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Open Source @Github

I won $500 vibe coding at a hackathon

https://handyai.substack.com/p/i-won-500-vibe-coding-at-a-hackathon
1•surprisetalk•50s ago•0 comments

Show HN: Plot lines of code over time in Git repositories

https://github.com/emanueldonalds/git-loc-plot
1•genericspammer•55s ago•0 comments

Hit hardest in Microsoft layoffs? Developers, product managers, morale

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/hit-hardest-in-microsoft-layoffs-developers-product-managers-morale/
1•mooreds•1m ago•1 comments

FDA to limit access to Covid-19 shots

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/05/under-anti-vaccine-advocate-rfk-jr-fda-to-limit-access-to-covid-19-shots/
1•AdmiralAsshat•2m ago•0 comments

Super Creepy Laptop Ad

https://jetgirl.art/super-creepy-laptop-ad/
1•nivethan•3m ago•0 comments

Samsung Back to Working on Upstreaming Tesla FSD SoC Support in the Linux Kernel

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Samsung-Tesla-FSD-PCIe-SoC-2025
1•Bender•4m ago•0 comments

Together Code Sandbox

https://www.together.ai/blog/code-sandbox
1•handfuloflight•4m ago•0 comments

The Lost Decade of Small Data?

https://duckdb.org/2025/05/19/the-lost-decade-of-small-data.html
2•oli200110•5m ago•0 comments

What If Every Picture You've Ever Seen Exists?

2•cin4ed•5m ago•0 comments

The Tech Industry Is Huge–and Europe's Share of It Is Small

https://www.wsj.com/tech/europe-big-tech-ai-1f3f862c
1•danielcampos93•5m ago•0 comments

Is "Specification Repair" the AI Endgame?

https://aboard.com/is-specification-repair-the-ai-endgame/
1•gbseventeen3331•6m ago•0 comments

Alone and Adrift in the Pacific

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/commercial-fisherman-shipwreck/682580/
1•anarbadalov•8m ago•0 comments

The Evolution of the Alpha Male Aesthetic

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-maga-man-style-history/
1•mooreds•9m ago•1 comments

Behind Netflix's UK launch: Why now, why no DVDs, and what's next? (2012)

https://www.wired.com/story/netflix-reed-hastings-feature/
1•microsoftedging•10m ago•1 comments

Show HN: AI Agent for Documentation and other apps

https://sitegui.com/agent/platform_assistant
1•ciaovietnam•10m ago•0 comments

Nonprofit news media leaders are struggling to stop leaning on foundations

https://theconversation.com/nonprofit-news-media-leaders-are-struggling-to-stop-leaning-on-the-foundations-that-say-they-should-branch-out-more-255821
2•rntn•12m ago•0 comments

Why figuring out what's behind a big gender paradox won't be easy (2018)

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/gender-differences-in-personality-are-bigger-in-egalitarian-countries/
1•Tomte•13m ago•0 comments

Why does Taylor Swift write so many one-note melodies? (2017)

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41886475
1•Tomte•13m ago•0 comments

Why Windows 11’s most important new feature is post-quantum cryptography

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/05/heres-how-windows-11-aims-to-make-the-world-safe-in-the-post-quantum-era/
1•Ivan92•13m ago•0 comments

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Financial Datasets: Connect your LLM to the stock market

https://www.financialdatasets.ai/
1•handfuloflight•16m ago•0 comments

Enter the maze of Hong Kong's tech wonderland

https://restofworld.org/2022/tech-markets-hong-kong/
1•outrunner•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A Social Media Feed for Busy B2B SaaS Founders

https://getmentio.com/
3•Mredfox•18m ago•1 comments

Starfish Space announces plans for first commercial satellite docking

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1•LorenDB•19m ago•0 comments

Computational Public Space [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PixPSNRDNMU
1•coloneltcb•19m ago•0 comments

Optional Rust-in-FreeBSD Support May 2025 Status Report

https://hardenedbsd.org/article/shawn-webb/2025-05-20/optional-rust-freebsd-support-may-2025-status-report
2•todsacerdoti•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I made a SaaS to generate viral scripts for faceless Shorts

https://zeroface.ai/
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Hosting SQLite databases on GitHub Pages – (or IPFS or any static file hoster) (2021)

https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/hosting-sqlite-databases-on-github-pages/
2•thunderbong•22m ago•0 comments

Do electric cars need a gearbox?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAryICHkKjA
2•janosch_123•23m ago•1 comments

Agentic AI Systems – Tools, System Design, and Resources for AI Agents

https://github.com/alirezadir/Agentic-AI-Systems
2•alirezadeer•23m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: Astra – a new js2exe compiler

https://github.com/astracompiler/cli
45•qwertycodepl•4h ago
Hi everyone I'm new here and i wanted to introduce my project i've been working on. Astra is a simple but powerful node.js to exe compiler. It uses esbuild and Node SEA. It uses postject to inject your code to nodejs binary. It focuses more on compiling cli and Servers like pkg or nexe (express) than fullstack applications like electron or tauri. It has rich ESM and typescript support. It has good DX and cli UX. I made it bc i didn't like using pkg or nexe, they cause a lot of problems with esm.

LIMITATIONS: Now it has problems compiling projects with depencides containing binaries (e.g. bcrypt, rcedit), and it compiles only for Windows but i'm working on it

If you like it, leave a and comment what you think about it!

Comments

jasonjmcghee•3h ago
To understand the underlying architecture- is my understanding correct that this runs esbuild to bundle then bundles that with node runtime and creates a binary that executes "node index.js"?
qwertycodepl•3h ago
yes but it uses node SEA you can read about it here: https://nodejs.org/api/single-executable-applications.html
TheRealPomax•3h ago
You probably want to put that information in your README.md, because there is barely any information in the readme, and the docs look to be a placeholder atm =)
qwertycodepl•3h ago
thanks :)
belmarca•3h ago
I clicked on this hoping for an actual compiler. However from what I can see this is a bundler. The name is confusing.
qwertycodepl•3h ago
Thanks for the feedback! You're right - Astra is technically a bundler-to-executable tool, not a source-level compiler like Babel or TypeScript.

I called it a “compiler” in the sense that it transforms a JS project into a standalone .exe, similar to how tools like pkg or nexe are often described. That said, I’ll consider clarifying that in the description to avoid confusion. Appreciate the comment!

ymsodev•2h ago
Honestly, I would drop calling compiler altogether -- it's just not a compiler. It doesn't make it any less cool though!
qwertycodepl•2h ago
yeah it's not but i don't know how to call it. if i say it's bundler it will be more confusing in my opinion. waiting for your suggestions!
zamadatix•1h ago
Sometimes the term "packager" is used instead of "bundler". Honestly though, "compiler" is the term most likely to cause any confusion. Even if one is not familiar with packagers/bundlers "js to exe ${unknown phrase}" still conveys things more clearly than "js to exe ${misleading phrase}".
quotemstr•1h ago
Blame bun's --compile flag: https://bun.sh/docs/bundler/executables

We're probably going to have to live with "compiler" meaning "bundler" as an ongoing JavaScript-world neologism.

Vorh•3h ago
Looks like a good start. A few notes:

- The first thing on the "features" list should be something that other compilers cannot do. Esthetics (maybe just say "DX"?) is a nice to have - sometimes VERY nice to have - but should not be positioned as the most important item.

As the original post says the alternatives have poor ESM support - that's a good differentiator.

- Even though ES Modules are part of the ECMAScript standard, having a header stating "(Partial) Support for ECMAScript"- to me, at least - indicates the project does not support base JS features, not that ESM imports have problems. Maybe say "improved ESM support"?

- Docs seem a little bare. For example, the Usage section says:

    # Preinstall Node.js on the target machine
    astra install
Which machine is the "target" machine? I would assume, in the context of compiling, that the target would be the machine you are compiling for... but installing software remotely seems out of scope. Does it install it locally, or swap the bundled installation in the .exe?

Also, no mention of binary limitations in actual docs, despite mention in post.

Hopefully this does not come off as discouraging - this looks like a good project.

qwertycodepl•3h ago
Thanks for the feedback! I'm constantly working on the project. It's hard to do bc node sea is still an experimental feaurte and there's no much documentation about it, and i want to make it highest quality possible. And it's my first open-source project what's actually getting attention. I would really appreciate any help with this project!
thot_experiment•2h ago
> Average exe is ~70-80MB (depends on your code) so it's lighter than most compilers

I know it's JS not actually a compiler but a bundler that just packs node in with your code, but I still had a nice laugh at 80mb being light. I suppose that's where the overton window is in a world of 1gb node_modules folders.

I wish there was a middle ground between this sort of thing and QuickJS (which is actually light, but has a lot of rough edges when it comes to its filesystem and network interfaces)

martinsnow•2h ago
What's light enough when the average user in the western hemisphere has +300gb of storage?

I'm just asking since a 512gb disk has become the standard when ordering a laptop.

CleanCoder•1h ago
The amount of functionality an application provides should be the benchmark for the size rather than one's available disk space. I'm sitting on 20TB+ of available storage and anything over 1MB for a simple "Hello World" is excessive.
johnisgood•1h ago
Well, if we already could make something in 1 MB, why do we want to achieve the same thing with 100 MB? It is as if there is a mentality of "somehow the higher the size the better".
TimTheTinker•1h ago
Bun also supports this out of the box, and the overhead is likely a bit less (reportedly 30-40MB for a single `console.log` call with no further dependencies - I didn't verify that myself though).

https://bun.sh/docs/bundler/executables

I suspect a large portion of the executable size in both cases is for the ICU library for localization support (Note QuickJS has its own, much smaller l10n library.) It's possible to download a Node binary without ICU, which could trim ~30MB.

zamadatix•1h ago
> reportedly 30-40MB for a single `console.log` call with no further dependencies - I didn't verify that myself though

I got a 110 MB exe for "console.log('test')" in "test.ts" using "bun build .\test.ts --compile --outfile test.exe". Pretty compressible though, on the order of 1/4th the size pretty easily. Considering it has zstd compression for sourcemaps that'd be an interesting option to add in.

dpcan•1h ago
This is really interesting, got it up and running very quickly.

I'm not sure what the use case is and it doesn't auto-load chromium with its own web server from what I can tell. Is it just for creating javascript CLI utilities?

zamadatix•1h ago
Very interesting. The readme notes "Different than the others - Astra is a new approach to compiling JavaScript/TypeScript applications. It uses a different method than other compilers like pkg or nexe." but never really explains what the difference is. Is it just that the code is run through esbuild before the SEA step or is there some other "magic sauce"?
qwertycodepl•50m ago
Yes it's just esbuild and SEA BUT that's actually the point. SEA is officialy supported by node.js and it constantly improves. Remember pkg and nexe supports only the older versions of node.js (~14) and astra supports the latest ones.

So in a way, the "magic sauce" it that it doesn't try to do anything fancy. I made astra beacuse i needed to compile js to exe for latest versions.

I wanted astra to be simple, built on official tools, and be future-proof.

quotemstr•1h ago
This is not a compiler. It is doing no program translation. No register allocation. No parsing. No linking. It in no way resembles a compiler. Not every program that produces an executable file is a compiler just because some programs you may have heard of, like gcc, are in fact compilers.

I wish the JS universe would stop inventing new and wrong names for things.

(That said, this thing is at least using postject for actual insertion of the payload blob into the target executable, and based on its README, postjecth as the good taste to embed data as PE/ELF/Mach-O sections instead (as Bun does) of just YOLOing the attachment with cat.)

qwertycodepl•43m ago
I totally understand your point - Astra doesn’t do register allocation or full parsing, so strictly speaking, it’s not a compiler in the traditional sense.

I used the term "compiler" because for many developers, it’s strongly associated with "turning source code into a single binary." That’s what Astra does at a practical level - even if it's technically just bundling and embedding into a node executable using SEA and postject.