24206
Top stories from https://news.ycombinator.com (with 100+ score) Contribute to the development here: https://github.com/phil-r/hackernewsbot Also check https://t.me/designer_news Contacts: @philr
Oniux: Kernel-level Tor isolation for any Linux app (Score: 150+ in 15 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vpsg
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vpsg
RenderFormer: Neural rendering of triangle meshes with global illumination (Score: 150+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vpYw
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vpYw
Progressive JSON (Score: 150+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vpNb
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vpNb
A Lean companion to Analysis I (Score: 150+ in 6 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vp2P
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vp2P
AI video you can watch and interact with, in real-time (❄️ Score: 150+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6veBS
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6veBS
Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs (❄️ Score: 150+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vegr
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vegr
C++ to Rust Phrasebook (Score: 150+ in 19 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vmnx
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vmnx
Beware of Fast-Math (Score: 151+ in 6 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vn4s
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vn4s
Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent (❄️ Score: 150+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vdz7
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vdz7
I've been hacking away lately, and I'm now proud to show off my newest project - The Icepi Zero!
In case you don't know what an FPGA is, this phrase summarizes it perfectly:
"FPGAs work like this. You don't tell them what to do, you tell them what to BE."
You don't program them, but you rewrite the circuits they contain!
So I've made a PCB that carries an ECP5 FPGA, and has a raspberry pi zero footprint. It also has a few improvements! Notably the 2 USB b ports are replaced with 3 USB C ports, and it has multiple LEDs.
This board can output HDMI, read from a uSD, use a SDRAM and much more. I'm very proud the product of multiple weeks of work. (Thanks for the pcb reviews on r/PrintedCircuitBoard )
(All the sources on github under an open source license :D)
PS. See some more pics on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/comments/1kwxvk8/ive_made_my_f...
Show HN: Onlook – Open-source, visual-first Cursor for designers (Score: 203+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vhjP
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vhjP
Hey HN, I’m Kiet – one half of the two-person team building Onlook (https://beta.onlook.com/), an open-source [https://github.com/onlook-dev/onlook/] visual editor that lets you edit and create React apps live on an infinite canvas.
We launched Onlook [1][2] as a local-first Electron app almost a year ago. Since then, “prompt-to-build” tools have blown up, but none let you design and iterate visually. We fixed that by taking a visual-first, AI-powered approach where you can prompt, style, and directly manipulate elements in your app like in a design tool.
Two months ago, we decided to move away from Electron and rewrite everything for the browser. We wanted to remove the friction of downloading hundreds of MBs and setting up a development environment just to use the app. I wrote more here [3] about how we did it, but here are some learnings from the whole migration:
1. While most of the React UI code can be reused, mapping from Electron’s SPA experience to a Next.js app with routes is non-trivial on the state management side.
2. We were storing most of the data locally as large JSON objects. Moving that to a remote database required major refactoring into tables and more loading states. We didn’t have to think as hard about querying and load time before.
3. Iframes in the browser enforce many more restrictions than Electron webview. Working around this required us to inject code directly into the user project in order to do cross-iframe communication.
4. Keeping API keys secure is much easier on a web application than an Electron app. In Electron, every key we leave on the client can be statically accessed. Hence, we had to proxy any SDK we used that required an API key into a server call. In the web app, we can just keep the keys on the server.
5. Pushing a release bundle in Electron can take 1+ hours. And some users may never update. If we had a bug in the autoupdater itself, certain users could be “stranded” in an old version forever, and we’d have to email them to update. Though this is still better than mobile apps that go through an app store, it’s still very poor DX.
How does Onlook for web work?
We start by connecting to a remote “sandbox” [4]. The visual editing component happens through an iframe. We map the HTML element in the iframe to the location in code. Then, when an edit is made, we simulate the change on the iframe and edit the code at the same time. This way, visual changes always feel instant.
While we’re still ironing out the experience, you can already:
- Select elements and prompt changes
- Update TailwindCSS classes via the styling UI
- Draw in new divs and elements
- Preview on multiple screen sizes
- Edit your code through an in-browser IDE
We want to make it trivial for anyone to create, style, and edit codebases. We’re still porting over functionalities from the desktop app — layers, fonts, hosting, git, etc. Once that is done, we plan on adding support for back-end functionalities such as auth, database, and API calls.
Special thank you to the 70+ contributors who have helped create the Onlook experience! I think there’s still a lot to be solved for in the design and dev workflow, and I think the tech is almost there.
You can clone the project and run it from our repo (linked to this post) or try it out at https://beta.onlook.com where we’re letting people try it out for free.
I’d love to hear what you think and where we should take it next :)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41390449
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40904862
[3] https://docs.onlook.com/docs/developer/electron-to-web-migra...
[4] Currently, the sandbox is through CodeSandbox, but we plan to add support for connecting to a locally running server as well
Running GPT-2 in WebGL: Rediscovering the Lost Art of GPU Shader Programming (Score: 150+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vbtj
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vbtj
FromSoft's singular mech game Chromehounds is back online (Score: 150+ in 17 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6v9tn
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6v9tn
German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal (🔥 Score: 165+ in 1 hour)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6v7TV
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6v7TV
GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world (Score: 157+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6v6Un
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6v6Un
Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs? (Score: 155+ in 6 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/c/6v6Y7
I use LLMs daily for stuff like:
- solving tasks that just require applying knowledge ("here's a paste of my python import structure. I don't write Python often and I'm aware I'm doing something wrong here because I get this error, tell me the proper way organise the package").
- writing self-contained throwaway pieces of code ("here's a paste of my DESCRIBE TABLE output, write an SQL query to show the median [...]").
- as a debugging partner ("I can SSH to this host directly, but Ansible fails to connect with this error, what could be causing this difference").
All these use cases work great, I save a lot of time. But with the core work of writing the code that I work on, I've almost never had any success. I've tried:
- Cursor (can't remember which model, the default)
- Google's Jules
- OpenAI Codex with o4
I found in all cases that the underlying capability is clearly there (the model can understand and write code) but the end-to-end value is not at all. It could write code that _worked_, but trying to get it to generate code that I am willing to maintain and "put my name on" took longer than writing the code would have.
I had to micromanage them infinitely ("be sure to rerun the formatter, make sure all tests pass" and "please follow the coding style of the repository". "You've added irrelevant comments remove those". "You've refactored most of the file but forgot a single function"). It would take many many iterations on trivial issues, and because these iterations are slow that just meant I had to context switch a lot, which is also exhausting.
Basically it was like having an intern who has successfully learned the core skill of programming but is not really capable of good collaboration and needs to be babysat all the time.
I asked friends who are enthusiastic vibe coders and they basically said "your standards are too high".
Is the model for success here that you just say "I don't care about code quality because I don't have to maintain it because I will use LLMs for that too?" Am I just not using the tools correctly?
The Rise of the Japanese Toilet (Score: 150+ in 20 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vnLL
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vnLL
Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API? (Score: 151+ in 15 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/c/6vnGb
Are there any solo devs or small teams out there genuinely paying their rent from selling API access?
What's your API? How much MRR? What's your pricing model? How did you find your first paying customers? And most importantly - what problem are you solving that people will actually pay for monthly?
Bonus points if you can share:
- Your biggest challenge (rate limiting? customer support? competition?)
- Whether you'd do it again
- Any "I wish I knew this before starting" wisdom
Using lots of little tools to aggressively reject the bots (Score: 152+ in 15 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vn9B
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vn9B
Reverse engineering of Linear's sync engine (❄️ Score: 150+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vfT5
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vfT5
AtomVM, the Erlang virtual machine for IoT devices (❄️ Score: 151+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vdzT
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vdzT
Precision Clock Mk IV (🔥 Score: 151+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vnM8
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vnM8
Cap: Lightweight, modern open-source CAPTCHA alternative using proof-of-work (Score: 151+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vkAd
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vkAd
Mary Meeker's first Trends report since 2019, focused on AI (Score: 151+ in 15 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vm5D
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vm5D
See also https://www.axios.com/2025/05/30/mary-meeker-trends-report-o....
Jerry Lewis's “The Day the Clown Cried” discovered in Sweden after 53 years (Score: 151+ in 10 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vm92
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vm92
Show HN: I wrote a modern Command Line Handbook (Score: 153+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vgZe
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vgZe
TLDR: I wrote a handbook for the Linux command line. 120 pages in PDF. Updated for 2025. Pay what you want.
A few years back I wrote an ebook about the Linux command line. Instead of focusing on a specific shell, paraphrasing manual pages, or providing long repetitive explanations, the idea was to create a modern guide that would help readers to understand the command line in the practical sense, cover the most common things people use the command line for, and do so without wasting the readers' time.
The book contains material on terminals, shells (compatible with both Bash and Zsh), configuration, command line programs for typical use cases, shell scripting, and many tips and tricks to make working on the command line more convenient. I still consider it "an introduction" and it is not necessarily a book for the HN crowd that lives in the terminal, but I believe that the book will easily cover 80 % of the things most people want or need to do in the terminal.
I made a couple of updates to the book over the years and just finished a significant one for 2025. The book is not perfect. I still see a lot of room for improvement, but I think it is good enough and I truly want to share it with everyone. Hence, pay what you want.
EXAMPLE PAGES: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PkUcLv83Ib6nKYF88n3OBqeeVff...
https://commandline.stribny.name/
Tariffs in American History (❄️ Score: 150+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6v2d7
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6v2d7
Square Theory (🔥 Score: 156+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6vb3Q
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6vb3Q
A new class of materials that can passively harvest water from air (🔥 Score: 153+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6v7B2
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6v7B2
Jjui – A Nice TUI for Jujutsu (Score: 150+ in 12 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6v6nY
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6v6nY
Trading with Claude, and writing your own MCP server (❄️ Score: 150+ in 4 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6uUgy
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6uUgy