We beat Gemini Embedding 2 by training only 16M params (open weights)

IB

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.

RM

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!

RA

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.

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