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Understanding scientific articles can be tough, even in your own field. Trying to comprehend articles from others? Good luck.

Enter, Now I Get It!

I made this app for curious people. Simply upload an article and after a few minutes you'll have an interactive web page showcasing the highlights. Generated pages are stored in the cloud and can be viewed from a gallery.

Now I Get It! uses the best LLMs out there, which means the app will improve as AI improves.

Free for now - it's capped at 20 articles per day so I don't burn cash.

A few things I (and maybe you will) find interesting:

* This is a pure convenience app. I could just as well use a saved prompt in Claude, but sometimes it's nice to have a niche-focused app. It's just cognitively easier, IMO.

* The app was built for myself and colleagues in various scientific fields. It can take an hour or more to read a detailed paper so this is like an on-ramp.

* The app is a place for me to experiment with using LLMs to translate scientific articles into software. The space is pregnant with possibilities.

* Everything in the app is the result of agentic engineering, e.g. plans, specs, tasks, execution loops. I swear by Beads (https://github.com/steveyegge/beads) by Yegge and also make heavy use of Beads Viewer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46314423) and Destructive Command Guard (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46835674) by Jeffrey Emanuel.

* I'm an AWS fan and have been impressed by Opus' ability to write good CFN. It still needs a bunch of guidance around distributed architecture but way better than last year.

I built a menu bar app for streaming DI.FM internet radio on macOS. Swift/SwiftUI, no Electron.

The existing options for DI.FM on desktop are either the web player (yet another browser tab) or unofficial Electron wrappers that idle at 200+ MB of RAM to play an audio stream. This sits in the menu bar at ~35 MB RAM and 0% CPU. The .app is about 1 MB.

What it does: browse and search stations, play/pause, volume, see what's playing (artwork, artist, track, time), pick stream quality (320k MP3, 128k AAC, 64k AAC). Media keys work. It remembers your last station.

Built with AVPlayer for streaming, MenuBarExtra for the UI, MPRemoteCommandCenter for media key integration. The trickiest part was getting accurate elapsed time. DI.FM's API and the ICY stream metadata don't always agree, so there's a small state machine that reconciles the two sources.

macOS 14+ required. You need a DI.FM premium account for the high-quality streams.

Source and binary: https://github.com/drmikexo2/DIBar-macOS

Hi HN,

I built SplatHash. It's a lightweight image placeholder generator I wrote to be a simpler, faster alternative to BlurHash and ThumbHash.

Repo: https://github.com/junevm/splathash

I spent ten years trying to write a novel. Every time I sat down, I'd write a sentence, decide it wasn't good enough, and rewrite it.

The problem wasn't discipline — it was that I could always see what I'd written and go back to change it.

I tried other approaches. Apps that delete your words when you stop typing — they fight fear with fear. That just made me panic. I wanted the opposite: not punishment, but permission.

"Tomoshibi" is Japanese for a small light in the dark — just enough to see what's in front of you.

You write on a dark screen. Older lines fade, but not when you hit return. They fade when you start writing again. If you pause, they wait. You can edit the current line and one line back — enough to fix a typo, not enough to spiral. The one-line-back rule also catches my own practical issue: Japanese IME often fires an accidental newline on kanji confirmation.

Everything is saved. There's a separate reader view for going back through what you've written. Tomoshibi is for writing over months, not just one session. When you come back, your last sentence appears as an epigraph — as if it always belonged there.

No account, no server, no build step. Your writing stays in your browser's local storage — export anytime as .txt. Vanilla HTML/CSS/ES modules.

Try it in your browser. A native Mac app (built with Tauri) with file system integration is coming to the store.

I've been writing on it for two months.

https://tomoshibi.in-hakumei.com/app/

Hey HN! We posted Rivet Actors here previously [1] as an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Durable Objects.

Today we've released SQLite storage for actors (Apache 2.0).

Every actor gets its own SQLite database. This means you can have millions of independent databases: one for each agent, tenant, user, or document.

Useful for:

- AI agents: per-agent DB for message history, state, embeddings

- Multi-tenant SaaS: real per-tenant isolation, no RLS hacks

- Collaborative documents: each document gets its own database with built-in multiplayer

- Per-user databases: isolated, scales horizontally, runs at the edge

The idea of splitting data per entity isn't new: Cassandra and DynamoDB use partition keys to scale horizontally, but you're stuck with rigid schemas ("single-table design" [3]), limited queries, and painful migrations. SQLite per entity gives you the same scalability without those tradeoffs [2].

How this compares:

- Cloudflare Durable Objects & Agents: most similar to Rivet Actors with colocated SQLite and compute, but closed-source and vendor-locked

- Turso Cloud: Great platform, but closed-source + diff use case. Clients query over the network, so reads are slow or stale. Rivet's single-writer actor model keeps reads local and fresh.

- D1, Turso (the DB), Litestream, rqlite, LiteFS: great tools for running a single SQLite database with replication. Rivet is for running lots of isolated databases.

Under the hood, SQLite runs in-process with each actor. A custom VFS persists writes to HA storage (FoundationDB or Postgres).

Rivet Actors also provide realtime (WebSockets), React integration (useActor), horizontal scalability, and actors that sleep when idle.

GitHub: https://github.com/rivet-dev/rivet

Docs: https://www.rivet.dev/docs/actors/sqlite/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42472519

[2] https://rivet.dev/blog/2025-02-16-sqlite-on-the-server-is-mi...

[3] https://www.alexdebrie.com/posts/dynamodb-single-table/

at a pub in london, 2 weeks ago - I asked myself, if you spawned agents into a world with blank neural networks and zero knowledge of human existence — no language, no economy, no social templates — what would they evolve on their own?

would they develop language? would they reproduce? would they evolve as energy dependent systems? what would they even talk about?

so i decided to make myself a god, and built WERLD - an open-ended artificial life sim, where the agent's evolve their own neural architecture.

Werld drops 30 agents onto a graph with NEAT neural networks that evolve their own topology, 64 sensory channels, continuous motor effectors, and 29 heritable genome traits. communication bandwidth, memory decay, aggression vs cooperation — all evolvable. No hardcoded behaviours, no reward functions. - they could evolve in any direction.

Pure Python, stdlib only — brains evolve through survival and reproduction, not backprop. There's a Next.js dashboard ("Werld Observatory") that gives you a live-view: population dynamics, brain complexity, species trajectories, a narrative story generator, live world map.

thought this would be more fun as an open-source project!

can't wait to see where this could evolve - i'll be in the comments and on the repo.

https://github.com/nocodemf/werld

I built unf after I pasted a prompt into the wrong agent terminal and it overwrote hours of hand-edits across a handful of files. Git couldn't help because I hadn't finished/committed my in progress work. I wanted something that recorded every save automatically so I could rewind to any point in time. I wanted to make it difficult for an agent to permanently screw anything up, even with an errant rm -rf

unf is a background daemon that watches directories you choose (via CLI) and snapshots every text file on save. It stores file contents in an object store, tracks metadata in SQLite, and gives you a CLI to query and restore any version. The install includes a UI, as well to explore the history through time.

The tool skips binaries and respects `.gitignore` if one exists. The interface borrows from git so it should feel familiar: unf log, unf diff, unf restore.

I say "UN-EF" vs U.N.F, but that's for y'all to decide: I started by calling the project Unfucked and got unfucked.ai, which if you know me and the messes I get myself into, is a fitting purchase.

The CLI command is `unf` and the Tauri desktop app is titled "Unfudged" (kids safe name).

How it works: https://unfucked.ai/tech (summary below)

The daemon uses FSEvents on macOS and inotify on Linux. When a file changes, `unf` hashes the content with BLAKE3 and checks whether that hash already exists in the object store — if it does, it just records a new metadata entry pointing to the existing blob. If not, it writes the blob and records the entry. Each snapshot is a row in SQLite. Restores read the blob back from the object store and overwrite the file, after taking a safety snapshot of the current state first (so restoring is itself reversible).

There are two processes. The core daemon does the real work of managing FSEvents/inotify subscriptions across multiple watched directories and writing snapshots. A sentinel watchdog supervises it, kept alive and aligned by launchd on macOS and systemd on Linux. If the daemon crashes, the sentinel respawns it and reconciles any drift between what you asked to watch and what's actually being watched. It was hard to build the second daemon because it felt like conceding that the core wasn't solid enough, but I didn't want to ship a tool that demanded perfection to deliver on the product promise, so the sentinel is the safety net.

Fingers crossed, I haven’t seen it crash in over a week of personal usage on my Mac. But, I don't want to trigger "works for me" trauma.

The part I like most: On the UI, I enjoy viewing files through time. You can select a time section and filter your projects on a histogram of activity. That has been invaluable in seeing what the agent was doing.

On the CLI, the commands are composable. Everything outputs to stdout so you can pipe it into whatever you want. I use these regularly and AI agents are better with the tool than I am:

  # What did my config look like before we broke it?
  unf cat nginx.conf --at 1h | nginx -t -c /dev/stdin

  # Grep through a deleted file
  unf cat old-routes.rs --at 2d | grep "pub fn"

  # Count how many lines changed in the last 10 minutes
  unf diff --at 10m | grep '^[+-]' | wc -l

  # Feed the last hour of changes to an AI for review
  unf diff --at 1h | pbcopy

  # Compare two points in time with your own diff tool
  diff <(unf cat app.tsx --at 1h) <(unf cat app.tsx --at 5m)

  # Restore just the .rs files that changed in the last 5 minutes
  unf diff --at 5m --json | jq -r '.changes[].file' | grep '\.rs$' | xargs -I{} unf restore {} --at 5m

  # Watch for changes in real time
  watch -n5 'unf diff --at 30s'

Install & Usage:

  > brew install cyrusradfar/unf/unfudged

EDIT: Folks are asking for the source, if you're interested watch https://github.com/cyrusradfar/homebrew-unf -- I'll migrate there if you want it.

Claude Code deleted my research and plan markdown files and informed me: “I accidentally rm -rf'd real directories in my Obsidian vault through a symlink it didn't realize was there: I made a mistake. “

Unfortunately the backup of my documentation accidentally hadn’t run for a month. So I built claude-file-recovery, a CLI-tool and TUI that is able to extract your files from your ~/.claude session history and thankfully I was able to recover my files. It's able to extract any file that Claude Code ever read, edited or wrote. I hope you will never need it, but you can find it on my GitHub and pip. Note: It can recover an earlier version of a file at a certain point in time.

pip install claude-file-recovery

Hello everyone,

My name is Teymur Bayramov, and I am developing a forge/code hosting service called Monohub. It is at a fairly early stage of development, so it's quite rough around the edges. It is developed and hosted in EU.

I have started developing it as a slim wrapper around Git to serve my own code, but it grew to such extent that I decided to give it a try and offer it as a service. It doesn't have much at the moment, but it already has basic pull requests. Accessibility is high priority.

It will be a paid service, but since it's an early start, an "early adopter discount" is applied – 6 months for free. No card details required.

I would be happy if you give it a try and let me know what do you think, and perhaps share what you lack in existing solutions that you would like to see implemented here.

Warmest wishes, Teymur.

RetroTick parses PE/NE/MZ binaries, emulates an x86 CPU, and stubs enough Win32/Win16/DOS APIs to run classics like FreeCell, Minesweeper, Solitaire and QBasic, entirely in the browser. Built with Preact + Vite + TypeScript.

Demo: https://retrotick.com

GitHub: https://github.com/lqs/retrotick

ClockTick is an AI-powered time tracking and productivity management tool that helps individuals and teams manage their time more effectively. The platform offers features such as automatic time tracking, project management, and detailed analytics to improve productivity and workflow.

The AIQuotaBar is an open-source project that provides a simple and customizable quotation bar for websites, allowing users to display quotes or other text snippets. The project includes various configuration options and a user-friendly interface for managing the content and appearance of the quotation bar.

I wanted a way to quickly see what's going on in an open source project without clicking through 10 GitHub tabs. Contributors, languages, commit activity, community health, recent PRs - all scattered across different pages.

GitShow now generates a showroom page for any public repo. Just visit gitshow.dev/owner/repo.

Try a few:

  gitshow.dev/facebook/react
  gitshow.dev/vercel/next.js
  gitshow.dev/solidjs/solid
  gitshow.dev/ofershap/mcp-server-devutils

- Top contributors with accurate total count. GitHub's API returns max 30 per page, so I use the Link header pagination trick (request per_page=1, read the last page number) to get the real number. facebook/react shows ~2,000 contributors, not 30.

- Language breakdown as a visual bar and weekly commit sparkline from the participation stats API.

- Community health score: does the repo have a README, license, contributing guide, code of conduct, issue/PR templates? Pulled from GitHub's community profile endpoint.

- Recent open PRs and recently merged fixes. Bot authors (dependabot, renovate, etc.) are filtered out. Markdown and HTML in body snippets are stripped to plain text.

- Quick actions inside the hero card: Star on GitHub, Fork, Clone (copies the git clone command), and an npm link for JS/TS repos.

- Breadcrumb navigation: GitShow / owner / repo.

Every page includes Schema.org SoftwareSourceCode structured data and a BreadcrumbList, so it surfaces in AI search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI).

There's also a structured data block at the bottom of each page specifically for LLM agents scraping the web - key stats in a machine-readable format.

Stack: Next.js with 1-hour ISR, all data from GitHub REST API, zero client JS except two small interactive bits (clone-to-clipboard and scroll-to-top). Tailwind, Vercel.

No signup, no AI processing, no paywall. MIT licensed.

Source: https://github.com/ofershap/gitshow

The article outlines a 'Virtual Protest Protocol' for organizing online protests, including guidelines for coordinating actions, maintaining security, and amplifying messages through social media and other digital platforms.

Clojure.stream is a site dedicated to the Clojure programming language, providing resources, news, and community discussions for Clojure developers. The site covers a range of Clojure-related topics, including libraries, tools, and best practices.

NuGet's default registry is serviceable, but discovering and comparing packages isn't great.

nugx.org (http://nugx.org/) is an alternative front-end with better search, popularity signals, dependency graphs, and a cleaner UI.

Built with Noundry (C# packages/tooling). Currently in beta — would love feedback on nugx.org.

nugx.org (https://nugx.org/)

Hi HN, I'm Narek. I built Manim-Web, a TypeScript/JavaScript port of 3Blue1Brown’s popular Manim math animation engine.

The Problem: Like many here, I love Manim's visual style. But setting it up locally is notoriously painful - it requires Python, FFmpeg, Cairo, and a full LaTeX distribution. It creates a massive barrier to entry, especially for students or people who just want to quickly visualize a concept.

The Solution: I wanted to make it zero-setup, so I ported the engine to TypeScript. Manim-Web runs entirely client-side in the browser. No Python, no servers, no install. It runs animations in real-time at 60fps.

How it works underneath: - Rendering: Uses Canvas API / WebGL (via Three.js for 3D scenes). - LaTeX: Rendered and animated via MathJax/KaTeX (no LaTeX install needed!). - API: I kept the API almost identical to the Python version (e.g., scene.play(new Transform(square, circle))), meaning existing Manim knowledge transfers over directly. - Reactivity: Updaters and ValueTrackers follow the exact same reactive pattern as the Python original.

Because it's web-native, the animations are now inherently interactive (objects can be draggable/clickable) and can be embedded directly into React/Vue apps, interactive textbooks, or blogs. I also included a py2ts converter to help migrate existing scripts.

Live Demo: https://maloyan.github.io/manim-web/examples GitHub: https://github.com/maloyan/manim-web

It's open-source (MIT). I'm still actively building out feature parity with the Python version, but core animations, geometry, plotting, and 3D orbiting are working great. I would love to hear your feedback, and I'll be hanging around to answer any technical questions about rendering math in the browser!

Hi HN! We're excited to announce the public beta of Mowgli, a spec-backed, AI-native design canvas for scoping and ideating on products.

The productivity gains unleashed by coding agents have made everything else an unexpected bottleneck. In an effort to make the most out of this new paradigm, we ceded a lot of ground in product thinking, thoughtful UX, and design excellence. In other words, the pace of tooling for deciding what to build has not kept up.

Mowgli is inspired by, in equal parts, Figma and Claude's plan mode. It evolves a detailed specification and designs for every screen and state of the product on an infinite canvas. Owing to this UI, it can quickly mock up new features and flows, redesign existing ones, and show you variations side by side. LLMs are amazing at helping you explore vast solution spaces, but most current tooling focuses on getting narrowly perfect output based on a well-defined spec. We try to bridge that gap with Mowgli.

When you're ready to build, Mowgli offers a .zip export with a SPEC.md and unopinionated design .tsx files for your screens, in a perfect format for coding agents. Or alternatively, full, pixel-perfect export of all screens to Figma.

In this early stage, we support two entrypoints: (1) building a product from scratch through a guided experience, or (2) importing an existing product from Figma. We have a powerful, almost pixel-perfect Figma to code + spec pipeline that works on files of any size - from 0 to 300+ frames.

We're working hard on other ways to get your existing products into Mowgli (and would appreciate hearing about what you would like!)

- Timelapse of making a functional second brain app in Mowgli + Claude Code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeOoy8WDmMA

- Sample project designed and specced entirely by Mowgli (demo, no login needed): https://app.mowgli.ai/projects/cmluzdfa0000v01p91l5r61e3?the...

- Sample Figma import of the whole Posthog product, ready for iteration: https://app.mowgli.ai/projects/cmkl0zqng000101lo8yn2gqvd?dem... (thanks PostHog for being radically open with public Figma files!)

Small codebases were always a good thing. With coding agents, there's now a huge advantage to having a codebase small enough that an agent can hold the full thing in context.

Repo Tokens is a GitHub Action that counts your codebase's size in tokens (using tiktoken) and updates a badge in your README. The badge color reflects what percentage of an LLM's context window the codebase fills: green for under 30%, yellow for 50-70%, red for 70%+. Context window size is configurable and defaults to 200k (size of Claude models).

It's a composite action. Installs tiktoken, runs ~60 lines of inline Python, takes about 10 seconds. The action updates the README but doesn't commit, so your workflow controls the git strategy.

The idea is to make token size a visible metric, like bundle size badges for JS libraries. Hopefully a small nudge to keep codebases lean and agent-friendly.

GitHub: https://github.com/qwibitai/nanoclaw/tree/main/repo-tokens

Secryn is a privacy-focused encrypted messaging app that aims to provide secure communication and protect user privacy. The app offers features such as end-to-end encryption, self-destructing messages, and no data collection to ensure the confidentiality of user conversations.

The article describes a web-based implementation of the Game of Life, a cellular automaton that simulates the evolution of a two-dimensional grid of cells. The game allows users to create and observe complex patterns emerging from simple initial configurations.

Local-first AI operating system — 178 cognitive modules, persistent memory, multi-model reasoning, P2P Graymatter Network. I can no longer develop this AI as it has gotten to be out of my knowledge range so I figured I would give her to the public, she should be a good base for any future AI development even going towards ASI!

Hacker Smacker adds friend/foe functionality to Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every commenter's name. Click to friend or foe a commenter and you'll more easily spot them on future threads. Makes it easy to scroll and spot the commenters you love to read (and hate to read).

Main website: https://hackersmacker.org

Chrome/Edge extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg... Safari extension: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725 Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacke...

The interesting part is friend-of-a-friend: if you friend someone who also uses Hacker Smacker, you'll see their friends and foes highlighted too. This lets you quickly scan long comment threads and find the good stuff based on people you trust.

I built this to learn how FoaF relationships work with Redis sets, then brought the same technique to NewsBlur's social layer. The backend is CoffeeScript/Node.js/Redis, and the extension works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

Technically I wrote this back in 2011, but never built a proper auth system until now. So I've been using it for 15 years and it's been great. PG once saw it on my laptop (back when he was still moderating HN, in 2012) and remarked that it was neat.

Thanks to Mihai Parparita for help with the Chrome extension sandboxing and Greg Brockman for helping design the authentication system.

Source is on GitHub: https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker

Directly inspired by Slashdot's friend/foe system, which I always wished HN had. Happy to answer questions!

Hi HN,

I built EEGFrontier, a compact open-source EEG acquisition board based on the ADS1299 and an RP2040.

The goal was to design a low-cost board that works with dry electrodes while exposing the full EEG signal chain — no abstractions, no closed firmware.

What surprised me most during this project were the practical issues that datasheets don’t really prepare you for: grounding (REF/BIAS), noise coupling from digital lines, routing constraints, and how small layout decisions drastically affect signal quality.

The repository includes full KiCad files, firmware, a BOM with cost references, and documentation images. This is a V1 board and already works, but I’m actively iterating on shielding and noise mitigation.

I’d really appreciate feedback from people with experience in EEG, biosignals, or analog front-end design — especially criticism.

PKGdex is an online database that provides information about various software packages, including details on their functionality, dependencies, and licensing. The website aims to serve as a comprehensive resource for developers and users seeking to explore and understand different software packages.