Wednesday, October 22, 2025

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Create interactive diagrams with pop-up content

Show HN: Create interactive diagrams with pop-up content
5 by ttd | 0 comments on Hacker News.
This is a recent addition to Vexlio which I think the HN crowd may find interesting or useful. TL;DR: easy creation of interactive diagrams, meaning diagrams that have mouse click/hover hooks that you can use to display pop-up content. The end result can be shared with a no-sign-in-required web link. My thought is that this is useful for system docs, onboarding or user guides, presentations, etc. Anything where there is a high-level view that should remain uncluttered + important metadata or details that still need to be available somewhere. You can try it out without signing up for anything, just launch the app here ( https://app.vexlio.com/ ), create a shape, select it with the main pointer tool and then click "Add popup" on the context toolbar. I'd be grateful for any and all feedback!

Sunday, October 12, 2025

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: I built a simple ambient sound app with no ads or subscriptions

Show HN: I built a simple ambient sound app with no ads or subscriptions
11 by alpaca121 | 3 comments on Hacker News.
I’ve always liked having background noise while working or falling asleep, but I got frustrated that most “white noise” or ambient sound apps are either paywalled, stuffed with ads, or try to upsell subscriptions for basic features. So I made Ambi, a small iOS app with a clean interface and a set of freely available ambient sounds — rain, waves, wind, birds, that sort of thing. You can mix them, adjust volume levels, and just let it play all night or while you work. Everything works offline and there are no hidden catches. It’s something I built for myself first, but I figured others might find it useful too. Feedback, bugs, and suggestions are all welcome. https://ift.tt/qrJE0mb...

New top story on Hacker News: 'Death to Spotify': the DIY movement to get artists and fans to quit the app

'Death to Spotify': the DIY movement to get artists and fans to quit the app
22 by mitchbob | 4 comments on Hacker News.


Wednesday, October 8, 2025

New top story on Hacker News: WinBoat: Windows apps on Linux with seamless integration

WinBoat: Windows apps on Linux with seamless integration
26 by nateb2022 | 13 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: I built a local-first podcast app

Show HN: I built a local-first podcast app
19 by aegrumet | 4 comments on Hacker News.
I worked on early podcast software in 2004 (iPodder/Juice) and have been a heavy podcast consumer ever since. I wanted a podcast app that respects your privacy and embraces the open web—and to explore what's possible in the browser. The result is wherever.audio, which you can try right now at the link above. How it works: It's a progressive web app that stores all your subscriptions and data locally in your browser using IndexedDB. Add it to your home screen and it feels native. Works offline with downloaded episodes. No central server storing your data—just some Cloudflare/AWS helpers to smooth out browser limitations. What makes it different: - True local-first: Your data stays on your device - Custom feeds: Add any RSS feed, not just what's in a directory - On-device search: Search across all feeds and episodes, including your custom ones - Podcasting 2.0 support: Chapters, transcripts, funding tags, and others - Auto-generated chapters: For popular shows that don't have them - AI-powered discovery: Ask questions to find shows and episodes (this feature does send queries to a 3rd party API, and also uses anonymized analytics while we work out the prompts) - Audio-guided tutorials: Interactive walkthroughs with voice guidance and visual cues The basics work well too: Standard playback features, queue management, speed controls, etc. I'm really interested in feedback—this is more passion project than business right now. I've been dogfooding it as my daily podcast app for over a year, and I'm open to exploring making it a business if people find it valuable. Curious if there are unmet needs that a privacy-focused, open web approach could address.

New top story on Hacker News: A 9KB (3KB gzip) single HTML notebook, perfect for minimalists

A 9KB (3KB gzip) single HTML notebook, perfect for minimalists
6 by chunqiuyiyu | 0 comments on Hacker News.


Tuesday, October 7, 2025

New top story on Hacker News: German government comes out against Chat Control

German government comes out against Chat Control
121 by SolonIslandus | 37 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Arc – high-throughput time-series warehouse with DuckDB analytics

Show HN: Arc – high-throughput time-series warehouse with DuckDB analytics
6 by ignaciovdk | 4 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, I’m Ignacio, founder at Basekick Labs. Over the past months I’ve been building Arc, a time-series data platform designed to combine very fast ingestion with strong analytical queries. What Arc does? Ingest via a binary MessagePack API (fast path), Compatible with Line Protocol for existing tools (Like InfluxDB, I'm ex Influxer), Store data as Parquet with hourly partitions, Query via DuckDB engine using SQL Why I built it: Many systems force you to trade retention, throughput, or complexity. I wanted something where ingestion performance doesn’t kill your analytics. Performance & benchmarks that I have so far. Write throughput: ~1.88M records/sec (MessagePack, untuned) in my M3 Pro Max (14 cores, 16gb RAM) ClickBench on AWS c6a.4xlarge: 35.18 s cold, ~0.81 s hot (43/43 queries succeeded) In those runs, caching was disabled to match benchmark rules; enabling cache in production gives ~20% faster repeated queries I’ve open-sourced the Arc repo so you can dive into implementation, benchmarks, and code. Would love your thoughts, critiques, and use-case ideas. Thanks!

New top story on Hacker News: Functional Threading "Macros"

Functional Threading "Macros"
14 by GarethX | 0 comments on Hacker News.


Saturday, October 4, 2025

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Run – a CLI universal code runner I built while learning Rust

Show HN: Run – a CLI universal code runner I built while learning Rust
5 by esubaalew | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN — I’m learning Rust and decided to build a universal CLI for running code in many languages. The tool, Run, aims to be a single, minimal dependency utility for: running one-off snippets (from CLI flags), running files, reading and executing piped stdin, and providing language-specific REPLs that you can switch between interactively. I designed it to support both interpreted languages (Python, JS, Ruby, etc.) and compiled languages (Rust, Go, C/C++). It detects languages from flags or file extensions, can compile temporary files for compiled languages, and exposes a unified REPL experience with commands like :help, :lang, and :quit. Install: cargo install run-kit (or use the platform downloads on GitHub). Source & releases: https://ift.tt/QAgyL0o I used Rust while following the official learning resources and used AI to speed up development, so I expect there are bugs and rough edges. I’d love feedback on: usability and UX of the REPL, edge cases for piping input to language runtimes, security considerations (sandboxing/resource limits), packaging and cross-platform distribution. Thanks — I’ll try to answer questions and share design notes.

New top story on Hacker News: Knowledge Infusion Scaling Law for Pre-Training Large Language Models

Knowledge Infusion Scaling Law for Pre-Training Large Language Models
3 by PaulHoule | 0 comments on Hacker News.