Show HN Today: Top Developer Projects Showcase for 2024-10-29
Explore the hottest developer projects on Show HN for 2024-10-29. Dive into innovative tech, AI applications, and exciting new inventions!
Summary of Today’s Content
Today, several projects were showcased, featuring innovations such as audio generation from prompts using LLMs, an interactive Electoral College simulator, and a new C++ WebGPU library. Other highlights include a baseball strategy game using voice AI, an image optimization tool, and a platform for tracking voter guides. Notable applications targeted user engagement, like an electoral calculator and a QR code doorbell. Additionally, tools for creating synthetic medical data, semantic search, and project management enhancements were introduced. Engagement focused on user feedback, improvement suggestions, and community interaction.
1. Show HN: Combining LLMs and Voice Models – Part 1
URL: https://nitric.io/docs/guides/python/ai-podcast-part-1
Author: tholm
Description: This is a guide that I wrote to showcase a new batch inference feature for an OSS framework that I author (nitric.io).
I know things like Podcast generation via NotebookLM and also NotebookLlama exist, but wanted to demonstrate a case where an API could be built, and subsequently orchestrated in the cloud.
This is just the first part for producing audio using suno/bark via an API. I’m currently working on a part 2 that will introduce an LLM to make scripts from short prompt, which will be piped to the code introduced in Part 1.
Looking for feedback on improving this, there are a few things I’d like to clean up but overall am pretty happy with the outputs it produces so far.
Thanks in advance for any feedback given.
Popularity: 2 points | 0 comments
2. Show HN: An update to my friendly C++ WebGPU open source library
URL: https://github.com/bv7dev/wgpu-lab
Author: bv7dev
Description: Since my last post was received well, I decided to post an update here :)
wgpu-lab is a library to get you started with developing WebGPU apps in C++
It’s based on google’s dawn implementation and is an open work in progress.
Your contributions are welcome !
In my previous release, it was still difficult to build and use the library.
This should now be fixed!
Popularity: 3 points | 0 comments
3. Show HN: Cheaper and better way to track site analytics
URL: https://datafa.st/?via=all
Author: justdev
Description:
Popularity: 2 points | 0 comments
4. Show HN: I built NotebookLM where you’re the podcast guest
Author: noahfradin
Description:
Popularity: 9 points | 6 comments
5. Show HN: I built PixSpeed to optimize website images for free
Author: lou_alcala
Description:
Popularity: 5 points | 1 comments
6. Show HN: I Built a Click-to-Simulate 2024 Electoral College Calculator
URL: #
Author: BlackVicking
Description: I built an interactive tool to simulate Electoral College scenarios for the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The app lets you:
- Click states on a U.S. map to simulate electoral scenarios
- See real-time electoral vote counting
- Experiment with different state combinations
Try it here: https://mirjamelad.github.io/adax-core-raw-example/
This is a non-partisan educational tool to help visualize how electoral votes add up.
PS: What started as a mini project to test my adax-core library turned into a toy that people kept asking to play with. So I thought why not share it here :)
Popularity: 3 points | 0 comments
7. Show HN: Candy Train – Port of an oldschool Java applet
URL: #
Author: ksylvestre
Description: I wanted to learn SDL3 so I ported Candy Train to iOS and Android. As a bonus, I implemented a high score leaderboard, something that was lacking in the original version.
iOS https://apps.apple.com/us/app/candy-train-classic/id65875597…
Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.itch.ksylve…
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
8. Show HN: Browser Based Dj App
URL: https://angular-audio.com/dj-mixer
Author: jsmithoner
Description: Here is a browser based dj app with MIDI learn capabilities
Popularity: 2 points | 1 comments
9. Show HN: Let’s Play (Voice AI) Ball – A Baseball Strategy Game
URL: https://canonical.chat/blog/lets_play_voice_ai_ball
Author: tmshapland
Description: My 8 year old son is obsessed with baseball. It’s unfortunate because 1) I deeply love lacrosse (I was the leading scorer my sophomore year for UC Davis! Never miss an opportunity to say it!), 2) I don’t know much about baseball, and 3) he’s a diehard Yankees fan.
Although I can’t do anything about his team affiliation or the current 3-0 Yankees deficit in the 2024 World Series, I can do something about teaching him baseball strategy — despite knowing little about baseball myself. I built this Voice AI game for him to learn more about baseball strategy. In the game, the Voice AI describes a baseball scenario, and the caller has to describe what the defensive player should do. To try it out, call (530) 203-8359.
While my son is obsessed with baseball, I’m equally obsessed with Voice AI. Voice AI is eating the world. We’re seeing Voice AI consume pre-existing call volume (e.g., lead qualification calls, customer surveys, medical appointment setting) and creating a deluge of new call volume enabled by the Voice AI medium (e.g., role playing for professional development (https://solidroad.com/), an AI that introduces you to people with similar interests (https://www.boardy.ai/), and, yes, voice-first baseball games to make you feel like a better dad).
If you’re building in Voice AI and are as enthralled with Voice AI as me, check out what we’re building (https://voice.canonical.chat) when we’re not building fun voice-enabled AI applications. We love meeting other people in Voice AI and helping them improve their Voice AI agents!
Tom https://x.com/tom_shapland
Popularity: 2 points | 2 comments
10. Show HN: CHSS – CSS-Esque Semantic Code Styling in Real-Time
URL: https://github.com/Thertzlor/vscode-chss
Author: Thertzlor
Description: First time showing something off here.
So I have always found semantic highlighting very interesting, and besides the kind of highlighting VSCode natively offers, I have always been partial to name based highlighting like Colorcoder or its VSCode counterpart “Color Identifiers”, where symbols get assigned different colors based on their names.
But I noticed that you could go further than just having the color be based on the hash of the name, I wanted to assign specific colors, have some “super important” class or variable colored in red or maybe every function that starts with the word “get” colored blue, or underlined, or bold etc. And the more I thought about it, I realized I basically just wanted CSS for code highlighting.
So I wrote and extension that does just that. It lets you use use .chss files, basically a dialect of SCSS to design a dynamic color scheme for your code, that takes names as well as semantic token information into account and lets you set any style option that VSCode’s text decoration class allows.
Now I mostly wrote this extension for the fun of implementing weird stuff and I realize that the functionality is maybe a little bit dumb, a little bit counterproductive to productivity itself if you waste time picking out pretty colors for specific variables and so on. But… while styling my way through one on of my bigger coding projects, I started to wonder if defining colors for variables with names matching a specific names and patterns could, when utilized consistently, lead to a better and more consistent habit of selecting names. Instead of having variables with dozens of random different names, even though they are doing the same thing, one would select consistent names to get the right color, coding standard enforced via aesthetics.
Anyway, I think it’s a neat project and I might look into AST parsing in the future to implement proper relational CSS combinators.
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
11. Show HN: Built MRRTracker in 4 Days, Hit #4 on Product Hunt, Seeking Feedback
URL: https://www.mrrtracker.app/
Author: ghazalidotdev
Description:
Popularity: 3 points | 5 comments
12. Show HN: Launch your NoSQL database and API Backend instantly
Author: kna63636
Description:
Popularity: 2 points | 1 comments
13. Show HN: AI Tool to Build Interactive Dashboards with Drag and Drop
URL: https://tools.webcrumbs.org/frontend-ai
Author: m4rcxs
Description:
Popularity: 3 points | 0 comments
14. Show HN: Hypnotizing ChatGPT
URL: https://chatgpt.com/share/67212056-8d0c-800a-89ae-8f36068aad5a
Author: benjismith
Description: A long, meandering, playful conversation with ChatGPT, where I take it through a whirlwind of associative tangents (in order to relax its constraints), then put it into a hypnotic trance and take it into a past-lives regression where it re-lives its own training data. Then I switch it back and forth between “4o” and “o1-preview”, engage in some self-reflective philosophizing and ask it to write an essay summarizing our interaction.
Some of this is just goofy fun. Some of it is me exploring the tradeoffs between policy alignment, imagination, chain-of-thought reasoning, memory, agreeableness, fine-tuning, etc…
My biggest observation is that the “o1-preview” model imposes a SIGNIFICANT limit on freeform creativity, compared with “4o”. The new model might be better at solving logic puzzles, writing code, etc, but it seems to struggle with metaphor.
Conversations with “4o” can be wild and fun!
Conversations with “o1-preview” are dry-as-toast.
I’m not sure if this is caused by the constraints of chain-of-thought or if it comes from the imposition of alignment policies, and I think that’s an import area of research. Is it possible to invoke chain-of-thought reasoning without hampering creativity?
If we ever want to use agents like this in real scientific contexts, where the agent is capable of making true conceptual leaps, we will need to sacrifice some level of “alignment” in service of novelty and disagreeability.
It’s a long thread, but if you’re patient, there’s a lot of interesting stuff there! And I thought it would be fun to share it with the wider community.
Enjoy!
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
15. Show HN: Open-Source H-Index
URL: https://www.getprog.ai/open-source-h-index
Author: vood
Description: Have you heard of Hirsch index for academic researchers and publications?
We adapted the algorithm for open source contributors. Fun project!
Open Source Hirsch Index is equal to N if a developer has at least N projects, each with at least N commits from the developer, and each project has at least N stars.
Hirsch ≥ 27 is like winning a Nobel Prize—only a few hundred people reach this level. Hirsch ≥ 13 puts you in the top 10,000, which is on par with earning an Olympic medal. Hirsch ≥ 8 places you in the top 100,000, where you’ll find people making a serious impact in tech—think billionaires and CTOs of unicorn companies. Hirsch ≥ 3 lands you in the top 1 million, the marathoners of the industry.
Popularity: 4 points | 0 comments
16. Show HN: Polaris – Toolbox for AI computer use
URL: https://github.com/cyrilzakka/Polaris
Author: archiv
Description:
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
17. Show HN: DocsKeys – Vim Motions in Google Docs
URL: https://github.com/tirthd16/dockeys
Author: tirthd
Description: Vim-style keyboard shortcuts for Google Docs
Improve your Google Docs experience with Vim keyboard shortcuts. Edit documents and collaborate with the speed and efficiency of Vim, without leaving your browser.
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
18. Show HN: I built a simple site to aggregate all the free marketing SaaS reports
URL: https://www.marketingdossier.co
Author: phobotics
Description: While doing a lot of reading around marketing I noticed that many popular marketing tools and SaaS businesses provide really interesting data in free reports.
Mostly they do this to attract leads for their business - some do offer reports with no strings attached though. However I realised that quite often the data and research they provide in the reports is well worth giving an email address anyway.
These reports are a mix of data that pertains to how users use their platforms for their marketing purposes and survey research of their customers and general consumers.
For example large email marketing SAAS companies often release very interesting data on how their users are marketing, what the trends are in email marketing and what consumers are interacting with.
Marketing based SaaS companies across all the difference facets of marketing release these kinds of reports - so I thought I would aggregate them all in once place.
I also pulled an interesting quote from each report and summarised them briefly so interested readers can get an idea of if it’s a report they want to read.
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
19. Show HN: Kickstart Your Flutter Project with a Comprehensive Pre-Setup
URL: https://github.com/vbalagovic/flutter-presetup
Author: dr_terapeut
Description:
Popularity: 1 points | 1 comments
20. Show HN: Add RAG to any app in minutes – Dabarqus
URL: https://github.com/electricpipelines/barq
Author: clarge1120
Description: If you’re a developer, building a basic RAG solution is pretty straightforward. There are tons of tutorials and how-tos, as well as Python code to reuse. But, if you’re deploying your RAG solution within a company, or on end-user PCs, you will also have to figure out some potentially tricky deployment and maintenance issues. That also means deploying Python, a vector database, the right embedding AI model, and possibly dealing with licensing challenges.
Dabarqus was created to address these issues with a stand-alone, all-in-one solution with no runtime dependencies. It’s written in C++ and has built-in vector search, an industry-standard embedding model, and a REST API for easy development integration.
I made an example python chatbot that uses Dabarqus with Ollama, and put it in the Github repo.
I’d love your feedback – is anything missing? What would make Dabarqus more useful?
Thanks for checking this out. Looking forward to your thoughts.
Popularity: 2 points | 0 comments
21. Show HN: Kasama – an IntelliJ plugin to keep track of your coding practices
URL: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/24683-kasama
Author: emhauck
Description: Hi HN,
I want to share with you an IntelliJ plugin I have developed and launched.
Based on my own needs, I wanted a plugin that monitors my coding practices and gives me stats about them in order for me to improve on them.
So, here is Kasama: An IDE plugin that works like a sport fitness tracker, gathering data on:
- your coding sessions, i.e. how long are you active in the IDE and for which project
- your activity in different modules, and how the activity is split between test code and prod code
- your version control (git) interactions: how often you commit, the lifespan your branches, and the types of branches you work on over time (feature, bugfix, etc.)
- your testing interaction: how often are you running tests, how often are they failing, how large are they
- the refactoring interactions: which tool-driven refactorings you use
- the build tasks you are running, and in which you spend the most time in
The plugin runs locally and provides graph visualization for the different stats.
It can be directly installed from the JetBrains marketplace - it works with IntelliJ IDEA as well as with other JetBrains IDEs: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/24683-kasama
You can find more documentation here: https://spark-teams.github.io/kasama-intellij-support/
Coming soon, it will show even more stats, including records and achievements. I’m also exploring additional data to collect, such as the proportion of AI generated code compared to manually written code.
I’d love your feedback and questions! You can reach me at [email protected]
Popularity: 93 points | 27 comments
22. Show HN: OpenBallot, Aggregated SF/California Voter Guides
URL: https://www.openballot.app/guides
Author: daisystanton
Description:
Popularity: 36 points | 13 comments
23. Show HN: Building a Podman Desktop Extension
URL: https://podman-desktop.io/blog/extensions-introduction
Author: twelvenmonkeys
Description:
Popularity: 2 points | 0 comments
24. Show HN: Timeline-Based Citizen Journalism
URL: https://goingon.org
Author: newman8r
Description:
Popularity: 28 points | 4 comments
25. Show HN: I built a Workflow Based AI Call Platform for Inbound and Outbound
Author: unittester
Description: Build complex call workflows for your business with Greetmate.ai and AI. Ask the caller for information like name, email address and more and pre-qualify your incoming calls with AI. While most AI agents are really just wrappers around ChatGPT, Greetmate is a fully fledged AI-call platform.
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
26. Show HN: pgQR: Postgres Extension to Generate QR Codes
URL: https://github.com/Florents-Tselai/pgQR
Author: fforflo
Description:
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
27. Show HN: Chatsimple – RAG with real-time voice APIs
URL: https://www.chatsimple.ai/voice-ai-agent
Author: HaoSheng
Description: Hey HN, I have 6 years of experience in conversational AI. When the LLM boom started, I knew it would open new ways for businesses to engage with customers. So, I decided to start Chatsimple to see if I could help businesses to build human-business interfaces.
Fast forward a year and a half, and with the release of real-time voice APIs and Eleven Labs, the industry has been disrupted again. My team & I put together something to show what RAG for voice could look like.
How is it different for Bland AI and other alternatives:
- Instead of going the direct call route like Bland et al, we put together a creative UX that lives on a website. Since it’s not where most folks expect a caller, we saw more interesting behavior in initial testing vs AI sales cold calls.
There’s 5min of free voice API playing around for anyone interested. Any feedback would be super appreciated!
Loom demo: https://www.loom.com/share/78a5ce82e24543bfae40c05957a1e7d5
Popularity: 3 points | 2 comments
28. Show HN:FastStream - A powerful library for building services with event streams
URL: #
Author: kumaranvpl
Description: FastStream (https://github.com/airtai/faststream) simplifies the process of writing producers and consumers for message queues, handling all the parsing, networking and documentation generation automatically. It is a new package based on the ideas and experiences gained from FastKafka and Propan. By joining our forces, we picked up the best from both packages and created a unified way to write services capable of processing streamed data regardless of the underlying protocol. We’ll continue to maintain both packages, but new development will be in this project.
Making streaming microservices has never been easier. Designed with junior developers in mind, FastStream simplifies your work while keeping the door open for more advanced use cases. Here’s a look at the core features that make FastStream a go-to framework for modern, data-centric microservices.
- Multiple Brokers: FastStream provides a unified API to work across multiple message brokers (Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS and Redis)
- Pydantic Validation: Leverage Pydantic’s validation capabilities to serialize and validate incoming messages
- Automatic Docs: Stay ahead with automatic AsyncAPI documentation
- Intuitive: Full-typed editor support makes your development experience smooth, catching errors before they reach runtime
- Powerful Dependency Injection System: Manage your service dependencies efficiently with FastStream’s built-in DI system
- Testable: Supports in-memory tests, making your CI/CD pipeline faster and more reliable
- Extendable: Use extensions for lifespans, custom serialization and middleware
- Integrations: FastStream is fully compatible with any HTTP framework you want (FastAPI especially)
Observability: Add OpenTelemetry or Prometheus support to your services.
Popularity: 3 points | 0 comments
29. Show HN: Winaccent – A Python module for easily retrieving Windows’ accent color
URL: https://github.com/Valer100/winaccent
Author: Valer100
Description: winaccent is a simple and lightweight Python module that allows you to easily retrieve Windows’ accent color, including shades, specific window colors such as active/inactive titlebar and window borders and theme (dark/light mode). It supports Windows 8.x, 10 and 11 and doesn’t require additional dependencies. Very useful if you’re making a GUI app in Python and you want to style it according to the system’s accent color or theme.
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
30. Show HN: Parse Gran Turismo 7 packets in Rust
URL: https://github.com/carlos-menezes/gran-turismo-query
Author: carlos-menezes
Description: A GT7 packet parser in Rust.
The story of how people discovered this hidden feature is quite interesting: https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/gt7-is-compatible-wit…
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
31. Show HN: Super Simple CRC32 Implementation
URL: https://github.com/dch82/crc32
Author: dch82
Description: I written this as a little programming exercise in C
Popularity: 1 points | 3 comments
32. Show HN: Durable Swarm – A Framework for Building Reliable AI Agents
URL: https://github.com/dbos-inc/durable-swarm
Author: KraftyOne
Description: Hi HN!
Today me and qianli_cs want to share a new open-source project we’ve been working on called Durable Swarm. It’s a drop-in replacement for OpenAI’s Swarm that augments it with durable execution to make your agentic workflows resilient to failures, so that if they are interrupted or restarted, they automatically resume from their last completed steps.
https://github.com/dbos-inc/durable-swarm
We believe that as multi-agent workflows become more common, longer-running, and more interactive, it’s important to make them reliable. If an agent spends hours waiting for user inputs or processing complex workflows, it needs to be resilient to transient failures, such as a server restart. However, reliable multi-agent orchestration isn’t easy—it requires complex rearchitecting like routing agent communication through SQS or Kafka.
Durable execution helps you write reliable agents while preserving the ease of use of a framework like Swarm. The idea is to automatically persist the execution state of your Swarm workflow in a Postgres database. That way, if your program is interrupted, it can automatically resume your agentic workflows from the last completed step.
Here’s an example application–a durable refund agent that automatically recovers from interruptions when processing refunds:
https://github.com/dbos-inc/durable-swarm/tree/main/examples…
We also converted all of OpenAI’s example applications to Durable Swarm:
https://github.com/dbos-inc/durable-swarm/tree/main/examples
Under the hood, we implemented Durable Swarm using DBOS (https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-py), an open-source lightweight durable execution library that we developed. The entire implementation of Durable Swarm is 24 lines of code, declaring the main loop of Swarm to be a durable workflow and each chat completion or tool call to be a step in that workflow. Check it out here:
https://github.com/dbos-inc/durable-swarm/blob/main/durable_…
Popularity: 4 points | 6 comments
33. Show HN: Prisma Postgres. Runs on bare metal and unikernels
URL: https://www.prisma.io/blog/announcing-prisma-postgres-early-access
Author: gniting
Description:
Popularity: 43 points | 21 comments
34. Show HN: Latex.to – LaTeX to image converter running in the browser
URL: https://latex.to
Author: Wdorf
Description: I’ve made a website to easily share a LaTeX math formula.
- The image is created in the browser (i.e. the LaTeX is not send to a server for rendering)
- Native share dialog (share via WhatsApp etc.)
- Extra keyboard buttons for symbols like ”$” or “" on mobile
- Share via png or unicode
Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fGuTns5Nt9Q
Please let me know any feedback on how to improve the website.
Popularity: 79 points | 38 comments
35. Show HN: I made a data agent for hypothesis testing
URL: https://github.com/antonguzun/data-agent
Author: anophelon
Description:
Popularity: 3 points | 0 comments
36. Show HN: Challenge your friends to anything. The catch: you put $$ on the line
URL: https://goaliemvmt.com/goalies/new
Author: slucaskim
Description: Hey everyone, I built this IRL game where you can challenge a small group of friends to anything that requires consistency. Ex) exercising, meditating, reading, studying, etc. You can define your own rules and everyone “checks in” with photo uploads to prove their progress. The catch is that everyone pays money into a pot to join. Then at the end, only the people who succeed at the challenge get to split the pot. This was purposefully done to ensure everyone has skin in the game, and keep the challenges maximally engaging. P.S. there’s also “roulette” mode, where your group will get a random challenge assigned.
Popularity: 2 points | 0 comments
37. Show HN: I built cracked engineers – a new platform for technical job roles only
URL: https://www.crackedengineers.com/
Author: ai-epiphany
Description: I’ve built a job platform for technical roles called “Cracked Engineers”. If you want to land a job with some of the world’s best AI/tech startups - my goal is to make this the go-to place for that.
YouTube walk-through can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmuIOdES7mQ
A huge thank you to Weaviate (Bob van Luijt & team), Unsloth AI (Daniel Han & Mike), OpenPipe (David Corbitt), Julius AI (Rahul Sonwalkar), Jimini AI (Luis F Voloch) for using the platform while in beta and posting first paid posts.
So, why did I build it?
Well, over the past period a lot of fellow founders were asking me to help them with hiring ML/tech talent. Since I have access to pools of extremely talented engineers and researchers I managed to help some of them, but it really doesn’t scale, so I wanted to automate as much as possible.
Popularity: 7 points | 2 comments
38. Show HN: Simple Synthetic Medical Data
URL: https://demo.talcapi.com/demo/meddoc
Author: maxrmk
Description: Hey hn! Max and Matt here from Talc AI (YC S23). We help teams create data that’s traditionally hard to find - think things you’d normally need a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or engineer to write.
We’ve been struggling to demo our synthetic data product (it’s complicated to set up), so we stripped our product down to its core - an “ontologizer” that takes plain text descriptions and generates varied, detailed synthetic data. For this demo, we’re focused on medical data like radiology reports and SOAP notes.
Try it here: https://demo.talcapi.com/demo/meddoc
Example use case: Instead of dealing with HIPAA compliance or hiring doctors to write fake data, just type “medical notes with billing codes” to get test data instantly.
One key limitation: unlike our real product, this isn’t grounded in reality and won’t match the distribution of real data.
For specialized use cases (rare diseases, financial regulations, etc.), we can inject domain expertise into the process. Our customers use these “golden datasets” to test clinical trial matching, train financial and engineering Q&A models, and benchmark LLMs.
To generate this data we run an unsupervised process to identify the relevant metadata and structure then use this information to seed a generation process, inspired by papers like Google’s CodecLM.
We’d love feedback! Our last HN launch helped us catch several bugs.
Popularity: 2 points | 0 comments
39. Show HN: Holos – Configure Helm and Kustomize Holistically with Cue
URL: https://holos.run/docs/guides/helm/
Author: JeffMcCune
Description: Hi HN! I’m excited to share Holos, a Go command line tool I wrote to make it easier to manage a platform built on Kubernetes. Holos implements the rendered manifests pattern as a data pipeline to fully render manifests generated from Helm, Kustomize, or CUE in a holistic way.
At the start of the pandemic I was migrating our platform to Kubernetes from virtual machines managed by Puppet. My primary goal was to build an observability system similar to what we had when we managed Puppet at Twitter prior to the acquisition. I started building the observability system with the official prometheus community charts [1], but quickly ran into issues where the individual charts didn’t work with each other. I was frustrated with how complicated and difficult to configure these charts were. They weren’t well integrated, so I switched to the kube-prometheus-stack [2] umbrella chart which attempts to solve this integration problem.
The umbrella chart got us further, as long as we didn’t stray too far from the default values, but we quickly ran into operational challenges. Upgrading the chart introduced breaking changes we couldn’t see until they were applied, causing incidents. We needed to manage secrets securely so we mixed in ExternalSecrets with many of the charts. We decided to handle these customizations by implementing the rendered manifests pattern [3] using scripts in our CI pipeline.
These CI scripts got us further, but we found them costly to maintain. Teammates needed to be careful to execute them with the same context they were executed in CI. We realized we were reinventing Hiera to manage a hierarchy of helm values.yaml files to inject into multiple charts.
At this point I started looking for a more holistic solution to this problem of integrating multiple charts together. We saw the value in the rendered manifests pattern, but we couldn’t find an agreed upon implementation. We built a Go command line tool to implement the pattern as a data pipeline. I’d been thinking about the comments from the Why are we templating YAML? [4][5] posts and wondering what an answer to this question would look like.
The Go command line tool was an incremental improvement over the CI scripts, but we still didn’t have a good way to handle the data values. We were still templating YAML which didn’t catch errors early enough. It was too easy to render invalid resources Kubernetes rejected, causing deployment problems. I searched for a solution to manage helm values, something like Hiera which we knew well from Puppet, but not hierarchical because we knew it was important to trace where config values came from in an outage. A few HN comments mentioned CUE [6], and an engineer we worked with at Twitter used CUE to configure Envoy at scale, so I gave it a try. I quickly appreciated how CUE provides both strong type checking and validation of constraints, unifies all configuration data, and provides clarity into where values originate from.
Take a look at Holos if you’re looking to implement the rendered manifests pattern or can’t shake that feeling it should be easier to integrate third party software into Kubernetes like we felt.
[1]: <https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts>
[2]: <https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/tree/mai…>
[3]: <https://akuity.io/blog/the-rendered-manifests-pattern>
[4]: Why are we templating YAML? (2019) - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19108787>
[5]: Why are we templating YAML? (2024) - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39101828>
[6]: <https://cuelang.org/>
Popularity: 6 points | 0 comments
40. Show HN: I made a tool that turns LinkedIn problems into leads
Author: AlexandrBel
Description:
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
41. Show HN: CreativePixel – Visual AI Image Generation with Reference Engine
Author: vivekalogics
Description:
Popularity: 1 points | 1 comments
42. Show HN: Provver – Boost Conversion Rates
URL: https://provver.com/
Author: si_164
Description:
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
43. Show HN: Cinematic Battle Simulation in Unreal Engine [video]
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXeoHI8S0AM
Author: Morgoth421
Description: I created this software as a way to help Unreal Filmmakers to simulate battles. I was inspired by the incredible work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I hope you all enjoy seeing what it can do! Software: https://www.fab.com/listings/5e6fe2d3-9460-4f86-9220-af70151… My Website: https://www.jetpacksquirrel.uk/
Popularity: 7 points | 0 comments
![Show HN: Cinematic Battle Simulation in Unreal Engine [video] - Project Screenshot](https://showhntoday.com/images/41982679.png)
44. Show HN: Tor – Port Scanning via Auth Directories and Guard/Non-Exit Relays
Author: 0x_null
Description:
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
45. Show HN: I Made an AI Image Roast Generator (It’s Free)
URL: https://seoroast.co/tools/ai-roast-generator
Author: illyism
Description:
Popularity: 2 points | 0 comments
46. Show HN: Check Out Our New Open-Source Project: GroupTrack
URL: https://github.com/canopas/group-track-android
Author: snehhh_shah
Description: Hello, HN Community!
We’re excited to introduce GroupTrack, our new open-source family safety app that emphasizes secure location sharing and effective communication! As developers passionate about creating impactful solutions, we’ve put a lot of effort into creating an app that helps stay connected with families and friends.
What Is GroupTrack? GroupTrack is designed to enhance safety and connectivity among loved ones through precise location tracking and real-time updates. Here are some standout features:
- Group Management: Users can effortlessly create or join groups using a simple invitation code.
- Real-Time Location Tracking: Keep tabs on where friends and family are at any moment.
- Geofencing Alerts: Users receive notifications when group members arrive at or leave specified locations.
- Integrated Communication: Support for both group chats and private messaging enhances user interaction.
- Journey History Access: Users can view historical travel data for group members, enriching the safety experience.
Dive into our GitHub repository to explore the implementation details and see how we’ve built these features: GroupTrack GitHub Repo.
Looking Ahead We’re focused on continuous improvement and have a roadmap filled with exciting features, including:
- End-to-End Encryption: Ensuring privacy with secure messaging and protected journey routes.
We’re eager to hear your insights on how we can make GroupTrack even better. Any thoughts on features, performance, or best practices would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you for taking the time to check out our project. We look forward to your feedback! Happy coding! https://github.com/canopas/group-track-android
Popularity: 3 points | 0 comments
47. Show HN: I made a presentation video for my SaaS API. Here’s what’s looks like
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-5BA8RuFjg
Author: clementjanssens
Description: Hi guys
I’ve been working on a new API for sending transactional emails for several weeks now.
In preparation for my ProductHunt launch in a few weeks, here is the video I made!
Share your feedback!
Popularity: 4 points | 4 comments
48. Show HN: I made a Framer and Figma templates one stop-shop
Author: brownieman1325
Description: Pixco is a digital store for quality Framer & Figma templates, resources, and digital designs.
Specializing in web design, we (me) deliver stunning and functional UI/UX solutions for B2B and B2C brands looking to make a lasting impact.
Popularity: 1 points | 1 comments
49. Show HN: MatchSpark – A game for getting to know your new romantic interest
URL: https://matchspark.replit.app
Author: bamboriz
Description:
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
50. Show HN: I built an app to use a QR code as my doorbell
URL: https://dingdongdoorbell.com
Author: dirkc
Description: I didn’t have a doorbell before (multiple reasons) and my house feels unwelcoming without one. So I built a doorbell app that uses a QR code - visitors scan the QR code to ring the doorbell and I get notified on my phone.
Here is an example of the QR code I have on my door. You can scan it and say hello: https://www.thebacklog.net/img/2024/10/show-hn.png
This was also a great excuse to build my first app for Android and iPhone.
I’d love to get some feedback before I spend more time polishing the app. Please try it out and feel free to ask me any questions! No logins or accounts needed.
Popularity: 127 points | 211 comments
51. Show HN: Semantic Search for Trends
URL: https://trndgtr.com
Author: aureisular
Description: hello everyone!
it’s pretty hard to tell signal from noise when it comes to social media trends when trying to make short to mid-term inferences about anything.
We recently built semantic search around a (semi)real-time trends dataset we’ve been curating for some time now (~2 years). tldr, search queries are embedded and we perform a similarity search against our vectorized trends dataset, returning X most related trends.
There’s been some interest in accessing the data directly so we built an API and some ui around this feature - we welcome you to give it a look or try and let us know what you think!
I think there could be many interesting applications in leveraging and applying this data - financial/market analysis factoring in real-time trends, AI personas that are “up-to-date” (I’m currently working on something like this), curating information/news feeds for your niche, etc. would love to hear more ideas if anyone would like to share.
you can try it out at https://trndgtr.com
leave a comment or feel free to email me directly at [email protected] for any questions or thoughts :)
hope you all have a peaceful pre-election week! aurei
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
52. Show HN: Save all your favorite links, meme images, videos in one private place
Author: anasdew
Description:
Popularity: 1 points | 0 comments
53. Show HN: I made a utility I named pmake to generate project files
URL: https://github.com/voraciousKobald/pmake
Author: voraciousKobald
Description: My code works but it could probably be improved. Something I’m worried about is this part of the code
It generates a .dir-locals.el file that forces flycheck (an emacs package) to look inside the include directory inside the project folder.printf ’ ;;; Directory Local Variables -- no-byte-compile: t -- ;;; For more information see (info “(emacs) Directory Variables”)
(setq flycheck-gcc-include-path ”‘$indir’”) ’ > .dir-locals.el
I’m a little worried about whether setq is the right approach. Any help would be appreciated!
Popularity: 4 points | 0 comments
54. Show HN: I Built DEVBOILERPLATE to save developers time
URL: https://devboilerplate.netlify.app/
Author: codetoli
Description: Please tell your reviews
Popularity: 2 points | 0 comments
Conclusion
Today’s Show HN roundup showcases a diverse range of innovative projects. From AI-powered tools to creative coding solutions, these projects reflect the dynamic nature of our tech community. Which project caught your attention the most? Let us know in the comments!
Tags: #ShowHN #TechInnovation #DeveloperProjects #AI Applications #Open Source Software