Show stories

I wanted to share this fun craft activity for the holidays that I've been doing with my family over the last few years. I came up with these while cutting up some cans trying to make an aluminum version of paper spinners.

There are a variety of shapes that work, but generally bigger+lighter spinners are better. Also incandescent bulbs are the best, but LEDs work too.

They remind me of candle carousels I would see at my grandparents' house during Christmas. Let me know what you think!

I wanted to see how far I could go building a notes app using only what modern browsers already provide – no frameworks, no storage APIs, no build step.

What it does:

Single HTML file, no deps, 111 loc

Notes live in the URL hash (shareable links!)

Auto-compressed with CompressionStream

Plain-text editor (contenteditable)

History support

Page title from first # heading

Respects light/dark mode

No storage, cookies, or tracking

The entire app is the page source.

https://textarea.my/

Hi HN, we’re Luke and Phillip, and we’re building Spice.ai OSS - a lightweight, portable data and AI engine and powered by Apache DataFusion & Ballista for SQL query, hybrid-search, and LLM-inference across disaggregated-storage used by enterprises like Barracuda Networks and Twilio.

We first introduced Spice [1] on HN in 2021 and re-launched it on HN [2] in 2024 re-built from the ground up in Rust.

Spice includes the concept of a Data Accelerator [3], which is a way to materialize data from disparate sources, such as other databases, in embedded databases like SQLite and DuckDB.

Today we’re excited to announce a new Ducklake-inspired Data Accelerator built on Vortex [3], a highly performant, extensible columnar data format that claims 100x faster random access, 10-20x faster scans, 5x faster writes with a similar compression ratio vs. Apache Parquet.

In our tests with Spice, Vortex performs faster than DuckDB with a third of the memory usage, and is much more scalable (multi-file). For real-world deployments, we see the DuckDB Data Accelerator often capping out around 1TB, but Spice Cayenne can do Petabyte-scale.

You can read about it at https://spice.ai/blog and in the Spice OSS release notes [4].

This is just the first version, and we’d love to get your feedback!

GitHub: https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28448887

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39854584

[3] https://github.com/vortex-data/vortex

[4] https://spiceai.org/blog/releases/v1.9.0

i started the selenium project 21 years ago. vibium is what i'd build if i started over today with ai agents in mind. go binary under the hood (handles browser, bidi, mcp) but devs never see it. just npm install vibium. python/java coming. for claude code: claude mcp add vibium -- npx -y vibium v1 ships today. ama.

Started off as a fun touch-screen theremin, and evolved into a full-fledged sequencer/groove box. Features hand feature detection to play the instrument and control effects.

Warning: Under heavy development! Still somewhat raw, but good enough to play around with :)

Hey HN, I built this because standard to-do lists let me hoard tasks forever. I wanted a 'use it or lose it' mechanic. The Tech: SvelteKit (Static) Dexie.js (IndexedDB wrapper) for client-side storage Web Audio API for the procedural sounds No account required, no server tracking (except privacy-preserving PostHog). Source code is messy but the logic is simple. Would love feedback on the offline-sync strategy.

This article provides a curated list of 'Awesome ChatGPT Prompts', a collection of prompts and examples to help users get the most out of the ChatGPT language model, covering a wide range of topics and applications.

I wanted to try Confer — Moxie Marlinspike’s private AI chat — but I don’t have a Mac lying around. Since it requires isUserVerifyingPlatformAuthenticatorAvailable(), and most Linux setups don’t qualify, I put together a minimal platform authenticator that works with what I have: a TPM and a fingerprint reader.

It’s a small bridge: Chrome extension + Go backend, using the TPM for key storage and fprintd for user verification.

Write-up: https://vitorpy.com/blog/2025-12-25-confer-to-linux-tpm-fido... Code: https://github.com/vitorpy/tpm-fido2-prf

Nothing fancy. No guarantees — it was a quick hack. But if it helps someone else get Confer working on Linux :)

Tabs, spotlight-like window finder, borders, etc... High Niri parity

We’ve been experimenting quite a bit with AI website builders and kept seeing the same pattern:

Sites often look finished to users — modern UI, fast loads, everything appears “done” — but when search engines crawl them, much of the main content isn’t actually present yet.

In many cases the issue isn’t SEO basics, keywords, or content quality. It’s simply when the HTML is generated and what Google receives on first visit.

We wrote up a calm, non-marketing explanation of what’s going on, how to spot it yourself (even if you’re not very technical), and why this keeps happening with many modern AI builders.

We’re also building a tool (Pagesmith) around this problem, but the article stands on its own and should be useful even if you never use our product.

Happy to answer questions or be challenged on any of the claims.

I built Pivor because I wanted a simple, self-hosted CRM without cloud lock-in or per-seat pricing.

Features: Clients, Contacts, Communications tracking (emails, calls, meetings, tasks), dark mode.

Stack: Laravel 12, Livewire 3, Tailwind CSS 4. Runs on SQLite by default, supports MySQL/PostgreSQL. Docker ready.

AGPL-3.0 licensed.

https://github.com/Lexaro-Software/pivor

Looking for feedback!

Hey HN! During this holiday season, I got the idea to update a small game I made 4 months ago.

Now, the ant collects snowflakes instead of apples to eat. The background trees have been replaced. I also added a small snowfall animation :)

Happy holidays everyone!

Puncker-RT is a real-time, open-source micropunching system that enables the fabrication of micron-scale features on various materials. The project provides a comprehensive toolkit for designing, controlling, and monitoring the micropunching process, making it a valuable tool for researchers and engineers working in the field of microfabrication.

The article describes a web-based tool called Secret Share that allows users to securely share sensitive information with others. The tool uses end-to-end encryption and various security measures to protect the shared data.

At this time, I had to sign multiple documents (energy, gas, water, etc) for our new house.

I'm using a Mac, and I have the option to create my own sign and reuse it multiple times, making it easy for me.

I'm also exploring vibe coding, so I decided to try building a small web app to generate handwritten signatures, allowing me to have a cool-looking signature and for others to use it if they want.

You can generate multiple signatures and only pay if you want to download your 7-signature pack.

I decided to let the users pay for it (only $3), not to become rich obviously :D, but to maybe cover some operational costs, like the VPS and the domain.

Since this is my first vibe-coded project, I'm also open to receiving feedback, so I can give some directions to my "virtual employee" :D

Thanks in advance!

A reading list for top Hacker News posts grouped monthly. Shows top posts by month with read/unread tracking. Set a monthly goal (15, 25, 50), mark posts as you go, see your progress.

Features: - Monthly view sorted by points (surfaces the best, not just the newest) - Mark as read/unread, or hide permanently - Syncs across browsers via your own private GitHub Gist - No server, no account, no tracking – just open the HTML file - Works offline, state persists in localStorage

Try it out here: [https://www.readhn.top/]

Had some fun over the christmas holidays and nunchux is the output.

A fun menu for tmux to reduce the number of apps I need to remember the name for.

Also a nice quick way to browse hacker news via hackernews_tui :-)

I built WebPtoPNG after getting frustrated with converters that throttle uploads or phone data; everything runs straight in the browser, and never asks for a signup.

Hi HN

I built CineCLI — a cross-platform terminal app to browse movies, view details, and open torrents directly in your system torrent client.

Features: - Search movies from the terminal - Rich UI with ratings, runtime, genres - Interactive & non-interactive modes - Magnet handling via system default client - Linux/macOS/Windows support - No ads, no tracking

GitHub: https://github.com/eyeblech/cinecli PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/cinecli/

Would love feedback from terminal + Python folks

The Shi-Mo Protocol is a decentralized, open-source protocol that aims to enhance web accessibility and inclusivity by allowing users to customize websites to their individual needs, such as adjusting font size, color contrast, and other accessibility features.

I’m constantly building small web-based tools for my own use. Usually, my workflow ends with a dilemma: do I keep a terminal tab open forever running `npx http-server -p 8080`, or do I spend time configuring a Caddyfile for a 50-line HTML tool?

Nothing felt right. I wanted something that felt like a native, always-on, utility that was easily accessible but invisible.

I built Buoy. It’s a minimal server that:

Lives in the status bar: I can see that it's running at a glance without hunting through ps aux.

Is persistent by default: It starts with macOS and keeps my utilities alive in the background.

Zero-config: It points at a XDG‑Standard www folder so I can create a symlink and be done.

Small: I wanted to avoid the modern bloat. Buoy is a single, self-contained binary that's under 10MB.

It’s a minimal tool that lets me build many small things and move on to the next.

Hi HN,

I’m one of the maintainers of Bridge Anonymization. We built this because the existing solutions for translating sensitive user content are insufficient for many of our privacy-concious clients (Governments, Banks, Healthcare, etc.).

We couldn't send PII to third-party APIs, but standard redaction destroyed the translation quality. If you scrub "John" to "[PERSON]", the translation engine loses gender context (often defaulting to masculine), which breaks grammatical agreement in languages like French or German.

So we built a reversible, local-first pipeline for Node.js/Bun. Here is how we implemented the tricky parts:

0. The Mapping

We use XML-like tags with ID’s that uniquely identify the PII, `<PII type=”PERSON” id=”1”>`. Translation models and the systems around them work with XML data structures since the dawn of Computer Aided Translation tools, so this improves compatibility with existing workflows and systems. A `PIIMap` is stored locally for rehydration after translation (AES-256-GCM-encrypted by default).

1. Hybrid Detection Engine

Obviously neither Regex nor NER was enough on its own.

- Structured PII: We use strict Regex with validation checksums for things like IBANs (Mod-97) and Credit Cards (Luhn). - Soft PII: For names and locations, we run a quantized `xlm-roberta` model via `onnxruntime-node` directly in the process. This lets us avoid a Python sidecar while keeping the package ‘lightweight’ (still ~280MB for the quantized model, but acceptable for desktop environments).

2. The "Hallucination" Guard (Fuzzy Rehydration)

LLMs often "mangle" the XML placeholders during translation (e.g., turning `<PII id="1"/>` into `< PII id = « 1 » >`). We implemented a Fuzzy Tag Matcher that uses flexible regex patterns to detect these artefacts. It identifies the tag even if attributes are reordered or quotes are changed, ensuring we can always map the token back to the original encrypted value.

3. Semantic Masking

We are currently working on "Semantic Masking"—adding context to the PII tag (like `<PII type="PERSON" gender="female" id="1" />` ) to preserve (gender) context for the translation. For now, we are relying on a lightweight lookup-table approach to avoid the overhead of a second ML model or the hassle of fine tuning. So far this works nicely for most use cases.

The code is MIT licensed. I’d love to hear how others are handling the "context loss" problem in privacy-preserving NLP pipelines! I think this could quite easily be generalized to other LLM applications as well.

HTML2PNG.dev is a free online tool that allows users to convert HTML pages into high-quality PNG images, enabling easy sharing and integration of web content on various platforms.

I missed clippy and bonzi buddy, so I spent the past few days reversing and implementing microsofts old agent format (acs) and wrote a small viewer on top of it (wasm + typescript)

You can check out the code here as well: https://github.com/Ell/bonzi

A Promise-like primitive which is lazy/cancelable, has typed errors, and emits synchronously instead of on the microtask queue. In a way LazyPromise is what you get if you take an Observable and make it impossible to misuse it for what the Signals were built to do.

Hi everyone! My name's Luke and I made the original Jmail here alongside Riley Walz. We had a ton of friends collaborate on building out more of the app suite last night in lieue of DOJ's "Epstein files" release.

Please AMA!

If you like the terminal, Claude Code is already lovely. No IDE needed.

The DX friction: it lives in your working directory. Switching branches means stashing, losing context, juggling. Git worktrees fix this. This script just connects them:

gwt-create feature-auth # new worktree + Claude opens gwt-switch fix-bug-42 # jump to another gwt-list # see what's running

Now I run parallel features without thinking about it. No hyped AI IDE needed to find a workflow like this — just git and a shell script.

zsh only. Bash port welcome.

Demo: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/slowestmonkey/gwt-claude/d...