ordeal and eat up hours of my day.<p>So, I started (and am now launching):<p><a href="https://cc.dev" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://cc.dev</a><p>cc.dev connects directly to your database and lets you write SQL queries to target your audience. It's backed by AWS SES, so the cost to send emails is significantly less than what you're used to seeing. Combined with a template builder, media management, and campaign monitoring, cc.dev is meant to be your final destination whenever you need to send marketing emails to your users.<p>Would love to hear your feedback on this! If you're interested in trying out cc.dev as your email marketing platform, shoot me an email and let's have a chat: kash at cc.dev
Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
Hi all! Excited to share cc.dev after months of work and refinement.<p>The idea for this product came from trying to do email marketing for my side project, CubeDesk, a site where Rubik's Cube enthusiasts can time themselves, race with one another, train algorithms — it's a fun niche!<p>With over 40k users, sending even a single campaign was becoming expensive with MailChimp. I knew AWS SES would be much cheaper, but it’s just an API with none of the other necessities you need for a robust email marketing platform.<p>Beyond cost, I was also frustrated with having to make sure my database was always in sync with MailChimp and the audience schema they enforced. If I wanted to email every user who had completed 10 solves, that would be a whole ordeal and eat up hours of my day.<p>So, I started (and am now launching):<p><a href="https://cc.dev" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://cc.dev</a><p>cc.dev connects directly to your database and lets you write SQL queries to target your audience. It's backed by AWS SES, so the cost to send emails is significantly less than what you're used to seeing. Combined with a template builder, media management, and campaign monitoring, cc.dev is meant to be your final destination whenever you need to send marketing emails to your users.<p>Would love to hear your feedback on this! If you're interested in trying out cc.dev as your email marketing platform, shoot me an email and let's have a chat: kash at cc.dev
Show HN: Primo – a visual CMS with Svelte blocks, a code editor, and SSG
Show HN: Primo – a visual CMS with Svelte blocks, a code editor, and SSG
Show HN: Ollama – Run LLMs on your Mac
Hi HN<p>A few folks and I have been working on this project for a couple weeks now. After previously working on the Docker project for a number of years (both on the container runtime and image registry side), the recent rise in open source language models made us think something similar needed to exist for large language models too.<p>While not exactly the same as running linux containers, running LLMs shares quite a few of the same challenges. There are "base layers" (e.g. models like Llama 2), specific configuration to run correctly (parameters, temperature, context window sizes etc). There's also embeddings that a model can use at runtime to look up data – we don't support this yet but it's something we're looking at doing soon.<p>It's an early project, and there's still lots to do!
Show HN: Ollama – Run LLMs on your Mac
Hi HN<p>A few folks and I have been working on this project for a couple weeks now. After previously working on the Docker project for a number of years (both on the container runtime and image registry side), the recent rise in open source language models made us think something similar needed to exist for large language models too.<p>While not exactly the same as running linux containers, running LLMs shares quite a few of the same challenges. There are "base layers" (e.g. models like Llama 2), specific configuration to run correctly (parameters, temperature, context window sizes etc). There's also embeddings that a model can use at runtime to look up data – we don't support this yet but it's something we're looking at doing soon.<p>It's an early project, and there's still lots to do!
Show HN: Infisical – open-source secret management platform
Hi HN, we’re the founders of Infisical, the open source secret management platform – it provides an end-to-end set of tools to manage your secrets across your team and infrastructure (<a href="https://infisical.com/">https://infisical.com/</a>).<p>Excited to show you all the progress that we’ve made in the past few months after our Launch HN in February (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34955699">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34955699</a>) and Show HN in December (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34055132">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34055132</a>).<p>During the previous Show HN and Launch HN, we received a ton of feedback which helped us improve Infisical. We’ve since released:<p>- Secret scanning: a new toolset to block commits with hardcoded secrets and continuously monitor your code.<p>- Folders: Deeper organizational structure within projects to accommodate for microservice architectures and storage of more secret types like user API keys and OAuth tokens.<p>- Node and Python SDKs, Webhooks: More ways to integrate and start syncing secrets with Infisical across your infrastructure.<p>- Integrations with Terraform, Supabase, Railway, Checkly, Cloudflare Pages, Azure Key Vault, Laravel Forge, and more.<p>- Secret Referencing and Importing: to create a proper single source of truth.<p>- 1-click deployments to AWS EC2, Digital Ocean, Render, Fly.io: More ways to self-host Infisical on your own infrastructure.<p>In addition, the platform has become more stable and undergone a full-coverage penetration test; we’ve also begun the SOC 2 (Type II) certification process.<p>Overall, we’re really lucky to have support of the developer community, and, in fact, Infisical has gathered over 7k GitHub stars, and now processes over 200 million secrets per month for everyone from solo developers to public enterprises.<p>Our repo is published under the MIT license so any developer can use Infisical. Again, the goal is to not charge individual developers. We make money by charging a license fee for some enterprise features as well as providing a hosted version and support.<p>Check out Infisical Cloud (<a href="https://infisical.com/">https://infisical.com/</a>) or self-host Infisical on your own infrastructure (<a href="https://github.com/Infisical/infisical">https://github.com/Infisical/infisical</a>). We’d love to hear what you think!<p>We’re excited to continue building Infisical, and keep shipping features for you. Please let us know if you have any thoughts, feedback, or feature suggestions!
Show HN: Peeng – like Pingdom, but the other way around and simpler
Hey folks! Shahar and Tal from Keep (<a href="https://www.keephq.dev">https://www.keephq.dev</a>) here!<p>For the last few weeks we’ve been building Peeng and can now share our beta with you: <a href="https://www.peeng.sh" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.peeng.sh</a>. Peeng is the easiest and quickest “heartbeat” architecture we could think of. Just pick a subdomain (e.g. x.peeng.sh), configure an interval, an endpoint, and a payload, and hit that subdomain every <X (interval) seconds — If you won’t, Peeng will send an HTTP POST request to your configured endpoint.<p>It’s Pingdom/Cronitor/heartbeat.sh free alternative (but the other way around and A LOT simpler, with a lot more capabilities), suitable for developers, system administrators, DevOps, and individuals with complex networking situations (think “onprem” or K8s clusters with no inbound).
Instead of inbound heartbeat checks — Peeng presents outbound heartbeat checks!<p>Quick demo: <a href="https://youtu.be/ZX5mrnMRCwU" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/ZX5mrnMRCwU</a><p>Why we built this:<p>- We needed an easy way to let Keep (<a href="https://github.com/keephq/keep">https://github.com/keephq/keep</a>) customers behind closed networks monitor their Keep instance
- We needed an easy & quick way to setup monitoring for our cronjobs
- We wanted to give people with complex networking situations (e.g. behind a firewall) an easy way to monitor their services/processes<p>The beta version lets you:<p>- Create 5 endpoints for free
- Configure the endpoint and the payload to be sent when the subdomain is not hit
- See the visits (every HTTP GET request to your subdomain) and requests (every HTTP POST sent to your configured endpoint)
- Secret header (x-peeng-secret) that confirms requests are made by you<p>What’s next:<p>- A status page that displays your subdomains and their health together with embeddable status blocks that allow you to display the status of an endpoint in your web page (you can also send query params when sending the GET requests that will be included)
- Rest API (for subdomain creation, beats retrieval, etc., imagine curl -X POST peeng.sh/subdomain -H API_KEY —json {”subdomain”: “hn”, “endpoint”: “<a href="https://..”" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://xn--ivg</a>, “payload”: {…}})
- Hierarchy-based subdomains that allow you to create a nested heartbeat solution (i.e. dynamically create a heartbeat subdomain under x.peeng.sh → y.x.peeng.sh, z.x.peeng.sh)<p>This is still very early, so we’d love to hear your feedback and opinions. We’re open to any feature request, so just reach out via Intercom :)
Show HN: Use DNS TXT to share information
dig +short TXT youpay.govorenefekt.com @1.1.1.1 | fold -s<p>You can base64 encode an image, split to TXT records and send over Internet. Useful in certain circumstances. Like when one of the communicating parties is under severe censorship.
Show HN: Structured output from LLMs without reprompting
Built a tool for transforming unstructured data into structured outputs using language models (with 100% adherence).<p>If you're facing problems getting GPT to adhere to a schema (JSON, XML, etc.) or regex, need to bulk process some unstructured data, or generate synthetic data, check it out.<p>We run our own tuned model (you can self-host if you want), so, we're able to have incredibly fine grained control over text generation.<p>Repository: <a href="https://github.com/automorphic-ai/trex">https://github.com/automorphic-ai/trex</a><p>Playground: <a href="https://automorphic.ai/playground" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://automorphic.ai/playground</a>
Show HN: Structured output from LLMs without reprompting
Built a tool for transforming unstructured data into structured outputs using language models (with 100% adherence).<p>If you're facing problems getting GPT to adhere to a schema (JSON, XML, etc.) or regex, need to bulk process some unstructured data, or generate synthetic data, check it out.<p>We run our own tuned model (you can self-host if you want), so, we're able to have incredibly fine grained control over text generation.<p>Repository: <a href="https://github.com/automorphic-ai/trex">https://github.com/automorphic-ai/trex</a><p>Playground: <a href="https://automorphic.ai/playground" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://automorphic.ai/playground</a>