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The article explores the effects of a novel drug that targets a specific metabolic pathway, resulting in significant weight loss and improved metabolic health in obese individuals. The findings suggest potential therapeutic applications for this drug in the treatment of obesity and related metabolic disorders.

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.

Hi HN, I'm Arsalan, founder of LiveDocs (https://livedocs.com). We're building an AI-native data workspace that lets teams ask questions of their real data and have the system plan, execute, and maintain the analysis end-to-end.

We previously posted about LiveDocs four years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735058). Back then, LiveDocs was a no-code analytics tool for stitching together metrics from tools like Stripe and Google Analytics. It worked for basic reporting, but over time we ran into the same ceiling our users did. Dashboards are fine until the questions get messy, and notebooks slowly turn into hard-to-maintain piles of glue.

Over the last few years, we rebuilt LiveDocs almost entirely around a different idea. Data work should behave like a living system, not a static document or a chat transcript.

Today, LiveDocs is a reactive notebook environment backed by real execution engines. Notebooks are not linear. Each cell participates in a dependency graph, so when data or logic changes, only the affected parts recompute. You can freely mix SQL, Python, charts, tables, and text in the same document and everything stays in sync. Locally we run on DuckDB and Polars, and when you connect a warehouse like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Postgres, queries are pushed down instead of copying data out. Every result is inspectable and reproducible.

On top of this environment sits an AI agent, but it is not "chat with your data." The agent works inside the notebook itself. It can plan multi-step analyses, write and debug SQL or Python, spawn specialized sub-agents for different tasks, run code in a terminal, and browse documentation or the web when it lacks context. Because it operates inside the same execution graph as humans, you can see exactly what it ran, edit it, or take over at any point.

We also support a canvas mode where the agent can build custom UI for your analysis, not just charts. This includes tables with controls, comparisons, and derived views that stay wired to the underlying data. When a notebook is not the right interface, you can publish parts of it as an interactive app. These behave more like lightweight internal tools, similar in spirit to Retool, but backed by the same analysis logic.

Everything in LiveDocs is fully real-time collaborative. Multiple people can edit the same notebook, see results update live, comment inline, and share documents or apps without exposing raw code unless they want to.

Teams use LiveDocs to investigate questions that do not fit cleanly into dashboards, build analyses that evolve over time without constant rewrites, and automate recurring questions without turning them into brittle pipelines.

Pricing is pay-as-you-go, starting at $15 per month, with a free tier so people can try it without talking to us. You'll have to sign up, as it requires us to provision a sandbox for your to run your notebook. Here's a video demo: https://youtu.be/Hl12su9Jn_I

We are still learning where this breaks. Long-running agent workflows on production data surface a lot of sharp edges. We would love feedback from people who have built or lived with analytics systems, notebooks, or "chat with your data" tools and felt their limits. Happy to go deep on technical details and trade notes.

The article discusses the similarities and differences between the programming practices of 'showboating' and 'rodneying', with the former focusing on impressive displays of coding prowess and the latter emphasizing pragmatic problem-solving and maintainable code.

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.

The article discusses the polarizing figure of a London cyclist who has garnered both admiration and criticism for his advocacy of cyclists' rights and confrontational approach to challenging motorists. The piece explores the debate surrounding his methods and the broader tensions between cyclists and drivers in the city.

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.

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 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.

A student journalist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) received a subpoena from Google, demanding information about their reporting on a contract between Google and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The article explores the implications of this subpoena and the potential chilling effects it could have on press freedom and academic research.

Qwen Image 2.0 is a powerful AI-powered image generation tool that allows users to create high-quality, custom images by providing textual descriptions. The article highlights the tool's advanced capabilities, including the ability to generate images with specific styles, compositions, and subjects.

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.

Hey HN, stripe-no-webhooks is an open-source library that syncs your Stripe payments data to your own Postgres database: https://github.com/pretzelai/stripe-no-webhooks.

Here's a demo video: https://youtu.be/cyEgW7wElcs

Why is this useful? (1) You don't have to figure out which webhooks you need or write listeners for each one. The library handles all of that. This follows the approach of libraries like dj-stripe in the Django world (https://dj-stripe.dev/). (2) Stripe's API has a 100 rpm rate limit. If you're checking subscription status frequently or building internal tools, you'll hit it. Querying your own Postgres doesn't have this problem. (3) You can give an AI agent read access to the stripe.* schema to debug payment issues—failed charges, refunds, whatever—without handing over Stripe dashboard access. (4) You can join Stripe data with your own tables for custom analytics, LTV calculations, etc.

It creates a webhook endpoint in your Stripe account to forward webhooks to your backend where a webhook listener stores all the data into a new stripe.* schema. You define your plans in TypeScript, run a sync command, and the library takes care of creating Stripe products and prices, handling webhooks, and keeping your database in sync. We also let you backfill your Stripe data for existing accounts.

It supports pre-paid usage credits, account wallets and usage-based billing. It also lets you generate a pricing table component that you can customize. You can access the user information using the simple API the library provides:

  billing.subscriptions.get({ userId });
  billing.credits.consume({ userId, key: "api_calls", amount: 1 });
  billing.usage.record({ userId, key: "ai_model_tokens_input", amount: 4726 });

Let's see how it works with a quick example. Say you have a billing plan like Cursor (the IDE) used to have: $20/mo, you get 500 API completions + 2000 tab completions, you can buy additional API credits, and any additional usage is billed as overage.

You define your plan in TypeScript:

  {
    name: "Pro",
    description: "Cursor Pro plan",
    price: [{ amount: 2000, currency: "usd", interval: "month" }],
    features: {
      api_completion: {
        pricePerCredit: 1,              // 1 cent per unit
        trackUsage: true,               // Enable usage billing
        credits: { allocation: 500 },
        displayName: "API Completions",
      },
      tab_completion: {
        credits: { allocation: 2000 },
        displayName: "Tab Completions",
      },
    },
  }

Consume code would look like this:

  await billing.credits.consume({
    userId: user.id,
    key: "api_completion",
    amount: 1,
  });

  await billing.credits.topUp({
    userId: user.id,
    key: "api_completion",
    amount: 500,     // buy 500 credits, charges $5.00
  });

This would be a lot of work to implement by yourself on top of Stripe. You need to keep track of all of these entitlements in your own DB and deal with renewals, expiry, ad-hoc grants, etc. It's definitely doable, especially with AI coding, but you'll probably end up building something fragile and hard to maintain.

This is just a high-level overview of what the library is capable of. It also supports seat-level credits, monetary wallets (with micro-cent precision), auto top-ups, robust failure recovery, tax collection, invoices, and an out-of-the-box pricing table.

I vibe-coded a little toy app for testing: https://snw-test.vercel.app. There's no validation so feel free to sign up with a dummy email, then subscribe to a plan with a test card: 4242 4242 4242 4242, any future expiry, any 3-digit CVV.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/demo-screenshot-Rh6Ucqx

Feel free to try it out! If you end up using this library, please report any bugs on the repo. If you're having trouble / want to chat, I'm happy to help - my contact is in my HN profile.

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.

The article discusses the concept of 'parsing, not validating' as a more effective approach to processing input data. It argues that parsing data into a structured representation is more reliable and maintainable than attempting to validate the data against a set of rules.

This article explores a novel approach to defining Go functions, where the order of parameters is irrelevant, and function signatures are defined using named parameters instead of positional arguments. The author presents several advantages of this technique, including improved readability, flexibility, and maintainability of Go code.

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.

A lawsuit alleges that Meta and Google purposefully designed their social media platforms to be addictive, causing harm to users, especially children and adolescents. The lawsuit claims these tech giants prioritized profits over user well-being and seeks to hold them accountable for their actions.

Clawhub is an AI-powered platform that enables developers to build applications that interact with real-world objects and environments. The platform provides a suite of tools and services to help developers create innovative solutions using computer vision, robotics, and other cutting-edge technologies.

The article describes the creation of a mini real-time audio processing library called Voxtral, which is written in Rust and designed for low-latency audio applications. The library provides a set of modular components that can be used to build custom audio processing pipelines.

This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to build a Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) system from scratch. It covers the key components, such as the base model, reward model, and training process, to create an AI system that can learn from human feedback.

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.

The article suggests that a Trump-era immigration crackdown could result in the first population decline in the United States in modern history, as tighter restrictions on immigration lead to fewer new arrivals and lower birth rates among immigrant communities.

This article explores various Discord alternatives, highlighting their features and use cases to help readers find the best communication platform for their needs, whether it's for gaming, business, or personal use.

HN is all about the rich discussions. We wanted to take the HN experience one step further - to bring the familiar keyboard-first navigation, find interesting viewpoints in the threads and get a gist of long threads so that we can decide which rabbit holes to explore. So we built HN Companion a year ago, and have been refining it ever since.

Try it: https://app.hncompanion.com or available as an extension for Firefox / Chrome: [0].

Most AI summarization strips the voices from conversations by flattening threads into a wall of text. This kills the joy of reading HN discussions. Instead, HN Companion works differently - it understands the thread hierarchy, the voting patterns and contrasting viewpoints - everything that makes HN interesting. Think of it like clustering related discussions across multiple hierarchies into a group and surfacing the comments that represent each cluster. It keeps the verbatim text with backlinks so that you never lose context and can continue the conversation from that point. Here is how the summarization works under the hood [1].

We first built this as an open source browser extension. But soon we learned that people hesitate to install it. So we built the same experience as a web app with all the features. This helped people see how it works, and use it on mobile too (in the browser or as PWA). This is now a playground to try new features before taking them to the browser extension.

We did a Show HN a year ago [2] and we have added these features based on user feedback:

* cached summaries - summaries are generated and cached on our servers. This improved the speed significantly. You still have the option to use your own API key or use local models through Ollama.

* our system prompt is available in the Settings page of the extension. You can customize it as you wish.

* sort the posts in the feed pages (/home, /show etc.) based on points, comments, time or the default sorting order.

* We tried fine tuning an open weights model to summarize, but learned that with a good system prompt and user prompt, the frontier models deliver results of similar quality. So we didn’t use the fine-tuned model, but you can run them locally.

The browser extension does not track any usage or analytics. The code is open source[3].

We want to continue to improve HN Companion, specifically add features like following an author, notes about an author, draft posts etc.

See it in action for a post here https://app.hncompanion.com/item?id=46937696

We would love to get your feedback on what would make this more useful for your HN reading.

[0] https://hncompanion.com/#download

[1] https://hncompanion.com/how-it-works

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42532374

[3] https://github.com/hncompanion/browser-extension

The article explains the scientific reason behind the sky's blue color, which is caused by the scattering of sunlight by air molecules, a phenomenon known as Rayleigh scattering. It discusses how this process leads to the predominance of blue wavelengths in the sky's appearance.

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.

The article discusses the implementation of a voice-controlled audio player called Voxtral, which allows users to control music playback using voice commands. It covers the technical details of the project, including the use of the STM32 microcontroller and the design of the voice recognition algorithm.