Ideas Lab

TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

Hi all! TikZ is a widely-used LaTeX package for drawing figures in papers. It uses commands like \draw[->] (0,0) -- (1,2); to draw lines, shapes, text, etc. Academics usually code up their figures by hand, so there is lots of twiddling around with the coordinates and recompiling until things look nice. I guess it’s a bit like SVG, but it’s more code than markup, for example it has loops with \foreach.I built an open-source WYSIWYG TikZ editor (available for web and desktop) that allows you to edit your TikZ source code visually by dragging and resizing elements. It simultaneously shows the source code and the rendered figure, and lets you edit either one while the two views stay in sync. I’m not aware of any other editors that are simultaneously source editors and WYSIWYG (even for editing SVG or HTML), and I’m quite pleased with how well the combination works.The way the app is implemented is by parsing the TikZ code, and at all times keeping track of the exact source location of each object. Thereby, when a user drags an element to a new position, the app can override just the numbers in the coordinate without changing anything else in the code (such as line breaks or indentation).This approach essentially required reimplementing a large fraction of TikZ, which is the kind of task that no human would ever want to do. I think building software that doesn’t exist yet because it would be impossibly tedious to code up is one of the great new possibilities thanks to coding agents, and it’s worth brainstorming for other examples. (This app was built almost entirely by Codex.)Implementing the app came with lots of fun side quests, including building converters from SVG / pptx / ipe to TikZ, re-implementing the LaTeX hyphenation and line-breaking algorithm to support multi-line nodes, and making a color picker that uses the red!20!black color mixing notation used in LaTeX papers.

Hacker News2mo agoToolAI

Treedocs: Documentation that automatically checks for staleness

Hacker News2mo agoToolOther

No iOS app for Cursor AI code editor

Developers want to use the Cursor AI-powered code editor on iOS devices but no official or third-party app exists, limiting mobile coding workflows.

X2mo agoToolDev

65FL score

No non-dating way to discover who finds you attractive

People want a simple, low-pressure method to see a list of potential admirers without committing to dating apps or social interactions.

X2mo agoToolDating & Community

No second-hand marketplace platform focused on China with affordable international shipping

Shoppers seeking affordable second-hand goods from China face expensive shipping from Japan alternatives and lack a dedicated platform like Mercari for Chinese sellers with reasonable global delivery options.

X2mo agoToolE-Commerce

No buy-now-pay-later style app for credit-starved users in the US

Americans with poor credit want a dopamine-friendly ordering platform that allows purchases without immediate payment, similar to existing Korean services.

X3mo agoToolFinance

No AI tool to filter mean or unwanted DMs on messaging apps

Users receive toxic or irrelevant direct messages and need an AI-powered filter that automatically keeps only positive interactions across apps.

X2mo agoToolAI

World Cup Match Outcome Predictor

Tool that simulates World Cup match outcomes and compares betting odds across sportsbooks, helping bettors make informed wagers by aggregating predictions and real-time odds. [Trending: "simulador copa do mundo" with 200+ searches in BR]

Google Trends2mo agoToolSport & FitnessBR

Heat Illness Risk Alert System

Mobile app that alerts users to personalized heat exhaustion/illness risk based on weather, activity level, and health conditions, with preventive guidance and emergency contacts. [Trending: "heat exhaustion" with 100+ searches in GB]

Google Trends2mo agoToolMedicine & HealthGB

Pagecast – Publish Markdown/HTML Reports to Cloudflare Pages

I built this because I kept generating HTML/Markdown reports from Claude Code/Codex and needed a permanent share link instead of a localhost tunnel. Pagecast is a local CLI that publishes those files to your own Cloudflare Pages account.It supports Markdown and HTML, stable URLs, renaming, republishing to the same URL, and watch mode for continuous updates to same file. It is MIT licensed.The main design choice is that there is no hosted Pagecast account. It uses your Cloudflare account and deploys there directly and has claude code and codex integrations as skill/hooks.Basically it can be used as a replacement for codex sites or claude artifacts

Hacker News3mo agoToolAI

Oak – Git alternative designed for agents

Oak is a version control system I've been working on designed for agents (https://oak.space). It improves the speed and context your agents need when working on serious projects. With virtual mounts, agents locally and in the cloud no longer need a full copy of a repo to get working. You can work on many tasks in parallel without needing to download everything or fight worktrees. Version control shouldn't waste you or your agents time. It should be fast, creative and fun to make things with agents.Oak is still early in development. There's no Windows build and missing plenty of features (no CI, no issues, no comments). We still use GitHub Actions for building Oak now, but we've been fully bootstrapped on Oak with no Git backup for several months: https://oak.space/oak/oak.Blog post: https://oak.space/blog#git-is-foreverDocs: https://oak.space/docs

Hacker News2mo agoToolProductivity

I rebuilt the only parts of my IDE I use, in Rust, over a weekend

I don't know Rust.Friday after work I realised that 90% of my IDE time now is just the commit/diff view — and even good IDEs feel heavy for that.So over the weekend I built a dedicated native tool for just that. Kyde is a macOS git commit + diff editor with one goal: be fast, do Git well.I'm curious whether anyone else mostly opens their IDE for git operations these days.It's open source, and there's a signed app in Releases.

Hacker News2mo agoToolDesign & Creative

MiniPCs.zip – Charting the Pareto frontier of Mini PCs

The overall idea is to chart out the thousands of Mini PCs by benchmark and reveal the Pareto Front so you can get the most Compute per Dollar. Definitely a labor of love as I have a number of Mini PCs for my "homelab" (TrueNAS, piHole, Plex, basic stuff). It uses Gemini to extract specs from listings (since they're not often strongly categorized).Quick blog post here: https://luke.zip/posts/pareto-pcs/

Hacker News2mo agoToolDesign & Creative

No platform to invest directly in promising individuals like equity shares

People want a way to invest in talented friends or individuals by taking a fraction of their future earnings or success, similar to buying stocks in a person, but no such mechanism exists.

X2y agoToolFinance

No cigarette delivery service available

Smokers frequently express frustration that there is no convenient delivery option for cigarettes, forcing them to go out or rely on inconvenient alternatives.

X4mo agoToolLogistics & Delivery

15FL score

Free AutoCAD alternative finder/guide

Help users discover and compare free or affordable CAD software alternatives to AutoCAD for design, engineering, and architecture work. [Google Search suggestion]

Google Trends2mo agoToolDesign & CreativeUS

Free Photoshop alternative comparison platform

Curated guide comparing free or low-cost image editing alternatives to Photoshop with feature matrices, tutorials, and user reviews. [Google Search suggestion]

Google Trends2mo agoToolDesign & CreativeUS

Recall – Local project memory for Claude Code

Hacker News2mo agoToolAI

CleverCrow: give tokens to your favorite projects

Howdy all. I'm Zack :wave:. I've been thinking about the problem of misguided AI pull requests and figured I'd throw a possible solution out there for feedback. Basically, CleverCrow lets supporters give tokens to a GitHub repo (or set of issues in that repo) for the maintainers to use to build/fix stuff. The fun implementation challenges have been around implementing the pooling dynamics and keeping the maintainers in charge while the backers are motivated to support their work.

Hacker News2mo agoToolAI