Hacker News

Subscribe to Hacker News feed
Hacker News RSS
Updated: 1 hour 17 min ago

How the Atmos Clock Functions

Sun, 07/26/2026 - 8:19pm
Categories: Hacker News

PGSimCity - How PostgreSQL Works

Sun, 07/26/2026 - 8:19pm
Categories: Hacker News

Odella [video]

Sun, 07/26/2026 - 8:11pm
Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: Blind-box commerce made easy

Sun, 07/26/2026 - 8:11pm

As controversial as this new wave of e-commerce is, its extremely effective.

There's a new Pokemon pack rip site every week now. What there isn't is a way for a store that already sells things to run this themselves, so I built one.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49063696

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: Port Zero – how I learned to stop worrying and love PORT=0

Sun, 07/26/2026 - 8:03pm

Hi HN,

Recently I wasted several hours wrangling my dev environment only to find out that the browser frontend was talking to the wrong version of the backend. This got me thinking--why on earth are we still using simple numbers to describe which process to connect to? Why not use names instead? I thought of all the times a program wouldn't start because of port conflicts. The more I thought about it, the crazier it seemed.

Modern operating systems already offer no-conflict ports: if you make your TCP server listen on port 0, the OS assigns you a random available port. But that only solves half the problem.

I built the other half: PortZero. It's a GPLv3 program that watches for processes (and docker containers!) with a special PZ_TUNNEL environment variable:

PZ_TUNNEL=myapp-{branch}.portzero.local:80 npm run dev When it sees such a process or container, PortZero does this:

1. Create a virtual NIC (if it hasn't already)

2. Create a new virtual IP address

3. Create a DNS record that substitutes things like {branch} based on the working directory of the process, and points at that virtual IP address

4. Start listening on that virtual IP address on the port of your choice (e.g. port 80 for http, port 443 for https, port 5432 for postgresql)

5. Forward any TCP connections to that virtual IP address / virtual port to the random, OS-assigned port that your process or container is actually listening on

The result is you don't have to think about ports anymore, you just have to think about subdomains. You can have multiple services available on port 80 without conflicts, as long as they have different portzero.local subdomains.

It does some other cool stuff like:

- Enable HTTPS on local HTTP services by creating a local CA and registering it on your machine

- Enable cloud tunnels so you can access your apps on other devices (paid feature)

Links:

https://portzero.net/docs/

https://github.com/PortZeroNetwork/portzero

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49063648

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: Distill and serve small models with frontier quality for half the cost

Sun, 07/26/2026 - 7:35pm

Hi HN, we built world-model-optimizer, an open-source tool for continually improve models specialized to agents. Today we are launching `wmo serve`, a tool to route repetitive tasks to distilled smaller models.

Agent traces you already capture are opportunities to get signal on how to make your model cheaper, faster, better. We continuously improve - your specialized model through distillation from open source models - model routing to frontier + custom models - token compaction to remove noise and save tokens

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_m4Ze6mdko

Pass in traces and an OpenRouter key, and wmo starts a local OpenAI-compatible endpoint to run with your model at a lower cost with equivalent quality. Behind the scenes a router decides which tasks should go to the frontier versus your model. Tinker continually trains as new traces arrive.

We also offer a hosted solution for anyone that just wants a frontier quality endpoint with self-improvement over time at a 40%+ lower cost.

Sign up for the waitlist at https://experientiallabs.ai and give the repo a star!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49063454

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Why do we do astrophysics?

Sun, 07/26/2026 - 7:29pm

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10181

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49063413

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Pages