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Beacon
I made Beacon, a tiny iOS app for answering: “which of my friends is free to talk right now?” It’s basically a one-to-many phone call that only one person can answer. Send a beacon to a group, and everyone gets rung at the same time. The first person who answers gets connected for a 1-1 call, and for everyone else the signal drops silently. No missed-calls or pressure to answer. Works pretty well given most people keep their phones on silent (and there are in-app settings for quiet hours too). iOS/TestFlight only for now. It works best if you're able to join with at least four people you don't speak with as much as you'd like. I have a couple dozen connections on the app now, and it feels like magic to me. Would love feedback from both introverts and extroverts who still like phone calls, or wish they had more of them: https://trybeacon.chat/ Android coming soon!
Show HNAltar II
I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard Hi HN, today I’m revealing Altar II, an ultra-low profile (4.75mm) mechanical keyboard designed to replace your Magic Keyboard. It’s the keyboard I wish Apple made. Altar II has fully mechanical switches, plus a magnetically detachable dial, haptic feedback, a red backlight, and a native macOS companion app. I’m a heavy Mac user and I feel that Apple hasn’t given its keyboards the attention they deserve, in terms of hardware, software, and features, so I set out to try and change that. It was a massive undertaking and it has taken almost 2 years to get to this stage. One of the main obstacles was fitting a reasonably sized battery into the chassis, and aggressive power profiling without messing with the user experience. Another issue was we couldn’t fit any components on the underside of the PCB because there was literally no space to do so (and there are a lot of components). Around 4 years ago I posted my first keyboard to HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507172). Its response blew me away and ultimately led to me quitting my job and making and selling keyboards full time. I’ve taken some of the feedback from that original post and incorporated it into Altar II (e.g. the detachable dial). I’ll be around to answer any questions. Please let me know what you think, I’d love to get some feedback.
Hacker NewsVestiges
I was an experienced game designer and producer (mostly RTS and narrative RPG). Some years ago, my career was derailed by major health developments. Since then, I haven't been able to work as I once did. I didn't expect I'd be able to meaningfully contribute to a game again. Earlier this year, a colleague encouraged me to experiment with Claude Code. So now I have a little game project. :) Being unfamiliar with genAI, I chose something modest so that I'd more likely be able to push it to a fairly polished state. Tentatively called Vestiges, it's a single player 2D roguelite strategy game with meta progression, some narrative, and a card minigame (the latter inspired by work I did on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II). It's set in the near future. You are using software (the game) to navigate a person's digitized mind, reading their memories. I hope to have a playable demo within the next month or so.
Show HNElevators
Elevators
Hacker NewsUruky
[NO-AI] My wife and I continue to work on Uruky [1], a simpler Kagi alternative, based in the EU. Last month we launched image search (got out of beta this month), added our own index and crawler (via Uruky Site Search [2]), and reached 100 monthly active accounts (we’ve passed 150 now)! You can also see a privacy-focused independent blogger wrote about us [3]!! You can check out the main differences between Uruky and Kagi, DuckDuckGo, SearXNG, etc. in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you can download a copy of the source code (licensed as BUSL into AGPLv3 in 2 years — a suggestion made here in HN)! You can also now get a free trial for 2 hours when you signup if you pass a proof-of-work captcha (another suggestion made here on HN, and it uses a local Altcha). Our main challenge continues to be discoverability and outreach because we want to do it ethically. Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring open source projects, open source maintainers, and indie, small-web, and privacy-related websites and applications. Feature-wise, for June we’ve already added a ton of personalization and privacy-increasing features like URL rewrites, cash-by-mail payments, and anonymous vouchers! Upcoming is partnering with ProxyStore to sell vouchers (we’re currently in talks for this), so you can buy vouchers with XMR/Monero or other cryptocurrencies. Then we’ll be looking into increasing our own index, focused on indie/small web. Thank you for your kindness! [1]: https://uruky.com [2]: https://uruky.com/site-search [3]: https://theprivacydad.com/interview-with-the-engineer-of-uru...
Hacker NewsCustom Newspaper Builder
A newspaper for kids - printed and delivered monthly. Full of puzzles, math, nature facts, science experiments, card games, outdoor scavenger hunts, etc... I wanted something for my kids to do for hours every month that is fun, education, and most importantly, screen free. I built a custom newspaper builder along with it to help me design it. I'm not a designer so tools like phoshop don't ocme easy. This allows me to have different layouts for pages and create different re-usable elements.