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When I bought my home, the big bank I'd been using for years quoted me 7% APR. A local credit union was offering 5.5% for the exact same mortgage.

I was surprised until I learned that mortgages are basically standardized products – the government buys almost all of them (see Bits About Money: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/mortgages-are-a-manuf...). So what's the price difference paying for? A recent Bloomberg Odd Lots episode makes the case that it's largely advertising and marketing (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2025-11-28/odd-lots-thi...). Credit unions are non-profits without big marketing budgets, so they can pass those savings on, but a lot of people don't know about them.

I built this dashboard to make it easier to shop around. I pull public rates from 120+ credit union websites and compares against the weekly FRED national benchmark.

Features:

- Filter by loan type (30Y/15Y/etc.), eligibility (the hardest part tbh), and rate type - Payment calculator with refi mode (CUs can be a bit slower than big lenders, but that makes them great for refi) - Links to each CU's rates page and eligibility requirements - Toggle to show/hide statistical outliers

At the time of writing, the average CU rate is 5.91% vs. 6.23% national average. about $37k difference in total interest on a $500k loan. I actually used seaborn to visualize the rate spread against the four big banks: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1pcj9t7/oc...

Stack: Python for the data/backend, Svelte/SvelteKit for the frontend. No signup, no ads, no referral fees.

Happy to answer questions about the methodology or add CUs people suggest.

I built Fresh to challenge the status quo that terminal editing must require a steep learning curve or endless configuration. My goal was to create a fast, resource-efficient TUI editor with the usability and features of a modern GUI editor (like a command palette, mouse support, and LSP integration).

Core Philosophy:

- Ease-of-Use: Fundamentally non-modal. Prioritizes standard keybindings and a minimal learning curve.

- Efficiency: Uses a lazy-loading piece tree to avoid loading huge files into RAM - reads only what's needed for user interactions. Coded in Rust.

- Extensibility: Uses TypeScript (via Deno) for plugins, making it accessible to a large developer base.

The Performance Challenge:

I focused on resource consumption and speed with large file support as a core feature. I did a quick benchmark loading a 2GB log file with ANSI color codes. Here is the comparison against other popular editors:

  - Fresh:   Load Time: *~600ms*     | Memory: *~36 MB*
  - Neovim:  Load Time: ~6.5 seconds | Memory: ~2 GB
  - Emacs:   Load Time: ~10 seconds  | Memory: ~2 GB
  - VS Code: Load Time: ~20 seconds  | Memory: OOM Killed (~4.3 GB available)

Development process:

I embraced Claude Code and made an effort to get good mileage out of it. I gave it strong specific directions, especially in architecture / code structure / UX-sensitive areas. It required constant supervision and re-alignment, especially in the performance critical areas. Added very extensive tests (compared to my normal standards) to keep it aligned as the code grows. Especially, focused on end-to-end testing where I could easily enforce a specific behavior or user flow.

Fresh is an open-source project (GPL-2) seeking early adopters. You're welcome to send feedback, feature requests, and bug reports.

Website: https://sinelaw.github.io/fresh/

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh

It all started as an experiment to see if I could build a game making heavy use of Deno and its SQLite driver. After sharing an early build in the „What are you working on?“ thread here, I got the encouragement I needed to polish it and make a version 1.0 for Steam.

So here it is, Microlandia, a SimCity Classic-inspired game with parameters from real-life datasets, statistics and research. It also introduces aspects that are conveniently hidden in other games (like homelessness), and my plan is to continue updating, expanding and perfecting the models for an indefinite amount of time.

The article discusses the development of AgentDiff, a tool that helps developers compare and understand the differences between machine learning models. AgentDiff provides insights into model behavior, enabling users to identify and address potential issues in their models.

Noeticmap is an online mapping platform that provides interactive and comprehensive maps for various regions around the world, offering users detailed information and analysis on topics such as demographics, infrastructure, and economic data.

Hi HN — ProbeOps Horizon is a Playwright-based geo testing browser. It lets you test how a site behaves from different regions using real Chromium sessions routed through regional egress nodes (instead of just header spoofing).

Use cases:

- geo redirects / pricing / localization

- CDN / edge routing differences (Cloudflare/Akamai/Fastly/CloudFront)

- consent banners, payment flows, bot checks

- per-region artifacts: HAR + TTFB/waterfall, screenshots/video, console/network logs

Current: local client (per tab/context region routing).

Links: (demo)

https://youtu.be/jXAnWzLue_c

Feedback I’m looking for:

which regions matter most,

which geo-specific behaviors you need to validate,

local vs cloud mode preference.

Happy to answer technical questions.

Hi everyone, I built a small desktop markdown note app called Mdit.

I wanted something as simple and minimal as Apple Notes.

I also wanted Notion style slash commands so you can write without knowing markdown syntax, while still keeping the freedom of plain local .md files like Obsidian.

I'd appreciate any feedback.

Website: https://mdit.app

GitHub: https://github.com/hjinco/mdit

Currently supports macOS only.

I built Banana Pro, a simple web app for text-to-image generation and context-aware editing using Google’s official flash image API. Upload an image (JPG/PNG/WebP, up to 6MB)

Edit with text prompts or blend styles

Get consistent, high-quality results in seconds

It’s free to try (first enhancement is free). Feedback and ideas welcome!

I finally got tired of XKCD #2347 living rent-free in my head, so I built Stacktower: a tool that takes any real package’s dependency graph and turns it into an actual tower of bricks. Along the way I had to wrestle some surprisingly spicy problems.

Full blog post here: https://stacktower.io

The result is half visualization tool, half love letter to the chaos of modern dependency trees. Open-source, works with PyPI, Cargo, npm, and more.

Code: https://github.com/matzehuels/stacktower

Zint is an open-source barcode generator library that supports a wide range of barcode symbologies, including 1D and 2D barcodes. It is designed to be used as a library in other applications and provides a simple API for generating barcodes.

I built Sonusly. Think Hacker News, but for music.

You search for a song, create a post with a title, and people can vote and discuss.

Here’s what you can do:

You can vote on posts you like by clicking ▲, with each vote costing 1 karma. Your karma starts at 100 and you earn 5 more each day you’re active if it’s below 100. You can save songs with the bookmark icon and save post discussions you care about for later. Click “listen” to hear a song in Spotify, use comments to discuss it with others, and click “share” to copy the post’s link/image.

Post example: https://www.sonusly.com/s/21B4gaTWnTkuSh77iWEXdS/p/dyi3czjdl...

First project I’ve ever shipped. I’d love feedback

The article explores the notion of 'friendly AI' through self-reports from 22 different AI models. It examines whether AI systems naturally tend towards being helpful and beneficial to humans, or if this requires explicit programing and design.

Hey everyone, I am sharing my open-source storage engine project TidesDB. I'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts.

Cheers.

I build a lot of small products myself and I realized how many indie founders want an exit that doesn’t involve platforms charging large commissions or requiring big revenue numbers. Sometimes a project makes $50/month, sometimes $500, sometimes $0 but has a great codebase, and that’s enough value for someone else.

So I built buy-startups.com, a very simple, privacy-friendly marketplace for buying and selling small online startups.

It’s not fancy. There’s no commission, no listing fee, no hidden funnel. Just a straightforward way for indie devs and bootstrappers to list a project and connect with someone who wants to pick it up.

Hey HN, I've been trying to correct for one of the biggest difficulties with moving from SEO -> GEO, which is the lack of public data (in the same way that for SEO we had ahrefs/semrush/etc).

To try and start fixing this, I've built a searchable database of 15k brands, across 500 different industries, with daily updates.

Each morning, the tool goes out and queries 10k different prompts, and normalises the results to all the relevant brands.

You can also see some of the most interesting tech rivalries here: https://trakkr.ai/rankings/rivalries

Would love your thoughts on anything to add :)

Marmot is an open-source data processing framework that provides a simple and efficient way to handle large-scale data processing tasks. It offers a powerful and flexible API for building data pipelines, with support for various data sources and scalable processing capabilities.

Hey HN,

I've been working on Onetone Framework for the past few years and finally releasing it as open source (AGPL 3.0).

*What is it?*

Onetone is an ambitious full-stack development framework that includes:

- Custom C interpreter with its own scripting language (.otc files)

- 27,000+ line OpenGL 3D graphics engine with PBR materials, skeletal animation, physics, and particle systems

- PHP web framework with MVC architecture

- Python utilities and tooling

- 716,000+ lines of code across 17 programming languages

*The scripting language features:*

- Classes, inheritance, generators, async/await

- Records, enums, pattern matching

- Built-in collections (ArrayList, HashMap, HashSet, TreeMap, etc.)

- Template strings, destructuring, spread operators

- Native bindings for OpenGL, Windows API, audio, networking

*Why build this?*

I run a game localization and needed a unified toolset for:

- Visual novel engines

- Translation management tools

- Quick prototyping with native performance

Instead of gluing together multiple languages and frameworks, I built one cohesive system.

*Current status:*

- Windows-focused (uses WinAPI extensively)

- Some features still in development (generators, full async support)

- Documentation is a work in progress

GitHub: https://github.com/onetoneframework/framework

Would love feedback from the community.

*Roadmap & Vision*

My goal is to evolve Onetone's scripting language to reach Python-level usability and ecosystem richness. I want developers to be able to pick it up as easily as Python while retaining native performance.

*A note on development process*

I want to be transparent: this project was developed with significant assistance from Claude (Anthropic's LLM). The codebase is a mix of hand-written code and LLM-generated code, with me directing the architecture, debugging, and integration.

I found this workflow surprisingly effective for a project of this scale – the LLM helped with boilerplate, documentation, and exploring implementation approaches, while I focused on design decisions and fixing the subtle bugs that AI still struggles with.

Whether you see this as "cheating" or the future of development, I think it's worth discussing. The 700K+ lines wouldn't exist without this collaboration, and I'm curious how others feel about AI-assisted open source projects.

There were many errors and strange bits of code produced by the LLM, and I spent a lot of time tracking down memory leaks; in fact, there isn’t a single piece of LLM-generated code that I didn’t end up modifying. I still think "vibe coding" has a number of issues.

I've been tinkering with a browser-based rhythm game creation tool. The pitch is simple: AI makes the music, Essentia.js figures out the beats, and you write the game logic in JS.

Demo: https://rhythm-seodang-web.vercel.app/

The problem I wanted to solve: most rhythm game workflows are heavy. Proprietary editors, manual charting, fixed gameplay patterns, desktop-only. I wanted something where you could just... open a browser tab and start messing around.

How it works:

- Music comes from AI services (Suno/Udio). No user uploads, no copyright headaches.

- Essentia.js (WASM port) runs entirely in-browser. Beat tracking, onset detection, energy curves, segment boundaries, all client-side.

- The output is a timing-only chart. What you do with that timing is up to you.

The fun part is the minigame sandbox. Charts and gameplay are completely decoupled. You define spawn rules, input handling, rendering, all in short JS functions. Same chart can become a taiko-style drum game, a directional swipe thing, or something experimental. Preview runs instantly.

Tech: Next.js, Essentia.js, custom rhythm engine, Canvas rendering, deployed on Vercel.

Current state: playable with sample tracks, chart generation works, minigame workshop is functional. In-platform AI music generation (prompt to track to playable) is next. Still rough around the edges.

If you've worked with WebAudio or rhythm engine internals, curious what you think. Feedback welcome.