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Show HN: The Channels SDK – Bring Any Agent to Any Channel (Slack, MS Teams)

Launch HN: ProvenMetal (YC S26) delivers circuit boards in days instead of weeks Hey HN, we’re Will &amp; Johnny from ProvenMetal (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;provenmetal.com">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;provenmetal.com</a>). You send us design files or specs and we give you assembled boards domestically in days.<p>The US produced 30% of PCBs globally in 2000, now they produce 4%. Chinese manufacturers have completely dominated this space at 55% of global production.<p>Now, the need for a domestic PCB supply chain is higher than ever before, yet the infrastructure has been dissolving over the last 2 decades. What is left is mostly small family run manufacturers (CMs) that have been operating in largely the same, labor intensive way since the early 2000’s.<p>When you place an order through a CM it typically takes several days to receive a quote and complete design for manufacture review, and then you have to source all of the components (the hardest part) and bare boards yourself, then wait anywhere from a few days to several weeks for the assembly and testing of those boards.<p>We started off assembling circuit boards out of a garage with prosumer grade equipment (NeoDen YY1, Glenbrook X-ray, solder paste stencils, and manual rework stations). We believed that by owning the manufacturing process, we could turn all the front of house automations inwards. But here’s the thing… manufacturing circuit boards with prosumer grade equipment out of a garage takes a huge amount of time. Suddenly we were spending 90% of our time assembling circuit boards instead of growing the business. We were completely capacity constrained, with fancy software automations that are not the binding constraint at low volumes.<p>Then we got our heads out of the weeds, took a step back, and realized that we were trying to solve the wrong bottlenecks.<p>These manufacturers are good at manufacturing and terrible at the front of house (quoting, DFM review, and part procurement). When you look at the full process, you realize that assembly is not the bottleneck. So we stopped trying to solve the problem that we can’t solve at this stage.<p>We measured the bottlenecks and nailed down the ones that we are best positioned to solve right now.<p>When a customer wants a domestically manufactured circuit board, it is not a straight forward process. We are making that process easy through front of house automation. A customer gives us their design files, and we automatically procure components, and co-ordinate bare board fabs and assembly houses to get quotes, design review, and manufacturing completed in a very tight loop.<p>How we solve part procurement (you can’t assemble boards with no parts!): When a user places an order with us, our system automatically sources their bill of materials across US and overseas distributors. However, when we work with customers during the design process, our plug-ins interact with KiCAD and Altium, sending the BOM to our ordering platform, which allows us to automatically procure components before layout is finalized.<p>KiCAD plugin: (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;proven-metal&#x2F;provenmetal-kicad" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;proven-metal&#x2F;provenmetal-kicad</a>)<p>Altium plugin: (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;proven-metal&#x2F;provenmetal-altium" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;proven-metal&#x2F;provenmetal-altium</a>)<p>This enables us to order long lead time parts in advance, suggest alternatives if parts are out of stock, and solve the biggest bottleneck in the process. We store parts in our hq in SF, and then kit the boards and route them through our network. We also do long term storage of parts for long lead time items.<p>How we solve endless emails: Every manufacturer wants the same information in a different shape. There’s usually a few days of back and forth emailing to achieve clarity. We’re building a profile per manufacturer and sending the order to fit their requirements. This may sound trivial but it removes a multi-day round trip on most orders, which on a quick-turn build is a meaningful share of the time.<p>How to solve design review: Each manufacturer has individual capability sheets, and so we have a heuristic harness that Fable 5 uses to check the board for DFM issues. We’re building a streamlined process for end-to-end pcb manufacturing, but is that enough to solve the supply chain? Not a chance. Capacity is the problem, and no amount of smart software will solve it. We’re extracting real slack from the system today, that slack is finite, and at some volume the only remaining move is adding physical capacity. We think that’s where this goes.<p>We charge a simple margin on the order value depending on order complexity with fully transparent quote breakdowns. We took our first paying order in less than a week and we’ve done roughly $70k across 11 orders in 6 weeks.<p>We are very interested in your opinion. We’re working in a problem space that has problems everywhere, we’re constantly pulled in wild directions regarding which problems we solve and how we go about solving them. What do you know that we can learn from?

Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard Hi HN, today I’m revealing Altar II, an ultra-low profile (4.75mm) mechanical keyboard designed to replace your Magic Keyboard. It’s the keyboard I wish Apple made.<p>Altar II has fully mechanical switches, plus a magnetically detachable dial, haptic feedback, a red backlight, and a native macOS companion app.<p>I’m a heavy Mac user and I feel that Apple hasn’t given its keyboards the attention they deserve, in terms of hardware, software, and features, so I set out to try and change that.<p>It was a massive undertaking and it has taken almost 2 years to get to this stage. One of the main obstacles was fitting a reasonably sized battery into the chassis, and aggressive power profiling without messing with the user experience. Another issue was we couldn’t fit any components on the underside of the PCB because there was literally no space to do so (and there are a lot of components).<p>Around 4 years ago I posted my first keyboard to HN (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32507172">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32507172</a>). Its response blew me away and ultimately led to me quitting my job and making and selling keyboards full time. I’ve taken some of the feedback from that original post and incorporated it into Altar II (e.g. the detachable dial).<p>I’ll be around to answer any questions. Please let me know what you think, I’d love to get some feedback.

I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me

Show HN: Science for Kids There’s a really good kids’ science magazine called Oyla, but it’s aimed at kids 12+<p>I subscribed a couple of years ago thinking that it would be fine for my son (then 8yo, but an advanced reader) but, even now (10yo), the articles are too dense for him and don’t hold his interest.<p>Last year, the same company launched ‘Oyla Junior’ aimed at younger kids ~8yo. But I read a couple of the articles and I think they’re too oversimplified.<p>I wanted something in between, but didn’t find anything suitable online.<p>So I used AI to create something, and did a bunch of iterations to tune the sentence length, the flow of the articles, how much info is introduced in each paragraph etc.<p>I still want to make it better, but it’s already good enough for my son to read.

Faster floating point math with Rust's new API

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AutoGPT is the vision of accessible AI for everyone, to use and to build on. Our mission is to provide the tools, so that you can focus on what matters.

Show HN: demake – one source project compiles to any retro game console ROM This started life as a graphics tool for a specific problem: gen AI can make retro-styled sprites but can&#x27;t follow exact hardware constraints of pixels and colors.<p>While building this I liked the idea that I can fan-out to any retro videogame console or handheld&#x27;s specifications.<p>I then devised my own declarative language - Demotic - to express the game you want to build as concisely and naturally as possible without implementation detail. To work on different machines, you use relative units, like vw, vh, vmin, vmax.<p>It has a web UI, CLI and NPM package. Still a work in progress.

How Americans View Capitalism, Socialism and Free Enterprise

Show HN: A terminal glued to the macOS dock Every single day of my life since I started programming back in 2020 I open my projects through the terminal&#x2F;ghostty. &quot;cd path&quot; + &quot;code .&quot;. Until today I don&#x27;t even know how to open vscode first then open a project from there.<p>I usually have 3-4 vscode windows open at the same time, and I like them in separate desktops (for mac users). i gotta admit, i use 8 desktops, 3-4 for vscode, 1 for arc, 1 for docker, 1 for postman etc.<p>So my daily routine when I turned on my mac was: (1) open ghostty; (2) cd-path+code.; (3) drag the vscode window to a desired desktop; (4) get back to the ghostty desktop; (5) repeat until all is open.<p>i was unbothered for 6y. Until i realized how inefficient i was being: (1) opening ghostty just to run one-off commands to open another app felt wrong, like why do I need a terminal if it&#x27;s not a process I need to watch; (2) the need to go back to the ghostty desktop every time i wanted to open a new project and drag it to a new desktop and switch back... it&#x27;s funny how we simply accept a habit and don&#x27;t bother to fix it<p>i wanted a terminal that persisted across desktops AND that was always visible so i could access it anytime AND that wasn&#x27;t big because i would only run one-off commands. so I created starboard.<p>where could I fit a terminal that was always visible and accessible? i looked at the macOS dock, i looked at the empty space to its right, and I said &quot;that&#x27;s it&quot;.<p>starboard is a floating terminal window that&#x27;s literally glued to the dock, filling the blank space to the right, tracking its height and position live. it&#x27;s visible from any desktop, a real companion to the dock, and it&#x27;s a persistent shell.<p>to close the story on my routine, I now can happily jump straight to the desktop i want my project to be in and open it there through Starboard. i rarely open ghostyy, unless i really need it.<p>here&#x27;s where feedback is massively important. i built this for the way i work with it, the way my dock is, which is in the bottom. my dock&#x27;s position and height give me a perfect sized Starboard with 3 visible lines that I can happily work with. hearing from you guys how it appears to you would be essential for further improvement.

France is banning unsolicited telemarketing calls starting next week

Show HN: Wallfacer – A terminal session manager for Claude Code, and more

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Show HN: Humor Arena – Which frontier model is funniest? What if you could measure humor?<p>Well we&#x27;ve trained a model on our own dataset of ~50k human ratings to detect what jokes people find funniest. We know it&#x27;s part objective, part subjective component. Subjective is out of our depth for now haha<p>The main results: Fable 5 is funniest - beating the average model 67% of the time, with GPT 4o last at 17%.<p>Other findings: - The models never refused to try, even with dark prompts - Thinking longer has a slight benefit - Absurdness correlates negatively with joke quality<p>Some methodology notes: - We benchmarked our model against the human majority and it agreed 72% of the time in a blind sample test. - We had 51 US adults rate the jokes, each blind to the models, with joke order randomized, and quality checked for attention and speed. - To rate some yourself visit <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pair.laugh.so" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pair.laugh.so</a><p>The full benchmark here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;laugh.so&#x2F;benchmark" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;laugh.so&#x2F;benchmark</a><p>Am taking requests if there&#x27;s more research you want to see! Cheers

A Fed official is asking whether AI is becoming 'too big to fail'

Show HN: Capy – A Git-style platform for managing your team's secrets Hello HN!<p>We&#x27;re all spending more and more time making stuff with agents, but I&#x27;ve noticed that one of the things that is the most disconnected from my daily engineering workflow is dealing with secrets and credentials. It often involves a lot of click-ops, copying&#x2F;pasting, and collaboration, and none of the secrets management products out there have truly scratched that itch.<p>I built Capy to solve this. It&#x27;s a secrets manager whose entire frontend is a developer CLI, and I find it extremely ergonomic to use by hand. You also don&#x27;t need to leave the CLI to sign up for and use it! You can install and authenticate without leaving your terminal (or agent) session.<p>It also has very powerful version management with git-like branching and conflict resolution. You can push a version manifest to source control and have collaborators pull a specific version of the secrets at any point in time.<p>The platform itself is extremely secure. It encrypts your local .env files so they can&#x27;t be read directly. Upon pushing the values to the service, it encrypts them yet again with a service key. That way neither a compromised local machine nor a compromised service alone will result in a leakage.<p>BTW: Since it was released in April, I&#x27;ve been refining it and have evolved the focus a bit. Originally I was going for more TUI and TTY with guided wizards for doing things like deployments, rotations, and connecting services, but I realize that the real future is in making the product work EXTREMELY well with agents.<p>So the next evolution of is a more satisfying Agent ergonomic, and I have been working on something big next on that front.<p>Curious about your thoughts on the idea, execution, and would appreciate any and all feedback!

Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2