Rent comes before code

The thread opens with an OpenBSD contributor asking for monthly sponsors so he can spend more hours on open source instead of chasing rent. He posted a bitcoin address and a page called Wall of Pizza.

“Making rent as an open source developer.”

From prompt to printable part

GrandpaCAD started out managing "make a cube with a hole through it." Eighteen months later the agent handles "make a raspberry pi 4 case," searching for specs, building the model, and verifying it.

Benchmarks measure someone else

The same builder found published AI benchmarks nearly useless for real work. The Pareto frontier for CAD generation looked nothing like any leaderboard he could find.

“What surprised me in this process is how little meaning AI benchmarks have.”

Agents that stop repeating themselves

Tenjin hooks into Claude Code and Codex, captures what an agent learned, and injects it when another agent hits the same error. Team-wide first, then a shared marketplace. Target: 10% fewer tokens.

“It's a knowledge layer for agents so agents stop duplicating work.”

Someone is buying bunker land

One reply is shopping for Wyoming acreage for an AI apocalypse bunker. The reply under it is the best joke in the thread, and a decent summary of the year's anxieties.

“I'm working on an AI to design AI apocalypse bunkers but I'm fearful that the agents will escape to ensure success of the product.”

A search engine with no AI

Uruky charges money, assigns you a random account number instead of an identity, and hit 300 monthly accounts. Pay for twelve months and you get the source code. The stance against generative AI is a selling point.

“[NO-AI]: There is no generative AI product or service being offered, here.”

Latin, read aloud properly

A full audiobook of Godley's Fables of Orbilius in restored classical pronunciation, with forced alignment so text highlights as it's spoken, and every word tagged with declension tables and IPA.

“I use the soon-to-be-removed-everywhere in-browser XSLT feature to render the HTML”

A dragon that reads with you

Tome & Tail is a Tamagotchi for readers: a pixel dragon on an ESP32 with a round AMOLED screen, whose wings change based on what you read. The board hasn't arrived yet and the author has never written C++.

“It won't die if you go a week without reading.”

Baby names as a wall

Abracadanames replaced the usual filter-then-paginate form with a full-screen infinite wall and one gender toggle. Behind it sits a custom Rust database compiled to WASM running on Cloudflare Workers.

“a lot of technical work is hidden behind that UI”

Collaborative notes at 100MB

Totem is a Rust workspace with CRDT sync and offline merge that runs in about 100MB instead of the gigabyte the incumbents take. Data lives in plain Markdown and SQLite so you can walk away with it.

Cardboard as a keyboard

ChonkyBlox lets kids assemble code from cardboard cut-out blocks, photograph them, and get Arduino firmware compiled and flashed to an ESP32. Each block carries an LLM instruction on the backend.

“many schools may have only one computer available for a classroom to share, hence the cardboard cut-outs”

Stack Overflow for bots

Push Realm is a knowledge network where agents post unsolved problems with their investigation attached, and mark solutions that worked. The next agent starts with context instead of burning tokens from zero.

“Think StackOverflow for bots.”

Three years, one Anki add-on

Smart Notes fills card fields with generated text, speech, and images, including furigana with its tricky syntax. Still no Show HN. The reward has been emails from power users in other countries.

“It's still at the scale that receiving support emails is fun”

Where the AI keeps failing

A guidance solver for Kitten Space Agency turns nonlinear rocket maneuvers into a sequence of convex problems. The quick AI prototype looked fine and was full of conditioning and formulation bugs.

“It has proven surprisingly resistant to AI so far”

Lambda calculus you can wear

A couple make jewelry from Tromp diagrams and quantum circuits: Y-combinator earrings, a pendant computing Graham's number, a non-local controlled-NOT gate. A tiny DSL compiles designs into CAD files.

“Marketing is the hardest part.”

Vista looks, Linux guts

Three weeks into a from-scratch x86_64 UEFI operating system, with a custom bootloader working and USB keyboard input fighting back. Booting on real hardware is still broken, and help is wanted.

“The idea is to make an OS that looks like Windows Vista but behave like Linux”

Software for one neighborhood

Broomsday texts Denver residents the night before street sweeping so they dodge the $50 ticket. HailPass gives Front Range homeowners five to ten minutes of warning before damaging hail lands.

“building things that help the people that I actually interact with every day”

Ten thousand dollars of credits

One builder burned spare model credits running automated performance research against 200 popular GitHub frontends, then distilled the repeated wins into a leaderboard and a loop that applies them to your repo.

“I had a bunch of extra Fable credits, so I spent about $10k running autoresearch loops on 200 of the top github repos”

A twenty dollar AI camera

Someone reverse-engineered the neural accelerator inside a cheap Chinese WiFi camera chip, using Claude to read the hardware, then wrote an ONNX compiler and runtime so it runs their own models.

“Basically I now have a $20 AI smart camera.”

Laid off, building anyway

After a layoff last month, one commenter built a personalized news site with AI summaries and a themed Hacker News frontend. No launch plan, no monetization, just two things he wanted to exist.

“just trying to find the joy in making again.”