Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion
24 by engomez | 5 comments on Hacker News. Hi HN, Nick here. We’re launching OpenKnowledge ( https://ift.tt/tuhiQ5T ), a “what you see is what you get” markdown editor that has direct integrations with Claude, Codex, and Cursor. Available as MacOS app or CLI. Fully free/local and OSS ( https://ift.tt/gMfdaPl ). We built this because we wanted a “Google docs” like experience for writing and sharing markdown files across our team. Obsidian is the best alternative we tried, but found it doesn’t have a true “what you see is what you get” UI and it didn’t integrate well with Claude/Codex outside of community plugins. So we built OpenKnowledge. It takes shape as: 1. A MacOS app with a file navigator, the WYSIWYG editor, and link explorer. 2. Integrations with the Claude, Codex, and Cursor desktop apps. The agents can open an OpenKnowledge editor within their embedded web browsers for a side-by-side experience. 3. Built-in mcps, skills, and RAG for LLM-wiki and “AI Second Brain” scenarios + spec writing 4. An embedded terminal and CLI for TUI-first users OSS stack includes: Tiptap/prosemirror, CodeMirror, yjs (CRDT), Electron (MacOS app), Orama, remark/rehype/micromark/mdast, @pierre/trees On the architecture side, the interesting eng. challenges included: 1. A pipeline to convert ProseMirror to markdown in a bidirectional lossless way. ProseMirror uses ASTs, which are not designed to have byte-fidelity. 2. A dual-observer CRDT to keep the ProseMirror and markdown state in-sync. The CRDT + git also power a collaborative experience that shows what Agents are doing in the markdown, have undo/redo, and version history. The “Share” and cloud-sync functionality are geared for team collaboration. They feel “no-code” but leverage git/GitHub under the hood, which also means data stays fully private. In that spirit, we made OpenKnowledge open source for anybody who’s curious or who’d like to contribute. We’re actively thinking about plugins/extensibility and what’s next. If you have suggestions or feedback, would love to hear it.
Show HN: LookAway, a Mac break reminder that knows when not to interrupt
10 by _kush | 0 comments on Hacker News. Hello, I'm Kushagra and I am the indie developer behind LookAway (I've posted about it earlier but it has received quite a lot of updates since the last time so I am posting it again). LookAway is a native break reminder for macOS that doesn't interrupt. I built it because I work from home and I spend a lot of time in front of my screens. It's very easy for me to get lost in the flow and I can end up sitting for hours. Due to this, I started facing issues like eye strain and back pain by the end of the day. The solution to this was simply taking enough breaks throughout the day. But remembering to take breaks was difficult, especially when I was in the flow. I tried some reminder apps but the problem with those was that they always interrupted me at the worst moments. So I ended up not using them. LookAway is designed not to interrupt. It gives enough heads up before a break so that you're not caught off-guard. It's also context-aware and it automatically pauses when you go into a meeting, start watching a video, record screen, and much more. It even waits for you to finish typing or dictating when a break is due. One thing worth mentioning is the free iOS counterpart LookAway Mirror. When your Mac goes on a break, your iOS devices can also mirror the same break so you don't end up scrolling your phone screen during the Mac break. I've spent a lot of time in making LookAway the least annoying break reminder app and I would love to know your thoughts. It's a native Swift app so it doesn't take much resources (150MB RAM and <1% CPU when idle). It's available to download from the website (lookaway.com), Setapp, and the App Store. Thank you!
Show HN: CleverCrow: give tokens to your favorite projects
12 by zhubert | 4 comments on Hacker News. Howdy all. I'm Zack :wave:. I've been thinking about the problem of misguided AI pull requests and figured I'd throw a possible solution out there for feedback. Basically, CleverCrow lets supporters give tokens to a GitHub repo (or set of issues in that repo) for the maintainers to use to build/fix stuff. The fun implementation challenges have been around implementing the pooling dynamics and keeping the maintainers in charge while the backers are motivated to support their work.
Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call
10 by AG342 | 2 comments on Hacker News. I'm the developer of Trace, a non-intrusive, shortcut-driven Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on-device. I know, another meeting transcription app. Please bear with me though, I'm confident that this is at least a little novel. I primarily built Trace for myself. I'd been using MacWhisper, but there was enough fiddling before each call that I'd forget to start it and walk out of an hour-long meeting with nothing written down. So the things I cared about most were that it's quick to activate and stays out of the way. You activate Trace by pressing a global shortcut (configurable), which reveals a small bar at the bottom of your screen (there's also a keystroke and/or option to hide it entirely if you'd rather not see it at all). As I was building it I wanted to bake in a couple of workflows I'd wished for in other transcription apps. 1. Mid-meeting you can press another global shortcut to mark a "key moment" and type a note. The note shows up in the resulting transcript inline at that timestamp. I wanted to add this because I kept catching myself thinking "wait, that bit matters" in meetings and reaching to jot it down in a separate app like Obsidian, which I then needed to add context to, which took me out of the meeting. I use it all the time. If I paste the transcript into an LLM afterwards (which I find myself doing more and more these days) the important moments are flagged so it doesn't gloss over them. This is more noticeable in longer meetings with lots of topics.
2. With another keyboard shortcut you can summon a rough live recap (subtitles, basically) to quickly recap what's just been said. Trace uses standard macOS microphone and system recording APIs to capture both sides of the conversation as two separate tracks and then runs the system side through on-device diarization to identify speakers. Right now we only label them as "Speaker 1", "Speaker 2", etc but there are plans for speaker labelling in the future. You can also show a "live recap" as the call is happening to review what someone just said. All transcription models run on your machine. To be clear though, Trace doesn't do any of the summarising itself, it just produces a markdown transcript, so if you want summaries then you need to pass the output to an AI. The app is sandboxed and your audio/transcripts are never uploaded anywhere - they just exist as audio files and markdown on disk. The only network call Trace is required to make is on the first run to download the speech and speaker models (around 500MB) from Hugging Face, and after that it can be used fully offline. If enabled, a Google Calendar integration can auto-name sessions but that needs a network connection. The app is £9.99 on the macOS App Store. I've been using it every day for months now and I'm super happy with how it's improved my workflow. Feedback very welcome.
Show HN: I built a Red Flag Warning zone-check tool for the East Bay in 48h
7 by vedant28t | 0 comments on Hacker News. Hey HN. I'm a high schooler in Fremont, CA. Tuesday morning I got a county-wide AC Alert text telling everyone in Alameda County to prepare a go-bag for an East Bay Hills Red Flag Warning that starts tonight at 11 PM. The text went to ~half a million phones. The actual NWS warning polygon only covers East Bay Hills (NWS zone CAZ515). Most people who got the text don't need a go-bag tonight. Some in the hills don't realize how close they are. So I built this tool - https://ift.tt/hoMS8Ff mit licensed public github - https://ift.tt/Xzwx2io It does a few things - tells people if they are in the flagged zone, and also provides a way to check if a buddy is in flagged zone and send them a text. Everything without installing an app. I heard back from Oakland Firesafe Council director about a gap in my understanding (and the tool). To my surprise, and through feedback, I realized that you cannot assume that only the flagged area is at risk. Adjacent areas are at risk too! Fires do not follow zone boundaries! I fixed the tool. I built this in 48 hours to close that specific gap: type your address, get a yes/no on whether the NWS polygon covers it, your Genasys evacuation zone, tonight's wind + humidity at your point, a plain-English action checklist, a per-school decision view for East Bay districts, and a one-tap iMessage buddy-check template for a hill-neighbor at 10:30 PM.
Inside FAISS: Billion-Scale Similarity Search
12 by tohms | 0 comments on Hacker News. Author here. I wrote this as a visual companion to the 2017 FAISS paper ( https://ift.tt/dXvcaU5 ), focused on the parts I found hardest to grok from text alone. The article covers a subset of what FAISS does, with the paper as the source of truth. NSG, FastScan, IMI are not covered here, they'll get their own articles. I'd be especially interested in feedback on: - the IVFPQ / IVFADC explanation, particularly the LUT reuse argument - whether the GPU part captures enough of the actual complexity Happy to answer questions.
Show HN: Cost.dev (YC W21) – making agents cost-aware and cheaper to call
7 by akh | 1 comments on Hacker News. We launched Infracost on HN five years ago ( https://ift.tt/DexZnp2 ) where our CLI generated cost estimates for infra-as-code, e.g. "this Terraform PR adds $400/mo". The idea was to shift cloud costs (FinOps) left, so engineers get visibility of costs before deployment and make better decisions. Earlier this year we started seeing agent traffic in our logs and it looked like coding agents were calling our CLI. But that CLI wasn't designed with coding agents in mind. We went down a philosophical rabbit hole to see if a CLI is even needed anymore given that Claude, Copilot et al. already follow best practices. Ultimately we decided to create a new CLI from the ground up with coding agents in mind for two reasons: 1. We optimized the CLI for agent callers and cut Claude's output token usage by up to 79% and API cost by up to 67% versus a bare-Claude baseline. We wrote a blog documenting our lessons on optimizing user token usage when designing a CLI, e.g. using predicate flags so the agent doesn't compose jq | python | wc pipelines, output format that strips JSON's redundant field names. The blog is here: https://ift.tt/dG81sXw... 2. With cloud costs, precision matters. Telling a coding agent "make this Terraform cost-optimized" can be expensive and lossy. You burn tokens loading code and policy context into every conversation. Your agent could make up a price and you wouldn't know because it's difficult to verify that across the ~10M price points that AWS, Azure and Google have. The CLI runs static analysis on the code, uses the latest prices from cloud vendors, and passes that context to the coding agent. So that's what we're launching today - Cost.dev: https://cost.dev/ . - It runs locally. Your code never leaves your machine, you get a fast feedback loop, and you're not burning API calls per character when you want to fetch prices. - The CLI does the deterministic work. Fetching price points, scanning the code, validating fixes. The coding agent does the natural-language part. You don't have to trust the LLM to remember the rules, and can verify it called the right CLI command. - It provides a consistent rule layer across every tool you use. Get cost estimates in your IDE and your coding agent with a single install. We support Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, as well as IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains Before we keep building more in that direction, I want to sanity-check with HN: is "agents writing IaC in prod" actually a thing yet, or am I betting on a future that's still a year out? I know software developers are using coding agents heavily, but are platform/infra folks doing that for prod too? Also, if you have any feedback on Cost.dev, I'd love to hear it!