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Monday, September 28, 2026

Show HN: HN.watch – Videos of all Hacker News posts https://ift.tt/vnltNaE

Show HN: HN.watch – Videos of all Hacker News posts Hi HN, I’m Per, founder of Scrimba (YC S20). We’ve spent the last decade teaching people how to code with an HTML-based video format. We’ve now plugged an LLM into it, so that people can create explainer videos about anything. It’s called “Scrimba Explain”. To demo this technology for Hacker News, we built HN.watch. It’s like HN, but with explainer videos instead of articles. We create them on-the-fly the first time someone clicks on a link. While there are obvious visual drawbacks of using HTML instead of diffusion models, there are three big benefits: - Speed: Much faster to generate than pixel-based videos (just a few seconds from click to playback) - Cost: Our cost per video is ~$0.04. (Excluding image generation, which some videos utilize. Quickly blows up the cost) - Easy editing: the above benefits also make AI-assisted editing cheap & fast Our hypothesis is that if video creation goes from “dollars and minutes” to “cents and seconds”, a bunch of new use cases will be unlocked. Here are some we see already: - A video explanation of every single Pull Request (we do this internally) - Give every page in your internal/extrernal docs a video - Turn a complex article into a video in ~4 seconds (via our Chrome extension) - Course creators can quickly draft lessons before recording the real thing - People also create a lot of personal stuff stories for their kids, wedding invitations, birthdays, etc The stack is based on an open-source programming language (Imba) created by our CTO, Sindre Aarsæther. It compiles to JavaScript, so it interoperates fully with the npm + node ecosystem. You can learn more here: https://imba.io/ We’ve also built our own sync engine (OP), and a context management system for agents (Q). We feared this would make the LLMs struggle when writing code for us, as neither is in their training data (there’s very little Imba in there too). However, we’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that LLMs actually are really good at our stack. This is probably because the stack is extremely dense. Imba is compact, and so is OP, where a single declaration sets storage, sync, permissions, UI, and what the AI sees. This means there’s no translations between frontend, API, db and JSON where the model can get confused and get things wrong. Simply said, instead of using React.js, Express, Supabase, and LangChain, we built it all from scratch. Definitely suffering from the “not invented here” syndrome, lol! As for the models, we use Gemini, GPTs, Inworld, ElevenLabs, and a few others. If you want to try it out, just take your pick: - The Web UI (scrimba.com/explain) - MCP (add it to your coding agent) - ChatGPT Plugin - Chrome Extension You can find a link to all of the above in our docs: https://ift.tt/wSk6sza And finally, a real pixel-based video of the tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rbHmBxSEs Would love to hear your feedback and if anyone has ideas for other use cases. PS: I expect quite a bit of pushback from HN for this launch, given how fan of text the HN crowd is. This kind of tool is not for everyone. But there are a lot of people today who prefer videos over text, especially in the younger generations. https://hn.watch/ September 28, 2026 at 10:16PM

Show HN: I built an idle game that rewards you for doomscrolling less https://ift.tt/3vIceTO

Show HN: I built an idle game that rewards you for doomscrolling less https://getisland.app/ September 28, 2026 at 10:59PM

Sunday, September 27, 2026

Show HN: Gat – Version large files with Git, without an LFS server https://ift.tt/MT4OvVw

Show HN: Gat – Version large files with Git, without an LFS server Hi HN, I built Gat because I wanted one thing from data versioning: check out an old Git commit and recover the datasets, model weights, or assets that belong to it. It's basically a lock file for large files. I’d appreciate any feedback! https://ift.tt/Wsdmutk September 28, 2026 at 12:20AM

Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi https://ift.tt/bZCluY9

Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi https://loficities.com/ September 28, 2026 at 01:44AM

Show HN: Banker – CLI for your finances using Enable Banking and SQLite https://ift.tt/k5UD0AB

Show HN: Banker – CLI for your finances using Enable Banking and SQLite Hi HN, here, what started as a small personal tool, I wanted to create an AI agent-friendly way to fetch and store financial data, like bank accounts, their respective balances and transactions and store them in a small SQLite database, to gather all of them in a single place, store them long term, and assign arbitrary metadata, for example, expense categories, etc. There are not many PSD2 compliant providers, that allow access to personal bank accounts, but Enable Banking is one of the rare few. That is why it is the core of the engine used to access the financial data from different ASPSPs. Thus, it is quite easy to register and set up a personal "application" and link your existing bank accounts to access them in the banker CLI. I hope you find it useful! https://ift.tt/WUXeKG2 September 27, 2026 at 11:32PM

Saturday, September 26, 2026

Show HN: Jev predicting your life choices https://ift.tt/cfGW2oM

Show HN: Jev predicting your life choices Built a simple quiz to check whether AI (Jev) can simply learn and predict life choices. Experiment) https://quiz.seek.ws/ September 26, 2026 at 11:24PM

Show HN: Spivak's Calculus formalized in Lean 4 – every theorem, every problem https://ift.tt/alxscPK

Show HN: Spivak's Calculus formalized in Lean 4 – every theorem, every problem https://ift.tt/kx31T7Q September 27, 2026 at 12:00AM

Friday, September 25, 2026

Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red https://ift.tt/6pirsvc

Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red Hey HN! Wanted to share a fun project I've been hacking on. Given Jev can make decisions really fast (but not fast enough to play Doom yet sadly), I wanted to try and push it to play a more complex game than Tetris. So I went with Pokémon. I've spent endless hours playing this game as a child so building this was a ton of fun. I open sourced everything in case you want to hack on it yourself here: https://ift.tt/835SZ9t The game is being streamed live including the tokens and cost - hopefully we get all the badges and don't get stuck in a cave :) https://jev-pokemon.vercel.app/ September 25, 2026 at 09:28PM

Show HN: I couldn't deal with another Claude Code tab https://ift.tt/Kczb9LM

Show HN: I couldn't deal with another Claude Code tab https://aidash.dev/ September 26, 2026 at 01:22AM

Show HN: Doom or Bloom, map your AI worldview with Jev https://ift.tt/RI5KPGq

Show HN: Doom or Bloom, map your AI worldview with Jev Map your AI worldview by answering a few questions, and see how you compare with others. only takes a few minutes && free & open source && private by default && powered by Jev I think this is a really important question for everyone to be asking themselves, and my hope is that this lil project helps to move our conversations around AI futures in a more balanced, productive direction. https://ift.tt/0fCpJ2H September 25, 2026 at 11:51PM

Show HN: Encryption as a Service https://ift.tt/GEoBqka

Show HN: Encryption as a Service Hello, I’m looking for some criticism. I’m also looking for some people to help test this service. https://rypt.dev/ September 25, 2026 at 11:36PM

Thursday, September 24, 2026

Show HN: Treepeat – Code similarity detection using Tree-sitter https://ift.tt/2F5QXT6

Show HN: Treepeat – Code similarity detection using Tree-sitter treepeat is a tool that finds similarities in your codebase. Find duplicate code blocks meaningful to the language (classes/functions), not just lines. Find near-duplicates: ignore whitespace, strings, high level AST nodes such as function and names. Find structurally similar code: anonymize identifiers, constants, etc. Pull requests welcome: This is very much an proof of concept - I'm happy with it, but I haven't supported very many languages at present. Languages supported: astro, bash, css, go, html, javascript, lua, markdown (plus codeblocks), python, sql, typescript, java, kotlin, rust, yaml https://ift.tt/QN7J6dZ September 22, 2026 at 11:53PM

Show HN: Scalar.dev – Python/SQLite server-rendered starter app, no build step https://ift.tt/kAQLRUX

Show HN: Scalar.dev – Python/SQLite server-rendered starter app, no build step Hi HN, I'm Felipe. AI-assisted coding is great, but complexity is still complexity. The more you have it, the harder it is to keep the system sane and changes safe over time. I've built this project because I wanted to have a different foundation for my apps - one that started simple, with no external dependencies, and that made the code stay easy to understand as it grows and cheap to modify. Simplicity in the stack is a means to absorb the business complexity without turning the project into an unmaintainable mess. This foundation is a Python server-rendered app (no build step, no SPA), and as a starter app it comes with some basic features that most apps will need (Authentication, AI chat, Settings, Clients/Tasks as a demo crud). The foundation is free (MIT), and there are also two paid options if you want more features. Looking forward to hear your feedback! https://getscalar.dev/ September 24, 2026 at 10:48PM