GhostBox

VA

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

SS

Spotlight shows what your Claude Code/Codex are doing

Hola HN! Long time lurker, sometimes commentor, first time poster here. I’ve been working alongside my two co-founders and a few colleagues on a project I’m excited (and a little nervous) to share with you all! Like many of us, I’ve lived a tortured existence with AI coding (is it vibes?) over the past few months - I think November was a big moment with this. But, one thing I’ve noticed after building orchestration layer after orchestration layer is that the thing I always came back to was “what the hell is Claude Code actually doing?” Perhaps it’s because of the time Claude Code got confused and “rm -rf”’ed root, or the time it deployed a feature flag flip to prod instead of stage, or the time it got stuck in a cycle of doom logging in with playwright, etc etc - but it inspired us to build this tool; we call it Spotlight by Backplanes. Spotlight takes your Claude Code and Codex sessions and finds security issues, things that could be sped up, and where you’re burning your time and tokens. We also create fun little archetypes of what kind of builder you are. The way it works: you install a backplanes CLI daemon/TUI that takes your Claude and Codex sessions, scrubs them of their PII and secrets locally, sends them to us where we do a second level scrub using a locally hosted model, and store your sessions row level encrypted with customer keys. Today we create and store the customer keys in AWS secrets manager, which we can’t access directly. Doing this work hosted lets us stitch sessions across machines and multiple harnesses and even gives you the ability to give team-level patterns. Details are at https://backplanes.com/trust. You can see an example report at https://backplanes.com/features/session-reports, To play with this, it's a one-line CLI install (yes, there's a signup, I'm sorry), and it's free at backplanes.com. In the coming weeks we will be releasing a Powershell version along with native MacOS and Windows apps. Please let us know what you all think. Thanks guys and gals! Nick

MA

machine0

Hi HN! Excited to launch machine0, a CLI that makes it easy to create, provision and snapshot persistent NixOS (& Ubuntu) VMs. You can think of machine0 as a modern VPS provider. VMs stay on unless switched-off (with 99.99% uptime), they have static IPs and HTTPS endpoints, 1-60 vCPU, up to 240GB RAM and optionally GPUs. The CLI provides commands to manage lifecycle, snapshots and also provision the VMs using Nix flakes or Ansible playbooks. VMs are priced by the minute of usage. What makes machine0 unique is that it has first class support for NixOS! In a nutshell, NixOS lets you define your entire OS as code (think Terraform but for your Linux). A flake declares your system state (packages, services, firewall rules, users...) and pins all dependencies via a lockfile. Given the same flake.nix and flake.lock, `nixos-rebuild switch` always produces the exact same system. The NixOS ecosystem is mature, and flakes are expressive: at the system level you can define packages, what's in /etc, firewall rules, users & groups etc. At the user level, you can define your shell, aliases, tmux and vim config. Having your entire environment defined as code makes it easy to audit what's installed and how things are set up. You can rollback by reverting the last commit. And agents can write the code for you and test it against disposable machine0 VMs. If you'd like to dive right in, these commands will get you started: npm install -g @machine0/cli machine0 new my-vm --image nixos-25-11 # create a new nixos VM machine0 provision my-vm ./flake#my-profile # provision it using a nix flake machine0 ssh my-vm # ssh in machine0 stop my-vm # stop the VM machine0 images new my-vm my-snapshot # create a snapshot machine0 new my-clone --image my-snapshot # create a new VM from the snapshot - Demo of installation + NixOS provisioning via Claude Code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT8N0_e3Vfg - Documentation: https://docs.machine0.io/introduction/overview - machine0 NixOS flakes: https://github.com/fdmtl/machine0-nixos If you're in the habit of using VMs, or want to know what the NixOS fuss is about, would love for you to give machine0 a try!

PF

Philosophy for Kids

Sometimes my son asks me 'why' questions that could be answered well by a kid-friendly philosophy article. But I don't know where to find those, so I ask Claude or ChatGPT, and have a specific workflow for getting the type of output I want. I figured other people might find those AI-generated articles helpful, so I put them here: https://philosophy.ocaho.com/ There's a search box at the top.

BR

Brightdeck

Show HN: Brightdeck – an OOXML-compatible AI presentation maker