Ideas Lab

Creators struggle to reach X monetization thresholds efficiently

X/Twitter creators face significant friction and lack of targeted tools to grow their accounts and hit monetization requirements faster, leading to frustration and slow progress.

X1mo agoToolAI

VODForge – a free local desktop UI for YouTube video/playlist downloads

I built VODForge because I work with a CTV company that needed to pull YouTube videos from our channel partners into our media workflow.Converter sites are always an option but the bitrate wasn't optimal for a CTV network that needs to make multiple streaming version off of a single source file. So I build vodforge to use yt-dlp and ffmpeg under the hood with preconfigured settings for the highest quality end result, automatically adjusting the output settings based on source quality, frame rate, and things like that.It became a game changer internally for us because we were able to avoid sketchy converter sites and avoid paid converter software. Eventually I decided to release it for free and others loved it as well. We started to add support for many of the features that other software charges for, supporting 4K, playlist support, customizing application theme, persistent searchable library, auto organizing downloads by channel and playlist, MP3 support up to 320 kbps, and much more.Looking for feedback on the user experience and additional features that you might find useful. My goal is to grow VODForge into a widely adopted free tool for people who do not want to deal with sketchy websites, CLI mess, or pay for things that you could ultimately do for free given time and effort. VODForge wants to make it EASY and maintained for you. We know anyone can make a GUI wrapper, but that is a trivial way to describe what VODForge aims to offer, user-friendliness, "it just works", libraries and packages maintained for you. All you should think about is what to download next.VODForge awaits...

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Moadim.io – A scheduler for agents

Why can't we get an agent scheduler that supports all of the following:- git compatible- agent agnostic- 100% open source- os and system-agnostic- multi-runner support- support mcp/ui/http- unlimited routines/cronsSo I built one, moadim.io is a local Rust daemon you install in the target machine, give it a name and manage its routines via a Git repository, wants a new routine that send you a daily message from this machine? Create a pr and merge, have another routine that run every hour to pull the latest changes to the ~/.config/moadim folder.With more than 1,000 users, I define this project as almost "done" and ready for production. Me and thousand more people are use it in a daily manner.It currently supports Claude, Codex, Hermes, and Pi, and you are welcome to add your agent of choice as well because it's 100% configurable.You are welcome to have a look at the source code of the daemon in "http://github.com/moadim-io/daemon"Feel free to provide me with suggestions for more features around this topic. I don't want to branch out to new off road topics likt webhooks, this is a "done" software in the realm of agents schedulers that focus on cron-like work.Also feel free to start the github repository and open issues and PRs for your suggestions.

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?

Infinite Google ReCAPCHA loop trying to access archive.is using current Firefox from Linux. Just started today. Firefox is in "strict" mode. Disabled Privacy Badger for that site, and it didn't help. Tried private browsing, and it didn't help.Is this part of Google's war against ad-blocking and non-Chrome browsers?

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

SKIP

15FL score

OwnTime – a chess clock for your day's priorities

I made OwnTime to balance between competing priorities in my life. The idea is based on two main influences: the concept of "roles" from "The 5 Choices" (2015), and my repeated failure to effectively implement time blocking due to the necessary flexibility in my role.The app allows you to define time budgets, which are not much more than a few mutually exclusive countdown timers. The UX is essentially that of a chess clock for an arbitrary number of players with configurable time.The whole point of the app is to kick you out of the running role/priority when its time is up. One feature that was essential for me was AlarmKit alarms, which only became possible last year (>= iOS 26.1). Another was watchOS support, as a natural surface for time-related matters.The current version is strictly focussed. The timers track time allocation during one day. All timers are reset at midnight. I didn't build any statistics - you can export the raw internal SQLite store and make any evaluation or dashboard you want from there.I don't plan to extend the app nor to convert it into a service. All data stays local on your devices (synced between phone and watch locally) and fully open to you. No need for an account or subscription. Thus, I ask for a small one-time fee of $1.99.The website has a short video and rendered preview: https://owntime.appIf you want to go straight to the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6770125662I look forward to your comments and feedback.

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Resolving disputes for AI agent transactions

Builders in the agentic economy need a reliable tool or layer for AI agents to resolve disputes when making autonomous transactions.

X1mo agoToolAI

Changing only the genre of an audio track while preserving lyrics and vocals

Musicians and AI music users need a tool to upload audio and modify just the genre, keeping the original style, lyrics, and vocals intact (beyond current Suno-like tools).

X2mo agoToolAI

RonanRX (YC S26) – Personalized Peptides and GLP-1s

Hi HN,I’m Lloyd, one of two founders of RonanRx (https://ronanrx.com/). We are building a vertically integrated pharmaceutical company with software for prescribing, telehealth, compounding, manufacturing, and delivery. We are starting with GLP-1s and peptides.The path to RonanRx is fairly unconventional. During the pandemic, I built one of the largest mask manufacturing factories in the US. We could make a million masks in a day. We converted raw polypropylene pellets into finished pallets of masks.I had a background in software from my YC W10 company, so we took a software approach to building our factory. We used machine learning and computer vision to optimize production. We also vertically integrated almost everything. It worked. We built an efficient manufacturing operation and grew the business to 50 million dollars in revenue. Then people actually stopped caring about masks. Fair enough.Around the same time, I decided to try and lose the weight I had gained while building the factory. I ate nothing but chicken for six months. While this diet got some results, I plateaued. My doctor suggested tirzepatide, a GLP-1 medication.For me, losing weight was only the beginning. "Food noise" was gone. I showed less interest in other compulsive behavior. I stopped scrolling Instagram and quit biting my nails. But that was just the beginning. I was born with a congenital heart defect called aortic stenosis. My whole life doctors told me I'd need open heart surgery in my 40s (I am 45 now). After just 18 months using tirzepatide, my cardiologist’s began to think (and still thinks) my surgery could be pushed back until I am 70 or 80.This was all happening when I was deciding what to work on next. I wanted to keep working on manufacturing. I didn't want to build another product that could be replicated by a frontier model. Pharmaceutical manufacturing was the best combination of digital, physical, biological, and regulatory infrastructure I

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

BUILD

Weedout – Safari extension that hides YouTube AI-labeled videos

I'm the developer. I built this because AI-generated conspiracy videos were getting out of control in my own YouTube feed. Weedout is a $1.99 Safari extension for macOS that removes videos YouTube labels “Made with AI” from feed, search, related videos, playlists and Shorts. It uses YouTube's label rather than AI detection, runs locally, and does not catch unlabeled videos.Source for developers who want to fork or build: https://github.com/masteranza/weedout-for-youtubePull requests are not accepted; the repository is for independent forks.

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

SKIP

28FL score

Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development

Hey HN, I’m Antonio from Nori Robotics (https://norirobotics.com). We build a $1,688 bimanual mobile robot in San Francisco for robotics developers and researchers.I started working on Nori while doing robotics research at Columbia. I was teaching robots through human demonstrations, but getting my hands on affordable hardware was difficult. Most labs have one or two expensive robots, which makes it hard to collect large datasets, run long experiments, or test across several robots.So I built my own. After seven iterations the latest Nori has:* 19 degrees of freedom* Two 7+1 DOF arms with a 1.5 kg payload per arm* A 55 kg telescoping lift* A differential wheeled base* Four 720p, 30 fps RGB cameras* 2D lidar* A dual microphone array with full-duplex voice communication* A 432 Wh battery* A Raspberry Pi 5 with 4 GB RAM (SLAM and safeties are run on board, heavier ACT and VLAs must be run from a computer via LAN or a server via WAN)Getting this under $2,000 was the main engineering challenge. Nori has more than 100 moving and structural parts, so costs add up quickly across actuators, bearings, wiring, power delivery, and assembly. Some main choices we made to get the cost low was using high-ratio servos instead of QDD motors, and using a wheel base instead of legs.We assemble each robot in San Francisco and have designed it to be easy to manufacture and repair (we offer 3D files to print repairs).Our open SDK includes teleoperation and demonstration tools: https://github.com/Nori-Robotics/nori-sdk-pyWe also built a browser-based simulator so you can try it out: https://lab.norirobotics.com/nori/modelWe’ve shipped our first robot and are building the next batch. Eventually, we want people without robotics experience to teach Nori tasks and share them with other owners.Currently the hardware is already capable of basic cleaning tasks, opening drawers, restocking shelves and pouring beers. Here is a video of Nori doing th

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Tool to de-AI or humanize AI-generated content

Need a tool that makes AI-generated writing, websites, and photos look more human and real.

X2mo agoToolAI

No infrastructure for AI machines to autonomously transact, buy data, and hire agents

As AI agents become economic actors needing fast, software-speed money movement for compute, data, and services, there's no dedicated on-chain or payment infra to support this new class of actors.

X2mo agoToolAI

Lack of a dedicated mobile app for Claude similar to Codex

Users want a specialized app interface for interacting with Claude AI, mirroring the convenience of Codex, to improve daily workflows and accessibility.

X2mo agoToolAI

SKIP

35FL score

Hebbian Robotics (YC S26) – Build scalable robotics data pipelines

Hi HN, we’re Brandon and Kingston, the founders of Hebbian Robotics. We built HFlow (https://github.com/Hebbian-Robotics/hflow), an SDK that turns multimodal recordings from robots and human operators into standardized, quality-checked episodes and queryable dataset manifests. A recording can contain synchronized video, joint states, actions, timestamps, and metadata, and HFlow processes those streams together.Here’s a demo of HFlow in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xni0GwV-xAwRobotics data pipelines often begin as scripts: one transcodes video, another checks timestamps, another adds labels, and another copies selected recordings into a training set. This works until the corpus grows. Then it becomes difficult to know which code ran, why an episode was excluded, or whether a dataset can be reproduced. The first pain is usually quality control because frozen cameras, missing topics, timestamp drift, and duplicate recordings can quietly enter training data.Brandon first encountered this while training embodied AI models for two-arm industrial cleaning robots. Kingston had run into related problems while building high-throughput infrastructure at Jane Street. Later, while speaking with robotics data providers, we kept seeing teams rebuild similar processing and quality-control infrastructure. We learnt that processing robotics data is itself one of the bottlenecks to improving robotics models.An HFlow pipeline consists of transformations, checks, labels, and enrichments. The SDK exposes them as plain Python functions that receive an episode and return measurements, artifacts, or transformed data. During development, the functions can run in-process. For scheduled corpus processing, HFlow packages the same registered steps as Airflow 3 DAGs, where teams can inspect task status, logs, retries, and reruns.HFlow currently accepts one MCAP file per episode. MCAP (https://mcap.dev/) is an open container format by Fo

Hacker News2mo agoToolAI

Almanac (YC S26) – AI that knows your company

Hi HN, I'm Kushagra, one of three founders of Almanac, a Hermes with a brain that knows everything about your company.We started our journey with setting up Hermes for our company, thinking it must be easy. We wanted an agent that would know every context about our company, so we could ask questions and get context-appropriate responses to.This started a very annoying and difficult journey. Setting up Hermes, getting it to talk right, building OAuth apps for every connector myself, then feeding it context myself, and ultimately struggling with Hermes's default memory. At the same time, we saw our YC batchmates struggling with the same problem, and we saw an opportunity.So we built Almanac. This is how it works. You sign up, you get a Hermes agent straight out of the box. You have a one-click connect to any account (Gmail, Calendar, Granola, PostHog, etc). You have personal accounts (only accessible by you) and also shared accounts (accessible by everyone in the company). The consequence being I can never see my cofounders' accounts.The “brain” of this agent is wikis. We pull in information from your connected sources, and start organizing this information in two wikis. A personal one, for you, which understands who you are, what your preferences are, the people in your life, and the things going on in your life. The second wiki is a company wiki, which includes what the company is, what you’re working on, what the roadmap is, and what the blockers of the company are. Your agent ultimately has access to these two wikis and the original accounts, which invoke the feeling of “it just knows you.”Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajXP5PHuK18We're three cofounders, Rohan, Kushagra, and Divit, and we've been friends for 11 years, since studying for the IIT-JEE. We all did Electrical Engineering (Rohan at IIT Delhi, me at IIT Kharagpur, Divit at BITS Pilani, Hyderabad), and Rohan and I later went to Harvard, where this pr

Hacker News2mo agoToolAI

Typebase – A single-folder back end you write in TypeScript

Hey HN!I built Typebase, a library that gives you Convex's DX with Supabase's openness.After trying Supabase I liked how fast it is to spin up a DB and auth, but really didn't like using RLS and SQL for authorization. With Convex I loved how your server "lives" in your code, but disliked the DB model and the realtime-first defaults.With Typebase you just write TS files inside a typebase/ folder in your existing repo. You can define your DB tables inside a schema.ts file and export server functions that your frontend calls like local functions, fully typed. Auth is built in.Then one CLI command uploads your server to any of the available providers (Vercel, Cloudflare Workers or Deno Deploy for the servera and Neon for the DB), or generates the code so you can deploy it wherever you want.Built on top of oRPC, Drizzle, and better-auth.Happy to answer any questions or feedback!

Hacker News2mo agoToolAI

SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material

I've been learning Japanese for a few years and kept running into a similar problem. I'd find a video I wanted to learn from, hear a useful sentence, and then realise that turning that sentence into something I could study later was both time consuming and draining at times.I would end up jumping between a video player, subtitles/transcription, a dictionary, screenshots, audio clips and Anki. So I built SubSmith to bring that workflow together.You can drop a video or audio file into it, generate a transcript locally and then use the transcript alongside the media to:* look up words and sentences * replay individual lines * edit the transcript * save useful sentences with their original context/audio * export them as Anki cardsThe important part for me is that it works with your own media. It isn't tied to a particular streaming service or library, so I can use the random anime episode, podcast, lecture, etc. that I'm actually interested in studying.It's an offline-first desktop app, and transcription happens locally rather than sending the media to a transcription API.I'm sharing it here because I'm now more interested in finding out where this workflow breaks down for other people rather than adding features randomly now that I have solid core/base.For example:* Would you actually save sentences from your own media? * Which part of this process feels like too much work? * Does having the audio/context attached make creating an Anki card more useful? * Would you prefer this to work inside your existing video player/browser? * Is installing a desktop app a significant barrier? * And does requiring an account before starting the free trial make you give up?The current version does require an account to start the trial, and I'm trying to work out whether that's meaningful friction for the people who would actually use this.It's free to try, and I'd particularly appreciate feedback from peop

Hacker News2mo agoToolAI

75FL score

Watches user sessions, finds bugs that matter, and fixes them

Hey HN,I’m Abhishek. I'm building Opslane, an open-source agent that identifies user-facing issues and investigates them. It only creates a PR if it can verify the fix.Demo: https://youtu.be/ccuOTYQMeYg Docs: https://docs.opslane.comAt my last job at Robinhood, we used to do a quarterly bug bash. We would go through our Sentry backlog and try to fix as many of them as possible. We only fixed bugs we knew were reported by customers. We had hundreds of bugs, and Sentry’s default priority levels made no sense. After the bug bash, we would declare bankruptcy - select all remaining bugs and mark them as resolved.This problem has only gotten worse since coding agents have become more prevalent.So I started thinking: what would Sentry look like if it were built in 2026?To me, error trackers have two failure modes:1. False positives: They show you thousands of errors, and you can’t tell the impact on the user2. False negatives: Many user-facing issues don’t throw exceptions, so they go unnoticed.Opslane combines error tracking and session recording. And there is an agent that acts on both. To get started, you install the Opslane SDK. It captures everything the user did: errors, console logs, network requests, and session recordings.Opslane reduces false positives by ranking issues based on how many users are facing a particular issue. It also learns about your product by reading your code and watching your session recordings.False negatives are harder. Opslane reviews session recordings to spot frustration. They look for rage clicks, dead clicks, and abandoned forms.This recently caught a bug in an early customer’s onboarding flow: a dropdown that closed itself when clicked. No exception, no bug report. The recordings showed users clicking it, selecting nothing, and dropping out of onboarding. Opslane flagged it and the team fixed it.Three guiding principles when building Opslane:1. Open Source: Self-host with one Docker Compose file.2.Agent-fi

Hacker News2mo agoToolAI

75FL score

Sesame - a local-first, open-source password manager

I have been working on Sesame, an open-source password manager that keeps your vault local by default. You don't need an account to create or use a vault, and the hosted service never receives the vault itself. It's still early software and the independent security review isn't finished yet, so I am mainly interested in feedback, testing, and people looking through the code.(Linux support is yet to be released on v0.1.2, but currently is in the works.)

Hacker News2mo agoToolAI