Monday, December 15, 2025

Show HN: A lightweight SaaS to reduce early-stage app friction https://ift.tt/Ju5Oahc

Show HN: A lightweight SaaS to reduce early-stage app friction I recently shipped a small SaaS I built in roughly 24 hours, mostly during school breaks. This is my first project that I have taken from idea to deployment, onboarding, and real users. The product targets early-stage developers and focuses on reducing initial setup and preparation when building new apps. It abstracts away some of the repetitive early decisions and boilerplate that tend to slow down first-time builders, especially around project structure, configuration, and “what should exist on day one”. I have a small number of active users, but churn is relatively high, which suggests either: the problem is not painful enough the abstraction leaks too early the UX or onboarding fails to communicate value or the tool solves a problem that disappears after the first session I would really appreciate technical feedback on: whether the abstraction layer makes sense if the mental model aligns with how you bootstrap projects where the product feels opinionated vs restrictive what would make this something you would actually keep installed Thanks for reading. Direct, critical feedback is very welcome. https://simpl-labs.com/ December 16, 2025 at 12:21AM

Show HN: A Wordle-style game for SHA-256 hashes https://ift.tt/spdI7YO

Show HN: A Wordle-style game for SHA-256 hashes i built a small wordle-style game where the target is a daily sha-256 hash. it’s intentionally not cryptographically realistic; the goal is to make avalanche effects and the meaninglessness of near-matches intuitive. this was a quick front-end experiment; the code isn’t published yet. everything runs client-side; no tracking; no accounts. https://hashle.app December 15, 2025 at 11:38PM

Sunday, December 14, 2025

Show HN: A meditation timer without guidance, music, or growth mechanics https://ift.tt/hufnUGV

Show HN: A meditation timer without guidance, music, or growth mechanics I've worked in tech my entire career, and over time mindfulness meditation has become less of a "wellness habit" and more of a practical tool for keeping my mind clear. I encourage mindfulness meditation to everyone because it's that impactful on stress and awareness in everyday life. After years of practice, I've that most meditation apps eventually became distracting or costly. To me, mindfulness apps that provide guidance, content, forced streaks, and incentives seem to replace the practice of mindfulness itself with some gamification of the act. So I built Center, a silent meditation timer with a few constraints: • No guided sessions, voices, or music • No subscriptions, ads, or paywall • Optional tracking, no gamification • Works across iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, and Mac via iCloud • Donation-supported, with no features locked The goal has never been growth or engagement, but reliability. I wanted something closer to a clock than a coach. This is a side project, but it’s been interesting to see how a deliberately "boring" tool changes how I personally practice mindfulness, and how that carries over into my work (especially decision-making and stress tolerance). Site: https://centertimer.com https://ift.tt/vESxZuo December 15, 2025 at 02:00AM

Show HN: 999 Penguins https://ift.tt/9Dkpzsq

Show HN: 999 Penguins https://999penguins.com December 14, 2025 at 07:31PM

Show HN: User.mom – Everything you need to reach Product-Market-Fit https://ift.tt/Zuy5YHC

Show HN: User.mom – Everything you need to reach Product-Market-Fit I've been building side projects for over a decade. Most failed to find Product‑Market‑Fit - I know the frustration of shipping features that don't stick. The painful truth I learned: many teams chase features over feedback. Worse, most feedback is shallow or useless because people avoid being critical. So I built user.mom to fix the process, not just add another tool. It maps the full PMF journey: Landing Pages to validate demand, Surveys to gather structured signals, Feedback Boards to organize requests, Customer Voting to prioritize, and Integrations (CSV, webhooks, API) to scale what works. If you’re tired of guessing what customers want, start your PMF workflow - the first product is free for every user. https://user.mom December 14, 2025 at 11:59PM

Saturday, December 13, 2025

Show HN: Tic Tac Flip – A new strategic game based on Tic Tac Toe https://ift.tt/vZMB9sb

Show HN: Tic Tac Flip – A new strategic game based on Tic Tac Toe The biggest problem with Tic-Tac-Toe is that it almost always ends in a draw. Tic Tac Flip tries to fix that! Learn the rules in Learning Mode or below: - Winning Criteria: 3 Ghosts (Flipped O or X, which can be a mixture). It's not just 3 Os or 3 Xs anymore! - Flipping Mechanic: When one or more lines having only O and X are formed, the minority of either all Os or all Xs get flipped to a Ghost, and the majority gets removed from the board. E.g., A line of 2 Os and 1 X leads to 1 X ghost and the removal of 2 Os. - Active Flip: You can actively flip your O/X to a Ghost (or flip a ghost back) once per game. - Placing Ghost Directly: You can place a "Ghost" piece directly as a final winning move (only once, and only when there are two existing ghosts in a line). I'm looking for feedback on the game balance and learning curve. Specifically: - Is the "Ghost" and "Flip" mechanic intuitive? - Is the Learning Mode helpful? - Is the game fair? Any rule adjustments needed? - Any bugs or issues? Any suggestions or comments would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance! https://tic-tac-flip.web.app/ December 14, 2025 at 11:19AM

Show HN: Soup.lua: making Lua do what it shouldn't https://ift.tt/5CvnfKG

Show HN: Soup.lua: making Lua do what it shouldn't https://ift.tt/2AXQL5O December 14, 2025 at 12:33AM

Friday, December 12, 2025

Show HN: I built a GitHub application that generates documentation automatically https://ift.tt/oG9qZdm

Show HN: I built a GitHub application that generates documentation automatically Hi HN, A lot of the dev teams I have worked with had a lot of issues with their documentation. In fact, some of my easiest clients to get were from clients that had "black box" solutions that devs no longer at the company had created. Personally, writing documentation is like grinding nails on a chalkboard. I have been having a lot of fun with building solutions that can run in a distributed way, not something a dev needs to run themselves. And after a significant amount of testing and building out several different solutions, I finally have a solution that is easy to set up and runs in the background continuously to automate the documentation process. I'm looking for feedback on a few things: - Ease of onboarding, it should be a simple click -> select repos you want to add. - Quality of documentation, our current free accounts have a standard model compared to premium but the concepts are the same. - Dynamic environments: I tried to make this compatible with any random repo thrown at it. Let me know your thoughts https://codesummary.io December 13, 2025 at 02:57AM

Show HN: PhenixCode – Added admin dashboard for multi-server management https://ift.tt/CtJ7WMr

Show HN: PhenixCode – Added admin dashboard for multi-server management I built PhenixCode — an open-source, self-hosted and customizable alternative to GitHub Copilot Chat. Why: I wanted a coding assistant that runs locally, with full control over models and data. Copilot is great, but it’s subscription-only and cloud-only. PhenixCode gives you freedom: use local models (free) or plug in your own API keys. Use the new admin dashboard GUI to visually configure the RAG settings for multi-server management. https://ift.tt/c560k1U December 13, 2025 at 01:46AM

Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon https://ift.tt/Yutqd8G

Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon I'm building an open source Amazon. In other words, an open source decentralized marketplace. But like Carl Sagan said, to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. So first I had to make open source management systems for every vertical. I'm launching the first one today, Openfront e-commerce, an open source Shopify alternative. Next will be Openfront restaurant, Openfront grocery, and Openfront gym. And all of these Openfronts will connect to our decentralized marketplace, "the/marketplace", seamlessly. Once we launch other Openfronts, you'll be able to do everything from booking hotels to ordering groceries right from one place with no middle men. The marketplace simply connects to the Openfront just like its built-in storefront does. Together, we can use open source to disrupt marketplaces and make sure sellers, in every vertical, are never beholden to them. Marketplace: https://ift.tt/VnN5EtO Openfront platforms: https://ift.tt/YdauvjI Source code: https://ift.tt/bcxvlza Demo - Openfront: https://youtu.be/jz0ZZmtBHgo Demo - Marketplace: https://youtu.be/LM6hRjZIDcs Part 1 - https://ift.tt/klJvA3t https://openship.org December 12, 2025 at 11:49PM

Show HN: ESLint Plugin for styled-jsx https://ift.tt/dVOsCmJ

Show HN: ESLint Plugin for styled-jsx https://ift.tt/ynbJlvu December 12, 2025 at 11:44PM

Thursday, December 11, 2025

Show HN: Gotui – a modern Go terminal dashboard library https://ift.tt/XfWD39n

Show HN: Gotui – a modern Go terminal dashboard library I’ve been working on gotui, a modern fork of the unmaintained termui, rebuilt on top of tcell for TrueColor, mouse support, and proper resize handling. It keeps the simple termui-style API, but adds a bunch of new widgets (charts, gauges, world map, etc.), nicer visuals (collapsed borders, rounded corners), and input components for building real dashboards and tools. Under the hood the renderer’s been reworked for much better performance, and I’d love feedback on what’s missing for you to use it in production. https://ift.tt/VjTq2QE December 12, 2025 at 02:35AM

Show HN: An endless scrolling word search game https://ift.tt/UjOLtrs

Show HN: An endless scrolling word search game I built a procedurally generated word-search game where the puzzle never ends - as you scroll, the grid expands infinitely and new words appear. It’s designed to be quick to pick up, satisfying to play, and a little addictive. The core game works without an account using the pre-defined games, but signing up allows you to generate games using any topic you can think of. I’d love feedback on gameplay, performance, and whether the endless format feels engaging over time. If you try it, I’d really appreciate any bug reports or suggestions. Thanks in advance! https://ift.tt/4foitj0 December 11, 2025 at 07:31PM

Show HN: SIM – Apache-2.0 n8n alternative https://ift.tt/PzurJA0

Show HN: SIM – Apache-2.0 n8n alternative Hey HN, Waleed here. We're building Sim ( https://sim.ai/ ), an open-source visual editor to build agentic workflows. Repo here: https://ift.tt/mUKcp3D . Docs here: https://docs.sim.ai . You can run Sim locally using Docker, with no execution limits or other restrictions. We started building Sim almost a year ago after repeatedly troubleshooting why our agents failed in production. Code-first frameworks felt hard to debug because of implicit control flow, and workflow platforms added more overhead than they removed. We wanted granular control and easy observability without piecing everything together ourselves. We launched Sim [1][2] as a drag-and-drop canvas around 6 months ago. Since then, we've added: - 138 blocks: Slack, GitHub, Linear, Notion, Supabase, SSH, TTS, SFTP, MongoDB, S3, Pinecone, ... - Tool calling with granular control: forced, auto - Agent memory: conversation memory with sliding window support (by last n messages or tokens) - Trace spans: detailed logging and observability for nested workflows and tool calling - Native RAG: upload documents, we chunk, embed with pgvector, and expose vector search to agents - Workflow deployment versioning with rollbacks - MCP support, Human-in-the-loop block - Copilot to build workflows using natural language (just shipped a new version that also acts as a superagent and can call into any of your connected services directly, not just build workflows) Under the hood, the workflow is a DAG with concurrent execution by default. Nodes run as soon as their dependencies (upstream blocks) are satisfied. Loops (for, forEach, while, do-while) and parallel fan-out/join are also first-class primitives. Agent blocks are pass-through to the provider. You pick your model (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, vLLM), and and we pass through prompts, tools, and response format directly to the provider API. We normalize response shapes for block interoperability, but we're not adding layers that obscure what's happening. We're currently working on our own MCP server and the ability to deploy workflows as MCP servers. Would love to hear your thoughts and where we should take it next :) [1] https://ift.tt/TgOBKj9 [2] https://ift.tt/k1MgO9j https://ift.tt/UgxfqPX December 11, 2025 at 10:50PM

Wednesday, December 10, 2025

Show HN: Cargo-rail: graph-aware monorepo tooling for Rust; 11 deps https://ift.tt/pU7GoTu

Show HN: Cargo-rail: graph-aware monorepo tooling for Rust; 11 deps https://ift.tt/87VchfK December 11, 2025 at 02:19AM

Show HN: I launched a podcast to interview makers https://ift.tt/CODudpz

Show HN: I launched a podcast to interview makers For years I’ve wanted to start a podcast to interview curious and passionate makers in the depths of their creative pursuits. I would love any feedback, a rating, and if you know anyone would would make a great guest, please let me know! https://ift.tt/j0FgkU4 December 11, 2025 at 12:40AM

Show HN: A 2-row, 16-key keyboard designed for smartphones https://ift.tt/fl1VJMW

Show HN: A 2-row, 16-key keyboard designed for smartphones Mobile keyboards today are almost entirely based on the 26-key, 3-row QWERTY layout. Here’s a new 2-row, 16-key alternative designed specifically for smartphones. https://ift.tt/q7yOoeL December 10, 2025 at 11:19PM

Tuesday, December 9, 2025

Show HN: Pixel text renderer using CSS linear-gradients (no JavaScript) https://ift.tt/6P91sUE

Show HN: Pixel text renderer using CSS linear-gradients (no JavaScript) I've been playing around with rendering pixel text using only CSS. No JS in the final result, and no per-pixel DOM elements (too heavy). The demo page is rendered as a long list of CSS linear-gradients. Each letter is an 8x8 matrix. Each pixel becomes a tiny background image. Demo: https://taktek.io Gallery/Debugger: https://ift.tt/cfMEOT6 Code: https://ift.tt/g6pCBOJ At first, I wrote each linear-gradient pixel manually... When I came to resize each pixel's size, I wrote the generator script. 1. It takes the text -> 2. breaks it into letters -> 3. gets its matrix -> 4. returns the linear-gradients list. It chooses a variant based on the context window. For example, a period after a sentence ("hello.") should look different than inside a domain ("example.com"). My workflow now is: open the gallery -> generate the CSS in the console -> copy the result into the static page. It's very small and a dumb tool, but I want it for an upcoming project. If you have any feedback, maybe some pitfalls, or a better approach, I'd love to hear them. https://taktek.io December 10, 2025 at 12:48AM

Show HN: ZON-TS 50–65% fewer LLM tokens zero parse overhead better than TOON/CSV https://ift.tt/gPYq8l9

Show HN: ZON-TS 50–65% fewer LLM tokens zero parse overhead better than TOON/CSV hey HN — roni here, full-stack dev out of india (ex-gsoc @ internet archive). spent last weekend hacking ZON-TS because json was torching half my openai/claude budget on dumb redundant keys — hit that wall hard while prototyping agent chains. result: tiny TS lib (<2kb, 100% tests) that zips payloads ~50% smaller (692 tokens vs 1300 on gpt-5-nano benches) — fully human-readable, lossless, no parse tax. drop-in for openai sdk, langchain, claude, llama.cpp, zod validation, streaming... just added a full langchain chain example to the readme (encode prompt → llm call → decode+validate, saves real $$ on subagent loops). quick try: ```ts npm i zon-format import { encode, decode } from 'zon-format'; const zon = encode({foo: 'bar'}); console.log(decode(zon)); ``` github → https://github.com/ZON-Format/ZON-TS benches + site → https://zonformat.org YC’s fall rfs nailed it — writing effective agent prompts is brutal when every token adds up. if you’re in a batch grinding observability (helicone/lemma vibes) or hitting gemini limits like nessie did, what’s your biggest prompt bloat headache right now? paste a sample below and i’ll zon it live. feedback (harsh ok) very welcome cheaper tokens ftw https://zonformat.org December 9, 2025 at 10:21PM

Monday, December 8, 2025

Show HN: tltv – Federation protocol for 24/7 TV channels https://ift.tt/KMVr6Ng

Show HN: tltv – Federation protocol for 24/7 TV channels I spent six years trying to build a tv channel server. rewrote it eight times. flas...