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Hey HN! We’re Arne and Raban, the founders of Emdash (https://github.com/generalaction/emdash).

Emdash is an open-source and provider-agnostic desktop app that lets you run multiple coding agents in parallel, each isolated in its own git worktree, either locally or over SSH on a remote machine. We call it an Agentic Development Environment (ADE).

You can see a 1 minute demo here: https://youtu.be/X31nK-zlzKo

We are building Emdash for ourselves. While working on a cap-table management application (think Stripe Atlas + Pulley), we found our development workflow to be messy: lots of terminals, lots of branches, and too much time spent waiting on Codex.

Emdash puts the terminal at the center and makes it easy to run multiple agents at once. Each agent runs as a task in its own git worktree. You can start one or a few agents on the same problem, test, and review.

Emdash works over SSH so you can run agents where your code lives and keep the parallel workflow. You can assign tickets to agents, edit files manually, and review changes.

We also spent time making task startup fast. Each task can be created in a worktree, and creating worktrees on demand was taking 5s+ in some cases. We now keep a small reserve of worktrees in the background and let a new task claim one instantly. That brought task start time down to ~500–1000ms depending on the provider. We also spawn the shell directly and avoid loading the shell environments on startup.

We believe using the providers’ native CLIs is the right approach. It gives you the full capabilities of each agent, always. If a provider starts supporting plan mode, we don't have to add that first.

We support 21 coding agent CLIs today, including Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Droid, Amp, Codebuff, and more. We auto-detect what you have installed and we’re provider-agnostic by design. If there’s a provider you want that we don’t support yet, we can add it. We believe that in the future, some agents will be better suited for task X and others for task Y. Codex, Claude Code, and Gemini all have fans. We want to be agnostic and enable individuals and teams to freely switch between them.

Beyond orchestration, we try to pull most of the development loop into Emdash. You can review diffs, commit, open PRs, see CI/CD checks, and merge directly from Emdash once checks pass. When starting a task, you can pass issues from Linear, GitHub, and Jira to an agent. We also support convenience variables and lifecycle scripts so it’s easy to allocate ports and test changes.

Emdash is fully open-source and MIT-licensed.

Download for macOS, Linux or Windows (as of yesterday !), or install via Homebrew: brew install --cask emdash.

We’d love your feedback. How does your coding agent development setup look like, especially when working with multiple agents? We would want to learn more about it. Check out our repository here: https://github.com/generalaction/emdash

We’ll be around in the comments — thanks!

I've been begrudgingly working on autorouters for 2 years, looking for new techniques or modern methods that might allow AI to create circuit boards.

One of the biggest problems in my view for training an AI to do autorouting is the traditional grid-based representation of autorouting problems which challenges spatial understanding. But we know that vision models are very good at classifying, so I wondered if we could train a model to output a path as a classification. But then how do you represent the path? This lead me down the track of trying to build an autorouter that represented paths as a bunch of patterns.

More details: https://blog.autorouting.com/p/the-recursive-pattern-pathfin...

It takes an input video and converts it into H.264/Opus RTP streams that you can blast at your video call systems (WebRTC, SFUs, etc.). It also injects network chaos like packet loss, jitter, and bitrate throttling to see how things break

It scales from 1 to n participants, depending on the compute and memory of the host system Best part? It’s packaged with Nix, so it builds the same everywhere (Linux, macOS, ARM, x86). No dependency hell

It supports both UDP (with a relay chain for Kubernetes) and WebRTC (with containerized TURN servers). Chaos spikes can be distributed evenly, randomly, or front/back-loaded for different test scenarios. To change this, just edit the values in a single config file

The article discusses the BrainStorm Medical Coding Platform (BrainStorm MCP), an open-source project that aims to simplify medical coding by providing a user-friendly interface and powerful features for healthcare professionals.

I built MiniVim, a small and minimal Neovim configuration focused on keeping things simple and readable.

The goal was to have a setup that:

starts fast

uses only essential plugins

avoids heavy frameworks

remains easy to understand and extend

The structure is intentionally small:

It’s not meant to compete with full Neovim distributions, but rather serve as a clean base configuration that can be extended gradually.

I use it across multiple machines (laptop, WSL, and servers), so reproducibility and simplicity were priorities.

Feedback is welcome.

Hi HN,

I’m Samrith, creator of Hyperterse.

Today I’m launching Hyperterse 2.0, a schema-first framework for building MCP servers directly on top of your existing production databases.

If you're building AI agents in production, you’ve probably run into agents needing access to structured, reliable data but wiring your business logic to MCP tools is tedious. Most teams end up writing fragile glue code. Or worse, giving agents unsafe, overbroad access.

There isn’t a clean, principled way to expose just the right data surface to agents.

Hyperterse lets you define a schema over your data and automatically exposes secure, typed MCP tools for AI agents.

Think of it as: Your business data → controlled, agent-ready interface.

Some key properties include a schema-first access layer, typed MCP tool generation, works with existing Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis databases, fine-grained exposure of queries, built for production agent workloads.

v2.0 focuses heavily on MCP with first-class MCP server support, cleaner schema ergonomics, better type safety, faster tool surfaces.

All of this, with only two tools - search & execute - reducing token usage drastically.

Hyperterse is useful if you are building AI agents/copilots, adding LLM features to existing SaaS, trying to safely expose internal data to agents or are just tired of bespoke MCP glue layers.

I’d love feedback, especially from folks running agents in production.

GitHub: https://github.com/hyperterse/hyperterse

Enveil is an open-source framework that provides secure, end-to-end encryption for data in use, enabling organizations to perform computations on encrypted data without exposing sensitive information. The project aims to advance privacy-preserving technologies and promote secure data sharing and collaboration.

Hi HN,

Most of us have been there: It’s 3 AM, there’s an outage, and the #incident channel is exploding with 200+ messages. Once the fix is deployed, the real pain begins—spending 4 hours reconstructing the timeline for the post-mortem.

I built ProdRescue AI to automate this. It’s an incident intelligence engine that correlates technical logs with human context from Slack.

How it works:

Native Slack Integration: Connect via OAuth 2.0. We only access channels you explicitly invite the bot to.

Contextual Correlation: It maps Slack timestamps to log events, identifying not just what failed, but who made which decision and why.

4-Layer Intelligence: We use a pipeline to Sanitize (mask PII), Correlate (logs + chat), Infer (RCA), and Verify (link every claim to a source log line).

Security: We use ephemeral processing. No log retention, no training on your data.

I’m really interested in your thoughts on the "Evidence-Backed" approach. Instead of just generating a narrative, we link every finding to a specific evidence tag ([1], [2], etc.) to eliminate AI hallucinations.

Check it out here: https://prodrescueai.com

Would love to hear your feedback on the Slack-to-Timeline flow!

The article introduces the Botanu AI SDK for Python, a toolkit that enables developers to build and deploy AI-powered applications. It covers the key features and capabilities of the SDK, as well as how to get started with using it for your projects.

I had a bunch of ebooks with no audiobook version available. So I built an iOS app that converts EPUB files into audiobooks using text-to-speech.

Two voice options: - Free on-device voices (processed locally, no server needed) - Natural cloud voices (one-time purchase per book, no subscription)

Cloud conversion runs chunk by chunk. You can start listening other chapters generate in the background. Once done, the audiobook lives on your device.

No account required. No subscription. You import your own EPUBs and either use device TTS for free or pay per book for the cloud voices.

Nothing stored on backend, neither books or audio files.

This article introduces Claude, a new AI language model by Anthropic that can generate and manipulate code in real-time using a visual interface. The article discusses the potential applications of Claude, such as rapid prototyping and interactive code exploration.

A photorealistic Moon viewer running entirely in the browser. WebGPU primary renderer with WebGL 2 fallback.

- NASA CGI Moon Kit textures served via a quadtree LOD tile system - Oren-Nayar BRDF (lunar regolith is non-Lambertian with strong backscatter) - Sun position calculated from astronomy-engine (±1 arcminute) - Scrub through the full lunation cycle or watch in real time - Earth and Tycho-2 starfield in the background

Tech: Three.js with TSL shaders (compile to both WGSL and GLSL), React Three Fiber, Vite. The shading model was the most interesting part — standard PBR looks completely wrong for the Moon because regolith doesn't have a specular lobe; it actually gets brighter at opposition (the "opposition surge"). Oren-Nayar gets close enough for a web visualization.

Tile system is a geodetic quadtree similar to CesiumJS's approach. Zoom level picks based on screen-space error. Currently 7 levels deep which gets you to ~4 km/pixel at max zoom.

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who's worked with lunar data or WebGPU in production.

The article explores the differences between the reconstruction and generation capabilities of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), providing insights into their respective strengths and limitations in tasks such as image generation and restoration.

The article discusses the creation of a website that allows users to explore the history of GitHub, including its founding, growth, and key milestones. The website provides a comprehensive timeline and interactive features to help users understand the evolution of this influential software development platform.

Hey all, I built babyshark, a terminal UI for PCAPs aimed at people who find Wireshark powerful but overwhelming.

The goal is “PCAPs for humans”: Overview dashboard answers what’s happening + what to click next

Domains view (hostnames first) → select a domain → jump straight to relevant flows (works even when DNS is encrypted/cached by using observed IPs from flows)

Weird stuff view surfaces common failure/latency signals (retransmits/out-of-order hints, resets, handshake issues, DNS failures when visible)

From there you can drill down: Flows → Packets → Explain (plain-English hints) / follow stream

Commands: Offline: babyshark --pcap capture.pcap

Live (requires tshark): babyshark --list-ifaces then babyshark --live en0

Repo + v0.1.0 release: https://github.com/vignesh07/babyshark

Would love feedback on UX + what “weird detectors” you’d want next.

Anthropic has released Steerling, an 8-billion parameter language model, aimed at providing a more aligned and truthful AI assistant that can engage in open-ended dialogue and assist with a variety of tasks while adhering to Anthropic's principles of ethical AI development.

Hey HN, just wanted to share a fun, vibe-coded Friday night experiment: a little playground for writing cellular automata in a subset of Rust, which is then compiled into WGSL.

Since it lets you dynamically change parameters while the simulation is running via a TUI, it's easy to discover weird behaviors without remembering how you got there. If you press "s", it will save the complete history to a JSON file (a timeline of the parameters that were changed at given ticks), so you can replay it and regenerate the discovery.

You can pan/zoom, and while the main simulation window is in focus, the arrow keys can be used to update parameters (which are shown in the TUI).

Claude deserves all the credit and criticism for any technical elements of this project (beyond rough guidelines). I've just always wanted something like this, and it's a lot of fun to play with. Who needs video games these days.

Sowbot is an open-hardware agricultural robot designed to close the "prototype gap" that kills most agri-robotics startups and research projects — the 18+ months spent on drivers, networking, safety watchdogs, and UI before you can even start on the thing you actually care about.

The hardware is built around a stackable 10×10cm compute module with two ARM Cortex-A55 SBCs — one for ROS 2 navigation/EKF localisation, one dedicated to vision/YOLO inference — connected via a single ethernet cable.

Centimetre-level positioning via dual RTK GNSS, CAN bus for field comms, and real-time motor control via ESP32 running Lizard firmware.

Everything — schematics, PCB layouts, firmware — is under open licences. The software stack runs on RoSys/Field Friend (for teams who want fast iteration) or DevKit ROS (for teams already in the ROS ecosystem). The idea is that a lab in one country can reproduce another lab's experiment by sharing a Docker image.

Current status: the Open Core brain is largely fabricated, the full-size Sowbot body has a detailed BOM but isn't yet assembled, and we have two smaller dev platforms (Mini and Pico) in various stages of testing.

We're a small volunteer team and we're looking for contributors — hardware, ROS, firmware, docs, whatever you can offer.

The best place to start is our Discord: https://discord.gg/SvztEBr4KZ — we have a weekly call if you'd prefer to just show up and chat.

GitHub: https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/feldfreund_devkit_ros/tre...

MasqueradeORM is a lightweight and flexible object-relational mapping (ORM) library for Python, designed to simplify database interactions and provide a more intuitive way of working with data. It offers a simple and straightforward API for creating, reading, updating, and deleting database records.

Interactive timeline of every major Large Language Model. Filterable by open/closed source, searchable, 54 organizations tracked.

Hey HN! Lev and Justin here, authors of PgDog (https://pgdog.dev/), a connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder for PostgreSQL. If you build apps with a lot of traffic, you know the first thing to break is the database. We are solving this with a network proxy that works without requiring application code changes or database migrations.

Our post from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099187

The most important update: we are in production. Sharding is used a lot, with direct-to-shard queries (one shard per query) working pretty much all the time. Cross-shard (or multi-database) queries are still a work in progress, but we are making headway.

Aggregate functions like count(), min(), max(), avg(), stddev() and variance() are working, without refactoring the app. PgDog calculates the aggregate in-transit, while transparently rewriting queries to fetch any missing info. For example, multi-database average calculation requires a total count of rows to calculate the original sum. PgDog will add count() to the query, if it’s not there already, and remove it from the rows sent to the app.

Sorting and grouping works, including DISTINCT, if the columns(s) are referenced in the result. Over 10 data types are supported, like, timestamp(tz), all integers, varchar, etc.

Cross-shard writes, including schema changes (CREATE/DROP/ALTER), are now atomic and synchronized between all shards with two-phase commit. PgDog keeps track of the transaction state internally and will rollback the transaction if the first phase fails. You don’t need to monkeypatch your ORM to use this: PgDog will intercept the COMMIT statement and execute PREPARE TRANSACTION and COMMIT PREPARED instead.

Omnisharded tables, a.k.a replicated or mirrored (identical on all shards), support atomic reads and writes. That’s important because most databases can’t be completely sharded and will have some common data on all databases that has to be kept in-sync.

Multi-tuple inserts, e.g., INSERT INTO table_x VALUES ($1, $2), ($3, $4), are split by our query rewriter and distributed to their respective shards automatically. They are used by ORMs like Prisma, Sequelize, and others, so those now work without code changes too.

Sharding keys can be mutated. PgDog will intercept and rewrite the update statement into 3 queries, SELECT, INSERT, and DELETE, moving the row between shards. If you’re using Citus (for everyone else, Citus is a Postgres extension for sharding databases), this might be worth a look.

If you’re like us and prefer integers to UUIDs for your primary keys, we built a cross-shard unique sequence, directly inside PgDog. It uses the system clock (and a couple other inputs), can be called like a Postgres function, and will automatically inject values into queries, so ORMs like ActiveRecord will continue to work out of the box. It’s monotonically increasing, just like a real Postgres sequence, and can generate up to 4 million numbers per second with a range of 69.73 years, so no need to migrate to UUIDv7 just yet.

    INSERT INTO my_table (id, created_at) VALUES (pgdog.unique_id(), now());

Sharding hardly works without a good load balancer. PgDog can monitor replicas and move write traffic to a promoted primary during a failover. This works with managed Postgres, like RDS (incl. Aurora), Azure Pg, GCP Cloud SQL, etc., because it just polls each instance with “SELECT pg_is_in_recovery()”. Primary election is not supported yet, so if you’re self-hosting with Patroni, you should keep it around for now, but you don’t need to run HAProxy in front of the DBs anymore.

The load balancer is getting pretty smart and can handle edge cases like SELECT FOR UPDATE and CTEs with INSERT/UPDATE statements, but if you still prefer to handle your read/write separation in code, you can do that too with manual routing. This works by giving PgDog a hint at runtime: a connection parameter (-c pgdog.role=primary), SET statement, or a query comment. If you have multiple connection pools in your app, you can replace them with just one connection to PgDog instead. For multi-threaded Python/Ruby/Go apps, this helps by reducing memory usage, I/O and context switching overhead.

Speaking of connection pooling, PgDog can automatically rollback unfinished transactions and drain and re-sync partially sent queries, all in an effort to preserve connections to the database. If you’ve seen Postgres go to 100% CPU because of a connection storm caused by an application crash, this might be for you. Draining connections works by receiving and discarding rows from abandoned queries and sending the Sync message via the Postgres wire protocol, which clears the query context and returns the connection to a normal state.

PgDog is open source and welcomes contributions and feedback in any form. As always, all features are configurable and can be turned off/on, so should you choose to give it a try, you can do so at your own pace. Our docs (https://docs.pgdog.dev) should help too.

Thanks for reading and happy hacking!

I built TTSLab — a free, open-source tool for running text-to-speech and speech-to-text models directly in the browser using WebGPU and WASM. No API keys, no backend, no data leaves your machine.

When you open the site, you'll hear it immediately — the landing page auto-generates speech from three different sentences right in your browser, no setup required.

You can then try any model yourself: type text, hit generate, hear it instantly. Models download once and get cached locally.

The most experimental feature: a fully in-browser Voice Agent. It chains speech-to-text → LLM → text-to-speech, all running locally on your GPU via WebGPU. You can have a spoken conversation with an AI without a single network request.

Currently supported models: - TTS: Kokoro 82M, SpeechT5, Piper (VITS) - STT: Whisper Tiny, Whisper Base

Other features: - Side-by-side model comparison - Speed benchmarking on your hardware - Streaming generation for supported models

Source: https://github.com/MbBrainz/ttslab (MIT)

Feedback I'd especially like: 1. How does performance feel on your hardware? 2. What models should I add next? 3. Did the Voice Agent work for you? That's the most experimental part.

Built on top of ONNX Runtime Web (https://onnxruntime.ai) and Transformers.js — huge thanks to those communities for making in-browser ML inference possible.

A structured archive of CIA World Factbook data spanning 1990–2025. It currently includes: 36 editions 281 entities ~1.06M parsed fields full-text + boolean search country/year comparisons map/trend/ranking analysis views CSV/XLSX/PDF export The goal is to preserve long-horizon public-domain government data and make cross-year analysis practical. Live: https://cia-factbook-archive.fly.dev About/method details: https://cia-factbook-archive.fly.dev/about Data source is the CIA World Factbook (public domain). Not affiliated with the CIA or U.S. Government.

The article discusses how power efficiency is crucial for modern electronics, exploring techniques like power management, energy-efficient design, and the role of microprocessors in improving power efficiency across various applications.

I built awsim, a lightweight AWS emulator in Go for CI/CD testing.

Core services (S3, DynamoDB, SQS, Lambda, IAM) implemented, 40+ services in progress.

- Single binary, no auth required - Instant startup, in-memory storage - Contributions welcome

Feedback welcome!

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a project called L88 — a local RAG system that I initially focused on UI/UX for, so the retrieval and model architecture still need proper refinement.

Repo: https://github.com/Hundred-Trillion/L88-Full

I’m running this on 8GB VRAM and a strong CPU (128GB RAM). Embeddings and preprocessing run on CPU, and the main model runs on GPU. One limitation I ran into is that my evaluator and generator LLM ended up being the same model due to compute constraints, which defeats the purpose of evaluation.

I’d really appreciate feedback on:

Better architecture ideas for small-VRAM RAG

Splitting evaluator/generator roles effectively

Improving the LangGraph pipeline

Any bugs or design smells you notice

Ways to optimize the system for local hardware

I’m 18 and still learning a lot about proper LLM architecture, so any technical critique or suggestions would help me grow as a developer. If you check out the repo or leave feedback, it would mean a lot — I’m trying to build a solid foundation and reputation through real projects.

Thanks!

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!

I built a macOS dictation app where everything runs on-device. Transcription, auto-correct, translation. No audio or text leaves your machine.

It ships with 4 transcription engines you can swap between: WhisperKit (99 languages), NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B (25 European languages, fastest of the bunch), Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (30 languages), and Apple Speech on macOS 26+. They all run through CoreML/Metal. Whisper is the most versatile, Parakeet wins on raw latency for European languages, Qwen3 does better with CJK. I went with a protocol-based architecture so you pick the engine that fits your use case instead of me pretending one model rules them all.

After transcription, there's an optional post-processing pipeline using Apple Intelligence (FoundationModels framework, macOS 26+, also fully on-device): auto-correct with filler word removal, tone rewriting, translation. The annoying part was FoundationModels cold start. First inference after idle takes 2-3s, which kills the experience. I worked around it by firing a throwaway mini-inference (`session.respond(to: "ok")`) in parallel while audio is still being transcribed, so the model is already warm when the text arrives. Hacky, but it shaved off the perceived latency.

Getting transcribed text into any arbitrary macOS app was honestly the hardest part. I use clipboard save/restore: read all NSPasteboard types (not just strings, also images, RTF, whatever the user had copied), write the transcribed text, simulate Cmd+V via CGEvent posted to `cghidEventTap`, then restore the original clipboard. Electron apps are slower to process paste events, so I detect them by checking if `Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework` exists in the app bundle and add extra delay. This whole approach requires Accessibility permissions, which means no sandbox, which means no App Store. I'm fine with that trade-off.

Built this solo in about 6 weeks. One-time purchase, no subscription.

I'm genuinely unsure about the multi-engine approach. Is letting users choose between Whisper/Parakeet/Qwen3 useful, or would most people prefer I just auto-select based on their language? Also curious if anyone has a cleaner approach to text injection on macOS. The clipboard hack works everywhere but it feels fragile and I don't love it.