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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.

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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'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

We’re building a real-time mirror of collective thinking.

Awaaz is a social insights platform where people anonymously vote on meaningful questions—about society, culture, relationships, work, politics, and everyday life—and instantly see how others think.

No followers. No performative opinions.

Just honest signals.

Unlike traditional social media that rewards the loudest voices, Awaaz is designed for quiet truth: structured questions, genuine responses, and clear visual insights that reveal patterns in human thought.

What makes it different:

Anonymity-first → reduces social pressure and virtue signaling

Signal over noise → votes, not debates

Psychological safety → opinions without backlash

Collective intelligence → every vote improves the data

At its core, Awaaz taps into a simple human drive: “How do others really think—and where do I stand?”

We believe curiosity, self-reflection, and belonging are timeless needs. When designed well, they don’t get boring.

Building this with a small team, strong conviction, and a long-term view.

If you’re interested in social data, human behavior, or products that prioritize depth over dopamine—happy to connect.

An older family member showed me these puzzle games that he was playing via YouTube videos. I wanted to make them more playable in a frictionless way, so I generated all possible combinations for these types of puzzles and put together an interface for them.

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

Build Dockmate - Docker/Podman containers manager TUI application in Go using bubble-tea TUI framework.

Features:

- Container management (start/stop/restart/remove, logs)

- Real-time container monitoring (CPU, memory, disk I/O, etc.)

- View/Hide columns (Memory, Cpu, Net I/O, etc.)

- Compose project grouping

- Podman runtime support (switch easily)

- Persistent settings (YAML config)

- Info/Help panels with shortcuts

- Configurable Interactive Shell (/bin/sh, /bin/bash, etc.)

- Homebrew support

- One command-line installation

Works on both Linux and macOS!!

Demo Gif: https://github.com/shubh-io/DockMate/blob/main/assets/demo.g...

Github: https://github.com/shubh-io/DockMate

Hacker News has been my homepage and my inspiration for many years. While I’m still learning the ropes of building a public website, I created DreyX.com out of a simple necessity: I wanted a better way to track AI news without all the fluff. Literally a tool built by a curious reader, for curious readers. Thoughts? Suggestions?

Hi HN, I’m a new developer with Aphantasia (no mental imagery).

A side effect of this is that regaining focus after a distraction takes me a long time (the "23-minute lag"). I tried standard binaural beats, but I discovered a technical flaw: streaming compression (AAC/MP3 on Spotify/YouTube) often muddies the specific phase differences required for effective entrainment.

I realized that to get effective entrainment, I needed lossless audio. Since I couldn't stream lossless easily, I decided to generate it locally. I built Phantas – a browser engine that uses the Web Audio API to generate raw sine waves in real-time on the client side. This ensures mathematical precision with zero compression artifacts.

For audio it uses Native AudioContext for dual-oscillator generation (Left/Right channel split).

For visuals I pair the audio with a 490nm Cyan strobe. The hardest part was syncing the visual flash (using requestAnimationFrame) to the audio pulse without "drift" caused by JavaScript's event loop latency.

I built this primarily for myself. Subjectively, it has reduced my "ramp-up" time from ~20 minutes to about 5 minutes.

I’m releasing the generator for free (no login) to see if this works for others or if it's just my specific brain chemistry. I’d love feedback on:

- Audio/Visual Sync: Does the strobe feel tight on your specific browser/refresh rate?

- Intensity: Are the default 14Hz flickers too aggressive?

I’ve been experimenting with an AI-assisted approach to detecting patterns in network traffic.

For context, I maintain a project called Phone Home Detector, which analyses traffic between IP address pairs. It aggregates traffic into one-minute buckets and applies a set of fixed rules based on byte counts and transmission intervals.

I recently prototyped an extension that exposes transmission size and timing data through an MCP tool, making it queryable by an LLM. The goal is to explore whether an LLM can identify patterns that are difficult to capture using static rules alone.

This work is still experimental, and I’m not yet convinced it is an improvement over fixed-rule approaches. That said, I do find it interesting, and it may be a foundation for further exploration. The following is an example of a summary that it generates:

The data sizes sent to IP address 91.189.91.49 are mostly consistent at 200, after an initial size of 168, and the intervals at which they are sent vary without any apparent pattern.

The article discusses the rise of disclass, a new social media platform that aims to foster respectful and constructive discourse on controversial topics. It explores the platform's unique approach to moderation and how it seeks to offer an alternative to the polarization often seen on other social media sites.

Hey HN! I'm Baha, creator of Mysti.

The problem: I pay for Claude Pro, ChatGPT Plus, and Gemini but only one could help at a time. On tricky architecture decisions, I wanted a second opinion.

The solution: Mysti lets you pick any two AI agents (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini) to collaborate. They each analyze your request, debate approaches, then synthesize the best solution.

Your prompt → Agent 1 analyzes → Agent 2 analyzes → Discussion → Synthesized solution

Why this matters: each model has different training and blind spots. Two perspectives catch edge cases one would miss. It's like pair programming with two senior devs who actually discuss before answering.

What you get: * Use your existing subscriptions (no new accounts, just your CLI tools) * 16 personas (Architect, Debugger, Security Expert, etc) * Full permission control from read-only to autonomous * Unified context when switching agents

Tech: TypeScript, VS Code Extension API, shells out to claude-code/codex-cli/gemini-cli

License: BSL 1.1, free for personal and educational use, converts to MIT in 2030 (would love input on this, does it make sense to just go MIT?)

GitHub: https://github.com/DeepMyst/Mysti

Would love feedback on the brainstorm mode. Is multi-agent collaboration actually useful or am I just solving my own niche problem?

Hey all!

I built Golazo because I wanted a minimal but effective way to get soccer live updates and catch up on finished matches right in my terminal. No browser tabs, no ads, no distractions: just clean match data where I already spend most of my day.

I couldn’t find any actively maintained tool like this, so I thought it could be cool to build something just for what I need. It was a great learning experience and if it’s useful to other people, then even better!

Current features:

- Live match tracking with real-time score updates (90-second polling intervals)

- Minute-by-minute match events (goals, cards, substitutions)

- Finished match statistics and full event history - Goal notifications via beeep (macOS, Linux, Windows)

- 40+ leagues supported (and growing) with customizable preferences to limit what you fetch

- Smart caching: data cached for 5 minutes, polling only when viewing live matches

Technical details:

- Built with Go using Cobra for CLI, Charm’s Bubble Tea/Bubbles/Lip Gloss for the TUI

- Data from a trimmed-down version of the Fotmob API

- Cross-platform terminal rendering has been the biggest challenge – still working through some rough edges

Easy to install via install script or build from source. Pre-built binaries available for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Would love to hear feedback from fellow terminal enthusiasts and soccer fans!

I built a CLI tool that lets you do common video/audio operations without remembering ffmpeg syntax.

Instead of: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf "fps=15,scale=480:-1:flags=lanczos" -loop 0 output.gif

You write: ff convert video.mp4 to gif

More examples: ff compress video.mp4 to 10mb ff trim video.mp4 from 0:30 to 1:00 ff extract audio from video.mp4 ff resize video.mp4 to 720p ff speed up video.mp4 by 2x ff reverse video.mp4

There are similar tools that use LLMs (wtffmpeg, llmpeg, ai-ffmpeg-cli), but they require API keys, cost money, and have latency.

Ez FFmpeg is different: - No AI – just regex pattern matching - Instant – no API calls - Free – no tokens - Offline – works without internet

It handles ~20 common operations that cover 90% of what developers actually do with ffmpeg. For edge cases, you still need ffmpeg directly.

Interactive mode (just type ff) shows media files in your current folder with typeahead search.

npm install -g ezff

SCTP is a low level protocol focused on reliable packet transmission. Unlike hopelessly flinging packets from one device to another, it makes sure that the packets are correct using CRC, removes duplicate packets, and allows for packets to be sent in any order.

Going into an established library, I thought that everything was already implemented and that there wasn't anything to do until I went through the existing issues and organized all the tasks and decided on an order. Sean DuBois (https://github.com/Sean-Der), one of the co-creators and current maintainers of Pion, an open-source pure Go implementation of WebRTC (which uses SCTP), introduced me to a dissertation that was written about improving SCTP from 2021 (https://duepublico2.uni-due.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/d...). To my surprise, the features in it weren't actually implemented yet, and generally went unused even though it depicted pretty big improvements. This came as a bit of a shock to me considering the countless companies and services that actively use Pion with millions of users on a daily basis.

This led to two things: 1) implement the feature (done by me) and 2) measure the performance (done by Joe Turki https://github.com/JoeTurki). If you're interested in reading more, please check out the blog post where we go over what SCTP is used for, how I improved it, and the effort that went into making such a large improvement possible.

This also marks a huge milestone for other companies and services that use SCTP as they can refer to the implementation in Pion for their own SCTP libraries including any real-time streaming platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Discord screen share, Twitch guest star, and many more!

For my personal background, please take a look at a comment below about what it was like for me to get started with open-source and my career related journeys. Thanks for reading!

I built a small web tool that generates finished music videos from uploaded songs.

Most AI video workflows I tried required prompting scenes, generating clips, and editing everything on a timeline. I wanted the opposite: upload a track, pick a style, and get a video out in minutes.

It’s intentionally opinionated: no accounts, no subscriptions, and no editing controls. One-time payment per video ($2–$12), and you own the output.

I’d love feedback on whether this feels useful or too limiting.

Repo: https://github.com/valdanylchuk/xcc700

Hi Everyone! I just wrote my first compiler!

- single pass, recursive descent, direct emission

- generates REL ELF binaries, runnable using ESP-IDF elf_loader

- very basic features only, just enough for self-hosting

- treats the Xtensa CPU as a stack machine for simplicity, no register allocation / window usage

- compilable on Mac, probably also Linux, can cross-compile for esp32 there

- wrote for fun / cyberdeck project

Sample output from esp32:

    xcc700.elf xcc700.c -o /d/cc.elf
    
    [ xcc700 ] BUILD COMPLETED > OK
    > IN  : 700 Lines / 7977 Tokens
    > SYM : 69 Funcs / 91 Globals
    > REL : 152 Literals / 1027 Patches
    > MEM : 1041 B .rodata / 17120 B .bss
    > OUT : 27735 B .text / 33300 B ELF
    [ 40 ms ] >> 17500 Lines/sec <<

Hi,

I whipped up this daily piano challenge game after noticing my partner struggling to play a tune by ear. She could hum the tune, but was struggling with recognizing whether the next note would be higher or lower than the previous.

That gave me the idea of KeyByKey. A simple Wordle-style daily challenge game, where you are given a tune to play back by ear.

There's no limit to the number of attempts, but after successfully completing the challenge it will show how you compare to other players.

Still ironing out some bugs.

Let me know what you think!

Hi HN,

I built a small Linux CLI tool called witr (Why Is This Running?).

The idea came from a situation most of us have hit: you log into a machine, see a process or port running, and immediately wonder why it exists, who started it, and what is keeping it alive right now.

witr traces a process, service, or port back to its origin and responsibility chain and explains it in a way that’s quick to read, especially when you’re debugging under pressure.

This is v0.1.0. It’s intentionally small and focused. Feedback, criticism, and edge cases are very welcome.

Repo: https://github.com/pranshuparmar/witr

3D-Generator.com is a website that provides a collection of free, customizable 3D models and generators for various applications, including digital art, game development, and 3D printing.

I built this to understand how vLLM works internally.

I’ve released desktop‑2fa v0.4.0 — an offline, encrypted TOTP authenticator designed for desktops, VMs, and air‑gapped environments.

Features: - AES‑GCM encrypted vault with Argon2 key derivation - No cloud, no phone, no telemetry - RFC‑compliant TOTP (SHA1/SHA256/SHA512) - Full CLI (add/list/generate/rename/remove/export/import/backup) - 99% test coverage - Zero external dependencies

GitHub: https://github.com/wrogistefan/desktop-2fa

I built this because I needed a reproducible, open-source 2FA tool for secure workstations and virtualized environments. Feedback welcome.

The article discusses the Claude handoff, a technique for seamlessly transitioning a conversation between different AI language models. It highlights the importance of maintaining context and continuity in multi-model conversational experiences.

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 am developing some music tools over the holiday season, and ended up coding this to help me iterate quickly on my Norns Shield. I know there are plenty of music folk on HN, hopefully they'll have fun with this.

I built Warlocks as a learning project around real-time multiplayer in the browser. The server is full authoritative and handles matchmaking, game state, collisions, and cooldowns over WebSockets.

It supports up to 8-player custom lobbies (easy to try with friends) and a quick 1v1 mode with raw matchmaking. If no opponent is found, it auto-matches you with a bot to keep wait times short.

I’d love feedback on gameplay feel, networking choices, or edge cases.

I built this over my Christmas break: pixels.style, a simple browser-based pixel art tool that gives your drawings a soft, watercolor vibe instead of sharp pixels. No signup, just open and draw. Installable as a PWA.

Try it: https://pixels.style

Would love feedback on whether it feels fun/useful and what you’d want next!

The article discusses the challenges and strategies for surviving on the coding platform Glitch, where developers face technical issues and unexpected software glitches. It provides tips on troubleshooting, maintaining a positive attitude, and embracing the community for support during the Glitch survival experience.

I made a web game inspired by Geoguessr and Wordle, where you get shown a 3D model of a random human protein each day, and you have to triangulate its gene name using similarity clues.

My background is in wet lab molecular biology and I intend this game to be engaging mostly to other biologists. But if you're outside the field, I'm interested to know if you can still solve it with browser use LLMs, and if you learned something interesting doing so. Let me know what you think.

I made it with Claude over the last 2 months. My coding experience is limited to basic python data analysis and figure making. I've seen people online asking, "Now that we have coding AI, why isn't there a deluge of awesome AI-generated apps made by non-coders?" - if this sounds like you, check out Geneguessr to understand what a web app by a non-coder looks like.

I might write more about the process if there's a demand, but what really unlocked the project for Claude was Linear MCP, where it could put each individual issue on a shared Kanban board. This, and Playwright MCP for testing on live site, were the two workhorses that got me through this. For bugs Claude couldn't one-shot, Linear was great for consolidating issue information so that I could dump it into ChatGPT Codex - it would usually think for like half an hour, output very confusing explanations, but the bug was gone.

Game is free, no log-in required, sorry if you run into any mobile bugs - didn't test it much there.

https://geneguessr.brinedew.bio/

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/