English
Construction workers, electricians, couriers: ICE disguises to detain migrants
Ant
Hello HN! I'm the author of Ant, a JavaScript ecosystem built around a runtime with its own JavaScript engine. Ant also includes a package manager, the ants.land package registry, a platform for deploying and hosting applications, and Ant Desktop for building native desktop apps with web technologies, similar to Electron. The goal is for these pieces to work as one coherent platform while remaining compatible with the wider JavaScript ecosystem. It's still early, and I'd appreciate any feedback on the overall direction or what you'd like to see from an e2e alternative to the existing JavaScript stacks. P.S. I’ve shared Ant here before as a runtime; since then, it has grown into the broader ecosystem you see today.
Learn by rebuilding Redis, Git, a database from scratch
Show HN: Learn by rebuilding Redis, Git, a database from scratch
We beat Cloudflare's bot detection (open-source stealth browser)
Show HN: We beat Cloudflare's bot detection (open-source stealth browser)
We beat Gemini Embedding 2 by training only 16M params (open weights)
Show HN: We beat Gemini Embedding 2 by training only 16M params (open weights)
I built a free app for New Yorkers to save money on groceries
I built this because I see that grocery savings are achievable in NYC. People usually just go to the store they're used to going to, and it's rarely worth the effort of combing through card cashback, weekly coupons, CPG rebates. Most people leave real money on the table by not stacking them, and even more don't even know that these deals are out there.... so I built a way to automate it. You can use it for free, no login, currently NYC-only with ~690 stores. I built it so that you just search whatever you want (use commas if you want to search multiple items). Or - use the AI tool to help shop for you. If you're curious, it's powered by a trained LLama model. Honest limitations are coverage and freshness. Id love some feedback on where the data looks wrong or is stale. Question for the room - what to prioritize if you're working with messy, multi-source retail/pricing data? Is freshness or coverage the top priority if you cant get a uniform response from every source? curious on what to prioritize here.
Reviving my 2001 college band with AI
25 years ago, I was approached to join a band called Fading Maize at Ripon College in Wisconsin. We did what we could with what we had. We recorded 3 albums over the next 3 years and played at as many bars and coffee shops as we could. We built a website with Microsoft Frontpage. Then we all went our separate ways, got married, had kids, focused on other things. Earlier this year I had the idea to approach the lead singer who wrote all of the lyrics and melodies to the stuff we played back then and wanted to "reimagine" everything in 2026 using AI. That's the project I want to share here! The site has a before/after player where you can flip between the original dorm-room recording and the 2026 version mid-song without losing your place, so you can hear exactly what changed. The original 2001 website is preserved and browsable at https://www.fadingmaize.com/2001, rough edges intact. On the AI question, since it's the elephant: the songs, lyrics, and arrangements are the original human work from 2001-2003. AI gets a bad rap and I can totally see why, but our case was different. We wrote the lyrics, we created the melodies, we played the parts, it just didn't sound as good as we heard it in our own heads. Being fully transparent about our use of AI, sticking tightly to our original lyrics and melodies, but making full use of AI to give us the studio, session players, and production budget we never had seemed like the right balance of concerns. I'm super proud of how it turned out and the transparency we've used along the way. Happy to discuss the audio pipeline, the site (Next.js), or what it's like to A/B your 20-year-old self!
Rubiks Cube Solver
Speedcube is an open-source platform for speedcubers featuring a Rubik's Cube solver, competition timer, algorithm library, and AI-assisted cube recognition directly in the browser. Built with React, TypeScript, Rust, and Python, the project aims to become an all-in-one platform for cubers—from beginners to competitive solvers. http://github.com/williamisnotdefined/rubiks-cube-solver/
RandoFont
Inevitably when starting a new web project I want to pick the perfect font. This is just a browser that shows Google Fonts, randomly, and lets me tag favorites. I built this years ago and just used AI to give it a minor facelift.
Voice Age Verification
I miss the old web. As a kid I could type in "a/s/l" in AOL messenger and chat with someone my own age, without worrying about the dangers that lurk on the web today. After seeing what happened to Omegle, a question stuck: is there a simple way to do age verification that both keeps people safe and doesn't contribute to a surveillance state? After a year of hard work, that question resulted in AGEWARDEN. Each part of the service puts people first. No tracking, nothing stored (it's more difficult these days to NOT collect data :smh:). Please give it a try if you have a moment https://agewarden.ai/demo. Feedback is very much welcomed. GG
Building Your Own Coding Agent on Top of Zot
Show HN: Building Your Own Coding Agent on Top of Zot – Meet Coil
Garden of Flowers
Hey all, I made this. The archive started with my 2015 BA thesis on Amiga ASCII art when I was curious about the history of ASCII art but found very little on text art that came before it. The historical precursors are often attributed to typewriter art and shaped/visual poetry, but I think letterpress is overlooked. So, I got slightly obsessed and started a personal database of pictures built entirely from metal type, ornaments, and rule, some going back to the 1600s. After eight years, I've managed to find ~2500 images. My friend Adel Faure built the website so it's now browseable by anyone! I would like to note that most images are from public digital collections (Internet Archive, national libraries, etc.) and displayed without permission (for educational purposes). I've tried to source every image, but check the original source and its license before reusing anything. I'd be happy to take down or correct anything. It's also incomplete and surely has errors and misattributions. Corrections to anything are very welcome. If anyone has leads on works I haven't catalogued, I'd love to hear them! The practice and pictures are scattered across languages and keywords (type picture, typosignet, typotectur, Bildsatz, stigmatypie, stunt typography...), so things hide in odd corners of archives. If you've seen something like this, please point me at it. There's also a longer essay on how it began: https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?essay