Show HN: Pointless but mostly-exact clone of Hacker News https://ift.tt/3gokGAr

Show HN: Pointless but mostly-exact clone of Hacker News Source code: https://ift.tt/xFpRTs6 I had more things I wanted to do with this, but I should probably admit to myself I probably won't be. The original idea was for https://ift.tt/lUIizhx to be "Hacker News, but all the comments are AI." Right now it's "Hacker News, but all the comments are the same as the real HN." Hence, it's completely pointless. Special thanks to dang for collaborating -- he even suggested the name for the codebase, "sharc". Development time was about four months of near daily work: https://ift.tt/ia5qtwb... Some days I'd spend a solid 16 hours on this. What's the point? None, really. Just to test the limits of my abilities and prove to myself that I could do what pg did. It's an extremely efficient port of HN to Common Lisp. One of the project's goals was to be high performance. According to benchmarks, it can generate pages very slightly slower than real HN. (dang shared some timings on a particularly busy page, along with how many views it got over a certain time period, for benchmarking throughput. I never got around to verifying whether I can handle 24 million views a day, though, so I'd imagine something might break if you scale this up. On the other hand, I think it'll hold up.) If you're particularly offended that this is copying your comments, claim your account by going to your profile (for example, I would go to https://ift.tt/la4fgmh ) and then click "claim" at the bottom. It'll ask you to put a 6 digit code into your real HN profile, at which point you'll be able to reset your cloned profile's password. Log in, go to your profile page, and set "redact" to "yes", the same way you'd set "showdead" to "yes" on HN. So, why make this? Eh, call it an art project. That's code for "It would've been a lot funnier with AI generated comments, but I seem to have stopped working on this for now." I'll post an update someday, if I can figure out how to do it without paying hundreds of dollars of API token prices. /ask and /show are missing. Those were the only two features left to clone. But pretty much everything else is there. It's been running for a couple months now, so I suppose it's stable enough for a public showing. Not that there's any reason to look. Shoo! Go find a more worthy project to devote your attention to. :) Kind of melancholy admitting that I spent four months with only something pointless to show for it. But then again, here's the punchline: go to any random comment on HN, then in the url change .com to .lol and you'll see an almost pixel perfect recreation. For example, https://ift.tt/5mI1rBq Sadly you can't form a loop, because if you edit your original comment with a link to itself, you'd only be able to go from HN to .lol to HN. But you could list both and switch between them as much as you want. For example: https://ift.tt/szmYMt5 https://ift.tt/3gokGAr This project was one of the most technically demanding things I've ever done. People look at HN and go oh, that? That looks easy. If you think so, I invite you to write it yourself -- it's an exercise that'll certainly make you a better programmer, and gain appreciation for how many subtle features we enjoy here on HN. Ha, and I just discovered a new one. I mixed up the "title" and "url" boxes just now. HN popped up a nice looking overlay that said "please enter a URL", pointing to the actual url box. https://ift.tt/l86q2Vr The HN team is always adding something or another, even if it's not always visible. Normally I'd dive into this and find out how it works and clone it, but ... eh, I'll settle for a 95% exact clone. https://ift.tt/lUIizhx October 7, 2026 at 11:35PM

Show HN: getrequest – Never lose an API request https://ift.tt/ObChzTH

Show HN: getrequest – Never lose an API request https://ift.tt/eD1gCqU October 7, 2026 at 11:31PM

Show HN: Browser-Based F1 Game https://ift.tt/t2Dykz7

Show HN: Browser-Based F1 Game Hello HN, I vibecoded a F1-styled game and it works in the browser. Check it out! https://ift.tt/yfC6PDG October 6, 2026 at 11:37PM

Show HN: Session-continuity, cryptographic proof of session chains https://ift.tt/lw8N1fY

Show HN: Session-continuity, cryptographic proof of session chains https://ift.tt/wQlIUhP October 6, 2026 at 08:22PM

Show HN: Live carbon intensity and power prices for 15 European grids https://ift.tt/v8FKnk7

Show HN: Live carbon intensity and power prices for 15 European grids https://ift.tt/7VCx0oc October 6, 2026 at 01:03AM

Show HN: Flash-Agents – DSH as MCP for Claude https://ift.tt/4kmDSq9

Show HN: Flash-Agents – DSH as MCP for Claude I do a lot of work using claude and codex. I use plenty of sub-agents. But nothing balances bang for the buck as good as deepseek v4.1 flash for me. So I thought, why not use the deepseek harness as MCP and drive it from claude as an orchestrator. I am probably not alone with this idea, but I haven't found something comparable. I wanted to fan out sub-agents and get back meaningful results. Well, say hello to flash-agents. With ollama as a backend driver no more training on my data (I think), and its pretty fast. I was driving a few billion tokens through that now without any issues. So I thought I'd open source it. What works for me, might work for others. Let me know what you think. If you know anything better, always welcome. Not claiming my solution is yay, but it works for me so far, and I get real productivity gain out of it. https://ift.tt/x1Wr5DL October 6, 2026 at 12:32AM

Show HN: Nightwatch – a Mac menu-bar app that tells you when tonight is clear https://ift.tt/2CQ1WAj

Show HN: Nightwatch – a Mac menu-bar app that tells you when tonight is clear Here in the north of England clear nights are at a premium, and it's never guaranteed that you'll be able to see anything but cloud. That's why I developed Nightwatch, so that I could be notified when one of those precious few nights where I could see into the heavens was available. Finding out whether tonight was worth setting up meant reading forecast charts every evening, usually to learn that it was not. Nightwatch does that reading for me. It sits in the Mac's menu bar and refreshes the forecast every 30 minutes. An hour before sunset it sends one notification, and only if there is an unbroken run of clear sky in astronomical darkness long enough to image in. Otherwise it says nothing: no news means "clouds". I hope this is useful for other hobbyist stargazers too! When I was a child I wanted desperately to be an astronaut or a dinosaur. I'm now old enough to be the latter and was born in a country where the former was never an option. I've had a fascination with the stars since a a friend of my father gifted me a telescope, and have faded memories of sharing time with my father staring at the stars. My father passed away a few years back and the memory of those nights came back, along with the want to share the same experience with my kids and grandchild. The app uses two forecasts: Apple's WeatherKit is the main source and Open-Meteo is a second opinion. When they disagree, the alert says so instead of averaging them. Thin high cloud counts for half. Stacking many short frames works through a veil of cirrus, so treating it as full cloud threw away usable nights. It works on your own horizon: hills come from terrain data, and you set the houses and trees in each direction, so they are accounted for when it says what is up. It works out, a year ahead, when the Moon will pass in front of a planet, a bright star or the Pleiades as seen from your site. You don't need an account. What leaves the Mac is the coordinates of the place being forecast, sent to the forecast and sky-survey services listed in PRIVACY.md. Limits: Mac only, and the aurora alerts are UK only. The worldwide light-pollution data is new this week. I have checked it against Britain's finer grid and a handful of cities, so I would especially like to hear from people elsewhere whether the darkness it suggests for your site looks right. https://ift.tt/TQ37CaN October 4, 2026 at 03:01PM