We’ve continued to get some paid customers and have exited beta last week, given everyone seemed to be quite satisfied and there hadn't been requests for changes, only some specific search providers.
Because of bots there isn’t a free trial easily available, but if you’re a human and you’d like to try it for a couple of days for free, reach out with your account number and we’ll set that up!
Thanks.
P.S.: Because people have asked before, our tech stack is intentionally very "boring" (as in, it generates and serves the HTML + bits of JS to enhance settings and such — search can be done without JS), using Deno in the backend (for easier TypeScript), PostgreSQL for the DB, and Docker for easier deploying.
I have subscribed for a month and will give it a try.
One feedback already though. Some of the German translations are...not great. For example, on the landing page under the "Not another AI tool". In English you write "We find it hard to do in a sensible, responsible, and respectful way." In the German translation its "Es fällt uns schwer, vernünftig, verantwortungsvoll und respektvoll zu handeln."
The German translation makes it sound like you (as in you as a company and person) have a hard time being respectful, not the actual AI implementation.
We are currently working with a professional technical translator for German (should get updated translations in a week or two) and will consider that for other languages, but it's quite expensive to do more of that right now.
Do you generally want feedback and have a preferred channel for it beyond hackernews comments?
I don't think Kagi is heading in a necessarily "bad" direction, though I don't agree with it, and I also think there's value in a product that's solely focused on private and personal search, that doesn't have to be as expensive, expansive (Drive, Maps, Email, etc.) or big (team and resources-wise) as they are.
I hope that makes sense!
Could you share more info about how you're building it? Like Kagi it wraps / reuses multiple other providers? How do you do that affordably, and how do you merge the results together into a good answer?
Initially we called all search providers and merged the results in a round robin fashion (so first of the first provider, first of the second provider, first of the third provider, then second of the first provider, second of the second provider, and so on), deduplicating them, but this was becoming very costly and inefficient once we had 3 and more search providers (most providers will return results within 500ms, but not infrequently one would take up to 2s or more — we timeout there, so I don't know if it'd take much more —, slowing everything down), so now we give everyone the choice of which providers to use first, and we pick results from the first two (we're actually considering switching to just the first, as costs are still a bit high and we don't want to increase pricing).
I hope that provides some more clarity! Happy to answer any more questions.
One bit of feedback from me, take it or leave it, but the name doesn't feel appealing or memorable. What does it mean?
There's no specific meaning, though I can't say I dislike the close name matches with Uruk-hai [1] and Uruk [2]! :)
Have you tried searching for meaningful words in other languages? Kagi means key in Japanese, for example. I've had luck with this approach before.
Search is _incredibly_ hard, there are reasons why there are no real Google competitors.
Is Uruky using Yandex?
It just won an award! It was awarded Players' Choice out of 700 daily web games at the Playlin awards: https://playlin.io/news/announcing-the-2025-playlin-awards-w...
Right now around 3,500 people play every day which kind of blows my mind!
It's free, web-based, and responsive. It was inspired by board games and crosswords.
I've been troubleshooting some iOS performance issues, working on user accounts, and getting ready to launch player-submitted puzzles. It's slow going though because I have limited free time and making the puzzles is time consuming!
Here's an article with more info about the award: https://cogconnected.com/2026/03/tiled-words-crowned-the-pla...
Bracket City is great! Definitely one of my favorites
My only concern is that there is a buzzing noise if the app is in the foreground and some audio is playing in the background. This is on pixel 9a
Oh interesting, thanks for the bug report! I hadn’t heard that one yet. I’ll look into it
Thank you so much for keeping it going!
- I applied to showcase the game at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game Squad. They accepted me so I was able to showcase it at the expo for a day. This got me some players right off the bat
- I shared it on HN, Reddit, Mastodon, etc.
- The website Thinky Games wrote an article about it
- The YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic shared it which got a lot of new players. More recently a couple of other YouTubers (Timotab and Stro Solves) have been posting videos regularly
- I link to it from my blog, and this unrelated rant went semi-viral in web dev circles: https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/shadcn-radio-button/
- Winning the award gave me more visibility and players
I've also tried using things like Instagram and Discord but haven't had much luck there. I don't really get how those platforms work.
To be honest I'm not great at marketing. I've just been experimenting and seeing what works.
---
I would say the most important thing is the game itself:
- I've worked hard to gather feedback and incorporate it into the gameplay.
- I focus on keeping the puzzles fresh and striking the right difficulty level. (Challenging but something most people can do in 10 minutes.)
- I built a sharing feature that ~300 or so people use a day
I think all my marketing would have been useless if people didn't like the game and want to play again and share it with their friends.
Re creating puzzles, does this mean you have to manually do them one per day? Is there a way to automate them ahead of time (as in have an app generate a bunch of puzzles you can pick from or tweak)?
Slopjective-C 3.0 https://github.com/doublemover/Slopjective-C
Whatever this is, I don't feel like explaining it, ask claude https://github.com/doublemover/PairOfCleats
And a zachtronics inspired game about building Ring Laser Oscillators in an attempt to make something that gets export controlled like the nuke building game. https://i.imgur.com/UGhT3BI.png
And a platformer for one of my favorite musicians that will be part of the media push for their next release.
And a spiritual successor to Math Blaster: In Search Of Spot to make sure my nephew and all of my friends kids are at least as good at math as I am.
F1 or ? will show the shortcut keys.
There are little +/- buttons you can click on (bottom of "Paws" button) to do this, right clicking will reset the speed.
There's also a benchmark mode, lots of other flags. This URL will run the game endlessly, spawning 10 lemmings at a time, automatically adjusting the speed to run as fast as it can, reducing speed when frames take too long. I chose a level that ensures they splat so that anyone who clicks on this and forgets about it only crashes the tab and not their browser https://doublemover.github.io/LemmingsJS-MIDI/?version=1&dif...
/s
I'm unsure what the other comment is on about, it is a fork in spirit only at this point. He is also credited in the readme, along with the excellent Lemmings community which made figuring out how every mechanic is actually supposed to function very easy.
Playing it for 1h, it reminds me of how much fun and how simple lot of games where back then - and these were blockbusters.
Today? 150 GB download from whatever game-net, the "ease joy of just entering a game and playing for some minutes" is gone with todays monster-AAA-titles
The main goal is letting people analyze their games and improve by studying their blunders. It uses stockfish and AI for analysis. You can chat with your games like "Why would I do ___ instead of this?"
Also, there are the standard puzzles and openings type learning with improvement plans.
I have built npm for LLM models, which lets you install & run 10,000+ open sourced large language models within seconds. The idea is to make models installable like packages in your code:
llmpm install llama3
llmpm run llama3
You can also package large language models together with your code so projects can reproduce the same setup easily.
Follow the docs here: https://www.llmpm.co/docs
Pro tip for your use case: Checkout the `llmpm serve` section
Why? Many yarncrafters painstakingly build spreadsheets, or try to bend existing general purpose pixel editors to their will. It's time consuming & frustrating.
Along the way, I've solved a bunch of problems:
- Automatic decreases (shapes the hat) / overstitching markers (shows when multiple colors are used in the same row)
- Parameterized designs, like waves, trees, geometric shapes. No more manually moving an object by a couple of pixels, it's a simple click & drag.
- Color palette merging (can't delete a color if you already use it in a pattern!)
- Export to PDF (so you can print it or stick it on a tablet)
- Repeat previews (visualize the pattern as it repeats horizontally)
If you drag a shape near the right edge of the canvas, you'll see it "wrapping around" onto the right edge.
This reflects the 3D reality of a hat!
I just deleted that particular if-statement so you should be able to export.
It's not anything fancy, but gets the job done. Uses pdf-lib.
https://www.youtube.com/@project-326/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@Asianometry/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@PhysicsExplainedVideos/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@TwoMinutePapers/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@DrBenMiles/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@professorjenniferhaslersci8510/vide...
What sorts of topics do you enjoy learning about on Youtube?
The basic idea is daters "teach" an algorithm what they like and then the algorithm uses the collective set of preferences to match everybody (or as many as possible) for single in-app "get to know you" chats. Everything is one-on-one to avoid overload and dead-end chats.
I now have working versions in the app stores and I'm currently testing in Seattle.
[1] geml.co [2] App Store - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/geml-dating/id6756629998 [3] Play Store - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.geml.andro...
a) how are you going to do the marketing?
b) according to my experience, all this social/viral stuff etc. does not work anymore today
c) former ideas like content & SEO -> is dead
d) nobody wants to talk today about anymore on being on a dating app?
e) And Sorry for being an Ass here: After I've lost a not-that-low-number of funds due to "following this idea" (just for prototyping/alpha & beta & final release), my recommendation is: Stop this immediately, it will save you years of your life! Im absolutely pro creating whatever app or service you may come along, but please please forget the dating market
P.S.: you will come back to this comment in 4 -5 years, latest :-)
You’re right that the 'traditional' playbook (SEO, viral loops) is largely broken for new dating entrants. Largely because I believe there's a lot of dissatisfaction with current offerings, I've been able to build a decent sized list of folks who want to try it out.
I'm curious. Given your experience, do you think there's any room left for hyper-local, community-first growth, or is the market truly locked by the incumbents regardless of the tech?
I’d love to hear more about where you saw the biggest friction points during your release.
So dating sites/apps are selling dreams, and the owners know this very precisely - thats the reason why there is no innovation: How would you innovative a product to make it better if there are some "technical" limits on how "best" your product can be?
b) a "decent sized list" is ... do not get me wrong ... bringing you nowhere: As Markus Frind, POF founder, famously said: If your app has less than 100k active users, this means nobody likes it. My experience is, depending on target area (conutry? city? local community?) the number of 100k is by far too low - its rather around 500k-1m users - AT LEAST
c) In my country, there are some fo these "hyper local" oriented dating websites, mainly for "special needs", these are the incumbents, and most of them are on the market since 20+ years. And for sure: They also have only a search form and a userdatabase to whom you can chat. Its not blocked in a sense that they are activly working against new entrants - its rather the fact that most new entrants cant survive long enough to get brand & traction awareness. Trying to launch a successful (niche)dating app with a marketing budget below 50m is going to fail, I promise.
Hister is basically a full text indexer which saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore previously visited content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines.
Here's a little summary of the background/motivation/beginnings: https://hister.org/posts/how-i-cut-my-google-search-dependen...
Project site: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister
Website: https://hister.org/ Read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
how does it handle forms or homepages with refreshed content? for example, the home page of hackernews - will it always show the latest feed from the last time i had a connection or will it store each time ive visited it ?
Currently it overwrites the previous content with the latest if there is any change, but I'd like to add option to store diffs as well in the future.
The front bump out leaks when we get driving rain. I installed some flashing but that wasn't enough, it's still leaking. So I'm working on that so I can close up the big hole in the ceiling some day.
The prior owners filled in the old coal chute with literal bags of cement sort of artistically placed in the hole in the brick foundation. So I'm trying to figure out what masonry tools and skills I'll need to close it up proper.
I'd like to build my kids a playhouse of some sort, sketching out some designs for that.
Very exciting on the playhouse. What kind of things will it have?
I'm expecting my first this year so have a ways to go before I get to work on that project
const app = new App("com.apple.finder")
const window = app.$({role: "window"})
const someButton = window.$(/* another query */)
someButton.press()
Targeted towards music producers and AI (there's one collection of snippets that starts an MCP server and exposes some basic functionality) in the beginning.
I have a fairly novel approach to operating it, and in the case of one time theft prevention security through obscurity is actually a great approach. The assailant only has a short time to pull the car apart and solve the puzzle, couple that with genuine security techniques, a physical aspect, and it should be pretty foolproof.
It can still be towed away, etc, not much to be done there except brute force physical blocks. Most cars get stolen here to do crime in that night so it's not as common.
Or time to pull the car apart
Adding a puzzle is brilliant and I would love to read a blog about this. Post it here on HN ;)
I've given myself 6 months
It's a bit scary basically 180ing like this but I figure if I don't try it now I never will
I've already started prototyping various ideas, and to be honest just sitting down and spending time doing this has been really quite lovely
One thing I'm finding fun is slowly unearthing what I actually find interesting
I started with messing around in minecraft and tinkering with rimworld-like game ideas, but I'm slowly moving away from them as I've been tinkering more and more
Don't get me wrong, I do want to revisit them at some point in the future, but I do find myself circling more around narrative, simulations and zachlikes
It's a bit of an odd mix and in some ways they look like paradox style games, but I'm well aware that taking one of those behemoths on is going to be a bit silly, so I'm trying to slim down until I get to a kernel that I actually find enjoyable tinkering with
A toy if you will
Currently I'm trying to work out if there's anything interesting in custom unit design, basically unpicking how games like rollercoaster tycoon's coaster design maps to stats like excitement ratings and seeing how that might mix with old school point buy systems
It feels like it might be small enough to be a good toy and I'm having fun tinkering with it, but I have no idea whether other people will xD
It might honestly be too niche for anyone and I've successfully optimised for an audience of one :shrug:
Essentially the hardest step is to throw yourself into the big enough fire that easier and simpler things would seem like a child's play.
Even less time is fine but throwing yourself at the hard stuff you don't know how to do is smart, cus after that If You Were to repeat it, it'd be easier for you to do.
Niche or not, it's about being satisfied of the project.
So it's more about who you are as a person, I like to throw myself into fire and I fully understand that I might get disenchanted quickly, but simpler tasks or projects will be easy easier to make.
I've got to admit throwing myself into the deep end is always how I've learned
It's been difficult at times, but in the end I've always found it more rewarding
I think I'm just struggling with trying to do something so different to what I've spent a lot of my career doing whilst being really aware this is such a challenging field
It's a bit like when I first decided to go all in on being a founder over 15 years ago
I do wonder if the problem is not so much having a place to find LAN events but actually just having enough people put on LAN events in the first place. It feels like a thing of the past with how much less people interact in person these days. It's a shame because LANs are awesome!
Have you thought about ways to make it easier for people to host LAN events? Or does this solve that as well? I guess a solution would require matching random people together. Happy to discuss more - nick at onthe.town
> I do wonder if the problem is not so much having a place to find LAN events but actually just having enough people put on LAN events in the first place.
Sort of! I did a lot of research on this before I built lan.events. There are more gamers than ever, but LANs dropped off during COVID lockdowns despite surveys showing an increasing interest in in-person events. More or less, it's actually a venue problem. Running events has incredibly thin and risky margins for something that by its very nature needs to be planned out months in advance. Everything around the events are becoming prohibitively expensive: venues, vendors, equipment rentals, etc are all eating away at the ceiling gamers will pay and the floor that organizations can charge from.
LAN.events helps tackle this by decreasing the cost per ticket and shifting that cost to the customer rather than the event manager. We don't introduce minimum event costs or percentage based pricing which lets event managers keep or give back more profits. There is more I can do in this space, but that's the biggest way I can contribute right now.
At this moment I’m working on improving the logic that decides when/how much to throttle the network.
The problem: every agent (Cline, Aider, Codex, Claude Code) has unrestricted access to your filesystem, shell, and network. When they process untrusted content — a cloned repo, a dependency README — they’re prompt injection vectors with full machine access. No existing tool evaluates what the agent actually does at the syscall level.
grith wraps any CLI agent without modification. OS-level interception captures every file open, network call, and process spawn, then runs it through 17 independent security filters in parallel across three phases (~15ms total). Composite score routes each call: auto-allow, auto-deny, or queue for async review. Most will auto approve - which eliminates approval fatigue.
Also does per-session cost tracking and audit trails as a side effect of intercepting everything.
Once I'm done with this project I'm planning on making a series of YouTube videos going into the code and the algorithms.
I'd be very interested to see your tutorial when it's done!
No idea when I'll get around to making the videos, but if you want to follow my channel it's at https://www.youtube.com/@fast_erik
It sits on top of what I already use and gives me a unified "What do I need to do (now/today)?" view.
Trying to auto-capture action items from meeting transcriptions and other inbound, and routing quick thoughts to the right tool with a couple of keystrokes, helping me prioritise my day so I'm not spending energy on too much organising (or through lack of organising getting distracted).
I wanted something that watched my inputs and keep my GTD loop running, especially when back-to-back meetings and context-switching make it really hard (or impossible) to stay on top of things I need to do!
Might also augment it with LLM for some support of task breakdown, but only as human-in-loop assistance.
Not thinking this could ever turn into a product since it's so custom.
The other project I am continuing to work on is Rad [1], a programming language tailor made for writing CLI scripts. It's not for enterprise software, it specializes specifically in CLI, offering all the essentials built-in, such as a declarative approach to arguments and generated help (as opposed to Bash where you have to roll your own arg parsing and help strings each time).
https://github.com/nickbarth/closedbots/ I was also trying to do a simplified openclaw type gui using codex. The idea being its just desktop automation, but running through codex by sending codex screenshots and asking it to complete the steps in your automation via clicks and keypresses via robotgo.
Now shifting to established SaaS companies adding AI assistants to their existing products. Some of them literally have people reading chats full time, so they actually value the experience.
Building https://lenzy.ai - 2 paid customers, 2 pilots, looking for more and figuring out positioning.
Established companies adding AI assistants is interesting because they already have baseline metrics to compare against. They know what good user experience looks like in their domain, so when the AI chat experience is terrible, it's obvious.
What's the biggest gap you're seeing between what these companies think they need to measure vs what actually matters for AI chat quality?
- UI for sandbox-exec to protect filesystem - Network sandbox per domain - Secrets filter via gitleaks - Vertical tabs option
It's highly customizable. You generate native macOS app wrappers for each terminal app, each with its own rules and customizations.
Lots of this is going to involve getting people more up to speed on CS, can't wait.
I'm working on socialproof.dev which automates that step — shareable link, structured form, one-click approve and embed. Wondering if that kind of tool would fit into what a growth agency delivers to clients, or if it's something you'd rather solve with AI prompts and an email sequence.
https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot
It's like OpenClaw but actually secure, without access to secrets, with scoped plugin permissions, isolation, etc. I love it, it's been extremely helpful, and pairs really well with a little hardware voice note device I made: