Real problems people complain about online, pulled every morning and scored out of 100. Build, validate, or skip. How scoring works
I've been slowly adding some new free tools to Moxie Docs (partly for SEO, partly to illustrate some of our feature sets before any commitment) for some reason this mermaid editor one blew up on Google rankings so I figured I'd share in case people find it useful! We also have ADR, AGENTS.md, LLMs, and a few other free tools.
Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
Users are frustrated when app updates fail or are delayed, preventing access to new voice models and features despite availability for others.
X2mo agoToolAI
Creators and users need AI output that doesn't obviously look like it was made by AI, to make it more natural and believable in marketing, writing, and content creation.
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Users struggle to manually choose the optimal LLM based on task type, latency, cost, and performance; need an automated router for better results.
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Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
He's 13 years old. He wanted to track his own ant colonies — growth, feeding, humidity, and other metrics. He built the whole app himself with some help from AI tools; I just helped him deploy it to a server. Would love to hear your feedback!
Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
Data visualizations are the bridge between user and data.But building AI agents that can generate visualizations reliably can be very tricky:- simple chart specs can be reliable, but generated charts are often of low quality due to reliance on system defaults; - complex chart specs with explicit details can produce good-looking charts, but they are verbose and agents can struggle with reliabilityWe figured out it is a limitation on the language issue (not just AI capability thing) -- current visualization languages are a bit too low-level for AI agents, requiring them to explicitly make visual decisions that are supposed to be handled by a good compiler. Flint is a visualization intermediate language to address this issue, allow AI agents to solve this last-mile human-agent interaction problem. It provides a simple semantic-type based specification, and contains a layout optimization engine that can produce good-looking charts (filled with derived low-level details) from simple high-level specs. The result is also very human understandable and adaptable. Flint powers data formulator for generating visualizations (another open source project from microsoft https://data-formulator.ai/).Flint is available open source, and we built a MCP server that you can directly plug flint in your favorite agent app to play with data.
Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
Claude’s desktop app is brilliant, but for our own daily work we kept wanting it to be less like a chat app and more like a full-fledged work app. Rowboat is our attempt at that, including the ability to build your own work surfaces inside Rowboat (more below).Our repo is https://github.com/rowboatlabs/rowboat, and there’s a demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et5yQABJ3xIIn a previous startup, we built a deep-learning product for enterprise support reps, including teams supporting P&G brands. Models took live notes, suggested replies, and recommended actions while support reps were on calls or handling emails. One lesson stuck with us: it's not enough for the AI to be right, the help has to show up where the work is happening.So we added what we came to call “work surfaces”: dedicated areas for email, meetings, notes, browser, and parallel coding, where the assistant can help inside the workflow itself rather than only through chat:- Email client: Rowboat has a simple email client that sorts incoming emails into important vs. everything else, and pre-creates drafts for important emails. As you edit and send emails, it takes notes on your style, so future drafts get closer to your voice.- Meeting notes: We built a Granola-style local meeting notetaker. Notes are stored as plain Markdown files on your machine. After a meeting, Rowboat feeds the notes back into the knowledge graph and updates the relevant people, project, and topic notes.- Browser: We added a built-in browser, isolated from your main one, where you can log in only to the accounts you want the assistant to help with. The assistant uses browser-use skills to navigate websites.- Parallel coding: The code-mode inside Rowboat lets you spin multiple instances of Claude Code or Codex and either work with them directly or let Rowboat use your work context to orchestrate them. We built an ACP (Agent Client Protocol) client in Rowboat for this.- Notes: Row
Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
My Downloads folder had been left unkept for a really long time and cleaning it up using Finder was quite cumbersome. So I started creating a simple app to help me filter out and delete or move the files in the folder.It started out very basic and the filtering options genuinely helped me clean out the Downloads folder, then as I thought of more features I would like to see in a file manager I started to add them. Some of the features are:- Fuzzy go to folder/file where you only need to write a few letters of a full path, get suggestions and can jump to the correct path instantly - Hover over a file to preview an image or PDF without opening it - Dual-pane view and tabs that remember selected filters - Command palette to find actions fast - Batch rename (with regex support and presets for common operations), image conversion (HEIC/WebP/AVIF to JPG/PNG), zip creation - Bookmarks, Quick Look, single-click open, keyboard controlAnd many other small quality of life features.I used Claude Code for making the app and the tech stack is .NET/C# with AppKit. The app is compiled to Native AOT so the total app size is only around 9 MB. Since file operations are very important to get right (I don’t want to lose any important files) I put a lot of time into hardening file move/copy/delete operations. Copies are written to a temp file and atomically renamed into place. I also made a dedicated audit of move/copy/delete and verified each operation by hand.Another thing that’s important to me is apps that are privacy first so the only network request the app makes is to check if there’s a new version (this is not done at all for the trial version, the trial expiry date is enforced locally by just checking the date and trusting the user) and the only information that is sent is the current app version.The app is Apple Silicon, macOS 12+ and has a 30-day free trial with a one-time launch price of $19.99 (no subscription).
Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
Hi HN, I'm Brian, I spent the last few years at Vanta (YC W18), helping startups and enterprises become compliant and I recently started exploring what that might look like in a post-agentic world.The problem Halo solves is: when a company buys an AI agent from a vendor and gives it access to their data, they have no way to check what the agent did with that data. Vendors may have built observability dashboards and audit logs, but those are editable and partisan. SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audit a company's controls, but controls are less predictive when the software is agentic. TLDR: give an agent the same prompt 50 times, and you get 50 slightly different actions/answers - so the only thing worth auditing in a post-agentic world is what happened at runtime.Halo is an open-source project that produces agent runtime evidence. It's a small recorder that records every action an agent takes (eg. tool calls, model calls, data access, etc), and becomes a record in an append-only log. It's hash-chained, so anyone can re-verify.Run the following command to see a fictional example: uvx --from halo-record halo demo --serve Then, delete a line from one of the .jsonl files and reload, and the report will catch that it's been tampered with.To wire up your own agent, run this line of Python: agent = trace(run_my_agent, profile="my-agent", log="audit.jsonl") Then use this to generate a real report and give it to your customers: halo report audit.jsonl -o report.html Disclaimer: this proves integrity, not completeness (as a self-held chain proves nothing was edited but does NOT prove that nothing was omitted). Catching this requires a witness outside the vendor and is what I'm working on next.Halo is Apache-2.0, contains zero runtime dependencies, and is about 4,300 lines of Python with 125 tests (if you prefer TypeScript, here's that repo: https://github.com/bkuan001/halo-record-ts).Give it a
Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) let an untrusted proved show that computation was executed correctly without revealing the inputs to the verifier. However to prove anything, the computation first has to be expressed as a circuit: a system of polynomial equations (constraints) over a finite field. Circuits are the assembly language of zk and every constraint costs prover (and sometimes verifier) time, so production circuits are aggressively hand-optimized.Over the last months, we have been experimenting with writing formal specifications instead and letting LLMs produce the circuits: as long as they could prove that their implementation was correct. It started with SHA-256: we hand wrote a specification in Lean for SHA-256 compression, and then we asked LLMs to write the circuit, targeting R1CS arithmetization and large fields.It took a few hours of work for Opus 4.7, and some light steering into the right direction, but in the end the model came up with a reasonable implementation. We then asked the LLM to aggressively optimize the circuits, by driving down a cost metric of the circuit (number of constraints). We immediately got very promising results, just by asking to come up with optimization ideas, implement them and prove that the new circuit still satisfies soundness and completeness. Sometimes, it came up with unsound optimizations, however, since it could not prove them, it backtracked and got itself back on to the right approach.The result was a (non-deterministic) circuit beating the current, human optimized, state of the art for SHA256 compression. This experience lead us to create "zk.golf" which is an open competition to produce optimized, formally verified circuits to lower the bar for the use of ZKPs and make their application more efficient.Come play (https://zk.golf/llms.txt) and learn about formal verification.
Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
Hey HN, I'm Shreyash, founder of Feyn. We built Pulpie, a family of Pareto optimal models for cleaning the web. Pulpie strips boilerplate (ads, footers, sidebars) from raw HTML and returns just the main content as HTML or Markdown.We match SOTA extraction quality while being 20x cheaper. Cleaning 1 billion webpages costs $7,900 with Pulpie versus $159,000 with Dripper, the current leading extractor.The gains come from architecture. Today's leading extractors are decoders that generate output one token at a time. Each step reads the full model from memory to produce a single token. Conversely, Pulpie models are encoders. They run one forward pass over the full input HTML and label each block as boilerplate or content. As a result, Pulpie is compute-bound while decoders are memory-bound. Cheaper GPUs have relatively more compute than memory bandwidth. This makes Pulpie easy to run optimally.Here's Pulpie and Dripper cleaning the same pages side by side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibd-tIiQECo. You can try a side-by-side comparison yourself: https://huggingface.co/spaces/feyninc/pulpieOur motivation for Pulpie came from building a deep research harness. Every search API returns noisy content that contains ads, nav elements, and sidebars. In one instance, an ad for "Gemini on Pixel" slipped into our search results, got passed into LLM context, and ended up in the final answer served to the user. Pretty embarrassing moment for us but it helped us realize how bad data kills model intelligence. We built Pulpie to get clean data for cheap.All models are open source on Hugging Face. You can read about our training process and how to use Pulpie here: https://usefeyn.com/blog/pulpie-pareto-optimal-models-for-cl...Happy to answer any questions!
Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
KiCad, a PCB EDA suite is now working in a browser, you can try it at the link, there's a demo project or you can bring your own. Firefox is best, Chrome is good, Safari is "working".We’re Emergence Engineering, a dev shop from Hungary, mostly working with rich text editors, CRDTs. PCBJam started as my (Viktor, CTO, ex-electrical engineer) hobby project but as time went on I put more and more energy into it, and a product started shaping up in my head, in the last few months we’ve started to focus on this project a bit more, and this is the first MVP~ish result.This project is a ton of fun, ton of learning, ton of improvements over improvements:- I thought there must be ways to emulate the PCB canvas OpenGL code on the web. And yes, there are a lot of ways, all of them very buggy. Turns out it’s faster to just write WebGL code that works with KiCad’s Graphics Abstraction Layer if you add the right intermediate debugging steps. I (with Claude) implemented the features and compared them to native at every step, then the app loaded up the first time and just worked. I spent weeks hunting weird emulation bugs before that.- There was an old wxWidgets web port as a starting point that helped a lot, bringing it up to the level KiCad needed is a long (and still ongoing) task. Thanks ahilss!- Pthreads on the web: with Emscripten it’s possible to port multithreaded apps (used by DRC, software 3D renderer). A lot of Emscripten features (Asyncify, Pthreads, native exceptions) are in a war with each other, but it’s possible.- Asyncify with native exceptions: Asyncify (used to make the WASM code suspend then call into the JS land, emulating blocking C++ calls by rewriting the WASM directly) is not compatible with native exceptions, even on the latest Binaryen version it can’t suspend inside catch arms. If you write a new Binaryen pass then it can, making the bundle 30-40% smaller and the app load in a second instead of 10.- Optimizing bundle size is a fun game. We
Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
AI applications require specialized defense systems to protect against threats and ensure security.
X2mo agoToolAI
Most AI support bots fail not because of bad prompts, but due to underlying problems in setup, context, or workflow before the prompt stage.
X2mo agoToolAI
I know we are very wary of AI slop but disclaimer: AI was used. I don't think that it is slop though and it was mostly used for formatting.
Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
hey guys, wanted to show one of my side projects i just made public.the idea is basically another osint tool for pentesters and bug bounty hunters. it watches certificate transparency logs and checks newly-seen domains for exposed stuff like .env files, open .git dirs, config files, db dumps and so on, and puts whatever it finds into a searchable db. you just search a domain (or part of one) and see what's exposed.it's read-only and free. one thing i've been thinking about adding is a way to register for certain keywords and get notified when something new shows up for that search.would love to hear if you have other ideas for useful features, and also ideas for how to reduce abuse of the data, since that's the part i'm least sure about.https://search.cerast-intelligence.com/
Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
I'm currently working on Bramble, an open source password manager with P2P cross-device sync. Initially I released the Chrome extension, but recently I also published the Android app and iOS is pending Apple's approval. Besides that, the latest version also includes passkey storage for all platforms!About Bramble:It aims to be as feature-rich as all popular and a replacement for cloud-based providers. I don't think we need to store our data in the cloud and be at the whims of companies raising their prices every year. There's always a breach and then we find out that some fields aren't encrypted, metadata is visible, and so on. I'm frustrated with this and the increasing lack of transparency during these breaches.The P2P sync in Bramble uses a Nostr relay (which can be self-hosted) to keep your devices in sync. The relay just introduces the devices to each other; the data then flows directly over WebRTC, so there's no vault server and no cloud copy of your passwords anywhere. What leaves your device is end-to-end encrypted and your devices authenticate each other directly, so a snooping or MITM relay gets practically nothing.Crypto is all done in Rust so I can control exactly how key material lives and dies in memory (secrets get zeroed out, no GB leaving copies lying around). In Chromium it's a wasm module, on mobile it's native builds bridged over via uniffi.Android app:I'm still deciding whether to publish the app on Play store or simply provide the signed APK which users can sideload. Reason for that is Google's plan to lock down Android and take away ownership from its users. Read more about it here: https://keepandroidopen.com/The app uses no Play APIs whatsoever and runs perfectly on GrapheneOS, where I actually did all my testing.Questions, feedback, feature requests - all welcome!TL;DR: I dislike private-equity and venture funded companies messing with our security, so I created my own Pa
Hacker News2mo agoToolAI
Users of AI tools like Fable find transcripts inadequate for sharing interactive conversations and desire integrated text-to-speech features to create engaging, user-friendly podcast-style recordings.
X2mo agoToolAI