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Paste in my prompt to Claude Code with an embedded API key for accessing my public readonly SQL+vector database, and you have a state-of-the-art research tool over Hacker News, arXiv, LessWrong, and dozens of other high-quality public commons sites. Claude whips up the monster SQL queries that safely run on my machine, to answer your most nuanced questions.

There's also an Alerts functionality, where you can just ask Claude to submit a SQL query as an alert, and you'll be emailed when the ultra nuanced criteria is met (and the output changes). Like I want to know when somebody posts about "estrogen" in a psychoactive context, or enough biology metaphors when talking about building infrastructure.

Currently have embedded: posts: 1.4M / 4.6M comments: 15.6M / 38M That's with Voyage-3.5-lite. And you can do amazing compositional vector search, like search @FTX_crisis - (@guilt_tone - @guilt_topic) to find writing that was about the FTX crisis and distinctly without guilty tones, but that can mention "guilt".

I can embed everything and all the other sources for cheap, I just literally don't have the money.

VideoToJPG is a free online tool that allows users to convert video files into high-quality JPG images. The tool supports a variety of video formats and provides users with the ability to customize the output, including the frame rate and resolution.

I built a visual editor that represents Excel formulas as blocks, making it easier to inspect, refactor, and reason about complex formulas structurally. Frockly is not an Excel replacement. It focuses on understanding and refactoring formulas before bringing them back to Excel. Demo: https://ryuu12358.github.io/Frockly/ GitHub: https://github.com/ryuu12358/Frockly Write-up: https://note.com/ryuu12358/n/naa65d9d5facd （Japanese）

Expense AI is an open-source project that uses machine learning and computer vision to automate the processing of expense receipts. It aims to streamline expense reporting by extracting relevant data from receipts and integrating with popular expense management platforms.

Hi folks, I am very new to the hacker news community and would like to share something I have been working on.

I've spent the past 3 years building Arvo, a TypeScript toolkit for applications where AI agents, humans, workflows, and business logic need to work together.

My core thesis is to treat the main units of work as event handlers. Agents, workflows, services, and humans all modelled as event handlers communicating across an event fabric. No architectural privileges. An agent coordinating with a workflow uses identical patterns to a workflow coordinating with a human.

Key characteristics: - Contract-first design with runtime validation (Zod-based) - Event driven durable execution with suspend/resume for orchestrations - State machines (XState) for structured workflows - Imperative orchestrations (Temporal style) for when state-machines becomes limiting - Infrastructure-agnostic (same code runs locally or on cloud) - Native OpenTelemetry integration

Built on CloudEvents, implements virtual orchestration through physical choreography. Handlers are stateless, workflows persist as JSON, everything composes naturally.

Open source, production-ready core, growing standard library (@arvo-tools).

Happy to discuss the architecture or answer questions about the design decisions.

https://fwsgonzo.medium.com/notes-on-libloong-loongarch-64-b...

Community, All the HN belong to you. This is an archive of hacker news that fits in your browser. When I made HN Made of Primes I realized I could probably do this offline sqlite/wasm thing with the whole GBs of archive. The whole dataset. So I tried it, and this is it. Have Hacker News on your device.

Go to this repo (https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook): you can download it. Big Query -> ETL -> npx serve docs - that's it. 20 years of HN arguments and beauty, can be yours forever. So they'll never die. Ever. It's the unkillable static archive of HN and it's your hands. That's my Year End gift to you all. Thank you for a wonderful year, have happy and wonderful 2026. make something of it.

I’m building a Unicode reference where each symbol has its own dev-friendly page with all relevant encodings.

Example: [https://fontgenerator.design/symbol/almost-equal-to](https://fontgenerator.design/symbol/almost-equal-to)

Includes Unicode, HTML, CSS, JS, UTF-8/16 bytes, URL encoding, and usage examples.

The same structure is used across thousands of symbols (math, arrows, currency, tech/UI, punctuation).

Built because existing references are fragmented. Feedback welcome.

EveeApp is a mobile app that allows users to track their electric vehicle's charging status, monitor battery life, and find nearby charging stations. The app aims to provide a comprehensive solution for electric vehicle owners to manage their vehicle's performance and charging needs.

I built a simple, ephemeral chat service that connects you only with users who share the exact same public IP address as you.

It's essentially a temporary, isolated chat room defined by your NAT gateway.

It's not super useful nowadays, but let's see where this takes us. :)

The article discusses the LAR (Lightweight Annotation Relay) framework, which is designed to streamline the process of creating and managing annotations for large-scale datasets. LAR provides a scalable and efficient solution for data annotation tasks, enabling collaborative work and the ability to apply various annotation strategies.

This article provides a detailed analysis of the classic dice game Yahtzee, including its history, gameplay mechanics, and optimal strategies. It offers insights into the game's mathematical probabilities and explores its evolution as a popular pastime.

Hey HN, I built this because the generational gap online is getting wider (and weirder). It’s an LLM-wrapper that translates "Boomer" (normal/corporate English) into "Brainrot" (Gen Alpha slang) and vice versa. It also has an "Image-to-Rot" feature that uses vision to describe uploaded images in slang. It’s mostly for fun, but actually kind of useful for deciphering what your younger cousins are saying. Would love to hear what you think!

I got tired of Claude Code forgetting all my context every time I open a new session: set-up decisions, how I like my margins, decision history. etc.

We built a shared memory layer you can drop in as a Claude Code Skill. It’s basically a tiny memory DB with recall that remembers your sessions. Not magic. Not AGI. Just state.

Install in Claude Code:

  /plugin marketplace add https://github.com/mutable-state-inc/ensue-skill
  /plugin install ensue-memory
  # restart Claude Code

What it doesn’t do: - it won’t read your mind - it’s alpha; it might break if you throw a couch at it

Repo: https://github.com/mutable-state-inc/ensue-skill

If you try it and it sucks, tell me why so I can fix it. Don't be kind, tia

The article discusses the development of a speech recognition model called nanoGPT-Audio, which is a lightweight and efficient alternative to existing models. The model is trained on a large dataset of speech audio and can be used for various speech-related tasks with high accuracy.

Hi HN —

Tidy Baby is a new game made by me and Wyna Liu (of NYT Connections!) that is inspired by the legendary card-based game SET that we assume many of you love (we too love SET).

In SET, you’ve got four dimensions: shape, number, color, and shading, each with three variants.

In Tidy Baby you only have to deal with three dimensions:

- word length (3, 4, or 5 letters) - part of speech (noun, verb, or adjective) - style (bold, underline, or italic)

Like in SET, you are trying to form sets of three cards where, along each dimension, the set is either all the same or all different. If you’ve never played SET there are more details/examples at “how to play” in the game.

The mechanics of Tidy Baby are sort of inspired by a solitaire/practice version of SET I sometimes play where you draw two random cards and have to name the third card that would make a valid set.

In Tidy Baby you are presented with two “game cards” and a grid of up to nine candidates to complete a valid set – your job is to pick the right one before the clock runs out.

Unlike in SET, you get points for “partial” sets where your set is valid on one or two dimensions (but not all three). It’s actually a pretty fun challenge to try to get only sets that are invalid along all three dimensions.

In building the game, we were sort of surprised that the biggest challenge was ensuring that all words were unambiguously one part of speech. You’d be surprised how hard it is to find three-letter adjectives that are not also common verbs or nouns. We did our best!

We’ve got three “paces” in the game: Steady, Strenuous, and Grueling (s/o MECC!)

Let us know what you think!

Hi HN,

Every year, we ask thousands of readers (and authors) to share their 3 favorite reads of the year.

Now you can enter a book/author you love and see what books readers loved who also loved that book/author.

Try it here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025

This goes wide and doesn't try to limit itself to the genre, so you get some interesting results.

What do you think?

Background:

I want better recommendations based on my reading history. I'm incredibly frustrated with what is out there.

This system is based on 5,000 readers voting on their 3 favorite reads from 2023 to 2025. So, this covers ~15,000 books and is a high-quality vote. We wanted to keep the dataset small for now while we play with approaches.

We are building a full Book DNA app that pulls in your Goodreads history and delivers deeply personalized book recommendations based on people who like similar books (a significant challenge).

You can sign up to beta test it here if you want to help me with that:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1VOm8XOMU0ygMSTSKi9F0nExnGwo...

The first beta is coming out in late January, but it's pretty basic to start.

Past Show HNs as we've built Shepherd:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40084193

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38600246

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26871660

Thanks, looking forward to your comments :)

Ben

Hi HN, I built this tool to help homeowners generate official appeal letters without hiring expensive lawyers or spending hours on research. It analyzes your property data to write personalized arguments and offers a certified mail option via Lob. It supports 3,000+ US counties. Would love to hear your feedback on the workflow or the pricing model.

TL;DR explanation (go to https://github.com/Sakura-sx/Aroma?tab=readme-ov-file#tldr-e... if you want the formatted version)

This is done by measuring the minimum TCP RTT (client.socket.tcpi_min_rtt) seen and the smoothed TCP RTT (client.socket.tcpi_rtt). I am getting this data by using Fastly Custom VCL, they get this data from the Linux kernel (struct tcp_info -> tcpi_min_rtt and tcpi_rtt). I am using Fastly for the Demo since they have PoPs all around the world and they expose TCP socket data to me.

The score is calculated by doing tcpi_min_rtt/tcpi_rtt. It's simple but it's what worked best for this with the data Fastly gives me. Based on my testing, 1-0.7 is normal, 0.7-0.3 is normal if the connection is somewhat unstable (WiFi, mobile data, satellite...), 0.3-0.1 is low and may be a proxy, anything lower than 0.1 is flagged as TCP proxy by the current code.

I've been working on a little open source [1] search engine, nilch. I noticed that nearly all well known search engines, including the alternative ones, tend to be run by companies of various sizes with the goal to make money, so they either fill your results with ads or charge you money, and I dislike this because search is the backbone of the internet and should not be commercial, so it runs in a not-for-profit style and aims to survive on donations. Additionally I'm personally really sick of AI in my search results so I got rid of that, and I wanted DuckDuckGo bangs so it supports all of them. Like many alternative search engines, it is fully private.

Sadly, it currently does not have its own index but rather uses the Brave search API. Once I'm in a financial position that it's possible, I would absolutely love to build a completely new index from the ground up which is open source, as well as an open source ranking and search algorithm, to back it.

I posted on Reddit and got an amazing amount of feedback which I implemented a number of feature requests, so I would really like your ideas, critiques, and bug reports as well. Thank you and sorry for the long post!

[1] https://github.com/UnmappedStack/nilch

I used the time over Christmas and in between the years to redesign my website.

This time I decided to make it in the theme of an evil Sith Lord that commands the Galactic Cookie Empire, because I found my previous cookie consent game a bit boring after a while.

Here's the website's welcome page and the cookie consent game: https://cookie.engineer/index.html

(the cookie consent game isn't started on any other page of my website, only on the welcome page)

I also made a "making of" weblog article series, in case you're interested in the development process and how I implemented it and what kind of troubles I went through already:

- Making of the Game: https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/making-of-my-website...

- Making of the Avatar: https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/making-of-my-website...

- Debuggers to toy around with: https://cookie.engineer/design/consent/index.html

It "should" work on modern browsers. I tested it on Firefox on Linuxes, Chrome/Chromium on Linuxes, and Safari on Macbook. Don't have an iPhone so I can't test that, but my two old Android phones were also working fine with the meta viewport hack (I can't believe this is still the "modern" way to do things after 15 years. Wtf).

Best experience is of course with a bigger display. On smaller screen sizes, the game will use a camera to zoom around the game world and follow the player's spaceship. Minimum window width is 1280 pixels for no camera, and I think 800 pixels to be playable (otherwise the avatar gets in the way too much in the boss fights).

Oh, there's also a secret boss fight that you can unlock when you toy around with the Dev Tools :)

What's left to do on the avatar animation side:

- I have to backport CMUdict to JavaScript / ECMAScript. That's what I'm working on right now, as I'm not yet satisfied with the timings of the phonemes. Existing tools and pipelines that do this in python aren't realtime, which leads to my next point.

- I want to switch to using the "waveform energy detection" and a zero cross rate detector to time phonemes more correctly. I believe that changes in waveforms and their structures can detect differences in phonemes, but it's a gut feeling and not a scientific fact. Existing phoneme animation papers were kind of shit and broken (see my making of article 2). The phoneme boundary detector is highly experimental though and is gonna need a couple weeks more time until it's finished.

That's it for now, hope you gonna enjoy your stay on my website and I hope you gonna have fun playing the Cookie Consent Game :)

Oh, also, because it might not be obvious: No LLMs were used in the making of this website. Pretty much everything is hand-coded, and unbundled and unminified on purpose so visitors can learn from the code if they want to.

~Cookie

Hi HN, We wanted to celebrate the new year so we built this little toy. Enjoy it and happy new year!

P.S. If you want, take a look at our product (now in early access) - userjam.com

How small can a language model be while still doing something useful? I wanted to find out, and had some spare time over the holidays.

Z80-μLM is a character-level language model with 2-bit quantized weights ({-2,-1,0,+1}) that runs on a Z80 with 64KB RAM. The entire thing: inference, weights, chat UI, it all fits in a 40KB .COM file that you can run in a CP/M emulator and hopefully even real hardware!

It won't write your emails, but it can be trained to play a stripped down version of 20 Questions, and is sometimes able to maintain the illusion of having simple but terse conversations with a distinct personality.

--

The extreme constraints nerd-sniped me and forced interesting trade-offs: trigram hashing (typo-tolerant, loses word order), 16-bit integer math, and some careful massaging of the training data meant I could keep the examples 'interesting'.

The key was quantization-aware training that accurately models the inference code limitations. The training loop runs both float and integer-quantized forward passes in parallel, scoring the model on how well its knowledge survives quantization. The weights are progressively pushed toward the 2-bit grid using straight-through estimators, with overflow penalties matching the Z80's 16-bit accumulator limits. By the end of training, the model has already adapted to its constraints, so no post-hoc quantization collapse.

Eventually I ended up spending a few dollars on Claude API to generate 20 questions data (see examples/guess/GUESS.COM), I hope Anthropic won't send me a C&D for distilling their model against the ToS ;P

But anyway, happy code-golf season everybody :)

I built an open-source org management platform for Star Citizen, a space MMO where player orgs can have 50K+ members managing fleets worth millions.

https://scorg.org

The problem: SC's official tools won't launch until 2026, but players need to coordinate now - track 100+ ship fleets, schedule ops across timezones, manage alliances, and monitor voice activity during battles.

Interesting challenges solved:

1. Multi-org data isolation - Users join multiple orgs, so every query needs scoping.

2. Canvas + Firebase Storage CORS - Couldn't export fleet layouts as PNG. Solution: fetch images as blobs, convert to base64 data URLs, then draw to canvas. No CORS config needed.

3. Discord bot - Built 4 microservices (VoiceActivityTracker, EventNotifier, ChannelManager, RoleSync) sharing Firebase state. Auto-creates channels for ops, cleans up when done.

Features: role-based access, event calendar with RSVP, LFG matchmaking, drag-and-drop fleet builder, economy tools, alliance system, analytics dashboard, mobile-responsive.

~15 pages, fully functional. Custom military-inspired UI (monospace, gold accents).

I’m Gopal, the guy behind QuickClip.

I built this out of pure frustration. Copying items between my phone and laptop was very painful. Sending notes and links on WhatsApp. Saving random drafts I’d forget about. It was total waste of time.

So I made QuickClip for myself first. A dead simple way to move text, links and images between devices instantly. No setup drama. No thinking. Fully encrypted

I use it every day. Shipping it publicly now to see if anyone else has the same problem.

Would honestly love to hear, how you move stuff between devices today, what’s broken or slow and what would make this actually useful for you

Happy to answer anything and take suggestions. Thanks for checking it out.

The article discusses the creation of the BrainKernel project, which aims to develop an open-source, cross-platform, deep learning framework for brain-computer interface applications. The project focuses on building a modular and scalable system to facilitate research and development in the field of brain-computer interfaces.

Airbnb is missing out on the biggest rental opportunity of 2026 so I built the solution.

Need to open Microsoft Teams and your other favorite Electron app? Get a temporary increase of memory

16 GB ought to be enough for everybody but in case it's not, you can rent more

I’m a student and I built this because my old lightning controller (DMX) became a brick after the vendor’s control software was deprecated in 2025.

My focus was entirely on developing a robust backend architecture to guarantee maximum performance. Everything is released under GPLv3.

The current frontend is just a "vibecoded" dashboard made with plain HTML and JavaScript to keep rendering latency as low as possible. In earlier versions Svelte was used. Svelte added too much complexity for an initial mvp.

Video: https://streamable.com/95kd4r Repo: https://github.com/Arian-Ott/hyperion

Technical Details: The system uses a distributed architecture where a FastAPI server manages the state in a Redis. State changes are pushed via WebSockets to Raspberry Pi gateways, which then independently maintain the constant 44Hz binary stream to the lights. This "push model" saves massive amounts of bandwidth and ensures low latency. In a stress test, I processed 10 universes (5,120 channels) at 44Hz with zero packet loss (simulated). An OTP-based pairing makes the setup extremely simple (plug-and-play).

I’m looking forward to your feedback on the architecture and the Redis approach!

Happy New Year!