Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
The article discusses a very snowy place, describing the unique characteristics and experiences of living in a region with heavy snowfall. It provides insights into the adaptations and daily life of individuals in this wintry environment.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)
The Feynman Lectures on Physics is a series of physics lectures delivered by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman at the California Institute of Technology. The lectures cover a wide range of topics in physics, from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics, providing a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the field.
Show HN: I taught GPT-OSS-120B to see using Google Lens and OpenCV
I built an MCP server that gives any local LLM real Google search and now vision capabilities - no API keys needed.
The latest feature: google_lens_detect uses OpenCV to find objects in an image, crops each one, and sends them to Google Lens for identification. GPT-OSS-120B, a text-only model with
zero vision support, correctly identified an NVIDIA DGX Spark and a SanDisk USB drive from a desk photo.
Also includes Google Search, News, Shopping, Scholar, Maps, Finance, Weather, Flights, Hotels, Translate, Images, Trends, and more. 17 tools total.
Two commands: pip install noapi-google-search-mcp && playwright install chromium
GitHub: https://github.com/VincentKaufmann/noapi-google-search-mcp
PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/noapi-google-search-mcp/
Booyah!
Exploring a Modern SMTPE 2110 Broadcast Truck
The article explores a modern SMPTE 2110 broadcast truck, showcasing the advanced technology and equipment used in live television production. It provides a detailed overview of the truck's capabilities and features, highlighting the evolution of broadcast technology.
The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
The article explores the concept of the technological singularity, a hypothetical point in time when technological growth becomes so rapid that it leads to unforeseeable changes in human civilization. It discusses the potential impacts and implications of the singularity, including the possibility of superintelligent artificial intelligence and the transformation of the human condition.
The Day the Telnet Died
The article discusses the decline of the Telnet protocol, which was once widely used for remote access and administration but has since been largely replaced by more secure alternatives like SSH. It explores the reasons behind Telnet's gradual disappearance and the implications for network security and connectivity.
CoLoop (YC S21) Is Hiring Ex Technical Founders in London
Work at a Startup is hiring for a Senior Front-end Engineer position to join their growing team and contribute to the development of their web application. The ideal candidate should have strong expertise in JavaScript, React, and modern front-end technologies.
Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents
The article introduces Entire, a new platform that aims to revolutionize the way people interact with the digital world by providing a seamless and personalized experience. It highlights Entire's vision to create a more connected and empowered digital ecosystem.
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish (2005)
The article is a commencement speech delivered by Steve Jobs at Stanford University in 2005. In the speech, Jobs shares his personal experiences and encourages the graduates to embrace the principles of 'staying hungry' and 'staying foolish' to lead a fulfilling life.
Flirt: The Native Backend
The article discusses the benefits of using a native backend for web applications, including improved performance, security, and maintainability. It provides an overview of the Flirt framework, a lightweight and flexible solution for building native backend services in Rust.
Fun With Pinball
The article explores the world of small pinball boards, highlighting their unique features, challenges, and the communities that have emerged around their preservation and appreciation.
Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine
The article discusses the Half-Life 2 (HL2) game engine and its significance in the gaming industry. It highlights HL2's advanced graphics, physics-based gameplay, and its influence on the development of other game engines.
The Little Learner: A Straight Line to Deep Learning (2023)
The Little Learner is a book that explores the world of machine learning and artificial intelligence, providing an accessible introduction to these technologies and their potential implications for society.
My eighth year as a bootstrapped founder
This article chronicles the author's experience as a bootstrapped founder over the past 8 years, highlighting the challenges, successes, and lessons learned in building a profitable online business without external funding.
Simplifying Vulkan one subsystem at a time
The article discusses the Khronos Group's efforts to simplify the Vulkan API by breaking it down into smaller, more manageable subsystems. This approach aims to make Vulkan more accessible to developers by reducing the complexity and learning curve associated with the full Vulkan API.
Willow – Protocols for an uncertain future [video]
Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)
The article explores the fundamental properties and applications of complex numbers, a crucial concept in mathematics that extends the real number system to include imaginary units. It delves into the algebraic structure, geometric interpretation, and practical uses of complex numbers in various fields such as physics and engineering.
Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun
The European Union is taking steps to reduce its reliance on the major credit card networks Visa and Mastercard, with the goal of creating a homegrown alternative payment system that would give the EU more control over cross-border transactions and reduce fees charged to merchants and consumers.
Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV
Rivian, a leading electric vehicle manufacturer, has unveiled its R2 model, a highly anticipated and versatile electric SUV designed for both on-road and off-road adventures. The R2 boasts an impressive range, advanced technology features, and a sleek, modern design that caters to the needs of eco-conscious consumers.
Tambo 1.0: Open-source toolkit for agents that render React components
Hi HN — cofounder Michael here.
We've been building Tambo for about a year, and just released our 1.0.
We make are making it easier to register React components with Zod schemas, a build an agent picks the right one and renders the right props.
We handle many of the complications with building generative user interfaces like: managing state between the user, the agent, and react component, rendering partial props, and we handle auth between your user, and MCP. We also support adding MCP servers and most of the spec.
We are 100% open-source and currently have 8k+ GitHub stars, thousands of developers, and over half-millions messages processed by our hosted service.
If you're building AI agents with generative UI, we'd like to hear from you.
Show HN: Rowboat – AI coworker that turns your work into a knowledge graph (OSS)
Hi HN,
AI agents that can run tools on your machine are powerful for knowledge work, but they’re only as useful as the context they have. Rowboat is an open-source, local-first app that turns your work into a living knowledge graph (stored as plain Markdown with backlinks) and uses it to accomplish tasks on your computer.
For example, you can say "Build me a deck about our next quarter roadmap." Rowboat pulls priorities and commitments from your graph, loads a presentation skill, and exports a PDF.
Our repo is https://github.com/rowboatlabs/rowboat, and there’s a demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AWoGo-L16I
Rowboat has two parts:
(1) A living context graph: Rowboat connects to sources like Gmail and meeting notes like Granola and Fireflies, extracts decisions, commitments, deadlines, and relationships, and writes them locally as linked and editable Markdown files (Obsidian-style), organized around people, projects, and topics. As new conversations happen (including voice memos), related notes update automatically. If a deadline changes in a standup, it links back to the original commitment and updates it.
(2) A local assistant: On top of that graph, Rowboat includes an agent with local shell access and MCP support, so it can use your existing context to actually do work on your machine. It can act on demand or run scheduled background tasks. Example: “Prep me for my meeting with John and create a short voice brief.” It pulls relevant context from your graph and can generate an audio note via an MCP tool like ElevenLabs.
Why not just search transcripts? Passing gigabytes of email, docs, and calls directly to an AI agent is slow and lossy. And search only answers the questions you think to ask. A system that accumulates context over time can track decisions, commitments, and relationships across conversations, and surface patterns you didn't know to look for.
Rowboat is Apache-2.0 licensed, works with any LLM (including local ones), and stores all data locally as Markdown you can read, edit, or delete at any time.
Our previous startup was acquired by Coinbase, where part of my work involved graph neural networks. We're excited to be working with graph-based systems again. Work memory feels like the missing layer for agents.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and welcome contributions!
The Falkirk Wheel
The Falkirk Wheel is a unique rotating boat lift that connects the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal, enabling boat passage between the two waterways. It is a major tourist attraction in Falkirk, Scotland, known for its innovative engineering and design.
Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor
We needed a JS-first WYSIWYG DOCX editor and couldn't find a solid OSS option, most were either commercial or abandoned.
As an experiment, we gave Claude Code the OOXML spec, a concrete editor architecture, and a Playwright-based test suite. The agent iterated in a (Ralph) loop over a few nights and produced a working editor from scratch.
Core text editing works today. Tables and images are functional but still incomplete. MIT licensed.
A brief history of oral peptides
This article provides a brief history of oral peptides, exploring their development, challenges, and potential applications in the pharmaceutical industry. It highlights the ongoing research and advancements in the field of delivering peptide-based drugs through the oral route.
How did Windows 95 get permission to put Weezer video 'Buddy Holly' on the CD?
The article discusses the importance of maintaining user trust and privacy when developing software, highlighting the need to balance user needs with ethical considerations and avoid potential misuse of data or features.
Competition is not market validation
The article argues that competition should not be seen as the primary validation for a business or project. It emphasizes that focusing too much on competition can lead to a narrow perspective and distract from creating unique value for customers.
Show HN: I built a macOS tool for network engineers – it's called NetViews
Hi HN — I’m the developer of NetViews, a macOS utility I built because I wanted better visibility into what was actually happening on my wired and wireless networks.
I live in the CLI, but for discovery and ongoing monitoring, I kept bouncing between tools, terminals, and mental context switches. I wanted something faster and more visual, without losing technical depth — so I built a GUI that brings my favorite diagnostics together in one place.
About three months ago, I shared an early version here and got a ton of great feedback. I listened: a new name (it was PingStalker), a longer trial, and a lot of new features. Today I’m excited to share NetViews 2.3.
NetViews started because I wanted to know if something on the network was scanning my machine. Once I had that, I wanted quick access to core details—external IP, Wi-Fi data, and local topology. Then I wanted more: fast, reliable scans using ARP tables and ICMP.
As a Wi-Fi engineer, I couldn’t stop there. I kept adding ways to surface what’s actually going on behind the scenes.
Discovery & Scanning: * ARP, ICMP, mDNS, and DNS discovery to enumerate every device on your subnet (IP, MAC, vendor, open ports). * Fast scans using ARP tables first, then ICMP, to avoid the usual “nmap wait”.
Wireless Visibility: * Detailed Wi-Fi connection performance and signal data. * Visual and audible tools to quickly locate the access point you’re associated with.
Monitoring & Timelines: * Connection and ping timelines over 1, 2, 4, or 8 hours. * Continuous “live ping” monitoring to visualize latency spikes, packet loss, and reconnects.
Low-level Traffic (but only what matters): * Live capture of DHCP, ARP, 802.1X, LLDP/CDP, ICMP, and off-subnet chatter. * mDNS decoded into human-readable output (this took months of deep dives).
Under the hood, it’s written in Swift. It uses low-level BSD sockets for ICMP and ARP, Apple’s Network framework for interface enumeration, and selectively wraps existing command-line tools where they’re still the best option. The focus has been on speed and low overhead.
I’d love feedback from anyone who builds or uses network diagnostic tools: - Does this fill a gap you’ve personally hit on macOS? - Are there better approaches to scan speed or event visualization that you’ve used? - What diagnostics do you still find yourself dropping to the CLI for?
Details and screenshots: https://netviews.app There’s a free trial and paid licenses; I’m funding development directly rather than ads or subscriptions. Licenses include free upgrades.
Happy to answer any technical questions about the implementation, Swift APIs, or macOS permission model.
Show HN: Distr 2.0 – A year of learning how to ship to customer environments
A year ago, we launched Distr here to help software vendors manage customer deployments remotely. We had agents that pulled updates, a hub with a GUI, and a lot of assumptions about what on-prem deployment needed.
It turned out things get messy when your software is running in places you can't simply SSH into.
Over the last year, we’ve also helped modernize a lot of home-baked solutions: bash scripts that email when updates fail, Excel sheets nobody trusts to track customer versions, engineers driving to customer sites to fix things in person, debug sessions over email (“can you take a screenshot of the logs and send it to me?”), customers with access to internal AWS or GCP registries because there was no better option, and deployments two major versions behind that nobody wants to touch.
We waited a year before making our first breaking change, which led to a major SemVer update—but it was eventually necessary. We needed to completely rewrite how we manage customer organizations. In Distr, we differentiate between vendors and customers. A vendor is typically the author of a software / AI application that wants to distribute it to customers. Previously, we had taken a shortcut where every customer was just a single user who owned a deployment. We’ve now introduced customer organizations. Vendors onboard customer organizations onto the platform, and customers own their internal user management, including RBAC. This change obviously broke our API, and although the migration for our cloud customers was smooth, custom solutions built on top of our APIs needed updates.
Other notable features we’ve implemented since our first launch:
- An OCI container registry built on an adapted version of https://github.com/google/go-containerregistry/, directly embedded into our codebase and served via a separate port from a single Docker image. This allows vendors to distribute Docker images and other OCI artifacts if customers want to self-manage deployments.
- License Management to restrict which customers can access which applications or artifact versions. Although “license management” is a broadly used term, the main purpose here is to codify contractual agreements between vendors and customers. In its simplest form, this is time-based access to specific software versions, which vendors can now manage with Distr.
- Container logs and metrics you can actually see without SSH access. Internally, we debated whether to use a time-series database or store all logs in Postgres. Although we had to tinker quite a bit with Postgres indexes, it now runs stably.
- Secret Management, so database passwords don’t show up in configuration steps or logs.
Distr is now used by 200+ vendors, including Fortune 500 companies, across on-prem, GovCloud, AWS, and GCP, spanning health tech, fintech, security, and AI companies. We’ve also started working on our first air-gapped environment.
For Distr 3.0, we’re working on native Terraform / OpenTofu and Zarf support to provision and update infrastructure in customers’ cloud accounts and physical environments—empowering vendors to offer BYOC and air-gapped use cases, all from a single platform.
Distr is fully open source and self-hostable: https://github.com/distr-sh/distr
Docs: https://distr.sh/docs
We’re YC S24. Happy to answer questions about on-prem deployments and would love to hear about your experience with complex customer deployments.
Markdown CLI viewer with VI keybindings
The article discusses the 'mdvi' tool, which is a command-line interface for rendering and manipulating Markdown documents. It highlights mdvi's ability to preview Markdown files and convert them to various output formats, such as PDF and HTML, making it a useful tool for Markdown-based content creation and publishing.
Oxide raises $200M Series C
Oxide Computer, a hardware and software company, has raised $200 million in Series C funding to accelerate the development of its cloud infrastructure and data center technologies. The funding will enable Oxide to expand its engineering team and further its mission of building high-performance, energy-efficient computing systems.