BBRouter – Ben Eater's 8-bit computer, simulated on 3D breadboards
Hi HN,I kept wiring Ben Eater's 8-bit computer wrong, so I built a realistic virtual breadboard editor.Some of the nice features are side-by-side diff, scope, schematics auto-sync, auto-router (BBRouter stands for breadboard router), and my favorites: upload from the real Arduino IDE and connect to your AI with MCP, let Claude & co build it or help you troubleshoot.The link is the SAP-1 running. You can orbit it, probe a hole with the scope, slow the clock down, play with the virtual displays for debugging, then you can actually build it following the step-by-step instructions.A side-goal is to create a community, there are quite a lot of simulators out there but mostly offline / too abstract to realistically use it for a real build. I also never found one that had a decent UI/UX and worked well on mobile or with a trackpad.Happy to answer anything, and tell me what breaks.p.s. Maker plan is $7/month; code HACKERNEWS makes the first month free and then $5/month for as long as you keep it.
FL score
out of 100
Verdict
high confidence
Competition
No competitor data yet
Trend
No signal yet
A realistic 3D virtual breadboard simulator for Ben Eater's 8-bit computer with AI-assisted wiring and debugging.
The pain
The gap
Build angle
Strengths
- Clear problem experienced by a passionate niche community
- Unique combination of 3D visualization and AI assistance
- Good UI/UX focus including mobile and trackpad support
- Subscription pricing with a free trial lowers entry barriers
Risks
- Niche market size may limit growth and revenue
- Competition from existing simulators and free tools
- Uncertainty if users will pay consistently for a subscription
- Dependence on AI integration quality and maintenance
Fly Labs Method
Is the pain real, is there a gap, is it the right time, can one person build it.
- Problem clarity
- 80
- Solution gap
- 70
- Willingness to pay
- 65
- Buildability
- 85
The idea addresses a clear pain point for hobbyists struggling with physical wiring by providing a realistic virtual breadboard with useful features, but the market willingness and uniqueness face moderate uncertainty.
Value Equation
Dream outcome and how likely it feels, against the time and effort it costs.
The product offers a valuable tool that reduces frustration and learning time for electronics hobbyists, but the pricing and market size may limit rapid growth.
One-Person Business
Curiosity pull, identity fit, and a path from free value to paid for a solo creator.
The concept fits a niche community with a real need, though the competitive landscape and monetization potential are moderate challenges.
Viral Frameworks
Hook strength, shareability, and how cheaply it can be tested.
The solution is technically feasible and well-targeted, but scaling beyond the core user base and converting free users to paid customers could be difficult.
Builder Lens
Evidence the problem exists, timing, defensibility, and a model that fits on a napkin.
The project solves a specific problem for a defined user group with a functional prototype and some early traction, but it needs clearer evidence of market demand and growth potential.
Five lenses, one composite. How scoring works
The angle
No market research recorded for this idea yet.
Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
Hey HN! We (Stephan and Thomas) recently open-sourced Semble. We kept running into the same problem while using Claude Code on large codebases: when the agent can't find something directly, it falls back to grep, reading full files or launching subagents. This uses a lot of tokens, and often still misses the relevant code. There are existing tools for this, but they were either too slow to index on demand, needed API keys, or had poor retrieval quality.Semble is our solution for this. It combines static Model2Vec embeddings (using our latest static model: potion-code-16M) with BM25, fused via RRF and reranked with code-aware signals. Everything runs on CPU since there's no transformers involved. On our benchmark of ~1250 query/document pairs across 63 repos and 19 languages, it uses 98% fewer tokens than grep+read and reaches 99% of the retrieval quality of a 137M-parameter code-trained transformer, while being ~200x faster.Main features:- Token-efficient: 98% fewer tokens than grep+read- Fast: ~250ms to index a typical repo on our benchmark, ~1.5ms per query on CPU (very large repos may take longer)- Accurate: 0.854 NDCG@10, 99% of the best transformer setup we tested- MCP server: drop-in for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode- Zero config: no API keys, no GPU, no external servicesInstall in Claude Code with: claude mcp add semble -s user -- uvx --from "semble[mcp]" sembleOr check our README for other installation instructions, benchmarks, and methodology:Semble: https://github.com/MinishLab/sembleBenchmarks: https://github.com/MinishLab/semble/tree/main/benchmarksModel: https://huggingface.co/minishlab/potion-code-16MLet us know if you have any feedback or questions!
AI
Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too.The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our own extension appeared daunting. We'd need a small team of sharp engineers and 6-12 months, I figured. And we'd probably still fall short of the performance of a mature system like Parade/Tantivy.Or would we? I'd be experimenting long enough with AI-boosted development at that point to realize that with the latest tools (Claude Code + Opus) and an experienced hand (I've been working in database systems internals for 25 years now), the old time estimates pretty much go out the window.I told our CTO I thought I could solo the project in one quarter. This raised some eyebrows.It did take a little more time than that (two quarters), and we got some real help from the community (amazing!) after open-sourcing the pre-release. But I'm thrilled/exhausted today to share that pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license), on Tiger Data cloud, and hopefully soon, a hyperscalar near you:https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearchIn the blog post accompanying the release, I overview the architecture and present benchmark results using MS-MARCO. To my surprise, we were not only able to meet Parade/Tantivy's query performance, but exceed it substantially, measuring a 4.7x advantage on query throughput at scale:https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-fu
AI
Consus (YC F24) – LLM gateway for companies handling sensitive data
Hey Hacker News! I'm Eric, the founder of Consus. We route all AI requests to ITAR restricted and controlled unclassified information (CUI) compliant infrastructure. Consus itself satisfies ITAR restrictions, and we recently completed our FedRAMP equivalency audit against the 410 FedRAMP High controls. FedRAMP High is the U.S. government’s strictest security baseline for cloud services handling sensitive unclassified data. A breach of this data could cause severe or catastrophic harm. Achieving FedRAMP equivalency, or authorization, is required before processing CUI information.Demo: https://youtu.be/6MYxJe6P4oYAerospace and defense is experiencing rapid growth. Unfortunately, most companies are struggling to use AI because of necessary data protections & compliance risk. These companies can move even faster if they could use the AI tools that most other industries take for granted.I spent most of my career prior to Consus in aerospace & defense. I launched national security payloads at SpaceX, and was an early employee at Castelion. I’ve watched first hand how compliance red-tape makes it difficult for companies to adopt new technologies and trust vendors that touch their sensitive data. For example, I worked with a satellite manufacturer that doesn’t allow any AI tools, even for non-sensitive work.Even as AI has become extremely useful over the past 9-12 months, I was surprised by how many aerospace & defense companies refused to touch it. They could see how it could be helpful, but they were scared about model providers training on their data, violating an ITAR rule, or risk losing new business because of a failed cyber assessment. These are all rational fears.There were a lot of ways to solve some/all of these problems, but we focused on building a compliant AI inference layer that can "plug" into any AI tool or workflow. Just as OpenRouter integrates with most tools, Consus can connect to tools like ChatGPT or Clau
AI
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