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Show HN: Mermaid Formatter – CLI and library to auto-format Mermaid diagrams

https://github.com/chenyanchen/mermaid-formatter
1•astm•10m ago•0 comments

RFCs vs. READMEs: The Evolution of Protocols

https://h3manth.com/scribe/rfcs-vs-readmes/
2•init0•17m ago•1 comments

Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

https://altermag.com/articles/kanchipuram-saris-and-thinking-machines
1•trojanalert•17m ago•0 comments

Chinese chemical supplier causes global baby formula recall

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/nestle-widens-french-infant-formula-r...
1•fkdk•20m ago•0 comments

I've used AI to write 100% of my code for a year as an engineer

https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1qxvobt/ive_used_ai_to_write_100_of_my_code_for_1_ye...
1•ukuina•22m ago•1 comments

Looking for 4 Autistic Co-Founders for AI Startup (Equity-Based)

1•au-ai-aisl•32m ago•1 comments

AI-native capabilities, a new API Catalog, and updated plans and pricing

https://blog.postman.com/new-capabilities-march-2026/
1•thunderbong•33m ago•0 comments

What changed in tech from 2010 to 2020?

https://www.tedsanders.com/what-changed-in-tech-from-2010-to-2020/
2•endorphine•38m ago•0 comments

From Human Ergonomics to Agent Ergonomics

https://wesmckinney.com/blog/agent-ergonomics/
1•Anon84•41m ago•0 comments

Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Inertial_Reference_Sphere
1•cyanf•43m ago•0 comments

Toyota Developing a Console-Grade, Open-Source Game Engine with Flutter and Dart

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fluorite-Toyota-Game-Engine
1•computer23•45m ago•0 comments

Typing for Love or Money: The Hidden Labor Behind Modern Literary Masterpieces

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/typing-for-love-or-money/
1•prismatic•46m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A longitudinal health record built from fragmented medical data

https://myaether.live
1•takmak007•48m ago•0 comments

CoreWeave's $30B Bet on GPU Market Infrastructure

https://davefriedman.substack.com/p/coreweaves-30-billion-bet-on-gpu
1•gmays•1h ago•0 comments

Creating and Hosting a Static Website on Cloudflare for Free

https://benjaminsmallwood.com/blog/creating-and-hosting-a-static-website-on-cloudflare-for-free/
1•bensmallwood•1h ago•1 comments

"The Stanford scam proves America is becoming a nation of grifters"

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/students-stanford-grifters-ivy-league-w2g5z768z
3•cwwc•1h ago•0 comments

Elon Musk on Space GPUs, AI, Optimus, and His Manufacturing Method

https://cheekypint.substack.com/p/elon-musk-on-space-gpus-ai-optimus
2•simonebrunozzi•1h ago•0 comments

X (Twitter) is back with a new X API Pay-Per-Use model

https://developer.x.com/
3•eeko_systems•1h ago•0 comments

Zlob.h 100% POSIX and glibc compatible globbing lib that is faste and better

https://github.com/dmtrKovalenko/zlob
3•neogoose•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Deterministic signal triangulation using a fixed .72% variance constant

https://github.com/mabrucker85-prog/Project_Lance_Core
2•mav5431•1h ago•1 comments

Scientists Discover Levitating Time Crystals You Can Hold, Defy Newton’s 3rd Law

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-scientists-levitating-crystals.html
3•sizzle•1h ago•0 comments

When Michelangelo Met Titian

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/michelangelo-titian-review-the-renaissances-odd-couple-e34...
1•keiferski•1h ago•0 comments

Solving NYT Pips with DLX

https://github.com/DonoG/NYTPips4Processing
1•impossiblecode•1h ago•1 comments

Baldur's Gate to be turned into TV series – without the game's developers

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c24g457y534o
3•vunderba•1h ago•0 comments

Interview with 'Just use a VPS' bro (OpenClaw version) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40SnEd1RWUU
2•dangtony98•1h ago•0 comments

EchoJEPA: Latent Predictive Foundation Model for Echocardiography

https://github.com/bowang-lab/EchoJEPA
1•euvin•1h ago•0 comments

Disablling Go Telemetry

https://go.dev/doc/telemetry
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•1h ago•0 comments

Effective Nihilism

https://www.effectivenihilism.org/
1•abetusk•1h ago•1 comments

The UK government didn't want you to see this report on ecosystem collapse

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/27/uk-government-report-ecosystem-collapse-foi...
5•pabs3•1h ago•0 comments

No 10 blocks report on impact of rainforest collapse on food prices

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/no-10-blocks-report-on-impact-of-rainforest-colla...
3•pabs3•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

ASCIIFlow

https://asciiflow.com/
143•marcodiego•5mo ago

Comments

staplung•5mo ago
Cool. One thing I found odd was that on export there are two listed formats. "ASCII" and "ASCII extended" but as far as I can tell, the ASCII version is actually outputting UTF-8. It's hard to tell for sure though because the output is just text that you can cut and paste and so it's difficult to know what conversions the browser or OS might be doing behind the scenes. But when I paste it into a text editor on my mac, it's definitely UTF-8, not ASCII encoded.

Which is probably more useful anyway given that if it really outputted ASCII encoded line drawing characters, you'd end up with gibberish on a system that assumed UTF-8 encoding.

ilovetux•5mo ago
Disclaimer, I just pulled this quote from Google ai which probably took it from somewhere else, but I just wanted to provide a little context. ASCII encoded text is also valid utf8.

> The first 128 characters of Unicode, which are the same as the ASCII character set (characters 0-127), are encoded in UTF-8 using a single byte with the exact same binary value as their ASCII representation. This means that any file containing only ASCII characters is also a valid UTF-8 file

em3rgent0rdr•5mo ago
Indeed, UTF-8 "was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII: the first 128 characters of Unicode, which correspond one-to-one with ASCII, are encoded using a single byte with the same binary value as ASCII, so that a UTF-8-encoded file using only those characters is identical to an ASCII file."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

staplung•5mo ago
Yes, but the box drawing characters in "ASCII" are all above 127 so they don't encode the same way. So that last AI generated sentence is basically false (or really misleading): ASCII files that consist only of characters in the lower 127 will also be valid UTF-8. But ASCII files that use characters above 127 will not be valid UTF-8.

Now, technically, ASCII only concerns the lower 127 characters. There's no single standard definition as to what the upper half of the byte space represents in ASCII itself so technically it's true that all valid ASCII files are valid UTF-8. By the same logic however, the box drawing characters are not ASCII. They're actually part of something called code page 437, which maps those bit patterns to box drawing characters. With other code pages they map to something else, often non-Latin characters or ones with accents.

So, the name ASCII flow is misleading and the the output options are too. ;-) Basically, if the high bit is set in UTF-8 it indicates that more than one byte is needed to represent the code point.

ilovetux•5mo ago
Granted, all of that is true, but GP specifically differentiated between ASCII and ASCII Extended, then GP went on to say that after choosing the ASCII option and pasting the text in a text editor on Mac it was reported as UTF-8, which I was pointing out would be true because if the ASCII option is chosen as opposed to the ASCII Extended option then what he ends up with (ASCII) is valid UTF-8 as reported by the text editor.
numpad0•5mo ago
20 20 78 78 78 ... Looks ASCII to me, Firefox on Windows. Could be OS.
craftkiller•5mo ago
Firefox on Linux: I just copied and pasted into emacs and did a M-x describe-char and got 0xE29480 which is definitely not ASCII: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2500

Also confirmed with hexl-mode (hex editor in emacs)

16bytes•5mo ago
" xxx"? That's the same in ASCII and UTF-8.

OP is asking what are the line-drawing characters encoded as e.g: "┌" and "┐".

Since the charset returned by the app is UTF-8, these will be interpreted and encoded as UTF-8 and not whatever "ASCII - Extended" means.

numpad0•5mo ago
that would be completely correct... sorry. the export options now read "ASCII Basic" and "ASCII Extended", and "Basic" generates plus signs for corners, as of now. I feel like the behavior might have changed. Extended option seem to use 0xE294xx range for lines.

1: https://gist.github.com/numpad0/7880ad1e3ed32b91d1ccf9c3374f...

NoSalt•5mo ago
Cool concept, but I couldn't get everything to work; namely the "Select & Move" on individual boxes or lines. The select area and move did work, though.
ctenb•5mo ago
It works for me, but differently than I first thought. You don't select and move line shapes as a whole, but only segments in a perpendicular direction
ChrisArchitect•5mo ago
Some previous discussions:

2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30273299

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27536253

2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16051428

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7085133

iamunr•5mo ago
https://monodraw.helftone.com/

But now on web!

leohart•5mo ago
I think monodraw is way better and at a one time price of $10, it's really is a fantastic piece of software.
stronglikedan•5mo ago
too bad it's only for a not fantastic piece of OS
leohart•5mo ago
While True, I believe the reason Monodraw doesn't expand is because the ASCII / TUI tooling economy is not rewarding. There are few users and even fewer customers who are willing to pay for ASCII/TUI tools.

If you look at tooling companies annual revenue

- Atlassian: 1.4B - Jetbrains: 400M - Vercel: 100M - Supabase: 16M - Prisma: 10M (maybe?)

We dive into the long tail quickly. I would be very surprised if Monodraw make more than 1M a year. At that revenue, it's going to be hard to expand into a multi-platform / web strategy (especially if your existing product is platform-locked).

behnamoh•5mo ago
Are there no-mouse alternatives? I hate drawing lines and boxes using mouse and I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that.
nonethewiser•5mo ago
>I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that.

How would what it generates be any different than what you wrote?

inanutshellus•5mo ago
He doesn't want to click and drag with his mouse. Instead he wants an input box that lets him say "make a box [30] columns wide and [4] rows tall".
behnamoh•5mo ago
Yes, exactly! Either in natural language or some DSL.
Aissen•5mo ago
It was on HN recently, the open source text-to-diagram tool d2 just launched an ascii output mode: https://d2lang.com/blog/ascii/
behnamoh•5mo ago
This is really close to what I wanted, thanks!
PhilipRoman•5mo ago
graph-easy? It doesn't give you a lot of control though
jvinet•5mo ago
Mermaid is great for this, though the output will be an image, not ASCII.

https://mermaid.js.org

johnisgood•5mo ago
There are lots of similar projects to this that made top HN the past week. Is there a list of it? I was not logged in and I lost history but the previous one I just saw earlier today was quite nice, too!

Edit: Oh apparently it was "Monodraw". There was yet another one besides that. I am all up for such tools. What was the name of the one that allowed you to specify the diagrams using some custom DSL which in turn would generate the diagrams themselves?

fmajid•5mo ago
MermaidJS, Graphviz or PlantUML, perhaps?
johnisgood•5mo ago
It was https://d2lang.com/, but I am favoriting this thread.
fmajid•5mo ago
Thanks, I did not know about this one. Reminiscent of https://diagrams.mingrammer.com
johnisgood•5mo ago
Nice! Another tool that may come in handy. :)
dragonwriter•5mo ago
> What was the name of the one that allowed you to specify the diagrams using some custom DSL which in turn would generate the diagrams themselves?

I think the recent one on HN that meets that description was D2 (https://d2lang.com/), though that description fits a lot of tools.

johnisgood•5mo ago
Yes, it was D2! Thank you a lot!

Note to self: IIRC author said I can do it locally from browser now, should work without connectivity.

MT4K•5mo ago
Doesn’t open in some regions because of Cloudflare.
IceHegel•5mo ago
Why is it blurry? If there is one thing I'd expect to be fast and sharp it's an ascii editor.
butlike•5mo ago
Reminds me of an old program I had on Mac: Monospace. Loved that program.