Tuesday, June 16, 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Pen and paper resource development game with an emergent world

Show HN: Pen and paper resource development game with an emergent world
9 by jhylands | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I've been working for a while on trying to curate a game that has the emergence of procedurally generated computer games but that can be played with only pen and paper. Here I present the best version I've been able to come up with that is simple and emergent. I've really enjoyed being able to engage with this sort of game while not feeling like my brain in rotting. I recon my numeracy improves while playing it.

New top story on Hacker News: Flip TABLE: storing arbitrary data in iNaturalist

Flip TABLE: storing arbitrary data in iNaturalist
4 by evakhoury | 0 comments on Hacker News.


Sunday, June 14, 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust

Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust
32 by Venn1 | 8 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call
5 by AG342 | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I'm the developer of Trace, a non-intrusive, shortcut-driven Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on-device. I know, another meeting transcription app. Please bear with me though, I'm confident that this is at least a little novel. I primarily built Trace for myself. I'd been using MacWhisper, but there was enough fiddling before each call that I'd forget to start it and walk out of an hour-long meeting with nothing written down. So the things I cared about most were that it's quick to activate and stays out of the way. You activate Trace by pressing a global shortcut (configurable), which reveals a small bar at the bottom of your screen (there's also a keystroke and/or option to hide it entirely if you'd rather not see it at all). As I was building it I wanted to bake in a couple of workflows I'd wished for in other transcription apps. 1. Mid-meeting you can press another global shortcut to mark a "key moment" and type a note. The note shows up in the resulting transcript inline at that timestamp. I wanted to add this because I kept catching myself thinking "wait, that bit matters" in meetings and reaching to jot it down in a separate app like Obsidian, which I then needed to add context to, which took me out of the meeting. I use it all the time. If I paste the transcript into an LLM afterwards (which I find myself doing more and more these days) the important moments are flagged so it doesn't gloss over them. This is more noticeable in longer meetings with lots of topics. 2. With another keyboard shortcut you can summon a rough live recap (subtitles, basically) to quickly recap what's just been said. Trace uses standard macOS microphone and system recording APIs to capture both sides of the conversation as two separate tracks and then runs the system side through on-device diarization to identify speakers. Right now we only label them as "Speaker 1", "Speaker 2", etc but there are plans for speaker labelling in the future. You can also show a "live recap" as the call is happening to review what someone just said. All transcription models run on your machine. To be clear though, Trace doesn't do any of the summarising itself, it just produces a markdown transcript, so if you want summaries then you need to pass the output to an AI. The app is sandboxed and your audio/transcripts are never uploaded anywhere - they just exist as audio files and markdown on disk. The only network call Trace is required to make is on the first run to download the speech and speaker models (around 500MB) from Hugging Face, and after that it can be used fully offline. If enabled, a Google Calendar integration can auto-name sessions but that needs a network connection. The app is £9.99 on the macOS App Store. I've been using it every day for months now and I'm super happy with how it's improved my workflow. Feedback very welcome.

New top story on Hacker News: Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed
25 by fkozlowski | 1 comments on Hacker News.


Thursday, June 11, 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: I built a Red Flag Warning zone-check tool for the East Bay in 48h

Show HN: I built a Red Flag Warning zone-check tool for the East Bay in 48h
6 by vedant28t | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN. I'm a high schooler in Fremont, CA. Tuesday morning I got a county-wide AC Alert text telling everyone in Alameda County to prepare a go-bag for an East Bay Hills Red Flag Warning that starts tonight at 11 PM. The text went to ~half a million phones. The actual NWS warning polygon only covers East Bay Hills (NWS zone CAZ515). Most people who got the text don't need a go-bag tonight. Some in the hills don't realize how close they are. So I built this tool - https://ift.tt/tQPonpa mit licensed public github - https://ift.tt/ZYH8C95 It does a few things - tells people if they are in the flagged zone, and also provides a way to check if a buddy is in flagged zone and send them a text. Everything without installing an app. I heard back from Oakland Firesafe Council director about a gap in my understanding (and the tool). To my surprise, and through feedback, I realized that you cannot assume that only the flagged area is at risk. Adjacent areas are at risk too! Fires do not follow zone boundaries! I fixed the tool. I built this in 48 hours to close that specific gap: type your address, get a yes/no on whether the NWS polygon covers it, your Genasys evacuation zone, tonight's wind + humidity at your point, a plain-English action checklist, a per-school decision view for East Bay districts, and a one-tap iMessage buddy-check template for a hill-neighbor at 10:30 PM.

New top story on Hacker News: Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks

Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks
14 by bugvader | 1 comments on Hacker News.


Tuesday, June 9, 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Transit-format (JSON/MessagePack) reader/writer in C

Show HN: Transit-format (JSON/MessagePack) reader/writer in C
3 by delaguardo | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Transit.c is an addition to the set of libraries to support transit data interchange format written in C11. It supports full 0.8 specification of cognitect's transit-format: JSON, JSON-Verbose and MessagePack encodings, all ground and extension types, compression via keys caching, extensibility via custom tag handlers.

New top story on Hacker News: CEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs

CEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs
8 by speckx | 1 comments on Hacker News.


Friday, June 5, 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Inside FAISS: Billion-Scale Similarity Search

Inside FAISS: Billion-Scale Similarity Search
10 by tohms | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Author here. I wrote this as a visual companion to the 2017 FAISS paper ( https://ift.tt/LjKG6lS ), focused on the parts I found hardest to grok from text alone. The article covers a subset of what FAISS does, with the paper as the source of truth. NSG, FastScan, IMI are not covered here, they'll get their own articles. I'd be especially interested in feedback on: - the IVFPQ / IVFADC explanation, particularly the LUT reuse argument - whether the GPU part captures enough of the actual complexity Happy to answer questions.

Thursday, June 4, 2026

New top story on Hacker News: AI, Ashby Engineering, and the future

AI, Ashby Engineering, and the future
14 by fredley | 6 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Cost.dev (YC W21) – making agents cost-aware and cheaper to call

Show HN: Cost.dev (YC W21) – making agents cost-aware and cheaper to call
6 by akh | 0 comments on Hacker News.
We launched Infracost on HN five years ago ( https://ift.tt/e5GYSl4 ) where our CLI generated cost estimates for infra-as-code, e.g. "this Terraform PR adds $400/mo". The idea was to shift cloud costs (FinOps) left, so engineers get visibility of costs before deployment and make better decisions. Earlier this year we started seeing agent traffic in our logs and it looked like coding agents were calling our CLI. But that CLI wasn't designed with coding agents in mind. We went down a philosophical rabbit hole to see if a CLI is even needed anymore given that Claude, Copilot et al. already follow best practices. Ultimately we decided to create a new CLI from the ground up with coding agents in mind for two reasons: 1. We optimized the CLI for agent callers and cut Claude's output token usage by up to 79% and API cost by up to 67% versus a bare-Claude baseline. We wrote a blog documenting our lessons on optimizing user token usage when designing a CLI, e.g. using predicate flags so the agent doesn't compose jq | python | wc pipelines, output format that strips JSON's redundant field names. The blog is here: https://ift.tt/sdYEKcN... 2. With cloud costs, precision matters. Telling a coding agent "make this Terraform cost-optimized" can be expensive and lossy. You burn tokens loading code and policy context into every conversation. Your agent could make up a price and you wouldn't know because it's difficult to verify that across the ~10M price points that AWS, Azure and Google have. The CLI runs static analysis on the code, uses the latest prices from cloud vendors, and passes that context to the coding agent. So that's what we're launching today - Cost.dev: https://cost.dev/ . - It runs locally. Your code never leaves your machine, you get a fast feedback loop, and you're not burning API calls per character when you want to fetch prices. - The CLI does the deterministic work. Fetching price points, scanning the code, validating fixes. The coding agent does the natural-language part. You don't have to trust the LLM to remember the rules, and can verify it called the right CLI command. - It provides a consistent rule layer across every tool you use. Get cost estimates in your IDE and your coding agent with a single install. We support Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, as well as IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains Before we keep building more in that direction, I want to sanity-check with HN: is "agents writing IaC in prod" actually a thing yet, or am I betting on a future that's still a year out? I know software developers are using coding agents heavily, but are platform/infra folks doing that for prod too? Also, if you have any feedback on Cost.dev, I'd love to hear it!