Show HN: Lamp Carousel – DIY kinetic sculpture powered by lamp heat
5 by Evidlo | 0 comments on Hacker News. I wanted to share this fun craft activity for the holidays that I've been doing with my family over the last few years. I came up with these while cutting up some cans trying to make an aluminum version of paper spinners. There are a variety of shapes that work, but generally bigger+lighter spinners are better. Also incandescent bulbs are the best, but LEDs work too. They remind me of candle carousels I would see at my grandparents' house during Christmas. Let me know what you think!
Show HN: HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HN
11 by hubraumhugo | 3 comments on Hacker News. I was looking for some fun project to play around with the latest Gemini models and ended up building this :) Enter your username and get: - Generated roasts and stats based on your HN activity 2025 - Your personalized HN front page from 2035 (inspired by a recent Show HN [0]) - An xkcd-style comic of your HN persona It uses the latest gemini-3-flash and gemini-3-pro-image (nano banana pro) models, which deliver pretty impressive and funny results. A few examples: - dang: https://ift.tt/0aSAGow - myself: https://ift.tt/Kro1w2L Give it a try and share yours :) Happy holidays! [0] https://ift.tt/KXg9sAS
Show HN: Paper2Any – Open tool to generate editable PPTs from research papers
6 by Mey0320 | 0 comments on Hacker News. Hi HN, We are the OpenDCAI group from Peking University. We built Paper2Any, an open-source tool designed to automate the "Paper to Slides" workflow based on our DataFlow-Agent framework. The Problem: Writing papers is hard, but creating professional architecture diagrams and slides (PPTs) is often more tedious. Most AI tools just generate static images (PNGs) that are impossible to tweak for final publication. The Solution: Paper2Any takes a PDF, text, or sketch as input, understands the research logic, and generates fully editable PPTX (PowerPoint) files and SVGs. We prioritize flexibility and fidelity—allowing you to specify page ranges, switch visual styles, and preserve original assets. How it works: 1. Multimodal Reading: Extracts text and visual elements from the paper. You can now specify page ranges (e.g., Method section only) to focus the context and reduce token usage. 2. Content Understanding: Identifies core contributions and structural logic. 3. PPT Generation: Instead of generating one flat image, it generates independent elements (blocks, arrows, text) with selectable visual styles and organizes them into a slide layout. Links: - Demo: http://dcai-paper2any.cpolar.top/ - Code (DataFlow-Agent): https://ift.tt/rDeyGIR We'd love to hear your feedback on the generation quality and the agent workflow!
Show HN: SIM – Apache-2.0 n8n alternative
20 by waleedlatif1 | 0 comments on Hacker News. Hey HN, Waleed here. We're building Sim ( https://sim.ai/ ), an open-source visual editor to build agentic workflows. Repo here: https://ift.tt/nuJwypC . Docs here: https://docs.sim.ai . You can run Sim locally using Docker, with no execution limits or other restrictions. We started building Sim almost a year ago after repeatedly troubleshooting why our agents failed in production. Code-first frameworks felt hard to debug because of implicit control flow, and workflow platforms added more overhead than they removed. We wanted granular control and easy observability without piecing everything together ourselves. We launched Sim [1][2] as a drag-and-drop canvas around 6 months ago. Since then, we've added: - 138 blocks: Slack, GitHub, Linear, Notion, Supabase, SSH, TTS, SFTP, MongoDB, S3, Pinecone, ... - Tool calling with granular control: forced, auto - Agent memory: conversation memory with sliding window support (by last n messages or tokens) - Trace spans: detailed logging and observability for nested workflows and tool calling - Native RAG: upload documents, we chunk, embed with pgvector, and expose vector search to agents - Workflow deployment versioning with rollbacks - MCP support, Human-in-the-loop block - Copilot to build workflows using natural language (just shipped a new version that also acts as a superagent and can call into any of your connected services directly, not just build workflows) Under the hood, the workflow is a DAG with concurrent execution by default. Nodes run as soon as their dependencies (upstream blocks) are satisfied. Loops (for, forEach, while, do-while) and parallel fan-out/join are also first-class primitives. Agent blocks are pass-through to the provider. You pick your model (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, vLLM), and and we pass through prompts, tools, and response format directly to the provider API. We normalize response shapes for block interoperability, but we're not adding layers that obscure what's happening. We're currently working on our own MCP server and the ability to deploy workflows as MCP servers. Would love to hear your thoughts and where we should take it next :) [1] https://ift.tt/uF93oWP [2] https://ift.tt/NBbEyAC
Show HN: Automated license plate reader coverage in the USA
4 by sodality2 | 1 comments on Hacker News. Built this over the last few days, based on a Rust codebase that parses the latest ALPR reports from OpenStreetMaps, calculates navigation statistics from every tagged residential building to nearby amenities, and tests each route for intersection with those ALPR cameras (Flock being the most widespread). These have gotten more controversial in recent months, due to their indiscriminate large scale data collection, with 404 Media publishing many original pieces ( https://ift.tt/suIFdBU ) about their adoption and (ab)use across the country. I wanted to use open source datasets to track the rapid expansion, especially per-county, as this data can be crucial for 'deflock' movements to petition counties and city governments to ban and remove them. In some counties, the tracking becomes so widespread that most people can't go anywhere without being photographed. This includes possibly sensitive areas, like places of worship and medical facilities. The argument for their legality rests upon the notion that these cameras are equivalent to 'mere observation', but the enormous scope and data sharing agreements in place to share and access millions of records without warrants blurs the lines of the fourth amendment.
Juan Orlando Hernández, once called the key figure in a drug trafficking scheme that flooded America with over 400 tonnes of cocaine, walks free after the pardon.