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The lifesaving secret hidden inside a horseshoe crab's blue blood

2026-08-12 @ 01:45:51Points: 39Comments: 7

New Bedford police officer accused of using Flock cameras to track ex-partner

2026-08-12 @ 01:42:46Points: 109Comments: 56

DEF CON crowd suspected in fake-hotspot attack on Delta flight

2026-08-12 @ 00:58:00Points: 35Comments: 10

WorldClaw Agentic 3D open-world generation at scale

2026-08-11 @ 21:56:18Points: 169Comments: 53

pg_clickhouse v0.10: Subquery pushdown and 1000x faster TPC-H queries

2026-08-11 @ 21:54:25Points: 45Comments: 3

Suzanne: AI tool for designing and manufacturing physical products

2026-08-11 @ 21:28:26Points: 45Comments: 31

Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models

2026-08-11 @ 21:14:10Points: 43Comments: 20

Compression is prediction

2026-08-11 @ 19:49:44Points: 380Comments: 148

Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyard

2026-08-11 @ 19:35:52Points: 199Comments: 107

Making holograms with a pen plotter

2026-08-11 @ 18:51:35Points: 135Comments: 14

How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story

2026-08-11 @ 18:09:56Points: 123Comments: 98

Grok Bot

2026-08-11 @ 17:23:09Points: 208Comments: 175

CSS properties you should know for better text designs

2026-08-11 @ 17:16:06Points: 95Comments: 10

RSI Simulator

2026-08-11 @ 17:01:21Points: 38Comments: 14

Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

2026-08-11 @ 16:57:09Points: 311Comments: 368

Mojo 1.0

2026-08-11 @ 16:56:46Points: 337Comments: 156

Show HN: Git-knife – Edit commit messages, authors, and dates like a spreadsheet

2026-08-11 @ 15:09:34Points: 144Comments: 93

Manus will return to operating as an independent company

2026-08-11 @ 14:14:53Points: 145Comments: 70

Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

2026-08-11 @ 13:22:00Points: 557Comments: 238

Neutrinos from Deep Inside Earth Provide a New Picture of the Mantle

2026-08-11 @ 13:20:44Points: 22Comments: 1

England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

2026-08-11 @ 12:41:59Points: 503Comments: 366

OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

2026-08-11 @ 12:23:07Points: 348Comments: 365

Nvidia's Risky Business

2026-08-11 @ 10:02:00Points: 316Comments: 151

London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

2026-08-11 @ 09:40:02Points: 266Comments: 271

Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo

2026-08-08 @ 22:47:10Points: 238Comments: 237

Jolt: Clojure compiler implemented with Chez Scheme

2026-08-08 @ 17:38:20Points: 170Comments: 60

Show HN: Tamron Lens Utility Alternative on Linux

2026-08-07 @ 13:36:39Points: 44Comments: 0

The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

2026-08-06 @ 20:22:29Points: 74Comments: 8

Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout

2026-08-06 @ 13:47:54Points: 46Comments: 11

Several Mermaid rendering engines already exist. Most, like the original mermaid.js, use Dagre or ELK graph drawing libraries to automatically lay out their diagrams. I’ve used Mermaid for the past four years but often recreated my flowcharts in a diagram editor so that I could modify the layout to something that better suited my needs.

Use Line9 when you want an automatic flowchart arrangement that optimises for clear communication. It seeks to layout flowcharts with regular grid spacing, closer positioning of related nodes, shorter, straighter edges and targets a page-like aspect ratio. The Compare button in the /diagram page (share panel on the left) shows you the Line9 and mermaid.js renders next to each other.

Use for free, no account required. A CLI tool can also be downloaded for Mac, Windows and Linux. Free-use diagrams carry a watermark. Commercial use of the CLI requires a paid account and you also get diagrams without watermarks. Line9 is not open source (I need to create an income and the business model is being tested).

I’ve tried to encode and automate the layout principles I use when creating flowcharts by hand. All rendering takes place in the browser, so no private data is sent to the web service. The CLI is written in Rust and embeds the renderer so you get a single binary install and all data and processing remains local. It’s currently a little slower than mermaid.js, due to the difficulty of solving node positioning and edge routing simultaneously to find the layout that best meets the design principles.

Output is produced in SVG or PNG formats. Diagrams can also be shared via a URL with a fragment that embeds the Mermaid text.

Things I know still need improvement: positioning and rotating subgraphs, folding graphs to hit good aspect ratios more often, further improvement on edge label placement, better interaction with long node labels and tidying up the display when scaling down. Then I also want to support more diagram types and the website needs lots of work.

Please paste your own Mermaid flowcharts into Line9 – particularly the ones that you previously discarded because the layout was bad. Let me know whether they improve, or what other work is needed.

Retire the Abstractions

2026-08-06 @ 01:05:16Points: 35Comments: 41

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