frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Start all of your commands with a comma

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
58•theblazehen•2d ago•11 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
638•klaussilveira•13h ago•188 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
936•xnx•18h ago•549 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
35•helloplanets•4d ago•31 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
113•matheusalmeida•1d ago•28 comments

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
13•kaonwarb•3d ago•12 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
45•videotopia•4d ago•1 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
222•isitcontent•13h ago•25 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
214•dmpetrov•13h ago•106 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
324•vecti•15h ago•142 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
374•ostacke•19h ago•94 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
479•todsacerdoti•21h ago•238 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
359•aktau•19h ago•181 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
279•eljojo•16h ago•166 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
407•lstoll•19h ago•273 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
17•jesperordrup•3h ago•10 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
85•quibono•4d ago•21 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
58•kmm•5d ago•4 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
27•romes•4d ago•3 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
245•i5heu•16h ago•193 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
14•bikenaga•3d ago•2 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
54•gfortaine•11h ago•22 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
143•vmatsiiako•18h ago•65 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1061•cdrnsf•22h ago•438 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
179•limoce•3d ago•96 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
284•surprisetalk•3d ago•38 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
137•SerCe•9h ago•125 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
70•phreda4•12h ago•14 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
29•gmays•8h ago•11 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
63•rescrv•21h ago•23 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: MidWord – A Word-Guessing Game

https://midword.com/
57•minaguib•8mo ago

Comments

jmpavlec•8mo ago
A little presumptuous to say it is the world's "favorite" guessing game... But I had fun for a few words. It was nice you could press the enter key on mobile and keep the keyboard up.

Are you thinking of doing a daily word? Or just a random dictionary word each time you refresh?

minaguib•8mo ago
It's a random word each game (but the URL is shareable with a friend to play the same word).

TBH I've had it up as-is for a decade as a classical web app, but just converted it to a frontend-only app to eliminate most hosting costs.

glaucon•8mo ago
Out of interest what did you use (framework, or 'no framework') for the frontend-only ? Anything you feel like you've learnt from the process ?
minaguib•8mo ago
I've always been a backend/systems kind of guy.

For the frontend for this I used Vue.JS as a learning experience. Overall it was straightforward and quite pleasant.

The hardest part was the mental process of giving up on server-side business logic enforcement (such as anti-cheating). At the end of the day ... "it's just a game" :)

radpanda•8mo ago
I think I prefer alphaguess.com’s simpler interface
minaguib•8mo ago
I like it as well - especially the logical top-input-bottom layout
pekim•8mo ago
I do https://wordnerd.co/secretword/ most days. It has a similar interface to alphaguess, and I prefer both of them to midword's interface.
pardner•8mo ago
Nicely implemented screen layout. Curious if you've thought of reporting metrics showing how many guesses it's taking people? (I got 'volatile' in 9)
minaguib•8mo ago
I have a decade's worth of guess statistics per word.

Unfortunately, I just converted it to a frontend-only app to eliminate hosting costs, so I have no good location to keep tracking these stats.

Theoretically, "Oxford English Dictionary estimates that there are around 171,476 words currently in use in the English language", the log2() of which is around 17.38 - I have no historical data for 'volatile'

SamBam•8mo ago
Hmmm, but the shortened dictionary being used is presumably less than that, so my best-so-far of 17 is probably below optimal...
aqme28•8mo ago
Pretty cool! Obviously the best strategy is binary search, but it's pretty hard to figure out the best choice for that on the fly.
_tqr3•8mo ago
> binary search

Hence the word "Mid".

spyrja•8mo ago
That's basically what I did. Drilled down in a binary-search fashion, guessing "captive" in 18 tries. (Doing it programmatically would have been even faster, of course, but then what is the fun of that? The manual approach yielded a fairly optimal performance anyway.)
sarpdag•8mo ago
It was fun. I don't know if I would play again or not, but played 2 times without losing focus.
flipnotyk•8mo ago
I got "Negociate" after like 20 tries, the spelling of which I've never seen. I ended up using the hints to figure it out. When I clicked on the link of the word it took me to a "No results found for negociate!" page on Dictionary.com. Pretty frustrating, might want to double check your word list.
minaguib•8mo ago
Thanks - cleaned up the list a bit with the help of AI
gcr•8mo ago
I suggest having two lists: a small handpicked list of 1500 possible goal words, and a copy of /usr/share/dict/words with common misspellings added as acceptable guesses
glaucon•8mo ago
I typed 'mountain' (without the quotes), pressed "GO" and I got a tooltip saying "only letters a-z are allowed" . This is Firefox/Windows.
glaucon•8mo ago
I then went back to the home page and started again and 'mountain' was accepted.
glaucon•8mo ago
Otherwise, I'm enjoying it !
minaguib•8mo ago
Thanks - I've removed the pattern validation for now
uptown•8mo ago
Had the same problem with a different word. Chrome / Mac.
cardamomo•8mo ago
Fun game! It stopped responding when I got close to guessing the secret word, though. Then I refreshed the page, and my progress was lost. With a little bit more polish, I think I can add this to my daily game rotation!
minaguib•8mo ago
Aah - not sure why it stopped responding, sorry about that.

I'll try to add some local state management so a refresh for a game doesn't lose progress.

cardamomo•8mo ago
Amazing! I've been enjoying the game a lot!
layer8•8mo ago
I didn’t now that binary search is the world’s favorite guessing game. ;)
salamanderman•8mo ago
Bisection search the game, but honestly was fun to play with my partner multiple times.
csnizik•8mo ago
Very clever idea! It's difficult to come up with an original idea for a word game, but you seem to have done it. If there's one like this, I haven't seen it.

The only issue I noticed was there seems to be some lag on printing some of the results. Maybe memoizing some repetitive functions might help, if you're not already.

Nice work!

ynac•8mo ago
I got "forth" in five guesses, first game. Which makes me feel like I'm psychic! Which would be really cool, but is it just matching the first two letters of the word or something? I'm usually terrible at these until I understand how they work.
gcr•8mo ago
It’s incredibly frustrating that only the first letter is highlighted. I was guessing tons of SU… and SV… words, but only the S had visual feedback. Bug?
pekim•8mo ago
It appears to highlight the letters that your guesses have narrowed it down to. For example if you had narrowed it down to after 'sudden' and before 'super', it would highlight 'su'.
minaguib•8mo ago
No it's intentional. The highlight is what I call a "known prefix"

It's a hint to tell you the word starts with "s", but since you didn't narrow it down to "su..." or "sv..." it's not giving you more hints.

Once you narrow it down further, say, "sub..." and "sun..." it'll highlight the known prefix "su"

thaumasiotes•7mo ago
There is a bug in the calculation of the known prefix.

Suppose the target word is before tin, but after timorous. Midword only displays "ti" for the known prefix. But it should display "tim" - there is no string that could start with "tin..." but sort before the string "tin".

(Another bug is that if you take a hint that would reveal the entire word, the site doesn't display what the word was.)

minaguib•7mo ago
I'll look into these. Thank you.
veganjay•8mo ago
Nice! Fun game.

Similar idea, different interface: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44189814

https://bobsword.com/

tmulc18•8mo ago
Would be more fun (even if you call it "easy mode") if you had the alphabet at the top of the page! Took me 17 tries to get "prepare" but I had a lot of mistakes because I forgot what came after what in the alphabet.
EPendragon•7mo ago
I played this game for a bit. Really loved it! Later, I realized that it is possible to get the secret word using JS in the console: https://evgeniipendragon.com/posts/reverse-engineering-midwo...