Ideas Lab

Real problems people complain about online, pulled every morning and scored out of 100. Build, validate, or skip. How scoring works

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752 ideas
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BitBoard (YC P25) – Analytics Workspace for Agents

We’re Connor and Ambar from BitBoard (https://bitboard.work). BitBoard is an agentic analytics workspace. We give you the infrastructure and visualization layer to analyze data with AI.Today, we’re launching dashboards that you and your agents can work on together. You can connect your coding agent or AI chat to BitBoard and build live reporting. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPl0K565a7c.AI tools treat data analysis as ephemeral, making it hard to report or collaborate. Legacy BI tools weren’t intended for AI users, so they bolt on chatbots and can’t offer meaningful control to your agents. Software can now make far more of a business legible than BI ever could, but neither legacy BI nor chat bots are built to handle it.Our original product was AI agents for administrative tasks in healthcare (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44237769), but customers kept pulling us toward their data analysis problems: queries scattered across disparate sources, spreadsheets floating everywhere. We kept building tooling for addressing that, and at a certain point those tools were becoming our product.We ran into several problems. Agents made bad inferences because they had no context on the business. They couldn't be trusted to make decisions because nothing checked their work. And anything one agent or one person figured out was invisible to everyone else. In BitBoard, humans and agents interact with the same data primitives but get tools designed for their own work.We’re building dashboards to make the human reading experience better. These dashboards progressively use intelligence - starting from code or SQL queries and leading to full embedded apps. Humans and agents will need to agree on methods to interpret data, so we’re letting both contribute to canonical sources, entities, and measures (using your favorite semantic model or ours). Every answer comes with provenance, and the same call with the same parameters

Hacker News4mo agoToolAI

72FL score
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Atlasphere – Live Infrastructure Diagrams

Hi HN. My name is Andrey. On a regular business day, I'm a software engineer working at AWS. Outside of work hours, I spend time on my hobby - writing code.I was once building a pet project that allowed customers to spin up fully synchronized blockchain nodes within just a few minutes. The backend was split into a control plane and a data plane, each with its own AWS account. Later I added two more AWS accounts. One for shared RPC nodes. One for the Analytics Service.Since I love to visualize things, I used drawio to visualize the architecture.With time, I noticed a pattern. I'd write some code, add a few lambda functions, update my drawio diagram, write more code, introduce a few more resources, test things, see that everything works fine and go to sleep with a smile on my face. Next week I'd check my diagram, and shockingly, it's missing some of the resources! This kept happening for a few more weeks until I decided to fully abandon the project until my infrastructure diagrams could stay in sync with my cloud account.That's how Atlasphere.io was born. I've been working on it for the past 6 months and I think the product is ready for some feedback :)A few notes:- Atlasphere uses a ReadOnly IAM role to scan your AWS account (my account reaches your account through a trust relationship).- The number of services is currently limited (WIP)- It's a macOS app- It's NOT an Electron app, i use Rust + WebviewWhat am I looking for? All I really need is for someone to try the app and tell me what they like about it and what they absolutely hate about it, haha!The website is https://atlasphere.io/

Hacker News4mo agoToolAI

62FL score
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Nucleus – A security-hardened, Nix-native container runtime

Hi HN, I've been building Nucleus, a lightweight Linux container runtime focused on two workloads: ephemeral AI-agent sandboxes and declarative NixOS services. It's a single Rust binary, no daemon.It is not a Docker replacement and not a strict subset of Docker either. I dropped the entire image-and-distribution half (no Dockerfile, no layers, no registry, no pull/push, no persistent storage layer) in exchange for going deeper on isolation and reproducibility. The rootfs is either a directory copied into tmpfs (agent mode) or a Nix-built closure mounted read-only (production mode). If your mental model is "run my image instead of docker run," this won't fit. If it's "run untrusted or ephemeral workloads with stronger, auditable isolation on a single host," that's the target.Things that I think are interesting: - Defense-in-depth defaults. All capabilities dropped, ~100-syscall seccomp allowlist (vs Docker's ~300), up to 8 namespaces including time/cgroup, Landlock LSM path ACLs per service. - Deny-by-default egress. Outbound traffic is denied unless you allow specific CIDRs or DNS-resolved domains. Enforced with namespace-local iptables rules. - Externalized, hash-pinned security policies. seccomp (JSON), capabilities (TOML), and Landlock (TOML) live as separate SHA-256-verified files, decoupled from the rootfs build. There's a nucleus seccomp generate that records syscalls in trace mode and emits a minimal profile. - gVisor as a first-class integrated runtime, not an add-on. Explicit network modes including a gvisor-host mode that's intentionally separate from native host networking. - Nix-native production path. nucleus.lib.mkRootfs builds locked-down closures; rootfs attestation verifies a per-file SHA-256 manifest at startup; first-class NixOS module. - Formal verification. TLA+ specs for the isolation/resource/filesystem/security/gVisor subsystems, checked with

Hacker News4mo agoToolAI

62FL score
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HelixDB – A graph database built on object storage

Hey HN, it’s been just over a year since we launched HelixDB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975423), a project a friend and I started in college. It’s an OLTP graph database built on object-storage, with native vector search and full-text search (FTS).Why graph, vector and FTS? Graph databases provide a natural cognitive model for data, vectors allow for a semantic understanding of the entities and relationships in the graph, and FTS provides more specific filtering. Many AI-driven applications attempt to combine all of these functionalities by stitching together multiple disconnected systems, but even then there’s no native way to perform joins or queries that span all systems. You still need to handle this logic at the application level.Helix started as a graph DB, but we moved to a hybrid graph/vector approach after attempting to build an AI memory system, which led us down the GraphRAG and HybridRAG rabbit hole, where we would need separate graph and vector databases.We knew scalability would be a challenge at each stage of our product's development, however our initial focus this past year was to prove out the product through local deployments and was only meant to be run on a single node. Scaling graph DBs remained a difficult and expensive problem we’d have to solve later. Some common ways other graph DBs solve scaling is by duplicating entire datasets across distributed machines (extremely expensive per node), or by sharding the data.Sharding databases is effective and affordable, however, graph data doesn’t have explicit partitions like relational databases do. For example, sharding a relational DB involves splitting up tables. When it comes to graph DBs, the edges can span across any of the partitions, and hopping across multiple machines when traversing nodes is ineffective and computationally expensive.Replicating graph DBs for high availability and better throughput drastically increases the operational cost of the db a

Hacker News4mo agoToolAI

62FL score
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Learn from 30 historical figures, open source, nonprofit, self-hosted

Hello HN, I am the founder of Agora Cosmica.This started about three years ago. On a walk I asked a chatbot to interpret the cave dream from Cormac McCarthy's book "The Road" as C.G. Jung. It gave me a perspective I had not thought of. But for my own dreams the policies of the big providers felt wrong for so personal conversations, as zero data retention is not available. So I started building.The project evolved to a German nonprofit and we published the code (AGPL-3.0) last month. The content is still copyright, but will be opened to CC-BY 4.0 in the next 6 to 12 months.Agora Cosmica is a library to learn from 30 historical figures. Each one has 12 narrated stories about their teachings / life wisdom, speech to speech conversation. Four learning modes and a council where you can gather the figures to discuss or reflect on a topic. Each figure is an AI Echo, an interpretation grounded in primary works, historical context, with a factcheck per figure to show what's verified versus recreated. On privacy: The speech is self hosted on Hetzner GPU servers, Qwen3-TTS for German, Kokoro TTS for English, Faster-Whisper for transcription. 30 free messages per day (EU-hosted for GDPR), BYOK, or you can run it in a full local self-hosted mode.No conversation is stored, no tracking cookies, no profiling, no signup.The app is slow on purpose. Cosmic, no dopamine rush.The mission is to be a doorway, a first step, an introduction to get people interested and outgrow the app to move to primary texts and human teachers.Live at: https://agoracosmica.org

Hacker News4mo agoToolAI

62FL score
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How to escalate a rejected Google extension?

I submit an extension (an adblocker) to Google Chrome's web store.Google keeps rejecting it for dubious reasons. The first rejection was claim it was "spam". When I appealed, the review came back that it contained "additional functionality" because it uses "modifies network traffic". Well of course it does! When I asked the reviewer how I could achieve the stated functionality of blocking ads without the use of "declarativeNetRequest" I simply received the same canned response.I submit a totally new update that simplified the code and included comments, and references to other open source projecs that use the exact same mechanisms. Again it was rejected. On this appeal I asked if it could be escalated to a senior reviewer who could possibly reply with more context. Same canned response and rejection.I can't help but think Google has some internal policy to give adblockers a runaround. It is obvious to me the stated rejections are not valid (Note that I'm also not new to this - I have several extensions that have been published for years with thousands of users) but have never encountered such gate-keeping before.It's a sad state of affairs even if not totally unpredictable. To be honest I'm surprised Google hasn't made it an official policy to prohibit adblockers. But they haven't - obviously there are other adblockers published to the store, and that's what makes this so frustrating.Anyway, fellow developers. Anyone run into a similar situation? And how did you resolve it? Thanks!

Hacker News4mo agoToolAI

25FL score
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Transload (YC P26) – Measuring freight items with CCTV

Hi HN — we’re Julius, Jago, and Nils, and we’re building transload (transload.io).transload helps LTL trucking companies measure freight dimensions using the security cameras already installed in their terminals. Instead of sending shipments through a dedicated dimensioning station, we measure them automatically as they move through the normal dock workflow.We’ve put together a small HN-specific demo site here: https://hn.transload.io/In LTL trucking, dimensions matter because they affect pricing, freight classification, and trailer utilization. If a shipment is larger than the shipper reported, the carrier may undercharge for it while still giving up the same amount of trailer space. The obvious fix is to measure every shipment, but that is surprisingly hard in a busy freight terminal. Dedicated dimensioning systems work for freight that passes through them, but they can add forklift travel, create dock congestion, and change the normal flow of work. In practice, many terminals only measure a sample of their shipments.Jago grew up close to this industry through his family’s LTL trucking and cross-docking business. We did not start out building freight dimensioning. Our first idea was an AI system for optimizing forklift routes inside cross-dock terminals. After spending time with customers and talking to more than 50 trucking companies, we realized that forklift routing was not the pain people kept bringing up. Freight dimensions were.At the same time, we saw that spatial AI was advancing quickly. Monocular metric depth estimation has become dramatically better, making it possible to recover accurate 3D structure from ordinary camera footage without expensive LiDAR sensors. MapAnything (https://github.com/facebookresearch/map-anything) and MoGe (https://github.com/microsoft/moge) are two examples.Freight terminals also have helpful structure: fixed cameras, repeated workflows, barcode scan timestamps, and known

Hacker News4mo agoToolAI

72FL score
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Command Center, the AI coding env for people who care about quality

Hi HN! We’re Jimmy and Ray. Jimmy is a Thiel Fellow with a Ph. D. from MIT who has worked on programming tools for 15 years; Ray became VP of Sales at a $2B company when he was 19 and has built side-businesses vibe-coding.Last year, we set to answer the question “If AI can write code 100x faster, then why aren’t you shipping 100x faster?” What we learned shocked us — even fairly nontechnical people and solo founders told us they were spending more than half of their development time reading the AI-written code. And much of the rest of the time was spent either de-slop-ping it, or wishing they had done so.As luck turns out, our last two products were a tool that quickly onboards people to large codebases ( https://x.com/0xjimmyk/status/1873357324229984677 ) and trainings that taught deep concepts of code quality to CEOs, YC founders, and engineers at top companies ( mirdin.com ), so we were extremely well-positioned to solve these problems.Command Center is an agentic coding environment focused on quality. With a few keypresses, you can start building 3 features at once and soon have 3 diffs ready, each consisting of 2000 changed lines across 50 files….This is normally the point where you think “Crap, what now?”With Command Center, at this point you simply click “Refactor,” and watch the vibed slop turn into readable robustness. Then you click “Generate Walkthrough,” and then suddenly, to read a 2000 line diff, instead of scrolling up and down trying to make sense of it, you just press the right arrow key 200 times. See something you don’t like? Click on line 37, type “Do this and all other network fetches in the background Cmd+Enter,” and you have a few more agents getting your code into final shape. Click or type “Commit,” “Push,” “Create PR” — you just shipped a high quality, non-slop featureWe’re striving to be the best at every step of the pipeline, but can just try Command Center in pieces wherever you feel your current workflow is wea

Hacker News4mo agoToolAI

72FL score
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Intuned (YC S22) – Build and run reliable browser automations as code

Hey HN, we're Faisal and Ahmad from Intuned (https://intunedhq.com). We’re building a platform for building, deploying, and maintaining browser automations.Customers primarily use the Intuned AI agent to automate websites that don't expose APIs. Common use-cases include scraping data, pulling reports, and submitting forms. As the website changes, our agent also helps automatically heal the automation.On Intuned, browser automations are created by an AI agent and run as code. Our infra captures the context of every run, allowing our agent to debug and maintain the underlying code - to keep the automations working over time. This way, we’re able to offer the predictability, speed, and cost of code, without the painful parts of writing and maintaining it.Here’s a demo of building a scraper on Intuned: https://youtu.be/ruZP73bK4FUHere’s a demo of using AI to maintain a project: https://youtu.be/e4R4hLdHBroBackstory: we were accepted into YC for a completely different idea. During the batch, because of Faisal's background at UiPath, several batchmates asked us whether RPA tools could fill API gaps in their products by automating websites without APIs. When it was time to pivot, we went back to those founders to dig deeper. (RPA in this context is referring to using UI automation to do complete non-testing tasks)We discovered that the actual hard problem in browser automation is maintenance. Websites change, selectors break, and failures can be painful to reproduce and fix. So in early 2024, we decided to take a crack at this problem with a handful of customers. It needed a fair number of iterations before we landed on our current code-first approach.How it works: Intuned is infra + agent, deeply integrated.On the infrastructure side, Intuned is a managed runtime for browser automation code. Projects are usually Playwright-based TypeScript or Python. Users can write them directly in our online IDE, or hand the work of

Hacker News4mo agoToolAI

72FL score
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