Top Tools from Oct 26 – Nov 1, 2026

A YouTube-style site, prompted into existence by Andrej Karpathy and published on 31 October, that gathers the videos Hacker News commenters keep recommending to each other. By his account Claude Opus 5.5, working in Claude Code, built the data pipeline, search, recommendations and site in about two hours. Every comment in a public archive of HN was scanned for YouTube links, and a video made the cut only if at least three different people linked it with real commentary in at least three different months; teams of Claude Sonnet 5.5 agents then judged whether each comment was recommending, citing, joking about or criticising the video, and wrote a card for each with a summary, why HN likes it, the kind of video and whether it has aged well. The result is 6,454 videos drawn from 39,834 labelled comments across 150 topics, ranked by how many separate months people recommended them in rather than by viral spikes. Home mixes classics, hidden gems, recent favourites and, once you like a few videos, picks from the same commenters; search works on topics rather than keywords, each video page shows what HN said about it with links back to the threads, and there are categories, playlists, a Longs section for long videos and keyboard shortcuts. There are no accounts, likes, history and Watch later stay in your browser, videos play through YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed, and the site loads no third-party analytics. The whole dataset, an 18 MB zip of JSON Lines files, search embeddings and a DATA.md written for coding agents, is a free download under ODC-By 1.0. Free, with no ads; not affiliated with YouTube or Hacker News

The latest release of Ghostty, Mitchell Hashimoto's fast terminal emulator with a platform-native interface on macOS and Linux, out on 27 October after seven months, 2,889 commits and 172 contributors. Idle scrollback is now compressed, cutting its memory use for typical text by 70 to 90 percent on macOS and 64-bit Linux, so the default scrollback limit rises from 10 MB to 50 MB. Kitty graphics gain animation and relative placements, which the release notes say makes Ghostty the first terminal besides Kitty to cover the whole published specification, and Kitty's clipboard protocol, rearranging splits by dragging on Linux and a ghostty +ssh wrapper that installs Ghostty's terminfo on remote hosts arrive too. macOS I/O throughput is up 25 to 55 percent and macOS 27 is supported, while the Linux and FreeBSD build moves to a new EGL renderer that needs GTK 4.18 and libadwaita 1.7, which Ubuntu 24.04 does not have. Breaking changes include copy-on-select taking none, primary, clipboard or both and defaulting to none on macOS, moved tab and prompt-jump shortcuts on Linux, and scrollback-limit renamed to scrollback-limit-bytes, and the release fixes several security issues around pasting, Kitty graphics and tmux control mode. The project has dropped its plans for a Windows version of the app, while the embeddable libghostty library keeps Windows support and is due to reach 1.0 before Ghostty 1.5, planned for March 2027. MIT and free; Ghostty has been fiscally sponsored by the non-profit Hack Club since December 2025, takes tax-deductible donations and paid contributors 41,820 US dollars during this cycle. 63.2k stars as of 2 November 2026

A free desktop app from Ronny Fernandez that puts a local AI model and an offline emergency library on your own computer, so that once it is set up you can ask about first aid, repairs, water, food or shelter with no internet. The library holds about 930,000 Wikipedia articles, WikiMed, MedlinePlus, the UK's Medicines A to Z and WikEM, FEMA's Ready.gov and the CDC's travellers' health guides, US military medicine and survival manuals, wikiHow, iFixit repair guides, Appropedia and Stack Exchange answers on home repair, cooking, gardening, the outdoors and ham radio; the full version is a 9 GB download that takes 19 GB installed, or 1.3 GB without Wikipedia and iFixit. The model is picked by how much memory you have, from IBM Granite 4.2 8B, a 6 GB download, on 16 GB machines to Qwen3.8 27B on Macs with 32 to 96 GB and NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 models on bigger Macs and 32 GB Windows PCs; on the maker's 22-question emergency test the larger models got 19 to 21 right and the smallest 14, and the page warns that smaller models make more mistakes. Questions never leave the computer, there is no account or tracking, and on a MacBook Pro an answer takes 5 to 40 seconds at about 100 watts. Apple silicon Macs on macOS 14 or later and 64-bit Windows 10 or 11, with Linux left to building from source; version 0.4.1 shipped on 29 October. The code is MIT, while the library's sources keep their own licences, some of them non-commercial. 1.3k stars as of 2 November 2026

A code forge built on the AT Protocol, the network behind Bluesky, from Tangled Labs in Helsinki, founded by Anirudh and Akshay Oppiliappan, which relaunched on 30 October with a rebuilt site and what it calls the first truly federated forge. Your profile and social activity are records on your own AT Protocol account, repositories live on knots, Git servers that anyone can run, and CI runs on spindles, self-hostable runners that build in NixOS microVMs with Docker and services such as Postgres; the hosted instances are open to anyone who would rather not self-host. The relaunch rewrites the knot server in Rust with its own Git and SSH servers and stores issues, pull requests, comments, reactions and labels inside the repository as chains of Git objects, so they travel with the code, with an attestation written to your own account for each edit. It also adds organisation accounts and stacked pull requests with interdiffs between versions for both Git and Jujutsu users, and replaces the old Go monolith with an edge-served Svelte frontend fed by a Rust indexer running in more than 11 regions. Private repositories, a CLI, language SDKs and agent skills are due over the following weeks. MIT and free, with no paid plans so far; the company raised a 3.8 million euro seed round led by byFounders, with Bain Capital Crypto, in March 2026

The first official plugin release of CorridorKey, the neural green- and blue-screen keyer from Corridor Digital, the Los Angeles studio behind the Corridor Crew YouTube channel, with the model designed and trained by Zachary Harris and the plugins led by Alê Alvaro. It predicts a clean alpha and the true colour of semi-transparent foreground, so hair, motion blur, defocus and glass come out without the screen colour, can look at a whole clip at once to stop mattes flickering, and takes an optional black-and-white hint image or video to say what to keep, at native 4K and above, in HDR and in floating point. It runs on your own machine as a plugin for DaVinci Resolve, Nuke, After Effects, Premiere Pro and Blender, plus a standalone app for batches of shots, on Windows 10 22H2 or 11 with an NVIDIA RTX 30-series card or newer, 20-series in beta, and 4 GB of video memory for 1440p or 6 GB for 4K, or on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 14 or later; AMD cards and Linux are planned. The Personal licence is a one-time 99 US dollars before tax for one person on up to two machines, with 2.x updates and a 14-day refund, and Studio is 85 dollars a seat for 5 to 300 seats, both half price until 20 November, with prices adjusted by region at checkout. Separately, the Python code and model weights are on GitHub under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 with added terms that allow commercial work and leave what you make yours, but forbid reselling it or offering it as a paid service and require companies with more than 20 million dollars in revenue to buy a seat for each user; that version needs an NVIDIA GPU. 2.0k stars as of 2 November 2026

An open-hardware story box from Arnaud Aubry of Zebra Rodeo, built for their three children with no prior electronics experience, that plays a story when a child stands a figurine on top. Each figurine carries an NFC sticker read by a PN532 reader, and an ESP32 on a custom board plays MP3 or M4A files from a microSD card, or a stream address, through an amplifier and speaker on a 3,000 mAh battery inside a 3D-printed case. Stories are added from the box's own web page over Wi-Fi, and a figurine can hold several tracks; there is no app, account or cloud service, though firmware updates are fetched over Wi-Fi from a fixed address. It is a build-it-yourself project rather than a product for sale, and the write-up walks through the breadboard, a burnt potentiometer, five enclosures and the printed board, of which five assembled copies cost 160 euros from JLCPCB. Case files, board manufacturing files, bill of materials, firmware and documentation are MIT, free

A free geology app from Flyover Country LLC, whose Flyover Country app explains the view from an aeroplane window, out on Android with the iPhone version in TestFlight beta while it waits for App Review. Point the camera at a landscape and it drapes the geologic map over the view in augmented reality and names the rock in the middle of the screen; tap a spot for its name, age, composition and how it formed, a rock column with units, gaps in time and fossils where Macrostrat has data, and a globe that animates the plates from where that rock formed to today using Christopher Scotese's PALEOMAP reconstructions. Bedrock and faults cover the world, while Quaternary geology, recently active faults and soils are US only, and detail depends on how well a place has been mapped; sources include Macrostrat, the USGS, USDA soil data and the Paleobiology Database. Saved areas keep the map and camera view working with no signal, apart from fossil finds and active faults. There is no account, analytics, crash reporting or advertising, location history and searches are not kept, and camera frames are processed on the phone and never uploaded, though coordinates and search text go to the map services that answer them, Mapbox included. Free, closed source

The fourth major version of Screen Studio, Adam Pietrasiak's Mac screen recorder from Kraków that zooms in on your clicks, smooths the cursor and adds motion blur on its own, so a raw recording comes out looking edited, launched on 1 November. Version 4.0 adds Glass Loupe, a zoom that magnifies one detail, split screen that also works for vertical video, editing the video by editing its transcript, a camera cutout that keeps you and drops your background, automatic hiding of sensitive data and faces, sharper zooms, ProRes export and exports up to four times faster. It records a display, a window or an area with webcam, microphone and system sound, or a connected iPhone or iPad over USB with nothing to install on it, framed in a device mockup, and exports MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps, GIF up to 1080p, captions and SRT transcripts, in 16-by-9, square or 9-by-16. Recording, editing, transcription with Whisper or Apple's speech recognition, noise reduction and export run on the Mac, while share links of up to 30 minutes at 1080p, shared projects and the optional cloud transcription upload to its servers. Built for Apple silicon, with macOS 13.1 or later recommended. Proprietary; every feature is in every plan, at 29 US dollars a month or the equivalent of 9 dollars a month billed yearly, with 40 percent off for students and educators, and the one-time licences sold in the past still work but are no longer offered

The 1.0 release of Strawberry, an AI browser for macOS and Windows from Strawberry Browser Inc. in Stockholm, out of beta on 26 October, with built-in AI companions that work inside the accounts you are already signed into. Companions research companies, source leads on LinkedIn, update CRMs, transcribe meetings, draft emails and posts in your voice, build slide decks and dashboards, pull data into spreadsheets and run scheduled tasks; ready-made ones cover sales, recruiting, executive admin, marketing and consulting, and there are integrations for Gmail, Slack and Notion and a ChatGPT connection. Chrome extensions, bookmarks and passwords can be brought over from your old browser, and passwords, history and cookies are stored on your device and never shown to the company or to the AI providers, which it does not name; it says it does not train on your content. Browsing is free and credits are spent only when a companion works, with 500 credits a month free, 6,000 for 20 US dollars a month, 25,000 for 85 dollars and 75,000 for 250 dollars, Expert mode, a choice of models and priority at peak times among the paid additions, two months free on annual billing, top-ups at a cent a credit that roll over, and three free seats for every team. Proprietary; the company raised a 6 million dollar seed round co-led by General Catalyst and EQT Ventures in October 2025

A platform from Overmind in London that turns an AI agent's production traces into versioned datasets, evaluations and experiments, then fine-tunes models on them whose weights you can download, retrain or roll back, served next to frontier models through one OpenAI-compatible API. It scans the agent's repository into a graph of capabilities, prompts, tools and tasks, scores OpenTelemetry traces as they arrive against what good means for each capability, runs prompt, tool and control-flow experiments whose winner comes back as a git diff, and backtests models against the agent's own traces; you drive it from a web console, the overmind CLI, a REST API or an MCP server inside Cursor, Claude Code, OpenCode or Codex. The hosted Free plan gives 50 US dollars of credits once and one seat per project, Pro costs 120 dollars a month with 120 dollars of credits and unlimited seats, and Enterprise is custom; a credit is a cent, unused credits do not expire, and tracing, dataset preparation and the tools themselves cost nothing, with credits paying for training, inference, evaluations and optimiser runs. The platform is AGPL-3.0 and self-hosts with Docker Compose, keeping traces and training data on your own network, though it still needs OpenRouter and Modal keys for scoring, training and serving; the SDK and CLI are MIT. The company raised a 2 million pound seed round led by Osney Capital in February 2026. 743 stars as of 2 November 2026

A fan-made way to play Magic, the trading card game, from Brandon G. Neri in Mexico City, built as a fork of XMage, the open-source rules engine with its cards, AI opponents, drafts and tournaments, plus a WebSocket bridge and a browser client styled after MTG Arena. You can play the AI or friends through invite links, practise against a goldfish opponent, import decks from Archidekt, Moxfield, a pasted list or a .dck file, run booster drafts, sealed, Jumpstart and constructed tournaments with AI players in empty seats, spectate and watch replays, and take on an optional single-player Career with five colour campaigns, puzzles, a gauntlet, a weekly challenge, packs to open and a collection to craft, illustrated with AI-generated art. It plays on a public server the project runs, from desktop installers for Windows, Mac and Linux with Java bundled that let friends on the same Wi-Fi join from a browser, or from your own server as one Docker Compose stack for x86 or ARM with Caddy and automatic HTTPS, a Scryfall card-picture cache, nightly backups, an admin console with roles, reports and an audit log, and optional one-button updates and rollback; the maker puts a group's evening at about 1 GB of RAM. Desktop browsers, tablets, an installable web app and an Android app, in English and Spanish. The engine is merged from XMage regularly, and the maker calls it a work in progress with rough edges. MIT, free, with donations through Ko-fi; not affiliated with Wizards of the Coast. Version 0.2.0 shipped on 23 October

Alexis Couvreur's tool from Montreal that starts self-hosted apps when someone visits them and stops them after a stretch with no traffic, while your reverse proxy shows a waiting page or holds the request until the app is ready, made for the services you open twice a month but keep running around the clock. Version 1.19.0, released on 28 October with 1.19.1 the same day, came with a catch-up post four years after its first. It now starts and stops apps on Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Podman, Proxmox LXC, systemd, Nomad and AWS ECS, with plugins for Traefik and Caddy and for Nginx, Envoy, Istio and Apache APISIX through proxy-wasm. A scale mode can keep an idle app running with throttled CPU, memory or disk I/O instead of stopping it, to avoid cold starts, and there are webhooks when instances start or stop, a Prometheus metrics endpoint, OpenTelemetry tracing, running hours that keep something up at set times whatever the traffic, anti-affinity that makes one app back off while another group is in use, for example to free a GPU, groups, optional instances and themes for the waiting page. AGPL-3.0, free, funded through GitHub Sponsors. 3.1k stars as of 2 November 2026