Hello HN!
I've spent years debugging Windows crashes with tools that were either friendly but limited (e.g. Visual Studio) or powerful but archaic (e.g. WinDbg). I developed patterns and methods for understanding what was going on, and decided to build it into a much more effective debugging tool called ForensicDbg.
I built a modern interface to minimize the friction when debugging. All of the data shown to you is analyzed, interpreted, and presented to you clearly, so you can focus on what matters. Everything is interlinked so you can quickly and intuitivly navigate through the process space.
ForensicDbg comes with an MCP server which allows for agenic debugging. The work done to interpret and interlink your data also benefits AI tools. It removes the risk of hallucinations while building a stable foundation for them to work from without spending tokens.
If you want to try it out you can sign up and get a free beta license here: https://www.forensicdbg.com/beta
A joke tool that abuses OpenType's ligature feature to mix fonts. It works pretty fast on client-side by loading Python in WASM.
Hello HN!
On these weekends, I was sitting and thinking about where our industry is going, and how fun it was earlier, when we wrote more code than chat messages. The thoughts quickly turned into a wish to build something like we did earlier. In my case, it ended up as something much "earlier" than I had in mind initially...
So, Conway's Game of Life running from a 512-byte x86 boot sector. Maybe you will find it interesting. I tried to comment the code as much as possible, which might be especially useful if you are learning assembly.
Have fun!
I built an independent reimplementation of the QBasic 1.1 compiler, virtual machine, and IDE that runs entirely in the browser. TypeScript with a Svelte 5 frontend.
Hi HN! I built JevBench because Jev kicks ass, and the world deserves to know how the serious open source and fake lookalike projects really perform in comparison.
Jev-class models return bounded choices and probabilities instead of text, and are disruptively faster and cheaper than LLMs, while being similarly intelligent on the text input they operate on.
JevBench allows looking at accuracy, latency and price all at once, in a weighted way - you can even configure the weighting.
A full run asks 534 English decisions. The v1.3 score combines chance-corrected Intelligence, Calibration, Speed and Cost.
Leaderboard right now:
#1 - Jev 74.4
#2 - SemIf 73.1
#3 - djev 73.0
#4 - Winnow-12B Q8 71.2
#5 reflex 4B 70.3.
https://github.com/fstandhartinger/jevbench
Two no-signup demos:
https://who-is-right.app.mintapis.com
https://is-it-ai-slop.app.mintapis.com
Limitations: English-only; latency from one German server; local/demo latency gets a disclosed ×2 adjustment (+150 ms on my servers) which is an informed assumption; held-out prompts still reach evaluated services; ~1-point gaps can be noise.
Wdyt?
Hi HN,
I just open sourced the DSL that our harness in grep.ai uses to turn repeatable parts of agent work into workflows. You can combine tool calls, code, Jev-powered system one decisions for things like routing and screening evidence, and agents when a step needs more investigation.
Our harness uses the traces and retro notes agents leave behind when doing a job to figure out which parts can become a workflow. The idea is to make the work easier to understand and avoid paying for a full agent loop where one isn’t needed. For example, a research workflow can split a question into subquestions, send agents to research them in parallel, use Jev to screen the evidence, and have another agent write the report. You can inspect the steps, evaluate the evidence screening separately, or change one agent without rebuilding everything.
The DSL and examples are in our GitHub. There’s a scripted demo you can run without API keys: https://github.com/Parcha-ai/agentrun
You can also use it as a Pi extension to build, inspect, and run workflows: https://github.com/Parcha-ai/agentrun#use-it-in-pi
I would love to hear if this is useful to others.
More background on how AgentRun works in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOVhtGjtwpg. Or read about our use cases in this article: https://x.com/MiguelriosEN/status/2101029313906987422.
I created Drop because I always felt uneasy installing and running third-party programs using my main user account. A single compromised dependency means a full compromise of the system. What is even worse, because I ship software from my computer, a single compromised dependency can lead to compromise of all the users of my software.
Containers and VMs are one solution, but for local work, they are often detrimental to productivity. It takes effort to configure a machine with all the tools and configs needed for productive work, but a container or a VM will be stripped of all these tools. This is great for production deployments, where the aim is a reproducible system with minimal dependencies, but can get in the way of productive local work.
Drop is language independent, but the workflow is inspired by Python's virtualenv. With virtualenv the environment isolation is only a convention that relies on installed dependencies being good citizens. With Drop the isolation is enforced.
Each Drop environment gets its own writable and easily disposable home dir, with only selected config files and dirs from the original home mounted, mostly read-only.
Drop uses Linux namespaces for isolation (user, mount, network, PID, IPC, cgroup), doesn't require root and, as an option, uses gVisor user-space kernel, which adds protection against exploiting host kernel vulnerabilities to escape the sandbox.
I don't want to make the introductory post too lengthy, but I'm here to answer any questions and give any additional technical details.
Note: This is my 3rd submission of the project, the first two did not draw attention. Since then I have added support for gVisor and created a project website to better explain the concept and organize documentation.