🛠️ Hacker News Tools

Show HN: TLA+ Process Studio Disclaimer: This was made with LLMs.<p>I made this tool to help understand large business processes that can be modelled as a single state machine.<p>The core loop of this is to enable to walk stakeholders through discussing each step, adding comments, and reiterating with an LLM of their choice to generate the TLA+ syntax on the left.<p>Users can click through the green state nodes to see how things work visually.<p>You can see some sample state machines in the dropdown in the top left.<p>The power would come from getting folks on the same page of the business process, so engineers can think about how best to automate&#x2F;modernize the system once they get all of the context.<p>Additionally, once you have a single canonical model of the process, you could in theory send into a dark factory to produce the software as quickly as possible, but now we can allocate more time in the entire software lifecycle at the design and alignment before coding now that coding is faster.<p>Additional work could be done using this book for guidance, Workflow Modeling: Tools for Process Improvement and Application Development, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Workflow-Modeling-Improvement-Application-Development&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1596931922" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Workflow-Modeling-Improvement-Applica...</a><p>MIT licensed repo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;RCSnyder&#x2F;tlaplus-process-studio" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;RCSnyder&#x2F;tlaplus-process-studio</a><p>Let me know what you think!<p>Thanks!

Show HN: Onsight: pay a local to photograph any spot in San Francisco, on demand

Linux Eliminates the Strncpy API After Six Years of Work, 360 Patches

Show HN: Pulse – Dashboard for Claude Code, approve tool calls from your phone Hi everyone, I&#x27;m a student from Flanders and I like to use Claude Code for my purposes, ideas and also just for fun and also make solutions for problems in our world!) So that&#x27;s why I built &quot;Pulse&quot;, it&#x27;s an local application that you can easily install to your device and easily follow what your claude agent is doing right now in your terminal session with an ambiance design and easily give permissions for your agent. For those who wants to see directly how much tokens you spent, and how much the session costs, and approve tool calls from everywhere from your phone and everything runs locally without an account can install Pulse from GitHub: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nikitadoudikov&#x2F;claude-pulse" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nikitadoudikov&#x2F;claude-pulse</a>

Show HN: MiniPCs.zip – Charting the Pareto frontier of Mini PCs The overall idea is to chart out the thousands of Mini PCs by benchmark and reveal the Pareto Front so you can get the most Compute per Dollar. Definitely a labor of love as I have a number of Mini PCs for my &quot;homelab&quot; (TrueNAS, piHole, Plex, basic stuff). It uses Gemini to extract specs from listings (since they&#x27;re not often strongly categorized).<p>Quick blog post here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;luke.zip&#x2F;posts&#x2F;pareto-pcs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;luke.zip&#x2F;posts&#x2F;pareto-pcs&#x2F;</a>

Show HN: Persona.js – a vanilla-JS agent UI library with native WebMCP (MIT) Hey everyone. My cofounder and I are formally open sourcing (MIT) persona.js. It&#x27;s a VanillaJS library that helps anyone build agentic experiences on the web, without a framework dependency, and full WebMCP support<p>So, why&#x27;d we do this?<p>1) We&#x27;re super fans of the web and the browser can do a ton today<p>2) We&#x27;ve seen AI builds be way overly complex because the FE requires a large project within an existing app OR the site wasn&#x27;t using a framework to begin with<p>If you&#x27;ve been a part of huge apps with multiple frameworks inside them, or work inside CMS &#x2F; website builders &#x2F; ecomm platforms... you know what we&#x27;re talking about. A &quot;simple&quot; AI feature disrupts your life for months<p>If you have a singular React codebase and can&#x27;t possibly imagine building an interface without JSX, nothing to see here! You already have a lot of great options that are really cool too. Check out Assistant UI &#x2F; CopilotKit &#x2F; AI Elements which are all MIT<p>----<p>Some specifics:<p>Persona has a ~15 kB brotli to first paint (the full widget lazy-loads on first click) while being able to render most of the primary agent experiences you see on the web: from &#x27;Fin&#x27; (pill launcher) to &#x27;Claude&#x27; (fullscreen assistant) to &#x27;Shopify Sidekick&#x27; (docked)<p>You can run it in Shadow DOM isolated mode so existing styles play nice<p>Everything has hooks and events, so you can add unique flavor (and easily share back!) in a few lines<p>We have a ton of demos on the library site, along with all the knobs to play with how each aspect renders. Tool and reasoning, custom loading animations, voice, approval UX, etc<p>We&#x27;ve also added a ton of examples across agent and frontend stacks<p>Check out the code @ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;runtypelabs&#x2F;persona" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;runtypelabs&#x2F;persona</a><p>Feedback and contributions welcome!

Show HN: My Windows XP portfolio with working Game Boy and iPod I posted my portfolio here about a year ago (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45154609">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45154609</a>) and while there was a big response, it was very mixed! It&#x27;ll probably be similar this time, but regardless of your thoughts about the concept, I think I&#x27;ve done a pretty good job creating one of the most nostalgic corners of the internet, especially with the latest additions.<p>It&#x27;ll always be up for debate whether this is an effective way to get noticed as opposed to a standard, quick and easy portfolio, but I&#x27;ll die on the hill that this is way more fun for both parties, every day of the week.

Show HN: An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine

PostgresBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Postgres Services

Millimeter wave technology drills 100 meters into granite

Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)

Show HN: Ember, a native iOS Hacker News reader I built around accessibility I read HN on my phone every day and never really settled on a reader, so I wrote my own and finally tidied it up enough to put out there.<p>It&#x27;s plain SwiftUI with no third-party dependencies. A few things I spent the most time on:<p>Comments are parsed and drawn as native text instead of being dumped into a web view. Links, italics, quotes and code blocks behave like the rest of the OS, text selection works, and threads collapse instantly. The whole comment tree comes back from the Algolia API in a single request, which felt a lot nicer than walking the Firebase API node by node.<p>Accessibility. Nothing depends on color on its own, so points, read state and selection all carry a shape or an icon too. VoiceOver reads each story as one coherent element with proper actions, Dynamic Type and Reduce Motion are respected, and there&#x27;s a color-blind mode. The first-run setup actually looks at your device&#x27;s accessibility settings, switches on the matching options, and tells you what it changed instead of making you hunt for them.<p>Then the usual things you&#x27;d expect: Top&#x2F;New&#x2F;Best&#x2F;Ask&#x2F;Show&#x2F;Jobs, search, saved stories, read tracking, an in-app reader, light and dark, and a handful of accent colors.<p>It only talks to the public HN APIs, there&#x27;s no account and nothing is tracked. Source and screenshots are in the repo.<p>I&#x27;d most like feedback on the comment rendering and the accessibility choices, since those were the parts I cared about getting right. Happy to answer anything about how it&#x27;s put together.

Epidurals are a miracle technology

Show HN: StartupWiki – A Free Alternative to Crunchbase I&#x27;ve been building StartupWiki, a free startup database designed to make it easier to discover and research companies.<p>The original motivation was frustration with how difficult it can be to find information on early-stage startups. Most databases need accounts, or subscriptions, ro just feel too cluttered. I wanted a website that felt like Wikipedia, no accounts, no subscriptions, no weird metrics, just go in, the info is on the page.<p>The project is still very early, but currently includes:<p>Startup profiles Search and filtering Company categorization Public API (in progress)<p>I&#x27;m especially interested in feedback on:<p>What information you look for when researching startups Features missing from existing startup databases API use cases<p>I&#x27;d love to hear feedback.

US Scientist John Jumper to Leave Google DeepMind for Anthropic

The European Social Stack

Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

Show HN: We post-trained a model that pen tests instead of refusing Anthropic and OpenAI&#x27;s publicly available models are explicitly guard-railed so that they refuse offensive tasks. And their cyber-focussed models are gated for enterprises. This leaves SMEs and mid market open to major vulnerabilities.<p>AI can be used as both an adversarial and defensive tool in the world of cyber. A worst case outcome is if only the adversaries have access.<p>Meanwhile, most existing AI cyber tools are just wrappers. The problem is that they still have all the guardrails on from the foundation model where they will inherit its refusals.<p>For this project we&#x27;ve post-trained a specific model on a decade of capture-the-flag contests. This won&#x27;t be made available to anyone and everyone, but we do believe that responsible SMEs and midmarket companies also need access to these tools in order to identify key vulnerabilities in their systems; not just enterprises.<p>We have developed two modes that run over a CLI:<p>• Security scan: a read-only audit of your local codebase for vulnerabilities. It only reports what it can tie to a specific file and line, so you&#x27;re not wading through vibes-based findings.<p>• Pen test: an active adversarial mode that will try to break a live system in a sandboxed environment. It proves each vulnerability by running the exploit and showing the request it sent and the response your code gave back, not a confidence score. Currently gated.<p>To show what the scan does, we pointed it at Bank of Anthos and it found an integer overflow in the transfer path: amount is an int, and amount + fee can overflow negative, so the balance check passes and you move funds you don&#x27;t have. Plus the usual auth and secrets issues. (Bank of Anthos is Google&#x27;s open-source bank. It&#x27;s a known app and some of it is intentionally weak, which is the point: you can clone it and re-run the scan yourself instead of trusting a screenshot)<p>The base model is a Kimi K2.6 (open weights). We didn&#x27;t pretrain from scratch. We post-trained it ourselves, SFT on CTF writeups, then RL with verifiable rewards against actual exploit checks.<p>How the harness works:<p>Along with the model we built the harness to support this. The harness runs on a multi-agent swarm: an orchestrator splits the job across subagents running in parallel, each owning a slice, then synthesising one report.<p>The CLI is a local binary (brew&#x2F;curl). It reads your code locally, then sends context to our inference API over TLS tcpdump it and you&#x27;ll see exactly what leaves and where. Install is free; and you can run a scan for free up to 2m tokens, then need to pay for tokens beyond this.<p>For full disclosure this is a product part of Cosine (YC W23)<p>Up for debate: tool safety, e.g. domain verification is one method that proves control but not necessarily permission. How would you gate a pen-test tool given that?

Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cauenapier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;townsquare_release&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cauenapier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;townsquare_release&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cauenapier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;townsquare&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cauenapier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;townsquare&#x2F;</a>

Show HN: Make every bug perfectly reproducible We are building a VM that helps you simulate realistic production conditions, model latencies, different interleaving, user requests, and find bugs.<p>Every non-deterministic property is turned into a knob you or a coding agent can control. We have helped teams perfectly reproduce support incidents and found bugs in some of the world&#x27;s most well tested software (including a database)<p>I you would like to try it out, I am giving away $100 in free credits to first 100 signups.